Collecting Icons of Power and Identity: Transformations of Indonesian Material Culture in the Museum Context (original) (raw)
Related papers
1994
[Chapter 6 (Pp. 71-90) in: "Fragile Traditions: Indonesian Art in Jeopardy" ed. by P.M. Taylor Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1994] [NOTE: The entire book is available in the "Books" section below.] Several chapters in this volume examine changes to Indonesia's art forms, including destruction and loss due to the international primitive art market. Suppose we could prevent the local losses that occur as a result of the international exportation of collectible Indonesian art. What alternative is there to the decontextualization and loss that occur for this and many other local reasons? This essay attempts to consider the viability of Indonesia's fledgling but rapidly growing museum system as an alternative to such loss. A museum has many functions. In Indonesia as elsewhere these include preserving objects, but also publicly presenting them to tell a story. The 1980s and 1990s constitute a period of rapid growth in Indonesia's museum system, with centrally planned regional museums taking shape in every province. To watch this expansion of a centralized museum system throughout the archipelago, and reactions to it, is to watch Indonesia's center and periphery debate their public presentation of themselves.
The Politics of Indigeneity and Heritage Indonesian Mortuary Materials and Museums
Museum Worlds, 2020
This article contributes to comparative museology by examining curation practices and politics in several "museum-like" heritage spaces and locally run museums. I argue that, in this era of heritage consciousness, these spaces serve as creative stages for advancing potentially empowering narratives of indigeneity and ethnic authority. Understanding practices in ancestral spaces as "heritage management" both enriches our conception of museums and fosters nuanced understandings of clashes unfolding in these spaces as they become entwined with tourism, heritage commodification, illicit antiquities markets, and UNESCO. Drawing on ethnographic research in Indonesia, I update my earlier work on Toraja (Sulawesi) museum-mindedness and family-run museums, and analyze the cultural politics underlying the founding of a new regional Toraja museum. I also examine the complex cultural, religious, and political challenges entailed in efforts to repatriate stolen effigies (tau-tau) and grave materials, suggesting that these materials be envisioned as "homeless heritage" rather than "orphan art. " n
The Curatorship Of Cultural Objects In Indonesia
2021
Lukisan ini cukup menarik. Tidak hanya estetis, tetapi juga bersejarah dan penting. Lukisan ini menawarkan wacana polarisasi. Ini bukan hanya pengangkut rempah-rempah, tetapi juga mewakili pergolakan umum. Selain menggambarkan transportasi bahan pangan di tengah gelombang laut, lukisan ini juga menunjukkan transfer ilmu pengetahuan, transfer selera, dan transfer besar-besaran budaya modern ke Nusantara. Diungkapkan pula bahwa Dutch East Indies Company (VOC), meskipun merupakan lembaga ekonomi yang ekspansif, juga menjadi mediator budaya dan seni yang terlibat dalam pengiriman sesat sejumlah pelukis Eropa ke Nusantara antara tahun 1600 dan 190
Craft and the archive: Museum collections and memory in a Balinese village
craft + design enquiry
This paper examines the different forms of indigenous agency embodied in a museum collection and identifies personal relationships as a constructive platform from which to understand objects in collections of material culture. Specifically, it describes the results of a field investigation to gather Balinese responses to the Forge Collection of Balinese Art at the Australian Museum. This approach reflects the broadening vision in museum practice and scholarship over the last decades, recognising that most museum institutions describe themselves as the custodians or guardians of collections and seek to engage with the indigenous communities that produced them. Most people in the village of Kamasan in East Bali, Indonesia, have recollections of the late collector and anthropologist Anthony Forge, given that only 40 years has passed since he lived in the village with his family. This paper relates some general responses to his collecting project before considering the complex and productive relationship between Forge and the artist Mangku Mura. Not only is it apparent that the relationship between artist and anthropologistcollector had implications for the material form of art produced in the village, and subsequently housed in the museum collection, it shows that traditional artists produce their art in defiance of conventional understandings of 'traditional' art. While this paper is an occasion to reflect on the applicability of a particular field methodology and approach to other cultural collections, it also points to the wider implications for interpreting 'traditional' practices by opening up to debate ideas about timelessness and originality in the context of changing social relations. 1 The research was made possible with a postgraduate scholarship funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project between the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, 'Understanding Balinese painting: collections, narratives, aesthetics and society'. 2 The term 'source communities' refers to: 'groups in the past when artefacts were collected, as well as to their descendants today. These terms have most often been used to refer to indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Pacific, but apply to every cultural group from whom museums have collected: local people, diaspora, and immigrant communities, religious groups, settlers, and indigenous peoples' (Peers & Brown 2003: 2).
