For the Moluccan community in The Netherlands representation and emancipation are important matters. This thesis examines how one of the most renowned Dutch ethnology museums, the Museum of...Show moreFor the Moluccan community in The Netherlands representation and emancipation are important matters. This thesis examines how one of the most renowned Dutch ethnology museums, the Museum of Ethnology, has represented the Moluccas and the Moluccan people in its exhibitions between 1995 and the present-day. It also zooms in on how the museum has engaged with the colonial history of its Moluccas collection. Lastly, this thesis shows to what degree it has involved the Moluccan community in the creation of its Moluccas exhibitions.Show less
This study examines the colonial dynamics of knowledge production about Indonesian textiles in the collecting practices of hippie trail collectors Rudolf Smend and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg. Its focus...Show moreThis study examines the colonial dynamics of knowledge production about Indonesian textiles in the collecting practices of hippie trail collectors Rudolf Smend and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg. Its focus is on the private collections of these individuals, which are documented in multiple catalogues, and their engagement with these objects as textile experts. The study demonstrates the scholarly relevance of the ‘hippie trail collector’ as an analytical category and asserts its implication in the ongoing epistemological, ontological, and territorial colonialism foundational to and perpetuated by the hippie trail. To analyse the case studies, it first establishes the enmeshment of these collectors with the hippie trail network, it then examines their contributions to knowledge production about Indonesian textiles, and lastly it explores their engagement with the epistemological hierarchies regarding these objects. It argues that both Smend and Kahlenberg have aided the incorporation of Indonesian textiles into a Western art system, a venture which has a colonial genealogy but also fits with the countercultural period’s renewed international interest in textile arts. Through said revaluation as well as the co-option and capitalization on Indonesian expertise, these collectors promote the erasure of other meanings and reproduce the colonial underpinnings of knowledge production about these textiles.Show less
The aim of this thesis is to study the Mozambican collections in the Netherlands. They were acquired in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a network of European men, among them Hendrik...Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to study the Mozambican collections in the Netherlands. They were acquired in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a network of European men, among them Hendrik Muller, most of whom were linked to a Dutch trading house called the Handels-Compagnie Mozambique. Building on critical insights into provenance research, I intend to complicate the provenance of the Mozambican collection by using methodological insights provided by literature from the fields of archival studies, museum studies, and provenance research. Museum collections, which Carolyn Hamilton calls ‘the marooned archive of material culture’, have been neglected as sources in the study of colonial history. Drawing on archival theory, I aim to reconceptualize the Mozambican collections as part of the broader archive of Dutch colonial history. In piecing together the fragments of the colonial archive, researchers must choose which narratives to reconstruct and how. In my reconstruction of the collection’s history, I focus on three key moments in the objects’ biographies before they left Mozambique. The making of the objects and the context of their making, the buying of objects and the context of their buyers and collectors, and finally, the taking of objects within the context of colonial conflict. In each chapter, I will reflect on a specific object and the implications of its biography for understanding the Mozambican collections in the Netherlands as a whole. These objects are a large beaded tablecloth, made by Mozambican women specifically for sale to Europeans; a woven shawl with touristic imagery, made by Mozambican men, also for sale to Europeans; and a beaded headdress of a ritual specialist which was looted by Europeans following the suppression of an anti-colonial uprising known as the Massingire Uprising. Building on these case studies, I reflect on the strengths and limitations of provenance research using European archives to study colonial history.Show less
If we want our institutional archives, as knowledge banks and houses of memory, to be democratic and reflect, to a much a greater degree than they currently do, the societies which they are meant...Show moreIf we want our institutional archives, as knowledge banks and houses of memory, to be democratic and reflect, to a much a greater degree than they currently do, the societies which they are meant to serve, then they will need to become more diverse: more diverse in their collections, in their processes, in their personnel and in their actions. Diversity is a complicated and nebulous term. Within the framework of the wider academic discourse about why and how to diversify institutional archives, this thesis focuses on BBC’s The Listening Project (TLP) in the context of the oral history movement. It analyses TLP’s aims, methods and the extent to which it can provide insights into increasing diversity in institutional archives.Show less
