Kampong Dreams

Exploring the construction of belonging for Moluccans living in Lunetten

Amsterdam – 16th January 2018 Master thesis submitted to the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology

Word count: 23,943 Supervisor: Dr. T. Harris Second and third readers: Dr. T. Schut and Dr. R.J. van Ginkel

Plagiarism Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis meets the rules and regulations for fraud and plagiarism as set out by the Examination Committee of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. This thesis is entirely my own original work and all sources have been properly acknowledged. Sam Toogood 16-01-2018

Acknowledgments

Pol You were the assistant I couldn’t afford. They should put your head on Easter Island for your stoic patience.

Mum and Dad The second time might not be the charm, but you trusted me.

Tina You have a talent for giving advice to those who aren’t much good at taking it. This thesis might not have been written without your relentless optimism.

There's a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place, And I know that it's the Spirit of the Lord; There are sweet expressions on each face, And I know they feel the presence of the Lord.

- Sweet Sweet Spirit, sang during a Sunday service in Lunetten

Contents

Introduction 5 Chapter 1: Opening the Baggage 19 Chapter 2: Kampong/Compound 20 Chapter 3: Resisting Suburbia 45 Conclusion 58 Bibliography 62

Introduction

The seed of this thesis lies in a previous project, in which I investigated the contemporary construction of ‘Indo’-ness in the context of Dutch multiculturalism. ‘Indo’ refers to Eurasian people who experienced colonialism as subjects of the former Dutch East Indies. It was originally a term used by the colonial administration to refer to people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian descent, and more generally to those who had European and Asian ancestry in the former Dutch East Indies. As colonial subjects of mixed ancestry, Indo people benefited from a racial hierarchy in the colonial administration that favoured European parentage, and gave them privileged access to rank, salary and favours that were unavailable to the wider population. As Indonesia gained independence, the racial construction of Indo-ness was maintained in the Netherlands through the cultural capital provided by their previous education in colonial Dutch schooling, granting access to better housing and jobs than their Indonesian compatriots.

Speaking to many Indo people young and old, I found that many took pride in being regarded as “model immigrants” or “good immigrants”, speaking about how they had integrated. Indeed, although being Indo was a point of identification for them, so was the oft-quoted idea that they have become “more Dutch than the Dutch”. Some participants occasionally compared Indo people to other types of immigrant, such as those from Turkey and Morocco, perceived as ‘troublemakers’ who, they argued, were not interested in integrating into Dutch society. In particular, Moluccans were singled out for criticism. At the centre of their comparison of Indo people to Moluccans was a notion of belonging. Every association – anger, ungratefulness, violence – seemed, for my interviewees, to be rooted in their inability to lay down roots. Displaced to the Netherlands from the Moluccan islands in Eastern Indonesia after independence, the Moluccan diaspora had laid their hopes on stoking the fire of a future republic, the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS). Many led second lives maintaining communication with their families and the whole kampong they had grown up in. Kampong is Malay for ‘village’, but it is also the origin of the English word ‘compound’, an added layer of meaning that adequately describes the form of territorial belonging explored here. Members of the second generation diaspora went on pilgrimages to keep the flame bright, yet in spite of political terrorism during the 1970s, the years saw the RMS turn to cinders. The Indo interviewees I spoke to about Moluccans described how Moluccans were stuck in a purgatory, unable to return but equally spurned by the host culture who viewed them with suspicion. However, in the research towards this thesis, I found a diaspora community that built a new fire on top of the ashes of the RMS, and in its glow called it the kampong.

Setting and historical context

Moluccan position in colonial Indonesia Similarly to Eurasian Indo people, Moluccans received preferential treatment during the colonial period compared to much of the rest of the Dutch East Indies population. The Moluccan Islands were the first part of the Indonesian archipelago to be conquered by the Dutch, prized for the precious spices that grew there. As is often the case with colonisation, the colonial power skewed the existing economic infrastructure towards a single tradeable resource, but once the spice trade collapsed the Moluccan Islands were never to receive significant investment to balance the economy (Steijlen 1992, p. 780). Although the Moluccan population was somewhat equally split between Christian and Muslim followers, it was the former who were to be given employment opportunities by the Dutch colonial power, as

Maluku Islands. Source: Wikipedia clerks, teachers, and later as soldiers in the Colonial Army (the KNIL, Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger). Many of the Christian Moluccans were to grow into a middle class society, being payed better than their Muslim neighbours, and educated in Dutch schools. As the Moluccan islands had been colonised first, and most thoroughly, a career in the KNIL was popular among Protestant Moluccan islanders.

The KNIL was established to defend Dutch assets in the Indonesian archipelago and maintain order amongst locals. Due to the religious bond and upbringing in Dutch education, soldiers from these islands were regarded by the Dutch as particularly reliable, fearsome and loyal (Amersfoort 2004, p. 154; Manuhutu 1991, p. 498). It should be noted that in the Dutch administration the term “Ambonese” was used to count not only people from Ambon, but also other Moluccan islands and Christians in Eastern Indonesia and the Mcnadonese. Moluccans nevertheless provided a very high proportion of the soldiers. The KNIL was organised along ethnic lines, what was known as the landaarden, and “Ambonese” recruits were paid more than the Muslim Javanese soldiers in the army. The Ambonese were seen as a counterweight to the majority Javanese, and were often ideologically defined in relation to the special bond held with the Dutch.

War and the RMS

Following the Pacific War and the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, the KNIL was integral to the Dutch plans to restore their influence over the archipelago. Nevertheless, Indonesian nationalism had grown since World War Two broke out, and European nations were under pressure to commit to decolonisation. The Netherlands was forced to relinquish sovereignty on 28 December 1949 to the Republic Indonesia Serikat, a republic with a federal structure. Subsequently, as the KNIL had to be disbanded, 62,000 native soldiers had to choose between demobilisation or joining the ranks of their former enemy, the Republican Army. By October 1950, 8,000 men had still refused to make a choice, frustrating the Dutch government’s attempts at decolonisation.

Concurrently, the nationalist government of President Sukarno changed the constitution in order to move from a federal structure, which was perceived to be a colonial relic, to a more centralised republic. This demanded that federate states disbanded themselves and join the central state, but among the Christian population of the Ambonese islands it met much resistance. This resulted in the proclamation of the independent Republic of the South Moluccas (RMS: Republic Maluku Selatan), which was perceived to be an anti-nationalist rebellion by the Indonesian government. For the remaining KNIL soldiers, 90 per cent of which were Ambonese, the RMS was a new cause to fight for after the collapse of the colonial administration. According to their contract, KNIL soldiers had a right to choose where they would be demobilised, and after the proclamation of the RMS, many demanded to be discharged in Ambon. The Indonesian government embargoed Ambon to any military personnel, and when pockets of resistance popped up in Ceram, soldiers were forbidden to go there as well. A Dutch court prevented the Dutch government from non-consensually discharging former KNIL soldiers, by now made members of the regular Dutch army, on any Indonesian territory. Finally capitulating to external pressure, the Dutch government transported the 3,578 soldiers to the Netherlands in order to discharge them there. Between March and June 1951, soldiers and their families – around 12,500 people – were transported in a month-long voyage to the Netherlands. As a last resort, temporary transportation to the Netherlands was hope to change the mood of Moluccans soldiers after a few month, and request return. The Moluccans on board were also optimistic about a swift return. For both parties, however, events in Indonesia and the Moluccas were beyond their control.

Kamp Vught

Only after the first ship arrived in the Netherlands were soldiers told that they had been discharged with immediate effect from the Dutch army. The humiliating loss of rank, purpose, and the security they had caused unrest, and several lawsuits contesting the discharge were brought to court, but had limited success. It seemed that the Netherlands, still in shock from the devastation of World War Two, had no succinct strategy to deal with the new arrivals. The government hurriedly prepared camps around the country that were intended as temporary accommodation for Moluccans until their swift repatriation (Bartels 1989, p.13). Fearing backlash from the rural Dutch population who were already suffering under the flooding of the countryside, the government regularly anncounced the impermanence of the Moluccans’ residence here and “maintained that they would be returned to Indonesia as soon as possible” (Amersfoort 2004, p. 156). Sixty hastily equipped camps, spread out and isolated both from each other and from urban centres, served as accommodation. Often in a state of disrepair, they included two former Nazi camps – Kamp Westerbork and Kamp Vught – and their segregation from Dutch society would prove to be one of the government’s biggest mistakes in their own terms, halting any possibility of integration

for a generation (Bartels 1989, p. 13). Kamp Vught and surrounding Dutch rurality, 1944. Source: Nationaal Archief During the four-year Japanese occupation of Indonesia, thousands of islanders and Dutch civilians were imprisoned in camps where they faced malnourishment, severe overworking, scant medical care, and infamous “death marches”. As loyal soldiers of the Dutch Crown, Moluccans had suffered greatly under Japanese occupation, and the act of being sent to camps immediately after arrival in the Netherlands was for many a sign of betrayal and of being “sold out” (Ibid, p. 14). Kamp Vught had already gone through several different iterations before housing Moluccans. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, it was used to house Jews, political prisoners, Gypsies, homeless people, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexuals, and black market traders. It was primarily used to take pressure off the transport camps of Westerbork and Amersfoort, which were used to move prisoners to larger camps such as Auschwitz and Mauthausen. During its use between January 1943 and September 1944, it held nearly 31,000 prisoners. Of those, 420

Back of the residential side of the barracks with attached kitchenettes, 1956-1966. Source: J.J. de Lima, Collectie Molukse Historisch Museum died of hunger, abuse, or sickness, and a further 329 were murdered in the execution site just outside the camp. For a few years after the war, the camp was used to hold German and Dutch collaborators.

The 1951 refurbishment of Kamp Vught divided the communal dormitories and dining areas by a corridor, which led onto small rooms measuring 2.5 by 5 metres. The dividing walls were cheaply made from thin pressed straw, which did little to insulate rooms from the new chill of the Netherlands or the sound of neighbours. Every family was allocated one such room, or two in cases where there were many children. The sleeping area of straw mattresses on bunk beds was partitioned off with a curtain. The one hot water tap on site had to be shared between 3000, located at Barrack 1B. Kitchenettes were added to the exterior of one side of each residential barrack.

The Dutch Ministry of Welfare set up the Directorate for Ambonese Welfare (Commissariaat Ambonezen Zorg) which was responsible for state policy towards Moluccans, including food, clothing, and education. Adults were taught skills in Malay that would make them more employable back in Indonesia, and children were often taught in Dutch as Dutch education was more highly valued in Indonesia than Malay. In Kamp Vught and other large camps, the schools were often located on-site. However, as it became clear that swift return to the

A Lunetten classroom with schoolchildren, 1958-1960. Source: Moluks Historisch Museum

Moluccas wasn’t possible, the government shifted its policy to the principle of so-called “self support” in 1956. The Moluccans in the Netherlands spoke very little Dutch, yet they were expected to earn a living. This policy shift also demanded that all camps had to close, but this wasn’t finally executed for many years. Between 1958 and 1982 many residents of Lunetten migrated to other towns, often where factories provided accommodation for workers, or the government offered newly built residential districts. Over this period, around 60 families moved to Capelle aan de Ijssel, 130 to Moordrecht, 110 to Leerdam, 40 each to Breda and Culemborg, and 30 to Alphen aan de Rijn. Their departures led to an increase of living space in Lunetten per family, which will be addressed in a later chapter.

While the RMS had been a rallying point for many Moluccans in the Netherlands, the 1970s hostage crises had shown both to Moluccans and the Dutch government the importance of improving the living conditions and the social position of the Moluccan population. In the 1980s, the government attempted to force the residents of Lunetten to move elsewhere, under the pretence of poor maintenance. This was resisted by the Camp Council, under the leadership of the young Chairman Ton Latuhihin. Rather than appealing on the grounds of old KNIL rights, the Camp Council was by this point using Dutch rent control laws as their point of reference. The struggle to return to the Moluccas was being usurped by the second generation’s desire to improve their living conditions in the Netherlands.

One of the barracks in 1984. Source: Rob Bogaerts, Fotocollectie Anefo

Against years of resistance by Lunetten’s residents, the camp buildings were demolished by the Dutch government, with the hope that they would finally take the offer of newly built districts elsewhere, closer to native Dutch people. However, the demolition was finally agreed to only on the condition that new homes would be constructed on the site of the camp. This is exactly what the government did. In what appears almost like a simple restoration job, the houses were built, connected to each other in barrack form, on the exact site of the previous buildings. A museum was opened there, the National Monument Kamp Vught, in the early 2000s, and stood between the museum and Lunetten’s residential district is Nieuw Vosseveld high security prison, which houses some of Europe’s most dangerous criminals. All this, nestled within the beautiful forest of Vughtse Heide and quaint houses that form Vught’s wealthier neighbourhoods.

