31 Oct 2024  |  Magnus Treiber

(Re)mobilizing historical expeditions: Collections, fieldworkers, and digital returns

It was certainly unexpected, when a student assistant, screening Prof. Dr. Erwin Stresemann’s personal estate in our university archive at LMU Munich, found two handwritten diaries, authored not by Stresemann, but by Markus Mailopu. Mailopu, born and educated on Seram island in the Moluccas in today’s Indonesia, was hired as a field assistant for the 2nd Freiburg Moluccan Expedition, 1910-1912, and joined the expedition members on their return to Europe. The student assistant’s discovery led to a research project, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and inspired us to further explore the legacies of historical expeditions and their potential value today.

In our workshop “(Re)mobilizing historical expeditions: Collections, fieldworkers and digital returns”, organized by Bart Barendregt, Luisa Marten, Philipp Schorch and Magnus Treiber at Leiden University, June 17-18, 2024, we brought together scholars who work in similar fields and on similar topics: museum curators, historians, anthropologists, and art activists with Dutch and Indonesian, German and Moluccan backgrounds. In one of the Institute of Social Anthropology and Development Sociology’s brand-new meeting rooms, we met for an intense two-day workshop in a hybrid format, with face-to-face and online presentations that allowed contributors from Ambon, Jakarta, Den Haag, and Munich to participate. Presentations took place in three sections: Remobilizing collections, Historicizing encounters, and “Decolonizing” (?) photography.

During the workshop: Bart Barendregt (left) is summarizing the last presentations. Photo: Luisa Marten.Pim Westerkamp from the Wereldmuseum Leiden presented his work on the museum’s small but unique Kapala Saniri collection: clothing, headdresses, the top of a stick and a wand, collected by Dutch missionaries and military officers. Most probably, the Kapala Saniri represented influential families and acted as regional leaders and spokesmen. While being part of the Kakean secret society, they seem to have also acted as intermediaries between the Dutch colonial administration and the local population. Secret societies fascinated European travellers, colonialists and missionaries alike, maybe because they could never be fully explored and explained and set limits to colonial attempt to transcend the exoticized other. For the collectors, however, nothing was considered sacred, as Marjolein van Asdonck, also from the Wereldmuseum in Leiden, showed in her contribution on “The Girl from Aru”, a dead girl’s body, taken away by the Snellius expedition in 1929/30. The body ended up in the museum’s storage, apparently with no one caring much.

Classical ethnographic writings found their way more easily back to the Moluccas. Geger Riyanto from the University of Indonesia sketched out how certain publications have kept on shaping cultural self-identities in the region until today. The 2nd Freiburg Moluccan Expedition and its attempt to raise knowledge – not only in the field of ethnography, but also in geography, geology, ornithology or botany – was the topic of my own contribution. Personal letters, diaries and unpublished reports show how local collaborators – Markus Mailopu prominently among them – actively contributed to the expedition’s research findings. A rigid positivist approach could be more readily applied by the exhibition members to the classical fields of the natural sciences, but their ethnographical research had a more open and less structured character. In any case, however, findings became information and were categorized and disentangled from local contexts.

Nuraini Juliastuti, from the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem, portrayed Indonesian artist groups, who seek to reverse that direction today, act as ‘fixers’ and help re-entangling and commoning such returning, through formerly alienated objects and knowledge. Hermien Soselisa and Fridus Steijlen, both affiliated with the University of Pattimura in Ambon, followed a similar pathway. They questioned to whom such ‘returning’ knowledge belongs – privileged institutions in the far-off capital? – and aspire to generate interest among people in the Moluccans themselves. To this end, not only access has to be provided, but local means of apprehension have to be respected and strengthened. It will be crucial to go ‘beyond re(mobilization)’ and understand the wider context of colonial research and modern knowledge production, which is inherently unequal and unjust. Tamara Soukotta (Radboud University) offered a critical decolonial perspective, not only on colonial knowledge extraction, but also on today’s attempts of restitution and return.

Seram, one of the Freiburg expedition’s most important destinations, has a long history of colonial rule. Yet, control and infrastructure concentrated on the island’s coastline and trading posts ignored much of Seram’s mountainous hinterland, which did not offer much to Dutch overseas trade. Only in the early 20th century, military officers perpetrated inner Seram, acting as both colonial rulers and curious researchers, interested in local culture, language, and organisation. Wim Manuhutu, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, sketched Seram’s historical situation and political scene, few years before the 2nd Freiburg Expedition arrived. Tri Hardjanti Riedel, the translator of Markus Mailopu‘s two diaries, and Luisa Marten, doctoral researcher in the project at LMU Munich, highlighted Mailopu’s experiences on his own way to Europe and his personal views on the linguistic collaboration with Stresemann in particular. In fact, Markus Mailopu acted as a kind of ethnographic researcher himself.

Another intimate source was presented by Liesbeth Ouwehand from the National Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands: H.M. van Weede’s private photo album documents 1906’s brutal subjugation of the Balinese kingdom of Badung by Dutch colonial troops. Personal travel memories portray colonial oppression and atrocities. Such personal sources raise questions on the ways and limits of making their sensitive content accessible and public. Another kind of cultural heritage is Java’s Borobudur temple, to which Fadjar Ibnu Thufail from Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency referred in order to question that world heritage site’s ongoing digitization, its potentials, and limitations.

The workshop proceeded over two intense days, during which historical expertise met museum perspectives, theoretical debates, and local contexts, calling for further involvement of individuals based in the Moluccas, be it through local academic research and discussion, the arts, or social media activism. If we want to learn anything from historical expeditions today, then we will need to remobilize their estates. To contribute to this end, our Mailopu Archive has now gone online.