Wayang as Technology

Abstract

Mata Hari’s casual handling of a puppet from Java as postlude to her 1905 Musee Guimet appearance signs at the ubiquity of Indonesian shadow and rod puppets in early twentieth-century Western Europe. Wayang puppets were imported to Europe in significant numbers beginning in the nineteenth century. Important collections formed in the British Museum in London, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and elsewhere. International exhibitions in Europe and America brought puppeteers and puppet vendors. Colonial civil servants, businessmen and travellers returned to Europe with puppet souvenirs of their Eastern sojourns. Specialist craft stores such as Boeatan in The Hague (founded 1903) sold shadow and rod puppets from Java among their wares.1 Playwright and puppeteer Alfred Jarry could assume in 1894 that readers of the French journal L’Art Litteraire had enough familiarity with wayang to understand his erudite comparison between the style of Georges and Felix Pissarro’s engravings and the ‘frail figures’ and ‘pointed gestures’ of wayang purwa (shadow puppets) and wayang gedog (flat wooden puppets).2 By the 1920s, wayang motifs were in fashion and wayang figures were common wall decorations around Europe and the United States. They acted as signs of cosmopolitan worldliness, and aide memoirs for stories of Eastern voyages.