Research question and theoretical concepts

Although I wanted to delve deeper into the history of Moluccans in the Netherlands, my bachelor thesis on Holocaust postmemory initially sidetracked me. I would nevertheless soon find that these two paths would unexpectedly cross. Lunetten popped on my radar while reading about the various ways in which former concentration and internment camps have

11 been appropriated after World War Two. I was fascinated with ways of engaging with the materiality of the Holocaust without musealising atrocity sites. Begin somewhat familiar with Foucault’s studies of discipline and prison architecture, it wasn’t a surprise that many had been converted into prisons, or even hospitals. One, until recently a museum, was in 2014 bought by a Hungarian millionaire and converted into a hotel. But while I saw the hotel as simply a rich man’s eccentric ostentation, it was Kamp Vught’s use as a refugee camp that I found insulting, both to the new residents and the old. I discovered that living there are still members of the first generation, who arrived a mere six years after the prisoners of the Nazis had been evacuated. I became intrigued, seeking to find an answer to the mystery I saw at the centre of it: how does one feel at home in such a place? Thinking more critically, I rephrased it slightly:

How have Moluccans developed a sense of belonging to Lunetten?

Much of the theoretical basis of this research was established in Marijn Ferier’s master thesis on the development of belonging in urban ethnic enclaves, Making Home: An Inquiry into the Everydayness of Migrant Belonging (2016). Her research introduced me to Marco Antonsich’s framework for understanding and studying territorial belonging. The perspective of space upon already established notions of belonging is what Antonsich (2010) refers to as ‘territorial belonging’. Up until his point of writing, he argues, studies of belonging have been hampered by vagueness in the definition of the concept, often relying on intuitive notions. In developing an analytical framework, he identifies varying dimensions of belonging. This begins with recognition of the tendency to use belonging as a synonym for identity, especially collective identity and citizenship. This highly political notion of belonging ignores the importance of emotions that people attach to places, such as a sense of ‘home’. To account for this difference, Antonsich defines belonging as including both place-belongingness, i.e. “a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place”, and politics of belonging, i.e. “a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion” (2010, p. 4).

Similar categories have been presented by other authors, such as Yuval-Davis (2006) who differentiates between ‘belonging’, which he defines as ‘feeling at home’ or ‘feeling safe’ in an entirely apolitical sense, and politics of belonging, which refers to the construction of belonging through various political projects often designed to protect a notion of collective identity when it is threatened. Likewise, Fenster (2005) divides belonging between explicit and official interpretations of belonging tied to notions of citizenship and group-membership, and more intimate expressions that rely upon personal experience.

Place-belonging

Place-belongingness is a highly subjective relationship to place, whereby one ‘feels at home’. Home is context dependent, and can vary in scale, but here Antonsich defines it as “a symbolic space of familiarity, comfort, security, and emotional attachment” (Antonsich 2010, p. 6). He outlines five factors that he argues help establish a feeling of home in an individual: autobiographical, relational, cultural, economic, and legal. Auto-biographical factors are about the personal experiences, relations and memories that entangle a person to a place. Often related to childhood memories, these factors refer to the history, temporality, and symbolism of individual-place relations. Relational factors range from strong to weak personal and social ties that contribute to the individual’s life in a given place, from friends and family to encounters with strangers. Economic factors refer to the existence of safe and stable material conditions that may not only allow a good quality of living standards, but also provide other perks that come with employment such as purpose, or the fulfilment of a social role in the family.

Cultural factors emphasise language as part of a semiotic universe that, on the one hand, demarcates ‘we’ from ‘them’, but also creates the warm feeling of having the meaning, not only the words, of speech being understood. Antonsich argues that “language can be felt as an element of intimacy, which resonates with one’s auto-biographical sphere and, as such, contributes to a sense of feeling ‘at home’” (2010, p. 648). As well as language, such a feeling can be generated from other cultural expressions and habits, such as particular clothing, food consumption, and religion. Legal factors such as citizenship or resident permits create and remove the feeling of security that is inseparable from belonging. Unlike Indos – migrants to the Netherlands from other parts of the Netherlands who upon arrival were almost immediately granted citizenship - Moluccans had struggled for decades in a legal quandary that effectively made them stateless and denied them many legal rights.

All of these cultural practices will prove to be relevant to the development of belonging in Lunetten, but this thesis will particularly focused on the dynamics and effects of autobiographical, relational, and cultural factors. A factor which does not fit into Antonsich’s categories is that of the affective qualities of space. I will argue in the first chapter that this is an integral part of the failure to develop a sense of place-belonging in the first decade or so for residents of Lunetten. Rather than simply being tied to auto-biographical factors, I argue that to some degree all space is affective. All these factors may contribute to a meaningful and worthwhile life, which Antonsich argues is essential to the development of place-belonging.

Politics of belonging

In contrast to place-belonging, the politics of belonging is concerned with the power relations involved in belonging to a group of people. The concern here is with the creation and maintenance of boundaries that defined membership (to a group) and ownership (of a place) (Trudeau 2006; Antonsich 2010). Through a policing of processes of inclusion and exclusion in what Trudeau calls “the imagined geographies of a polity”, the politics of belonging attempts to define ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Trudeau 2006, p.422). Rather than the intimate, individual relations that shape place-belonging, the politics of belonging regards the intentional, active arbitration of inclusion and exclusion in a placed community. While this conceptual difference is important to maintain, the two processes are deeply interdependent (Antonsich 2010, p. 649). Antonsich argues that “one’s personal, intimate feeling of belonging to a place should always come to terms with discourses and practices of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion at play in that very place” (ibid.). In this thesis, some of the points of contact between these two concepts of belonging will be traced and analysed.

Structure and Agency

While the phrase ‘I belong here’ will always be rooted particularly in a personal, intimate feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness), this sense of belonging is nevertheless learned and qualified by the arrangements of power relations (politics of belonging). Acknowledging this, Antonsich argues that any studies of feelings of territorial belonging must account for the full complexity of such feelings, in both their individual and social dimensions. Favouring one approach over the other could misinterpret belonging as solely personal matter, vacuuming the process away from the social context in which it is entangled; alternatively, it could put all the emphasis on social dimensions, essentializing belonging as solely the outcome of socializing structures, discourses and practices. Any further studies of (territorial) belonging must carefully map the points at which these two forces meet if they are to benefit from such perspective, just as other fields of anthropology have debated the influence of structure and agency in various contexts, both individual and social.

Regarding this methodological plea that Antonsich brings to the fore of his approach to belonging, structuration theory may help to further conceptualise the potential for favouring neither structure or agency. Structuration theory argues that the world is “simultaneously shaped by and shaping an external field of forces” (Burawoy 1998, p. 15). In the context of the process of belonging to Lunetten, it may be useful to account for the limitations over residents’ actions created by the meaning and the materiality of the place, as well as the choices taken to shape the environment to their needs and desires. To take one example, the affective qualities of the space, both as a barrack “non-place” and a deeply haunted place, constrain the

14 behaviour of everyday home-making and the domestication of the space. There may be a point at which Lunetten residents realise they are not returning to the Moluccas and wish to settle in their Dutch village, but the materiality and meaning of space limit them in that choice. Or in another example, the growth of private space in the village in previously semi-public space is perceived to have led to a weakening of ties between neighbours. Yet there are some residents who are struggling against this invisible force and attempting to protect this intimate semi-public space through various initiative such as neighbourhood barbecues. Giddens’ model of structuration theory attempts “to reconcile the idea of the free, voluntary act and the idea of systematic coercion” (Eriksen 2010, p. 92). Place and belonging are always a process, not a state of being, and structuration theory believes that place is “continually in the state of becoming via the actions of human subjects in everyday life” (Warf 2011, p. 182).

Lunetten has many characteristics that are associated with enclaves, which constitute an important part of literature discussing belonging and migrants. Enclaves are territorial clusters of a particular population, and often self-defined in terms of religion, ethnicity, etc. This spatial concentration is often interpreted as a path to social, political, economic or cultural development, as well as simply offering ‘signs of recognition’. The functionality of enclaves have a tendency of framing a causal relationship between the enclave and the residents – that enclaves are formed entirely voluntarily. Many authors distinguish between voluntary and involuntary segregation (Marcuse 1997; Peach 1999; Logan et al 2002; Knox & Pinch 2010; Galonnier 2015), but the dominant image is of migrants consciously creating safety in numbers. This view fails to account for cases of forced segregation entirely, such as most Moluccan camps that were set up in the 1950s, and provides insufficient complexity with regards to those voluntary aspects. As with the politics of belonging, even involuntary enclaves are not static or permanently stable spatialised communities, but must be maintained through conscious processes of inclusion and exclusion.

It is important to note that the Netherlands has been a reluctant ‘country of immigration’. For many years after the first wave of various post-colonial migrants had arrived, the Dutch government explicitly denied that there were immigrants in the Netherlands (Amersfoort & Niekerk 2006, p.324). Putting forth an image of the Netherlands as ‘overpopulated’, the government promoted emigration to Canada and the United States, which they considered ‘countries of immigration’ (ibid.). While this was partly a concern over housing and employment, it was also an attitude that was informed by the notion of ‘pillarised society’, which promoted certain groups to voluntarily segregate themselves in a context of complete legal absorption (citizenship) into Dutch society. The paradox that is obvious here resulted in vastly different approaches to the inclusion and exclusion of migrant populations. In the arrival of totoks from Indonesia – people who had family and other contacts in the

Netherlands, and many of whom were Eurasian – was followed by a policy of swift absorption into society, being granted citizenship almost upon arrival (ibid, p.326). On the other hand, Moluccans were encouraged to segregate themselves from the rest of society, and denied citizenship for many years after it was clear they weren’t able to leave.

In this thesis, I wish to highlight these debates of voluntary and involuntary segregation, and draw them out into the context of broader notions of structure and agency that are often implicit in discussions of segregated communities and the development of territorial belonging.

Methodology

Interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and anthropologists has led to new topics of investigation, methods of inquiry, and interpretive strategies to bleed into each other. Still, distinctions remain, as Peter Burke has written in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern History (1987), between historical anthropology and social history. Burke puts emphasis on the former’s tendency to be qualitative rather than quantitative. Instead of large populations over sweeping periods of time, historical anthropology focuses on small communities as its units of analysis through an interpretation of symbolic dimensions of culture rather than narrative explanations of change (Ten Dyke 1999, p. 39). The so-called “memory boom” in both history and anthropology in the past two decades is in part a testament to this cross-germination. For this study, an historical anthropological research paradigm allows for a re-evaluation of methodology, since the study of the (albeit fairly recent) past weakens the empirical relevance of one of the primary research methods of anthropologist: participant observation. Nevertheless, everyday life must be observable if the social use of space is to be properly studied.

In this research I employed a mixture of interviewing styles. Both oral histories and in-depth interviews use individuals as the basis of research, on the understanding that patterns may emerge from detailed and elaborate descriptions of the social life of participants. However, while in-depth interviews are primarily issue-oriented, focusing on a particular topic, oral histories attempt to cover a significant portion of the participants’ life story. The former was especially useful in drawing out details in the current social life of Lunetten, such as how social conditions such as samenhorigheid and sociale controle show themselves in everyday encounters, as well as hot-button issues like the spread of individualism. However, the issue- focused nature of in-depth interviews simply had insufficient sprawl as the topic – dwelling practices in former WWII camps – required both breadth and depth. Only oral histories grasped the web of seemingly unrelated experiences and memories and places that would have

16 occupied the lives of former residents, perhaps throughout their childhood and further on (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2011, p. 133). The latter approach unearthed most of the anecdotes that contribute to the first chapter’s focus of affective space.

I invited some participants – residents and former residents – to discuss as a group some of the experiences they had, as well as specific talking points. As extra stimuli, I sometimes asked participants to present photos and historical documents about life in the camps. One reason for conducting focus groups is that it allows different voices to contest and confirm each other, justify themselves through clarification and change their minds.

“What makes the discussion in focus groups more than the sum of individual interviews is the fact that the participants both query each other and explain themselves to each other….[S]uch interaction offers valuable data on the extent of consensus and diversity among participants” (Morgan 1996, p. 139)

There was nevertheless very little conflict or contradiction between participants in discussions of camp life. Some people in different interviews even used the same phrases, suggesting that the issues I was questioning them about was something that was frequently under discussion. Focus groups are also supposed to contribute to a denaturalization of life in the camps, which makes culture much more observable for the researcher; however, I found that generally residents were relatively self-conscious, and this may have been due to the presence of the Barak 1B museum in the neighbourhood, or more generally the demands by outsiders to explain themselves.

