Material Ties: The Museum as Contact Zone
Fiona Kerlogue (Anthropology Department Horniman Museum London)
The focus in this paper is on how Indonesian handicraft items produced in rural contexts have been consumed in large metropolitan centres by museums, and the tension between their local and global interpretation over time.
Since at least the seventeenth century CE, Europeans (and others) have been acquiring material culture in the form of handicrafts from various parts of Indonesia. Their motivations have included trade, but also other purposes. Sometimes they have acted as mementoes of events in the collectors’ lives, representing valued local links with Indonesia preserved in material form, and sometimes passed to descendants as heirlooms. Some have been used as markers of the collectors’ cosmopolitan identities, expressed to compatriots by display in their homes. Some may have been intended as examples or explanations of cultural difference. Since the late nineteenth century anthropological museums have acted as depositories and exhibition spaces for some such objects, wherein relationships between the host and originating cultures of these artefacts, imagined or otherwise, have been expressed.
In this paper I examine the acquisitions from Indonesia into the anthropology collections of the Horniman Museum in London since it was founded in 1901. During this period the nature of the Indonesian collections and the form of collecting have changed, transforming a relationship of distance and tentative understandings to one of increasing partnership and reciprocity, in which the Museum has aimed to become a ‘contact zone’, a site for cultural interaction and exchange. The paper ends with a discussion of a recent visit to the Museum by four artist-craftspeople from villages on the island of Savu in connection with the exhibition ‘Woven Blossoms’, which displayed textiles and lontar palm items to a largely metropolitan audience. The responses, connections and interactions to which the visit gave rise are explored.
