Marieke Bloembergen

Conserving the past, mobilizing the Indonesian future: Archaeological sites, regime change and heritage politics in Indonesia in the 1950s

The archaeological sites that the Indonesian Republic inherited from the past were not neutral. In this article we investigate the multilayered processes of signification connected to these sites – scattered all over Indonesia, and selected, uncovered, investigated, conserved and partly put on display by state archaeologists under Dutch and Japanese colonial regimes – and their meanings for the young Indonesian Republic in the 1950s. Taking a site-centred approach we focus on what we call ‘archaeological interventions’, and in particular on the reconstruction and conservation history of the ninth-century Śiwa temple at Prambanan (1910s-1950s), in the broader context of archaeological research (state supported as well as inter-Asian and internationally based) and colonial and postcolonial conservation politics. How did the Archaeological Services in successive colonial and post-colonial regimes in Indonesia contribute to the transmission of archaeological knowledge and to the skills and ethics of restoration politics over time? What was the effect of regime change on the development of archaeological sites into national sites? And how did post-independence national heritage politics relate to other, ongoing identifications with these sites – colonial/international, inter-Asian and local – that were stimulated by archaeological interventions taking place at these sites?

Exchange and the protection of Java’s antiquities : A transnational approach to the problem of heritage in colonial Java

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de memoire . By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.

Colonial Re-Collections: Memories, Objects, and Performances

Colonial Re-Collections is a critical response to a range of theoretical and empirical problems that shape individuals’ multifaceted engagements with colonial pasts. Among these engagements there is a remarkable fascination with the colonial, visibly present since at least the 1990s, both in formerly colonized and formerly colonizing societies. Scholars have defined this fascination as nostalgia that is ‘colonial’ (Werbner 1998; Bissell 2005), ‘imperial’ (Rosaldo 1989), or ‘structural’ (Herzfeld 2005). While these scholarly definitions differ, in a broad sense they all refer to a diverse range ofmaterial and immaterial phenomena— not only memories of times passed, but also an apparent desire, visible in the private and the public sphere, expressed by people of different generations or promoted by the consumer industry, for things, styles, and notions associated with the colonial era: from the recycling of colonial postcards to the wealth of movies addressing the colonial past; the rise of grand, colonial hotels to nostalgic colonial travel tours; the return of colonial-design advertisements to colonial furniture at home; and the laments about lost, colonial city quarters to memories of colonial quietness and peace.