The method of the walking interview may prove invaluable in studying the social meaning of space. In their work on ‘everyday’ and ‘unusual’ walks, Ingold and Lee (2008) argue that walking with interviewees may have three productive effects: walking as action establishes association with the environment; the selection of routes to take supports a dynamic and mobile understanding of places; walking with others can create a different kind of congeniality or rapport with them. By contrast, the ‘natural go-along’ sees the researcher shadow the participant on their everyday routine, whilst the guided walking interview is led by the researcher on a route they have probably planned out before, but certainly one in their control, because it is deemed best suited to answering a pre-set question (Carpiano 2009; Kusenbach 2003). The go-along is more useful for finding hidden or unnoticed habitual relations in familiar environments for the participant. I occasionally invited some participants to guide me around the camps, asking them at certain points how they experienced these spaces on the walks, and this often brought childhood memories to the surface.

It is usual to describe methods of access, as well the broad occupations and brief biographies of one’s participants in an ethnography. However, as Lunetten is such a small community, I feel that this may be at the expense of participants’ anonymity. Instead, I will simply say that Loes, Eunice, Isaac, and Tanu are aged between 60 and 70, while Joy is in her late 40s, and have lived in Lunetten all their life. Jeroen is in his 70s, and left Lunetten while in his 20s to move to another Moluccan wijk. Anton is in his late 50s, and has never lived in Lunetten but frequently visits the village in a religious capacity. Jimi is in his late 20s and only lived in Lunetten until he was three years old, but has often returned for friends, church events, and neighbourhood gatherings.

Thesis overview

While each chapter is thematically distinct, they chronologically follow each other in tracing the development of belonging. In the first chapter, I will explore an aspect that was frequently on the tip of my tongue throughout the fieldwork: the affectivity of the camp space, and how that was dealt with in order to domesticate the space. What emerges is an unexpected form of affectivity – the disciplinary yet transient military barrack space, as well as the haunting of traumatised space. Central in this chapter is the relevance of affect to the development of territorial belonging, and how they limit practices of domestication. I will furthermore argue that the banishing of ghosts from Lunetten is the beginning of a story of Lunetten residents’ efforts to define the village beyond the coercive circumstances.

The second chapter will start where the last chapter left off, revolving around further efforts by Lunetten residents to define the meaning and uses of space. Through the preservation of various legal, religious and cultural traditions, Lunetten residents further take control over the meaning and uses of space, and the village begins to develop aspects of the enclave. This chapter sees the diasporic longing for a distant republic become directed toward the creation of kampong life. In the third and final chapter, this localization of belonging is taken further, as the enclave and its past become sources of nostalgia that influence how Lunetten residents interpret the village’s politics of belonging. Here we see how Lunetten’s past is constructed as an era of community, compared to the unrooting effects of individualism that are perceived to be sweeping across Dutch neighbourhoods and even other Moluccan neighbourhoods. This self-image of Lunetten has heavily influenced recent initiatives to reinvigorate neighbourhood life through the negotiation of spatial boundaries. Subsequently, I wish to highlight a complication of the notion of the self-defining enclave that emerges in the appropriation of space.

Opening the baggage

Lingering military habits and ghosts

Introduction

While studies of belonging have become more prevalent in anthropology, geography, and urban studies, there has been very little work that establishes its relationship with another strand that has seemingly risen in tandem: affect and space. Rather, belonging has been primarily used as a synonym for identity, especially within studies of national and ethnic identity (Antonsich 2010, p. 644). As Antonsich notes, it is telling that belonging does not even have its own entry in a widely used dictionary of human geography (Gregory et al. 2009). Yet the feeling of being “at home”, and the affects of security, comfort, familiarity and emotional warmth that are tied up with that, are necessarily spatial. “Home” and the ability to say “I belong here” is dependent not only upon a subjective mood or atmosphere within certain places; the affectivity of the space also denotes what kind of activities are possible in that place, including the countless everyday actions that create a feeling a homeliness and safety (Massumi 2002, p. 27-28).

In other words, affect and space in the context of the home rely upon each other, and this chapter will deal with how this problem was encountered and dealt with. Affect is a particular sign of the body’s “power of acting”, its action-potential (Deleuze 1988, p. 50) as each instance of affect is experienced both as a particular emotion or feeling state and as a “distinctive variation in one’s willingness or capacity to act” in response to that emotion or feeling state (Duff 2010, p. 882; Hardt 2007, p. ix-x). Affective atmospheres shape the experience of place and the routines in the lifestyle of a place (Anderson 2009, p. 78-81; Thrift 2004). This chapter deals with the influence of the camp space’s ‘baggage’ on the ability to domesticate and secure the space.

Form, function, and habitual transience

A potential point of departure here is to take a closer look at how the residents of Lunetten related to the history of the camp. In studying the development of belonging in Lunetten, it is important to contemplate how residents felt living in the space at the beginning of their stay, before there was a chance to develop local networks. Consider this conversation with a second- generation couple, who arrived as young children to Lunetten in 1951:

Tanu We see [the barracks] differently than you do. Our parents were in the military, and they were used to barracks in Indonesia. There they also had to travel everywhere as soldiers. This place is a bit like an army camp. We experienced this as kazerne [military encampment].

Eunice We call that a tangsi. That is another word for kazerne. Because the soldiers who lived there took the families with them.

Tanu So if they had to go somewhere, they went together. So the families go with them, and they also lived in the kazerne. As part of the army, they were often stationed in Java, not the Moluccas.

Interviewer So it’s a very familiar lifestyle.

Translator And you felt like you were kind of exporting that to the Netherlands?

Tanu We didn’t look at it as a concentration camp as all, not with the baggage the people here see it with. I do know it, we just don’t experience it like them. It’s been a kazerne, it’s in the shape of a kazerne, and this is how it’s been seen.

This final sentence is particularly interesting in the context of place-construction – “It’s been a kazerne, it’s in the shape of a kazerne, and this is how it’s been seen”. Returning to the dialectical relationship between practice and meaning in the construction of place, it is important to recognise the influence of materiality. Materiality is often framed as a context for practice – enabling and constraining it. For example, as we will see in chapter three, public space in the camp allows for many intimate encounters with neighbours that contribute to a feeling of trust. Tanu and Eunice explain how the materiality of the camp – the fact that their home was in the shape of an army barrack – influenced the meaning of the camp. Yet for the families of KNIL soldiers, especially the first generation, the meaning of army barracks was already well-established, and was tied to many familiar practices. As spaces where families grew up and worked, barracks were places of discipline and mischief, purpose and listlessness. They were also places of constant motion; with families moving frequently to various different barracks around Indonesia at a moment’s notice, living in Lunetten must have felt similarly precarious. Indeed, with the belief that they would be returning to the Moluccas at any moment, and no attempts by the Dutch government to integrate and desegregate Moluccans, residents were more inclined to interpret the materiality of the space as they had known it – not as a home, but as a place where they would be stuck in a temporary holding pattern.

It seems that, for Tanu and Eunice at least, even in the knowledge of the events that took place in the camp, the camp space could be primarily understood as a generic military space. This begs a question about space and what Tanu calls the “baggage” of place. Without the collective memory through which Western Europeans interpret the details of the space - the barbed wire, the railway tracks, the cramped dorms that have been so much part of our cultural education

20 on the Holocaust – there can only be space and subjectivity. To what degree was belonging to Lunetten made possible by the perceived culturelessness, even affectlessness of Kamp Vught? Edward Casey provides a modus operandi for sketching the relationship between place and affect, characterising ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places.

Thick places are composed by the layering of habit, meaning, and affect, inviting the self’s ‘concernful absorption’ in place while offering the potential for ‘personal enrichment’ and an intensifying of affective experience (Casey 2001, p. 684-685). Thick places embellish the individual’s sense of belonging and personal meaning, cultivating a variety of affective and experiential connections in place (Duff 2010, p. 882). Thin places, by contrast, lack the “rigor and substance of thickly lived places” (Casey 2001, p. 684). They provide no means of rooting the self in place, and no meaningful grasp of placed experience. Thick places are made of affect and the practices in which it is imbricated; in the sense of placing the self, thick places are created as much as they are found.

Casey characterises thin places as expunged of the local specificity that could allow individuals and groups to actively engage with place, to have a ledge to grasp. Instead, thin places trade unique qualities for functionality, navigability, and compatible uniformity. Although Casey remains stubbornly cryptic and fails to name specific examples of thick and thin places, Duff attempts to identify some thin places, noting “the strange consistency of international airport terminals, shopping malls, and fast-food restaurants, which increasingly resemble one another no matter which corner of the globe one encounters them in” (Duff 2010, p. 886). Army barracks could in most cases be added to this roster. Their space is intended to be universally familiar to those who have spent time in such places before, with simple and impersonal public space dominating over the private and the idiosyncratic. For many Moluccans who first arrived in Lunetten, Kamp Vught may have been structurally familiar, yet it seems few had the inclination to call it home:

Tanu I think it’s important to know… our elders were promised to stay here for at most 6 months. So that is where we always get our ideas from. We stay here for 6 months. They stayed here longer than 6 months but they still had the idea that “Sooner or later we’ll go back”. So they say “okay, our luggage is always on standby, all the time, every year, it’s always on standby, then when we get the signal to go back, we go back.”

For Tanu’s parents, this camp space and the Netherlands in general was a place they had been temporarily exiled to. Even after the hope of returning to the Moluccas dwindled in the years after their arrival in Lunetten, it was nevertheless impossible to settle in the camp space, in a

21 material and presumably affective way. While the affective qualities of materially marking and claiming space will be discussed in another chapter, the quote above nevertheless illustrates the thinness of the camp space for many of the first generation of Lunetten’s residents. It suggests residents were trapped in limbo, unsure if they would be allowed to return home tomorrow or in twenty years or never, and as such were unable to relate to the space beyond what they knew of it, being a barrack, a place of permanent displacement.

Being denied the stability of a firm date of departure back to the Moluccas was only the start of their precarity. Legally, Moluccans were also in limbo, being denied citizenship both by Indonesia and by the Dutch government. A government in exile was established in other camps in the Netherlands after the nationalist struggle in the Moluccas stalled following the execution of the Moluccan President Soumokil. Yet this government never received official recognition, and by 1968 more that 80 per cent of the Moluccans in the Netherlands were stateless, having no official citizenship (Amersfoort & Niekerk 2006, p. 331). Antonsich’s legal factor in place-belonging is clearly missing, denying Moluccans the legal stability required to develop a sense of rootedness.

Yet as I have already outlined, this precarity is not simply a legal matter: it also plays out in the meaning ascribed to space and how the space is used. It is impossible to say decisively whether the inability to domesticate the camp space in early years was entirely due to the political situation Moluccans were stuck in. It is my view that, alongside these legal and economic deterrents against belonging, the meaning of the camp space had a pronounced impact upon the lifestyle of residents. Thin places designate its routines through its functional design and, as may be the case with Lunetten, that, along with fickle government inaction, made it difficult for residents to feel able to begin to develop a more settled life or a sense of stability or home. At the very least, the perceived precarity of their position in the Netherlands prevented Moluccans from marking and claiming their living space materially, which may stunt any development of “homeliness”.

Ghost stories, ancestors, space and thickness

It would seem that Kamp Vught for the Moluccans who lived there was never the sacred monument to the Holocaust that contemporary European musealization has designated for most such spaces. It should nevertheless be emphasised that European cultural memory around the Holocaust, and its accompanying reverence for the sites of atrocity, as it is recognised today was not developed until several decades after World War Two, beginning with the Eichmann trial in 1960, the German student movement in 1968, and reaching a wider public by the American 1978 TV miniseries Holocaust (Dreisbach 2009). Just as many of the

22 camps had existed before the Nazis appropriated them, in the aftermath of World War Two they were repurposed for various functions such as prisoner of war camps, make-shift schools, and hospitals to supplement the damage of the war and necessary building costs. At this point in history, these camp spaces were uniformly functional and unspecific not only to the Moluccans who had to move there, but to the various European governments who repurposed them. Their thinness to Moluccans in terms of a barrack lifestyle can therefore come as little surprise. Nevertheless, the history of the camps was felt in other ways. Many of the people I interviewed spoke about the trauma their parents faced from forced migration, immediate military discharge upon arrival, and subsequent abandonment by the Dutch government. The crutch that so many families leaned upon, according to my interviewees, was their belief in ancestors.

Anton [Every Moluccan] father gave a special ancestor’s name to a child, and the story goes that if you have problems, if you have something happening that you cannot solve, you must ask your ancestor with that name, asking for help. So that is very important. My father also gave me the name of an ancestor. He wrote it, under three or four pages he wrote the name of his ancestor, my ancestor. “If something happens, just call his name”. So ancestors are very important.

Interviewer As a way of being supported in day-to-day problems?

Anton Yeah, but the message is that if there’s something happening that you cannot solve alone, then you must ask for help. With this name [taps on the table]. Until now I haven’t used it.

