14Story

23 December 2008

Collectors, officials, missionaries

Shared Cultural Heritage

Contents:  Shared Cultural Heritage  - Introduction  - Collecting within a colonial context  - Scholarly expeditions  - Archaeological sites  - Collectors, officials, missionaries  - Donations  - Military expeditions

 

Individual collectors, government officials, missionaries

The broad category of individual collectors occupies a central place in this part of the project. Although all the figures discussed share the same colonial context,  large individual differences can be found. It was not only the collectors’ personal backgrounds that differed; there was a marked variation in their modes of collecting. A good deal depends upon the period in which a collector was operating.  According to present-day criteria, someone collecting objects in c. 1900 did so in a much more superficial manner than a collector a century later; he penetrated less far into the interior, and gathered less detailed ethnographic information. To illustrate this aspect, we'll have a closer look at a collector from the mid-nineteenth century: Carl Benjamin Hermann Baron von Rosenberg. This man collected objects for the museums in both Batavia and Leiden.

 

.                                        C.B.H. Baron von Rosenberg, illustration from                                        his book Der Malayische Archipel, 1878

Rosenberg was born in Darmstadt, in 1817. Although he was descended from an old aristocratic family, he did not possess the financial means for independence.  As a young man he had the urge to travel in distant countries, but a military career was more in line with his actual situation. His years of study thus constituted more of a preparation for military service than for a future in the academic world. After several years spent in the army of Hesse, Rosenberg applied for employment in the Dutch colonial army. It is clear that he still had no money of his own, since he had to be content with the rank of corporal. In May 1840 Rosenberg arrived in Java, being subsequently transferred to Sumatra, where (among other assignments) he acted as assistant to the geologist Frans Junghuhn (1809 – 1864). Rosenberg also frequently took part in military expeditions in the Batak region, at that time still firmly under Dutch control. This must have been the period in which Rosenberg collected various Batak objects. He must have collected one of the oldest Batak magic staffs or wands (tunggal panaluan) in about 1850. However, it is not clear from Rosenberg’s notes, published or unpublished, at what date and under what circumstances he acquired this staff. He did write frequently about the deserted villages the soldiers found, making it extremely difficult to establish contact with the local population. It seems likely that Rosenberg profited from the fact that the local people took to their heels as soon as a troop of soldiers approached their homes. From 1845 on, Rosenberg formed part of the General Staff in Padang (West Sumatra), a position offering him a greater opportunity for developing his broad sphere of interest. He carried out a good deal of map work, and he travelled along the islands off the west coast of Sumatra, among other places.

 

Magic staff or wand (detail) tunggal panaluan, (RMV 79-3) < More details on this object in the Masterpiece description >		Small ancestor statue, Nias (RMV 695-6) < More details on this object in the Masterpiece description >

In the years 1847 and 1849, Rosenberg called in at the Mentawai islands, and in 1852 he visited the island of Enggano. In this period he also began publishing, producing a steady stream of articles. Thus he was one of the first to publish fairly reliable information on the population of Enggano. His work is still very different from present-day fieldwork -  Rosenberg only stayed on Enggano for two weeks, and he was prevented by sickness from entering the interior –  but it was a beginning. As noted earlier, during the course of the nineteenth century there was a steady improvement in the quality of ethnological observations.  Even Rosenberg – no ethnographer at the beginning – developed in this respect. In 1855 he entered the service of the Topographical Office in Batavia, and in 1859 he left a military career behind him.

 

'Kaart der Groote Geelvinckbaai', map drafted by Rosenberg in 1861.

Subsequently Rosenberg entered the service of the Dutch colonial government, and was exempted from other duties in order to devote his time to scholarly research. From this moment on he concentrated especially on East Indonesia. He had already been in New Guinea, but now he was able to visit the Moluccas, the Lesser Sunda Islands, and Sulawesi. His writings continued to appear at frequent intervals, but – like so many early researchers – he was also increasingly smitten with tropical diseases. Consequently in 1871 he resigned from the government service, and left the Dutch East Indies. Back in Europe, Rosenberg was awarded honours for his many works from both the Dutch government and several German states, including his own home state of Hesse.  In 1878 his book Der Malaysische Archipel was published, in which he described his adventures in the Dutch East Indies in an accessible style. He died in The Hague in 1888. Rosenberg’s very productive life cannot be summarised in a few paragraphs. He wrote a great deal, and he visited large areas of the archipelago as a government official. In Batavia Rosenberg was also involved with the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. He was frequently mentioned in the Notes (Notulen), especially as the donor of collections, but he was also concerned in other ways with the Society. He published papers in the society’s Journal, and gave advice on the division by categories to be used in the first catalogue, for example. Whereas we would only need the fingers of one or two hands to count off the number of large-scale scholarly expeditions to the former Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if we wanted to count the number of diligent individual collectors, many hands would not be enough. This is not to say that these collectors were proportionately of any greater importance, where the extent or quality of the collections in the Jakarta and Leiden museums is concerned, than those people beavering away together in the large expeditions.  This verdict may be valid when we consider the diversity of the collections. At all events,  in many locations and at many moments, during a number of periods (sometimes lengthy) and with a number of different responsibilities, points of view, motives and ‘idiocyncracies’, a mixed group of individuals in the East Indies collected an ocean of knowledge and matching objects, that later were to benefit the community. Among the many people who, like Rosenberg, have made an important contribution to the collections, it is worth mentioning the following as representative of the three main groups we have distinguished:   1. government officials:     O.L. Helfrich, J.E. Jasper, J.G.F. Riedel, G.W.W.C. van Hoëvell   2. missionaries: B.F. Matthes, A.C. Kruyt and N. Adriani, B.A.G. Vroklage, P. Middelkoop   3. individual collectors: E. Jacobson, Th. A. Resink, W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp.

 

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