Inleiding Lieve Jetteke, […] Van ons porcelein en schilderijen zullen we niet veel terugzien: althans de garage is leeg & een naam adres ligt er niet in doch van veel belang is deze zaak niet; iedereen laat veeren. 1 zo schreef mr.dr. gerard gilles van Buttingha Wichers (1879-1945) vanuit het St. Vincentius kamphospitaal te Batavia (het huidige Jakarta) op 22 september 1945 aan zijn dochter. Hij hoopte de verjaardagen van de kinderen op 27 november met elkaar te kunnen vieren. Het zou er niet meer van komen. op 17 november 1945 overleed hij, verzwakt door langdurige gevangenschap, herenigd met zijn gezin in het interneringskamp Kramat. Van Buttingha Wichers' omvangrijke collectie porselein, 'Compagniesmeubilair', hindoe-Javaanse en Europese kunst en antiek was verloren gegaan; deels achtergebleven, deels verkocht, deels gestolen, maar gebleven in de herinnering en als zodanig levend. De manier waarop er verzameld werd, wat en waarom, welke betekenis aan objecten en de collectie toegekend werd en hoe de collectie werd samengesteld en geëtaleerd, hangen nauw samen met de manier waarop de wereld op dat moment aanschouwd, benaderd en geordend werd. Wat vertelt Van Buttingha Wichers' bijzondere collectie-vooral overgeleverd door foto's en bewaarde stukken-ons over hem, over de betekenis van de collectie en wat vertelt zijn collectie ons over de koloniale samenleving aan de vooravond van de Tweede Wereldoorlog?
Natural history museums have long escaped postcolonial or decolonial scrutiny; their specimens were and are usually presented as part of the natural world, containing only biological or geological information. However, their collections, like those of other museums, are rooted in colonial practices and thinking. In this article, we sketch a political and decolonial biography of ‘Java Man’, the fossilized remains of a Homo erectus specimen, housed in Naturalis, the Natural History Museum, in the Netherlands. We describe the context of Dutch colonialism and the role of indigenous knowledge and activity in the discovery of Java Man. We also follow Java Man to the Netherlands, where it became a contested specimen and part of a discussion about repatriation. This article argues that the fossils of Java Man and their meanings are products of ‘creolized’ knowledge systems produced by Empire and sites of competing national and disciplinary histories and identities.
Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became 'Dutch' through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people's identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial 'spatial imagination', diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes-roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the 'natural' social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.
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