Anton professed his belief in ancestors, but claimed that he’s “not busy with it”. As a devout Christian, he has seen what happens when people are in crisis, and where or who it is they turn to for help. I asked him where, as a Christian, he thought Moluccans’ loyalties lay in regards to religion or ancestors; after denying that there was a preference, he later confessed that ancestors are a far less “learned” form of faith, and so must be felt more fundamentally. Ancestors and spirits are also far more tangible than the Christian god, in the sense that they can occupy and possess specific places and objects, animate or inanimate. The Moluccan belief in the environmental presence of ancestors and spirits was described by Anton in contrast to Christian belief in an omnipresent God that is nevertheless distinct and separate from Earthly material.

Anton Faith [in the Christian God] is very easy to be accepted by the Moluccan people because of their belief in ancestors and uh… what do you call that… animism?

Interviewer Animism, yep, yeah.

Anton So, yeah, when [the Christian] God came it has the same spiritual connection. It’s only God, but it was normally trees, the sun, mountain, sea. Those were the gods, up to the great fish and beasts in the water.

Ancestors are nevertheless not considered a threat to Christian orthodoxy, as they are perceived to occupy the non-divine sphere alongside living human beings (Strijbosch 1993, p. 54). The meaning of the concept of ‘ancestors’ (in Malay nenek mojang) is broad. It tends to include all members of a social group who have passed on; yet two categories of ancestors are particularly important for Moluccans. The first type is comprised of members of the oldest groups of the deceased, in particular those whose names have become mythic and are often heard in stories. Sometimes they have become legendary due to their importance as brave or strategically-minded war leaders (capitan) or as the founder of a Moluccan village. The other type consists of the recently deceased: members of generations immediately preceding the present one, who are known from personal knowledge and memory. Both categories of ancestors are treated with respect and, crucially, they are considered as actively present – albeit not visible – members of the current Moluccan community, occupying the non-divine world (Strijbosch 1993, p. 53).

There are nevertheless many other spirits that may occupy the non-divine environment just as ancestors do: witches frequently possess objects and people, and occasionally other ancestors. One example in Northern and Eastern Moluccan folklore is the suanggi, a cannibal witch spirit who has many local variants across the region. Bubandt (2008) describes how, when rumours of the presence of the suanggi in Tobelo spread throughout the North Moluccas in 2004, parents of children who attended school in Tobelo sent money for them to leave town, or implored them not to go out at night. In other words, these spirits have specific spacialities and temporalities just as western notions of hauntings do. The suanggi of Tobelo, locally known as the o tokata, had several origin stories, but all had the themes of every malevolent spirit in the Moluccas: a violent death and the lack of a proper burial ritual. The fate of prisoners of Kamp Vught was not known in detail during the early years of Lunetten’s Moluccan residency, but some had childhood stories of discovering the shallow mass graves of former prisoners, as well as signs of violence: guns would occasionally be salvaged, and the execution platforms a short distance outside the village had remained for some years after the war ended.

I met Loes at the Museum in Lunetten, Barack 1B, which details the various generations who have occupied Kamp Vught from the decades prior to World War Two until contemporary Moluccan neighbourhoods. As one of the museum’s volunteers, she was an open and eloquent interviewee, sharing many stories that she often told to groups of schoolchildren. Prior to her work as a guide, Loes admitted that she didn’t know much about the past uses of the camp, only the broad strokes. What she did know, she mostly learned from her father, whom she describes as having always believed the Moluccans would be unable to return home. It was her

24 father who moved her at an early age from Lunetten’s Moluccan school to the Dutch school in Vught.

As we sit in a room for teaching to large school groups behind the museum, Loes tells me about various differences she experienced being schooled in the Dutch way instead of staying in Lunetten’s own Moluccan school. In her fourth year of elementary school, the class was asked to write an essay on any topic of their choice. Knowing that Lunetten was not quite like her friends’ neighbourhoods, Loes decided to write the essay about her home. She asked her father “What is this place where we live?”, to which her father replied mystically “You live in a concentration camp”, without explaining what exactly such a thing was:

Loes And then everyone asked where do you live, and of course I would say that I’m living in a former concentration camp, but not knowing what has happened here. Okay, the Jews were captured here, I know that, but I didn’t know what happened. Well something happened in the camps, something magic, mysterious happened and sometimes our parents say “oh maybe it’s this”, “maybe it’s that”

Other people describe childhood encounters and affects that made them feel that there was something unusual about the camps. Although some of my interviewees told me that they knew about the past uses of the camps even in their childhood, there is nevertheless a significant difference in how people, and children in particular, were affected by the space. As explained in the last section, some residents felt the camp space as mundane and familiar, albeit unhomely; however, others experienced, as Loes puts it, the “magic” and “mystery” of the space. Thus, it is essential to acknowledge that residents’ affective experience of Lunetten’s space was far from homogenous. As becomes clear, however, the outcome was much the same: Lunetten could not be domesticated.

During the 1970s, when Loes was in her late 20s, Loes was sitting in front of her barrack feeding birds when a white man approached her. He told Loes he lived in Germany, and that he was a prisoner here decades ago, and with Loes’s permission he explored her barrack. He returned, remarking that the barrack had totally changed, that it was far more cramped and uncomfortable during his days here. They walked around Lunetten, talking about what he remembered of camp life. Loes’s barrack – Barak 9 – was for men, and the barrack she lived in before was Barak 24, which was a women’s barrack.

Now the mystical bit comes. Because when we came to live here in 1951 it was spookte (haunted). When I was little it was spooky. The Jews lived here, and they died. And we people from the east, the Asians, are sensitive. So my mother told me later when I was a bit grown up – so she arrived here very young and we were small children – that at night when she would finish the housekeeping. You need to imagine there’s a barrack, a long hallway with lots of little rooms, and the washing facilities was at the end, and at night my mother would wash the clothes of her children, rinse them and such. So she walks to the washing

room and sometimes she would hear someone singing. She would wash them around midnight. Sometimes it would be singing, sometimes crying, or the tap was open and the water came out but there was no-one. Lot’s of things happened there in the barrack, but that from that lady, my mother said that you hear a woman singing or a woman crying. And then the visitor came, the Jewish visitor, and he said “That Barrack over there (where I lived), barrack 24 – that’s a woman’s camp when the Jews were here”. You understand? So it makes sense! So that was in the beginning. Lots of goings-on back then.

Interviewer Did you hear a lot of these stories?

Loes Yes, a lot. And the people in Westerbork or Schattenberg, they can tell you the same story. But I don’t think you want to hear about that.

It might be expected that those who occupy thin places would attempt to maintain daily contact with familiar cultural habits, and practices that would have been normal had they been able to stay in the places that are more rich in personal and collective meaning. What might then be expected is for Moluccans living in Lunetten to make frequent contact with the ghosts that are closest and most familiar to them. Yet the spirits that residents had such a hostile relationship with were wholly embedded in the story of the place itself, not Moluccan culture. The fact that Moluccans were troubled by spirits of past prisoners of the place suggests that, although the belief may be structured by Moluccan culture, the way that ghosts were related to and dealt with was inseparable from local history, and from the internal logics of the barrack space itself. What this ghostlore suggests to the researcher of affective space is that, rather than the history of the camps being overlooked, ignored, or forgotten in the thinness of the space, the first few years of camp life saw an antagonistic relationship between the space and the residents, even for those who knew little of the history of the camp. There is thus a conflict between the assumption of thinness and the haunting of the camp space.

In her study of Thai airport staff’s preoccupation with ghosts in the building, Ferguson (2014) considers how such hauntings can be seen as place-making within what Auge would call the ‘non-place’ ([1995] 1992), a concept which studies the low-level affectivities of certain characteristic spaces of kinds of modernity, which overlaps closely with Casey’s ‘thin places’. Ferguson attempts to show how “ghostlore can be locally embedded, but also intrinsically trans-local as well” (2014, p. 48). “Hauntings might take specific cues from ‘local’ culture, but appeasing the spirits, and hedging one’s bets, as well as the actions of spirits themselves can make use of regional logics, as well as the logistics of global aviation” (ibid.). During the building of Suvarnabhumi Airport, several construction workers suffered sudden, violent, and ‘unnatural’ deaths, the symbols and places of which have been incorporated by airport staff into practices of malevolent spirit appeasement for fear of terrible repercussions. Other ghosts that haunt the area include the cao thi, who was the original owner of the land upon which the airport was built. Ferguson argues that “this use of spirits taps into a broader critique of trans-

26 local social organization, and interpellates folk culture as well as the area’s past within the supposed ‘non-place’ of the airport terminal” (2014, p. 56). Anton explains how this was not limited to Lunetten, but spread to Kamp Schattenberg, another former Nazi camp:

Anton When Moluccans arrived in the Netherlands they all went to Amersfoort. They got a health check-up, and then they were sent to Schattenberg, Vught, Eijsden, Woerden. In the places that were barracks, Schattenberg and Vught, they were aware of the Jewish people has lived there. Because there are stories. They are very sensitive to ghosts, spirits. So, they knew. Last night I was thinking about if they were aware of the Jewish people who were there, because in… when I was a boy, the kids who lived in Lunetten, they told also stories about ghosts. Maybe they weren’t true but there were always stories about ghosts, and “you mustn’t go there or there”, and “that place is bad”. So I think they were aware, because children heard it from the adults. So they know that many people died here. Only the adults were aware and knew for sure what has happened there. So, I think they were aware in Kamp Lunetten and Schattenberg, and they were very aware of spirits.

Anton did not grow up in Lunetten, but his recounting of stories told whilst growing up with friends from Lunetten tells us that, while ghostlore is a significant part of how Moluccans relate to the environment, it seems that Lunetten was particularly saturated with hauntings, whether or not they were consciously related to the history of the camps. It suggests that, rather than maintaining the practice of ghostlore solely for the sake of keeping hold of cultural norms identity, this ghostlore was uniquely shaped by the space in which the Moluccans lived. As a reaction to the space, Moluccans used the belief structures that they knew to deal with what they didn’t.

Clearly, the haunting of Lunetten influenced not only the affective qualities of the space, but how it was used and occupied as a home. Returning to Deleuze’s conceptualisation of affect as an indicator of the body’s action-potential (1988), the presence of hostile spirits in Lunetten not only created an atmosphere of fear: it also seems to have prevented the camp being further domesticated. In many stories, the children are told that they cannot play in or around particular barrack buildings; in other stories, the ghostly encounter takes place in the middle of a domestic task such as washing clothes or preparing food. The affect felt by Moluccans about the space of Lunetten prevented the development of comfort, security, routine, and freedom that would have been required for a sense of belonging. Thus, the haunting of Lunetten shaped and restricted the possible lifestyles for several years, before the spirits were finally purged:

Loes I was always a bit afraid. Now I’m going to tell something that I’ve never told to anyone. Just you and I, we know it. At a certain moment there was a period when baracks would catch fire. In total there were three or four barracks that would catch fire. And then men, under which my father in law, men who came home pretty late, they suddenly saw a lady in white with long dark hair… I’m getting chicken skin … a lady with long hair would

come into a barrack and out of a barrack, floating. They saw that. So when the lady would visit a barrack, it would catch fire. And they would pay attention. They would see that she’d been to barrack 7, and later the barrack would catch fire, and later it would be barrack 6. The fire would usually happen about a month after the lady’s visit. Quite short. Then you understand that the lady is something to do with that. And then the men would be guarding and at a certain moment they saw a lady at barrack 9 floating from the front to the back – it wasn’t a real lady – and in a certain way they caught it. So they took her by the hair and left her outside the camp, and from that moment the fires stopped.

And so do the stories. From this moment onwards there were no encounters with malevolent spirits that were recounted to me. I believe this was a significant turning point in the development of belonging in Lunetten, as the security and comfort that are so important to a sense of belonging were able to be developed in the absence of hostile spirits. This act ensured a secure territorial zone and, I would argue, would constitute the first step in developing an enclave that is able to exercise the agency to define the meaning and use of space.

Conclusion The Netherlands could have given Moluccans a better welcome, to say the least, even if their stay would only be for several months. Yet the government of the war-torn Dutch state chose one of the few short-term residential that were available and that they deemed formally appropriate – the military barrack. I hope to have shown that the ‘baggage’ of the barrack, both in their functional form and their history as part of a great atrocity, has limited the action- potential of residents, stopping them from engaging in practices or developing feelings of belonging to Lunetten for years. Though it has been ignored by Antonsich, the relevance of affect to studies of territorial belonging should be considered in any future research.

A central finding in this chapter was that both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ space are in some way affectively influential. While thin space does not necessarily inspire feelings of fear or disgust, the functional form heavily limits the possibility of feeling comfortable and able to settle in such spaces. That does not mean thin space is anti-affect, oppressively neutral, but rather that the affective qualities of thin space are often disciplinary and transient.