"Introduction" [to]: P.M. Taylor (editor), "Fragile Traditions: Indonesian Art in Jeopardy"
1994
"Introduction" (Pp. 1-12) to: P.M. Taylor (editor) "Fragile Traditions: Indonesian Art in Jeopardy" [NOTE: The entire book is available in the "Books" section below.] This volume brings together a unique group of case studies about several endangered forms of Indonesian art. The essays assess the effects on this artistic heritage of certain national and international phenomena, especially the primitive art market and various kinds of private and institutional collecting. The authors, who have extensive experience in Indonesian communities, find that many vibrant art traditions in this region are threatened by these forces. Collections of indigenous art and material culture have always been recognized as sources of information about the people who produced the objects. Increasingly, collections and collecting institutions are also being analyzed as expressions of the cultural presumptions of the societies that are marketing or assembling the collections. This book, by contrast, investigates the effects of the market in collectible art on the small, indigenous communities where traditional artworks are produced. A collection of essays, like a collection of objects, has an origin in a particular historical context and can be examined for evidence of the presumptions held by the contributors and editor. This volume originated in a panel of papers presented at an annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Francisco. The panel included papers by three of this volume's contributors (Barnes, Crystal, and Taylor) and comments by two others (Kartiwa, Errington). It brought together anthropologists, museum specialists, and art historians concerned particularly with those Indonesian art traditions that had been labeled "primitive art," though no panelists used that label. After the original conference, several other scholars were invited to add important new perspectives to this topic. The additional contributors included people who have significant effects on these same trends and markets, as collectors, museum directors, or "cultural resource" planners and consultants (Barbier, Moss, Heppel), as well as one art historian who brings to the discussion a much longer-term view of transformations within a single indigenous tradition (Feldman). These studies contribute to the growing recent assessment and thoughtful critique of institutions that collect, sell, exhibit, appraise, restore, fake, and study art. As such, this book of perspectives from Indonesian anthropology, art history, market development, tourism consulting, and museology probably constitutes one of the most succinct yet broad-ranging examinations available, for any single country, of the current transformations of indigenous art forms within communities where artworks are created
The history of collecting has been part of anthropological discourse since the 1980s and it is now recognised that collecting is not a neutral activity. In colonial times particularly, it was a political statement. Three issues are raised in this article on collecting. Firstly, there has been inadequate attention given to the problem of hybridity in museum collections. Secondly, there is need for more research on the division of collections between the Netherlands East Indies and museums in the Netherlands as it is likely that some collectors circumvented official policies for regulating collecting activities. Thirdly, more attention should be given to the Ethical Policy and its influence on collecting.
Pragmatic Imagination and the New Museum Anthropology, 2024
This chapter spotlights the case of trafficked Toraja effigies of the dead (tau-tau) which, since the late 1970s, have moved into private collections and museums within and beyond Indonesia. This case is used to examine the practices of museum-oriented anthropologists doing long-term field research in locales where unrest, social inequality, poverty, international networks of antiquity thieves, or other factors have conspired to disenfranchise source communities from their spiritually sacred material cultural heritage. What does it mean to be engaged in such scenarios? What are the methodological, cultural, and ethical challenges embedded in the pursuit of engagement? Data derive from discussions with museum curators, collectors, and dealers, as well as recent fieldwork interviews with a cross-section of Torajans surrounding images of tau-taus in collections and their varied desires for these sacred effigies. Ultimately, this chapter addresses the complexities, challenges, and potential rewards entailed in the process of engaging multiple local and international communities in order to find satisfying ethical responses to a history of disenfranchisement from sacred material objects.