These affective restrictions are eventually removed, and their removal clearly contributes to the development of home and belonging. In banishing the malevolent spirits from the living space, Moluccans ensured a secure territorial zone, and began the first act of defining the meaning and use of the space – the first act of creating an enclave. The end of thin space’s influence is more difficult to trace, as it was so much more tied up with contextual factors such as Moluccans relationship with the Dutch government. However, by the 1960s there would be a large wave of migration out of Lunetten, and the remaining residents developed a habit of

28 knocking through the wall they shared with their previous neighbour and adopting it for themselves. In doing so, they were also defining the meaning and use of the space they occupied.

Kampong/Compound Defining the enclave and re-placing diasporic belonging

Introduction

In Chapter 1, I have shown that making a home in Lunetten is a lifestyle shaped by the affective qualities of the space, affectivity that allows for or prohibits attaching feelings of homeliness and security to the space and their accompanying routines. In this chapter, I will show how the concepts of community and collective identity have developed to shape a sense of belonging, and how the geographical, social and political isolation of Lunetten has served as a catalyst. Building off the eradication of ghosts from the space in its first decade of occupancy by Moluccans, the residents were granted a new freedom to develop the space as they wished. The history that residents of Lunetten have shared have strengthened the notion of community felt in Lunetten to a point where it is a dominant part of a sense of belonging.

A genealogical approach to examining Lunetten’s community could be useful to some extent. There is an enormous amount of pride taken in residents being able to trace themselves and each others neighbours’ ancestors back to their original kampong. From that point of origin they can identify their pelas and the historic relations between different villages. Compared to Indonesia, Lunetten still ensures that these blood ties and historic alliances between villages remain important in the everyday. Yet a genealogical approach would still leave unexamined the modern community, and how it has dealt both with the Dutch context, and with other Moluccan communities in the Netherlands. Lunetteners often compare themselves to Dutch neighbourhoods, which they feel are in many ways opposite to Lunetten’s neighbourhood: emotionally cold, non-religious, and socially distant from each other. A key phrase that Lunetteners used to talk about their own neighbourhood was sociale controle, which is not quite what it seems to mean in English. It refers to the obligation to ‘keep an eye out’ for one another, such as enquiring when you don’t see an older neighbour for a while, or making sure that children playing in the street can do so safely, and in many ways having an ‘open house’ where one is welcome without prior notice. Of course, this sociale controle has an overbearing side which recently has seen younger residents move out of Lunetten. This raises the question for many Lunetten residents as to how the perceived essence of the village, of what sets it apart no only from Dutch but also Moluccan villages, will survive.

The conflict over sociale controle will be addressed in the third chapter. In this chapter, however, I will explore how Lunetten residents identify themselves within the context of Dutch neighbourhoods, as well as other Moluccan neighbourhoods, and how collective identity is

30 shaped vis-à-vis both Dutch and Moluccan society. First I will an examine the factors of cultural homogeneity in the politics of belonging. That will be followed by an exploration of how Moluccans in Lunetten perform identity through the diasporic maintenance of traditions. Subsequently, I will consider the shared history experienced by residents and how it shapes a notion of belonging to a space that is inseparable from the people who live their and their memories.

Preserving the ethnic enclave through ancestral law

Enclaves have typically been contrasted to ghettoes, with the former having a more active, voluntary, and powerful connotation, while the latter is usually thought of as a consequence of the dominance of the ‘host’ culture (Marcuse 1997, p. 242). The self-definition of enclaves is particularly integral, which Marcuse emphasises in his definition:

An enclave is a spatially concentrated area in which members of a particular population group, self defined by ethnicity or religion or otherwise, congregate as a means of enhancing their economic, social, political and/or cultural development (Ibid.)

Marcuse nevertheless notes that the dichotomy is never pristine, as all spaces of concentrated activity share some aspects of the ghetto and some of the enclave. In the case of Lunetten, its’ life began, broadly speaking, as a state-designed ghetto, but over the years has become more actively involved in defining itself. This can be evidenced in the nuances of Lunetten’s ethnic politics. I had the following conversation with Anton:

Anton In the Netherlands you have places, in Limburg, where East Moluccans live. And in Boxtel, and Zwolle. There is also a… how can I explain this. In 1951 comes the people from the KNIL, and the people from the KNIL are from the Middle-Moluccas, and you have also East-Moluccas. And you have also North Moluccan.

Interviewer And they’re also not part of the KNIL?

Anton Well… also. East Moluccans and North Moluccans also served in the Dutch military, but here in the Netherlands, the Middle Moluccans don’t like the East Moluccans. They think they are better than somebody from East Moluccas. They are discriminating.

Interviewer And that also happens in the Netherlands? Is that… do you have to sometimes mediate or negotiate… help repair some…?

Anton We don’t have to negotiate or mediate because we know in the past things have happened, and people don’t like each other. So they lived in other places from the people in Ambon.

Interviewer So even in the Netherlands, they live separately?

Anton Yeah, till now.

During the initial distribution of the Moluccan population, the Dutch government, aware of potential conflict arising from ethnic mixing, maintained a policy of segregation between North, East and ‘Middle’ Moluccans. Over the years, as residents moved out of Lunetten and others move in, the ethnic homogeneity has been largely maintained by the traditional ancestral property rights of rumah tua, which will be discussed shortly. The cohesiveness of each Moluccan neighbourhood in a wider context of ethnic tension and discrimination brought up questions of how ethnic enclaves have been studied as either voluntary or involuntary in their segregation (Marcuse 1997; Peach 1999; Logan et al 2002; Knox and Pinch 2010; Galonnier 2015). Often enclaves are understood by the host society to be entirely voluntary. Although Lunetten began life as a refugee camp – a thoroughly involuntary ghetto – there is evidence that since it was rebuilt as family homes, residents have pursued policies that retain the ethnic homogeneity of the village. I spoke to Loes about one such policy:

Translator Do people who didn’t grow up here live here, or didn’t have a history here?

Loes Most of them do. Most who live here have a history. Dutch people are not allowed to live here. Only for Moluccan people.

Translator Maybe if you marry them it would be okay.

Loes Yeah yeah. If you married a Dutch person they would be able to live here, but we made sure of that. We made sure to put that into the contracts from the housing association. We held onto the principle of rumah tua. Rumah-tua is from the Moluccas, it is the ancestor’s house. We also wanted to uphold that here. For example, my house is a rumah tua, so that means that even if we come to pass away, our children or our grandchildren are still permitted to live in this house. They can’t give it to anyone else. They can only do that if my children refuse. If my children per se want to live there, it’s allowed.

Interviewer And that’s based on a Moluccan understanding of ancestors?

Loes Yes, like in the Moluccas, we have a rumah tua. My husband has a rumah tua. Rumah tua is for everybody who is a Parihala (her husband’s family name) who have the same ancestors.

The maintenance of ethnic homogeneity in Lunetten is a significant part of boundary control in the place’s political community. Belonging to a place is not simply belonging to a group of people. Essential factors in the politics of belonging are membership (to a group) and ownership (of a place), which necessarily speak to power relations (Trudeau 2006; Antonsich 2010). Trudeau defines his terms: “By ‘politics of belonging’, I mean the discourses and practices that establish and maintain discursive and material boundaries that correspond to the imagined geographies of a polity” (2006, p. 422). Politics of belonging concerns itself with the mechanics of inclusion and exclusion about who is entitled to belong in a specific place and who is not.

The initial ethnic composition of Lunetten as primarily a place for people from the Middle- Moluccas was established by the Dutch government in their distribution of Moluccans throughout the Netherlands. Over the years since the establishment of Lunetten, however, the effects of traditions that rely on ancestrally defined bonds and property rights have maintained the ethnic composition of Lunetten without appearing to be a conscious, concerted effort to police the place ethnically. In other words, ethnic homogeneity was an unintended, but not necessarily unwelcome, consequence of preserving cultural practices.

More recently, there has been a rise in intermarrying with the Dutch population, but this isn’t necessarily seen as violating ancestral traditions. Much of it is rather a practical approach to the problem of potentially marrying a pela, something forbidden by ancestral tradition:

Interviewer I did see a few white Dutch people in the church. Were they the spouses, the husbands and wives?

Tanu Yes. Correct. It’s mostly husbands and wives of Moluccans here.

Interviewer Do you think that’s also a part of this individualism, the rise of marrying Dutch people?

Tanu By now we think of it as normal.

Isaac In the earlier times my parents would say “I’d rather you didn’t”.

Tanu But now it’s very normal.

Isaac In the past my parents said “Don’t marry Dutch people”, but now I can’t say to my children “No, you have to marry a Moluccan”.

Translator Is it also easier to marry a Dutch person because you don’t have to worry about pelas and things like that?

Tanu It’s not a problem, but it could be a difficulty. It’s easier, you don’t have some of these traditional problems. In Moluccan families we want to know what’s your name, what’s your father’s name, where you from, you know?

Isaac It was my daughter’s birthday in August and I was there, and I hadn’t met her guy before. She said “Can he come to my birthday?” and then you see the situation – all her friends were there, and then all the family of her guy. For me, I don’t make a problem. If my children think it good, I also am good. But in the earlier time, my parents would say “No! I don’t want Dutch people coming into my house!”

The maintenance of ethnic homogeneity is thus not entirely involuntary, as parental qualms about marrying Dutch people evidence. Yet, as this may have been more motivated by historically poor relations with Dutch society, it is difficult to say that this, too, was for the sake of ethnic homogeneity. It is clear that in the politics of belonging, the ethnicity of Lunetten’s population was not as important as the maintenance of cultural traditions that, as a side effect, protected the ethnic homogeneity of the village. The differing intentions and outcomes of this

33 process raise questions over the politics of belonging and its characteristically active and conscious negotiation of boundaries. To totally discount the importance for Lunetten of a conscious genealogical approach to boundary maintenance may be naïve, as the cultural traditions maintained in Lunetten knowingly intertwine the cultural with the genealogical throughout. I spoke to Tanu who, in his role as a member of an advice council for Wet Maastschappelijke Ondersteuning [community support legislation], has been right in the middle of the specific formulation and enforcement of rumah tua. He gave an insight into how rumah tua contributes to the politics of belonging:

Tanu [W]e also thought while living here “How are we going to do that?” We do say that if a house is available, a Moluccan needs to get it, and not a Dutch person. And if no-one is available, we look to Vught. But now we have the question “How do we do that the most honest way?” So you see the thoughts about how we live together. So not only from the Moluccans but also from the Dutch society. The Netherlands has concerns about who is allowed to live where, and we Moluccans have that problem just the same. We also have to check that when a room is available a Moluccan will get it. But why do we want this actually? The most important thing in a wijk or a community is that they have a common history. If you have that, then you have a connection with each other. If you have a bond with each other, in whatever way possible – in our case history, we know each other very well. So that is a very strong bond, or connection, to live with each other without really having big problems. But you also see that with the elderly, that for example shop-keepers with old houses historic houses, who are independent businesspeople, they also stick together with other independent businesspeople. And the people who work on the land, the people who work in the factory, they also like to stick together with each other. So if you have a bunch of people with the same background, it gives the possibility for connection. And then you form a community.

At the heart of Tanu’s approach is an acknowledgment of the functionality of enclaves. As explained in Marcuse’s definition above, the enclave provides practical and emotional benefits, and the presence of a supportive community encourages a feeling of comfort and security (Kusenbach 2008, p. 240). Yet Tanu’s approach is also more broadly concerned with how a sense of belonging is maintained in relation to place and its other residents, regardless of the enclave context. He explained to me how individualism was eroding communities in Dutch neighbourhoods creating places where no-one has anything in common nor any roots to the place. It is the enclave that is the answer to this problem, Tanu believes, as it ensures that people who have something in common can live in a single place.

Marrying traditions and circumstances

Diasporic consciousness involves longing for the lost homeland, and a rememorializing of what eventually is understood as a mythical place. It was common in interviews to speak

34 romantically about ancestral villages in the Moluccas as a reference point for the authenticity of everyday life in Lunetten. For Joy, the toilets of the old barracks of Lunetten were rudimentary and uncomfortable, being squat toilets that appear to be little more than holes in the ground, yet speaking in retrospect she believes they gave her a fleeting, comforting notion of how it might be to live in her ancestral village. These rememorializing moments also occur in religious traditions, as Eunice accounts:

Eunice At the museum you can see a drawing where you can see that people are moving out from Lunetten to Culemborg and Breda, you name it. If those people are here for an event, then they say, you hear them say “Lunetten is unique”. There is a kind of atmosphere that reminds them of the life they have lived here. Their youth, and all . . . all the traditions that we have taken over, what we have held onto from the first generation.

Tanu It follows the kampong life the most.

Eunice and Tanu continue to explain how pela traditions have remained an important part of public life. The processes involved in diasporic belonging are closely related to religion. Much like diasporic longing for homeland, argues Mircea Eliade (1982, p. 128), religion is about the pursuit of pristine origins and to experience the cosmos in illo tempore, before time began, and before the ‘terrors of history’ corrupted humanity. Moreover, the sense of community that diasporic livelihood entails can be imagined, as two interviewees called it, as a unified volk. Similarly, Emile Durkheim (1971 [1915]) argued that religion is “essentially social solidarity distilled, expressed in collective representations and powerful shared rituals that create and sustain a moral community and protect the individual against the centrifugal forces of anomie” (Vasquez 2010, p. 128). In sum, the similar processes involved in both religion and diaspora, especially in terms of the articulation of individual and collective identities, mean that they have often been closely intertwined, bolstering one another (ibid.).

Over centuries of colonization and administration by the Netherlands and Portugal, as well as peaceful contact with Arab traders during the 14th century, Moluccans had hybridized much of their animistic traditions with the more recent worshipping of Christianity and Islam. Among the predominantly Protestant Moluccan population in the Netherlands, their hybrid beliefs and practices were nevertheless in need of protection from the potentially homogenizing effect of the Protestantism of the ‘host’ culture. Marriage traditions that are entwined with animism’s ancestral bonds, such as pela, are fiercely defended even after the practice has declined in the Moluccas and Indonesia in general. As mentioned in the previous section of this chapter, the preservation of pela traditions has had the knock-on effect of increasing the ethnic diversity of Lunetten, arguably weakening an aspect that is central to the self-defining enclave. However, the preservation of pela has also become a part of Lunetten’s politics of belonging.

Jimi’s comparison between Dutch and Moluccan concepts of family helps to show how these traditions have become a source of cultural identity for many Moluccans in a foreign land:

Jimi Our bonds are also different because in the western world, you have parents, and you have cousins, and then the next generation isn’t really counted as family. We are different because we are… we count our grandparents, our cousins, our brothers and sisters, but we go further with our bonds, and that’s a difference between us and Dutch people. We also have pelas and… and there are also blood bonds with that, so that’s why we are one people and not separate from each other. And that is also taught with the younger generations. We have stuck to that tradition here in the Netherlands. In the Moluccas itself, it’s less traditional I see, but you also have different villages. In Aboru that is also very traditional, it’s very close. And um if you go to Ambon, it’s less… the bonds are less… they are freer… more…

Joy Flexible.

Jimi Yes. They are not so tied on the traditional bonds with pelas and your original family etcetera. With them your family is still strong, in the whole Molucca, but also here… but yeah, that’s a difference between the Dutch people and the Moluccans, but you also see that in the younger generation because we are teaching our children not to marry that [pela] because we have a bond with them, and otherwise something might happen, if you know what I mean.

Another tradition that Lunetten residents have attempted to hold onto is the gifting of the dowry from the groom’s family to the bride’s. It is customary for the family of the groom to visit the bride’s family soon after the recognition of the couples’ engagement, and gifts would be carried in cases and pots balanced on top of the heads of the groom’s family. Aside from the gifts, that would always include wedding clothes, the primary bridal treasury was rarely paid in money. Isaac told me that when he visited the Moluccas he noticed that treasuries follow the different customs of each village. The family of the bride from one village might usually ask for a specific number of cattle, whereas a bride from another village may prefer clove trees, depending on the item’s availability in the groom’s village and the needs of the bride’s village. It struck me that, especially during the first few decades of economically impoverished Moluccan life in the Netherlands, weddings traditions might struggle to be maintained:

Tanu They had a hand-to-mouth existence. They didn’t have much money, no… only an allowance from the state. They weren’t allowed to work. The little money they had was already being spent on something else. But it was every time something different, you know? And the crazy thing is, well it’s not that crazy, when you think back to it, you think our parents were trying to keep traditions alive. In these kinds of traditions of officially asking the hand of a lady, or a girl, certain objects are part of that.

Translator Some objects are necessary?

Tanu Yeah, some objects. In the past, they asked for things that were common in the village of the groom. Something that was in general use and was easy to get hold of. And here, they

also tried to give things that they gave in the past. Because they think it’s tradition, so you have to give this, and this, and this, so in several villages they have several different things they give.

Translator Like what?

Tanu A small drum, and mostly fabric. Big rolls of fabric. Often it would be white fabric.

Isaac You can’t make clothes out of it, but still they ask for it.

Tanu You can just make practical things out of it, and now this is kind of what we do. That’s what they do nowadays, because they think it’s tradition. We’ve seen this kind of thing before.

Eunice They weren’t cut off yet, they were rolls straight from the factory.

Tanu And what you see now is… Because it’s difficult to get those things, they say it’s easier to give money instead of the material that’s difficult to get. That is a change from the past to the present. In the beginning, they could still get stuff from the store in Vught, where there’s fabric. That wasn’t a problem, but other things were a problem. Mostly they gave a bottle of Jenever. You could drink it together. But other things that were more difficult to get, people said “Okay, just give money”. I see it as a change of era. A change of era, because that’s what the time demanded. We live in a new time and we must give other things, and our thought about traditions, this also changes. It’s not so strict, but its more practical. It’s more practical, but… they still ask for the hand of the girl. They still do that, but more practical, but I see that it’s going a bit away. They live together now as partners, they don’t marry anymore.

Efforts to preserve kampong-style wedding traditions were thus only partially maintained, and a certain level of adaptation to their new economic context was necessary. For Tanu, this was perceived as an unfortunate weakening of the traditions important to the protection of kampong life. Other traditions also had to be compromised in the face of changing generational priorities, and the practicalities of accepting that, without the RMS, Moluccans had to develop their homeland in the Netherlands. The rules against marrying one’s pela, for example, were avoided by marrying Dutch people:

Joy It’s easier, it’s easier. Because you don’t have to ask yourself “is that a pela or not”. Maybe he or she is… we have a sort of relationship, a family or whatever, but if you’re going out with some dutch person, you don’t have to ask yourself “is that a pela, or is that a family of me”, no. And if you’re going out with Moluccan people, only Moluccan people, then you always have to ask these questions.

Isaac If you don’t do that, if you don’t ask and you have married and you have children and so on and so on, and then maybe 20 25 years later, you say “hmm why is my child sick?” You think something is wrong. “why? I don’t know.” We didn’t do anything bad, or so. And then it kills you. It kills you. It’s very strange.

The conversation between these two interviewees and myself revealed a problem of maintaining traditions through hybridization with the ‘host’ culture. As Isaac says, the belief that marrying a pela will have consequences on your progeny is still very strong. It is because of this very real fear that young Moluccans are increasingly deciding to marry Dutch people, as there is no risk of marrying a pela. Thus, an unintended consequence of maintaining marriage traditions that evoke kampong life are the increased ethnic integration of younger generations into Dutch society. Tanu, a member of the second generation, explained to me his view that the rise of marrying into the Dutch population was literally the point of no return, as it became clear to him that young people had lost faith in the RMS struggle, instead deciding to settle.

Sharing memories

Lunetteners put a high value on the memories and experiences shared between residents and family members, and the bonds that they form over time in such a small space. The history they share not only through nationwide Moluccan networks, but within the camp, evokes a shared destiny, too. Familiarity with one another is necessary for the warmth of the community many Lunetteners wish to maintain, as well as for the reconstruction of kampong life. Often I would ask residents if there was any other place they feel they could live, and some said they would rather live in their ancestral village in the Moluccas, but most said that they could not live anywhere else. Loes listed many events that had taken place in the confines of the village – the birth of her daughter and granddaughter, her own marriage to another Lunettener, her job at the museum – and her experiences seem reliant upon the self- sufficiency and social and geographical isolation of Lunetten:

Loes We in Lunetten we have our own school. Lunetten was like a little village. Like a Moluccan village in Holland. Because we have here a big school, an elementary school, a MULO school (high school), a housework school, a technical school. We have our own hospital in the camp and we have our own civil registry office. When you are born, you don’t have to go to Vught, and when you marry, you don’t have to go to Vught. You can marry here in this camp. You go to the hospital if you’re sick or your child needs a check up or vaccination. And if someone died you don’t have to go to Vught. It was a Moluccan village in Holland.

Many residents take pride in the institutional self-sufficiency that has allowed Lunetten to thrive in isolation to the rest of Dutch society. The proximity of vital services has allowed residents to tie integral autobiographical moments and memories to a single place. Autobiographical factors are an essential part of Antonsich’s (2010) concept of place- belonging, as he argues that one cannot belong to a place without having rich experiences and

Lunetten’s maternal ward, 1956-1966. Source: J.J. de Lima, Collectie Molukse Historisch Museum

memories in one’s life in that place. The importance of having family members continually present throughout one’s life in Lunetten, as well as the presence of members who have since passed away, was a common theme in conversations with residents. It was often professed that because of these shared memories in this particular place that leaving Lunetten was simply out of the question for some residents. Childhood memories are particularly potent in shaping the meaning of place and developing a sense of place-belonging. Antonsich leans on the writings of bell hooks (2009), for whom the Kentucky hills, “filled with childhood memories, experiences, and emotions, are narrated as the home-place where she feels that she can only truly belong to and find/be herself” (Antonsich 2010 p. 647). Especially common themes in my discussions with residents were stories of childhood that attach significance to particular moments and physical parts of the camp space, often to do with experiencing freedom, escape, and chaos, and in doing so often testing the limits of place.

Jeroen recalled many stories of mischief from his younger days in Lunetten, but his carefree experiences were often shaded by contact with the other meanings of the camp. He described banal encounters with German prisoners of war, on courtyard sweeping duty, for whom he would sate their demands to steal his father’s cigarettes. On another occasion, he was playing a game similar to ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with friends, and in an attempt to dig himself a hiding spot uncovered a shallow mass grave; he then proceeded to line up the skulls on a wall with

Children queue up at Lunetten’s clinic for a tuberculosis vaccination, 1960-1970. Source: Collectie Moluks Historisch Museum

pride. Other male interviewees often recounted similar stories – mischief that seems to make light of their dwelling situation. Yet these childhood memories are gendered by notions of domesticity:

Loes When we were young the girls were being raised quite strictly. We couldn’t leave the surroundings of the barrack. But the boys, they are free! They played in the woods, they shoot the ducks, they caught frogs, climbing in trees. They stole the weapons from the soldiers! And they hide them, and all these things. They had the youth of their lives! And we girls had to stay in the barrack.

Interviewer How would you pass the time?

Loes Playing! Girls play with girl’s things. I lived in barrack 24 on the other side of the camp, and there’s a moat, so me and my girlfriends would cross the moat and there’s a piece of land. And we told each other this is our toevluchtsoord (hide-out or refuge). If you didn’t feel happy, you could flee to there to be yourself with the nature. I am a woman of nature because that’s what I did. We would day-dream, use our imagination, that’s what we would do in our toevluchtsoord. The boys had their youth but we had ours.

In Loes’ account, there is a clear influence of her childhood experiences in the camp space and the way she considers how she relates to space now. Despite not really being able to leave the camps, her hideout provided a means of escape, which she remembers fondly in her reflection that she is “a woman of nature”. Childhood also saw an early construction of the gendering of

40 space, with the wild outdoors being for boys, and the domestic sphere reserved for girls. In ‘escaping’ to her hideaway, Loes was testing the limits of spatial meaning, and her memory of it has stayed with her in her adult interpretation of space. Sandercock (1998) connects memory to the relationship between belonging and space:

‘Memory, both individual and collective, is deeply important to us. It locates us as part of something bigger than our individual existences, perhaps makes us seem less significant, sometimes gives us at least partial answers to questions like: “Who am I?” and “Why am I like I am?” Memory locates us, as part of family history, as part of a tribe or community, as a part of city building and nation making. Loss of memory is, basically a loss of identity’ (Sandercock 1998, p. 207, quoted in Fenster 2005, p. 248)

Memory can consist of short-term memory based on intimate knowledge of the space, which builds upon daily usage of the space, such as knowing where to park your car most conveniently for yourself and other neighbours, or which street children play in most. This short-term memory is corporeal in the sense that it uses the body’s experiences in using these spaces such as driving or walking (Fenster 2005, p. 248). Memory is also long term, accreting events from the farthest times and smallest events in our life: childhood joys and ordeals, and personal encounters and experiences in specific places, and our subsequent interpretations and reflections upon them. These memories in our personal history often develop a sense of belonging to the places where they were experienced. Tanu emphasises the continuity of residents, providing the least disruption to these memories which locate us:

Tanu If you ask about belonging in Lunetten, you will get a different answer in another Moluccan village in the Netherlands, because we have a very old history. Not only because of the place, in the first place, but also the people, they are the original people who lived in Vught. In other places, they’re mostly coming from all over, and then they form a wijk somewhere. People usually come from different places. But here it’s really parents, children, who have stayed here. Third, fourth, fifth, maybe even sixth generation have stayed here.

In their conceptualisation of place-identity for victims of displacement, Dixon and Durrheim emphasise ‘place-referent continuity’, i.e. “a place’s ability to signify our identity by acting as a stable reference point for experience, values, relations and actions” (Dixon & Durrheim 2004, p. 459). In the collection of memories that are associated with a particular place, continuity of defining aspects of those memories contribute to the capacity of places to symbolise elements of the self. In this regard, the value that Tanu places on the persistence of other residents to stay in Lunetten is directly linked to memories that form the self’s relation to place. Lunetten residents often contrasted the consistency of residents in their neighbourhood with the transience of other Moluccans neighbourhood in the Netherlands:

Interviewer It sounds like… Our conversation started with how important religion was for Moluccans, and it seems to fit with your explanation just now of a whole neighbourhood

of people who have something in common. It’s a similarity that makes everyone in Lunetten equal…

Eunice Yeah, and also the history that we have experienced with each other. We have a history that is unique, and incomparable with the other Moluccan places. We can stay at the place where we came in 1951. In Westerbork and many other places, that’s not the case. So Lunetten is a symbol, a monument… a monument…

Tanu It’s the only place where the Moluccans’ camp still stays.

Isaac And you have built a society and you know everything, from that your good friend is dead, or your mother is dying. What else? When families get into fights. When people are sick in hospital, everyone comes to visit. People say you need to have empathy for your family but you also need empathy for your neighbours.

The experiences that Lunetten residents have shared with the same people, be they banal spontaneous encounters or life-altering events, have in Isaac’ words developed “empathy” with each other, a surely essential component in a neighbourhood where the consistency of the residents means that people “know everything”. The memories that people form of place, especially in one’s own neighbourhood, are necessarily relational, and the long-term residency of neighbours who feature strongly or weakly in memories of a place over the years will intertwine those social relations with the autobiographical sense of place. Antonsich also points out the importance of the length of peoples’ stay in a particular place, which he believes does not fit into any of his other factors in place-belonging. However, he simply justifies this by arguing that the length of stay impacts a person’s sense of place-belonging “when the place of residence is congruent with the individual’s life story” (Antonsich 2010, p. 649). This is entirely consistent with his autobiographical factor of place-belonging, and thus, I believe, the distinction is unnecessary. In maintaining certain stable features in a place, a sense of continuity of individual identity is maintained. Korpela expresses this well:

“The continuity of self-experience is also maintained by fixing aids for memory in the environment. The place itself or the object in the place can remind one of one’s past and offers a concerete background against which one is able to compare oneself at different times . . . . This creates coherence and continuity in one’s self-conceptions” (Korpela 1989, p. 251)

For most of the second generation interviewees I spoke to, the consistency of the place of (and people in) many important memories, as well as everyday ditties, was a conscious source of comfort and safety. Above all, though, the consistency of place and its population was integral to establishing a new reference point for belonging for some Moluccans, as hope in the establishment of an independent RMS slowly faded. The attempts by the Dutch government to demolish Lunetten’s barracks and relocate Moluccans elsewhere, even with the residential consistency to survive the move, made Loes realise that it was not merely the people around

42 her that were so important for her sense of belonging: it was the consistency of the place in her life and the lives of those close to her.

Interviewer Why do you think so many Moluccans decided to stay here?

Loes That’s a good question. At a certain moment, a lot of people were moved to Moordrecht, Tiel, to the factory towns. And the people who stayed were here for 35 years. They let us live here for 35 years until they were going to make a decision whether to let us stay or not. An order came from the state. “Lunetten needs to be dismantled”. This is in the 1980s. We had to move, but we didn’t want to because the KNIL soldiers, and our mothers of course, said “we’ve already stayed here 35 years, this is our home, our land, our ground. Instead of Ambon, this is our home, this is our mother country now”. This is where we belong. This is where our parents grew old here. And then they want to take our parents and put them amongst Dutch people!

In order to distinguish between place-belongingness and politics of belonging, it may be necessary to consider the ‘politics of place’. Staeheli & Mitchell (2009) conceptualise the politics of place as the case study-based analysis of conflicts pertaining to the meaning of place. These struggles can take many forms including placemaking, which is defined as “political action and debate […] intended to make (and remake) the place” (2009, p. 186). The meaning of place for those who use it and claim some sense of belonging to it suggests the exploitation of “place as a tool […] in broader political struggles” (2009, p. 186). Place identity and the process of placemaking are inseparable parts of broader political mobilizations that seek to bring about progress or nostalgic utopias through collective actions.

Conclusion

In the transition from ghetto to enclave, residents of Lunetten have ensured they retain certain aspects of life that inspire the feeling of being in a Moluccan kampong. At the same time, this seems to be paralleled by a transition from a diasporic longing for return to the feeling of belonging locally. While one does not necessarily cancel out the other, the presence of a new source of belonging directs a limited amount of personal energy in ensuring its survival. Although the diasporic maintenance of the RMS is unfortunately beyond the scope of this thesis, both sources of belonging are processual and ongoing, and it seems that this was a point at which Lunetten residents had to decide which deserved more of the ‘work’ of belonging. As is evident in the shared memories of residents, the enclave itself was beginning to construct relationships of dependence, linking the self to place and a community that was becoming more and more empowered over how it defines itself.

The importance of place in the new sense of belonging felt by Lunetteners, for Loes, constructed a new homeland. Only by the time of its impending destruction and the

Lunettener’s relocation was it apparent to Loes that a sense of belonging had been developing unconsciously for many residents. Yet, as the next chapter will show, forces both internal and external began to threaten the Lunetten they knew – from the government’s attempts to move residents elsewhere and demolish the barracks to the creeping encroachment of private space on what had previously been communal, and with it the erosion of a sense of togetherness. A sense of territorial belonging had only just been realised, but it soon had to be consciously protected and fostered. From this point onwards, this new homeland would have to be defended and struggled for just as much as the RMS once had. Whether the struggle has succeeded or not remains to be seen.

Resisting Suburbia Sociale controle and the restoration of liminality

Introduction

This chapter explores the late period of Lunetten, in which a form of nostalgia has been constructed around the early period of the camp. Much of this seems to have emerged after the demolition of the old barracks and the construction of private homes. This is a phase in the history of Lunetten in which public or mixed space that is integral to the enclave’s unique sociality is lost in the expansion of private space. It should be noted that in this chapter, I use the word ‘privatization’ not in reference to the transferring of an enterprise from the public sector to the private sector, but to refer to the growth of private living space at the expense of public or mixed space. Alternative words such as ‘domestication’ do not grasp the negotiation of spatial boundaries at play in this process. Additionally, I use ‘mixed areas’, ‘ambiguous zones’ and ‘liminal zones’ as essentially synonyms for one another.

For many residents, this split Lunetten’s history into two eras – one of community, the latter of individualism. Yet the expansion of private space figures earlier that the reconstruction of Lunetten, and has in some way become part of the enclave’s self-definition of spatial meaning and practice. Two social constellations – sociale controle and samenhorigheid – have developed over the camps history, and have become an integral part of the enclave’s notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the construction of nostalgia, these social constellations are inseparable from comparisons to Dutch and even other Moluccan villages, as well as Lunetten’s present state. Although this nostalgia is heavily influenced by diasporic longings for the kampong, this chapter sees residents rely upon images and stories of the past of the enclave itself as a narrative source of belonging.

The fragility of community

Walking through Lunetten with some older residents was warming as they would be greeted by other residents with broad grins and affectionate names like “Oom” and “Tante”. It came as a surprise to discover that, although residents were friendly enough to each other nowadays, there had once been a time when the community was much tighter. During my conversations with interviewees, many stories were peppered with anecdotes of everyday encounters in the old camp space. This seemed to be part of a broader nostalgia for those days by Lunetten

45 residents, but they would often draw upon the space of the camp as a contextual, sometimes facilitating factor in an everyday sociality.

Tanu Most buildings have a corridor here [points at map of old barracks]. It’s a bigger space, and here is the hallway.

Isaac I would stay there in the corridor and my neighbour opened the door and I could talk with him, you know. And we were inside the barrack. But now she lives alone, I live alone, everybody has their own home. But this [points at map of old barracks], this is social, very close.

Tanu If you wanted to go to the toilet you had to go out you would see everyone. You see everyone at some moment. So there is a different atmosphere later on when some people get more rooms. They also made some toilets inside so you get more privacy. That is later on, in the ’80s.

Both Tanu and Isaac attribute the change of everyday sociality or “atmosphere” to the changing of material space. The space that seems so important to the sociality of the past were the corridors that split up the rooms in each barrack, and the common spaces at one end where the toilets, wash-basins and laundry areas were shared between residents of a half-barrack. In these spaces, neighbours would be frequently in contact with each other throughout the day and into the night. As the family rooms were small, living quarters would spill over into the common areas, and residents would sit outside their rooms to fix a bicycle, to sew, play cards, socialize, or to do homework. Regardless of familiar or non-familiar relationships with barrack

The demolition of Lunetten’s barracks, 1991. Source: Collectie Moluks Historisch Museum

46 neighbours, these spaces allowed for superficial or ‘light’ social interactions. In her own study of everyday sociality among apartment dwellers, Kusenbach (2008) draws upon Festinger, Schachter and Back’s (1950, p. 10ff) study of 1940s community processes in a students housing complex, in which there was a great dependence of “friendship formation on the mere physical arrangement of the houses”. Design and placement features determine the “functional distance”, in other words the opportunity for passive contacts to occur among residents (ibid, p. 35ff), and is therefore an important factor in the maturation of close social ties. Using the communal areas as extensions of their small sleeping quarters, together with everyday encounters, resulted in a high visibility of the private and semi-private lives of barrack dwellers. The way that space was employed for the sake of function in Lunetten shaped the social meaning of the place. Take Joy’s account of how Lunetten used to be before the barracks were demolished and rebuilt as private homes:

Joy If you compare the situation in the barracks… I can compare because I lived in the barracks… until they were demolished… when we lived in the barracks it was a very tight community, and when we want to go to the shops, we didn’t close our doors. We just left them open and people came over, and it was easier to just kind of wander inside with each other. But after the demolition, now that they’ve rebuilt the barracks, it’s more iedereen voor zich zelf [everyone for themselves]. It’s so easy to knock on people’s doors. You don’t do that so quickly. You’re not going to ring the door, I have my own front door. It’s mine. And you’re not busy with each other. You’re not dealing with each other.

Lunetten since its reconstruction, 1993-1997. Source: Ad de Vrieze, Collectie Molukse Historisch Museum

Like many nostalgic accounts of less individualistic times, a description of the old camp sociality rarely left out the detail that most people would leave their doors open without fear, and neighbours might sometimes come by for a chat and some tea. This habit was compared to relatively private present-day practices in Lunetten, and especially to wider Dutch society which is viewed as cold, unfriendly, and incapable of trusting each other. Van Eijk and Engbersen (2011) draw links between the spontaneous short encounters described above and the development of “public familiarity”. Through brief but frequent social interactions with neighbours in public spaces, people are provided with information on the basis of which they may assess who others are, and how they may be socially related to themselves. Familiarity, in contrast to public anonymity, allows for the development of a sense of social identity and safety. In other words, through brief interactions, the individual learns information about others and uses it to judge whether or not they are to be trusted. Trust, in this context, refers to the predictability of others’ behaviour rather than emotional intimacy (2011, p. 37). This kind of trust is enough required to, say, ask a neighbour for the proverbial cup of sugar, water plants while you’re away, right up to walking the dog or picking up children from school every now and then (ibid.). As the functional importance of the common areas of the barracks was integral to basic tasks and chores, the daily interactions were far more frequent. As such, the design and materiality of the barracks was a factor in the development of trust among neighbours.

Another facilitator of contact between residents are micro-publics, which are spaces of “everyday social contact and encounter” (Valentine 2008, p. 330). Valentine describes micro- publics as “sport or music clubs, drama/theatre groups, communal gardens, youth participation schemes and so on” (Valentine 2008, p. 331), i.e. purposeful small-scale initiatives or organizations that try to bring together people with similar interests. Amin adds to such a definition the spaces of “the workplace, schools, and colleges” (2002, p. 969), which stretches the definition of micro-publics to include less organised spaces of association. Arguably, the common spaces of the barracks can be included in this, but Lunetten also had its fair share of organized group activities:

Jimi I know that from when I was a little child when I came here I could always knock on someone’s door and someone would be home and I could come in to eat something or drink something like that. And also, in the past there were more activities here with each other, more parties, markets, funfairs. But now there isn’t anymore. There was one community building here and all the activities were in the building. So yeah, there’s a big difference between then and now.

Lefebvre notes that, if private space is ‘for contemplation, isolation and retreat’, and public space is for ‘social relationships and actions’, there are nevertheless ‘mixed areas’ which connect the two (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], p. 153). Spatial boundaries can be material, conceptual,

A party is held at Lunetten’s community centre in barrack 1A, 1960-1970. Source: Moluks Historisch Museum

temporal and institutional depending on their function. Physical boundaries mediate access, visibility and sound; symbolic barriers signify differences between domains; judicial markers define legal possession and administrative borders serve the management of areas (Lawrence 1996). Ambiguous zones expand when boundaries that should convey the same meaning diverge (Rodman & Cooper 1996). In the case of Lunetten’s old barracks, it seems that boundaries would be almost solely physical and, to a lesser extent, symbolic rather than judicial or administrative, which would lead to ambiguous zones that include micro-publics – to be discussed later - and the proliferation of sociale controle. Public and private areas, rather than opposing poles, are part of a continuum with a variety of semi-public and semiprivate spaces between them (Madanipour 2003, p. 239).

At the end of the Joy’s last excerpt, she says that, since the new housing construction, “You’re not busy with each other. You’re not dealing with each other”. Joy is describing sociale controle, placing emphasis on the importance of what Kusenbach (2008, p. 233), drawing on Goffman, calls “friendly recognition as opposed to civil inattention”, in which a good neighbour actively engages in “extended as opposed to restrained helpfulness, and they embrace or resist local diversity instead of showing civility toward diversity” (ibid.). Sociale controle exists in the ambiguous, liminal zones between public and private areas. Neighbourhoods such as Lunetten ‘reduce the effects of a dichotomous divide between the

49 public and private spheres’ as residents have created an environment that they feel in control of, yet simultaneously, individuals or groups of residents may interfere with others’ private matters (Madanipour 2003, p. 239).

I believe this final point is crucial to understanding many residents’ anxieties about weakening ties between each other, and why the policy of rumah tua is so fiercely protected. Diversity would be perceived to have a negative impact upon two similar social forms: sociale controle and samenhorigheid (togetherness). Tanu explains how they are closely related.

Tanu That’s also happening in Dutch society. How do we make sure that communities, both Moluccan and Dutch, look out for each other. That is because the current government policy. For example, sometimes we see that a person has been lying dead in their apartment for two weeks, and that’s unacceptable. And also lonely people, and all those problematic issues that are happening right now, people who need care but are not getting it. It’s been said by the government that the state shouldn’t take care of that, the people have to. So what we see here now, especially in Lunetten, we used to have that we kept an eye on each other far more often. We arranged the celebrations ourselves, we did everything ourselves. We cooked together, gezelling, we ate together. That’s a form of samenhorigheid [togetherness]. So it’s very important that you keep an eye out for each other. Then you don’t have the situation where you have to be like “Uncle Piet is gone for three days, have you seen him anywhere?” That’s not the case in the barracks. That’s just us that need this, it’s important for all the neighbourhoods in Holland. I am, for example, in the WMO-adviesraad [advice council], the Wet Maastschappelijke Ondersteuning [Law for Community Support]. It’s a specialised committee from the government, and they handle these kind of issues: how are we going to arrange our community so we keep an eye out for each other?

Much of the texts on public and micro-public space up until now has been focused essentially on the tendency of such space to facilitate the realization of co-presence through visibility and frequent encounters. Yet the neighbourhood sociality that Tanu describes is not simply co- presence, but active collaboration and care. Amin (2012) develops the concept of “intimate publics”; the formation between people of social attachment within, and around, objects, technologies, and common spaces. The social ties produced by intimate publics are primarily based on the spread of feelings of care. “Intimate publics are […] the spaces in which a dispersed population becomes energized in a political society with distinctive yearnings and leanings” (2012, p. 32). Amin argues that social ties that are characterised by loyalty, reciprocity and trust are developed through the engaged collaboration that intimate publics facilitate. Emphasising that co-presence and collaboration are certainly different, Amin nevertheless maintains their place on the same spectrum of spatially-enabled social interactions and their knock-on effects upon the social identity of the residents of a place.

The important of social interaction in the attachments people develop to a place would seem to support Antonsich’s relational factors of belonging. Nevertheless, Antonsich questions the

50 effect of ‘weak ties’ on the development of place-belonging, such as ‘everyday encounters’ (Amin 2002) or forms of ‘everyday life micro-publics’ (Valentine 2008), arguing that they “would not be sufficient to generate a sense of connectedness to others on which belonging relies” (Antonsich 2010, p. 648). In the case of Lunetten, however, it is not simply the weak social ties that connect residents, but the politics of belonging that incorporates them into a notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In two separate quotations below, it is clear how this has become a point of group-belonging for Lunetten residents:

Tanu Individualism has grown strongly, that’s why you don’t keep an eye out for each other. So what the government wants is actually to go a bit backwards in time. That’s important in this moment, and that also it important for us because we also see that individualism is strong with Moluccans. In the past it’s less the case, because we used to be closer to each other. After a while when you’ve had your own freedom, your own bathroom, you will get that samenhorigheid less. Also people became more financially independent. Socially and economically the people were improving, but that’s earlier the case for the Dutch than the Moluccans. You see that in the Dutch society people are way more individualistic, and that the Moluccan society, especially the one here in Lunetten, is also developing that situation. That’s what we notice. In the same way, a collectivist society existed in the past.

Loes I don’t want to move. I don’t want to live between the Dutch people. They aren’t so friendly.

Translator I noticed it was a very familiar neighbourhood, everyone saying hello to everyone else. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to live somewhere else.

Loes Dutch people don’t do that. If they know each other from a village they might, but sometimes in the street where Dutch people live they don’t say ‘Hi’ even though they know each other. They’re strangers. That’s normal. We are used to greeting and saying ‘Hi’.

A family living room in 1984. Source: Rob Bogaerts, Fotocollectie Anefo

There are two points made in this section which supports the importance of weak ties in developing a sense of belonging to Lunetten. Firstly, the prevalence of ambiguous zones between public and private space allowed for repeated encounters with neighbours that, over time, develop deeper mutual knowledge and trust. Combined with the consistency of residents staying in Lunetten, the frequency of spontaneous encounters and their semi-private nature – often neighbours performing tasks they would otherwise do in private space – over time led to a familiarity beyond neighbourliness, developing the interdependence of sociale controle and samenhorigheid. While the space itself is not entirely responsible for the development of these two social conditions, Tanu shows how the change of material space, the shifting of public/private boundaries, and the increasing economic independence of residents has led to a weakening of sociale controle and samenhorigheid. The second point is that these two social conditions have nevertheless retained some presence in Lunetten, and their incorporation in Lunetten’s politics of belonging may have a role in that. As both Tanu and Loes demonstrate in the above quotations, samenhorigheid and sociale controle have become references of comparison, either to the individualism of Dutch society, or nostalgically defining the collectivism of Lunetten’s past, in contrast to its present. In both these ways, a concept of utopia, lost or found, it maintained.

A family living room in 1984. Source: Rob Bogaerts, Fotocollectie Anefo

Conceptualizing privatization

The first wave of privatization of Lunetten’s camp space was catalysed by changes in the state’s approach to the Moluccan population in the Netherlands. From the arrival of Moluccans in 1951, their living costs had been subsidized by a meagre allowance from the Dutch government of three gilders per week, per person. This was part of a broader approach towards the Moluccan population that banned them from working, in an attempt to prevent integration due to their intended short-term stay. In order to support their families, many Lunetten residents worked illegally picking fruit in the farms around the village. As 6 months turned to five years, however, the government decided to withdraw the welfare they had been providing and insisted that Moluccans had to work and integrate. Many moved from their Moluccan wijks to factory towns, where their new employers would often build cheap housing in order to attract labour. As a result, the 1960s saw a steady migration out of Lunetten and other Moluccan neighbourhoods. Cramped barrack rooms that had previously been occupied by families of up to 10 people were vacated, and adopted by families from neighbouring rooms. This continued up to the 1980s, with occupants often breaking through the thin dividing walls to create larger, more comfortable space. Some interviewees showed me photos ofliving rooms from the early 1980s that seemed to have transcended the camp space altogether and became a space indistinguishable from any middle class living room in Western Europe, with room for

53 the latest furnishings. Due to the limited space in the original rooms, they were often spartan with few nonessential furnishings, but the space gained through outward migration had allowed for the beautification of rooms and the development of an interior ‘style’. The appropriation of space left empty by other residents constitutes the first wave in the transformation of common space into private space.

By the middle of the 1980s, another government action instigated a second wave of privatization. The integration project towards Moluccans had been successful in some neighbourhoods, but Lunetten residents stubbornly rejected requests to move out to other neighbourhoods and de-segregate. By the 1990s the government had sent residents a notice that Lunetten was to be demolished, ostensibly because of safety concerns. New houses were built in Den Bosch and Vught for residents, but Leen describes how this offer was interpreted:

Leen There was… the government built houses for the Moluccan people but only a few people decided to go to Den Bosch. And a church was built only for the Moluccan people, and a community centre, but that was only a… we call it a zoethoudertje.

Translator Ah… It’s something you would give a child to kind of shut him up, you know?

Interviewer Right, right.

Translator It’s not a real gift.

Joy And in the 1980s, people also moved to Vught, and in 19… at the end of 1990s, 1999 or 1998, there was… Moluccans were sent to court because the Dutch government built a community, en wijk, for the Moluccan society because they wanted to shut down Lunetten. But most of the people, Moluccan people, then who lived here didn’t want to move to Vught, but the Dutch government told us “You have to move because those houses are especially built for you”. We had houses, we had a church, and we had a community centre. And then the Dutch government lost and we won, if you can call it winning, because after the ruling the old barracks were demolished. You now see the houses, and they were built in the form of a barrack.

The rebuilt houses are a strange compromise in vision – at once maintaining the outer form of the barracks, and at the same time internally designed as a “regular house”. Loes highlights this:

Interviewer The barracks were built exactly as they were before their demolition? The same shape?

Loes No no no it’s not the same. Almost. It seems like the old barrack but now in these buildings you have your own entrance, because in the old barracks you have the long corridor and on every side, left and right, you have your own door to enter your room. But now you have on the outside your own entrance. (…) You have seven different living dwelling units. So for example this part at the end of the barrack consists of one living room and five bedrooms, and the next one is one living room with three bedrooms. All different numbers of rooms. And it depends on the size of the family.

Both phases of privatization involved the shrinkage of ambiguous zones or mixed space, and the growth of private space. These transformations nevertheless had quite different causes – the first was privatization by appropriation, while the second was by planning. To put it another way, the first phase was voluntarily led by residents as they reshaped their living quarters, while the second phase was a top-down approach by the government.

The privatization of Lunetten is in many ways a question of the relationship between dwelling and building. In the first wave of privatization, abandoned rooms were co-opted by other residents, in what was seemingly an almost incidental, opportunist manner. In the second wave, new spacious homes were in part imposed upon residents by the government. Yet, although the development of private homes seems quite unideological, the effects on residents of living in such spaces should nevertheless be accounted for. In “Building dwelling thinking” (in Poetry, Language, Thought, 1971) Heidegger asks us to think beyond buildings so that we may see its foundation in dwelling, yet he always saw them as symbiotic and part of the same process. In other words, we can only build if we have a concept of dwelling and we may only dwell if we build. In the context of Lunetten, the expansion of living space would always be paired with a style of living associated with cultural values, such as luxury, the nuclear family, individualism, Dutchness and modernity. Mitch Rose (2012) reinterprets dwelling as a practice of marking and claiming: “It is the event by which a world is built and named as one’s own” (Rose 2012, p. 758). Rose emphasises the performative side of marking and claiming, arguing that when we dwell we are not only building the world we are already in, but building it in a way which makes it visible to ourselves and to other beings, because that which we are claiming is never properly ours in a world that is constantly in the midst of transformation (2012, p 759, 769). For Rose, marking and claiming are thus part of the development of a sense of self that consists of private space yet is reflected in the public sphere. In other words, marking and claiming space can be performative of one’s values. However, in spite of being involuntary, planned privatization can also allow residents to perform their values. Loes told me about how far back her aspirations for a more modern living space went:

Loes When I was a teenager I saw the Dutch houses, and we lived in a barrack. It was different to the houses of my girlfriends at school, or my colleagues at work. I see the difference between their houses and my houses. So sometimes I wanted to live in a normal house. And in 1992 there was a possibility. They demolished the barracks and built new houses, so I asked if I may live in this house because that was my dream when I was a teenager.

Translator Because this place looked like a normal Dutch house and not like a barrack?

Loes Yeah, and for me it’s my house until I drop dead.

Loes’ pride in her newly constructed private home was a rare admission among the residents I spoke to. Most interviews were dominated by nostalgia for old camp life, but Loes clearly aspired to something else from quite a young age. Unlike most of her village-educated fellow Lunetten residents, Loes attended a Dutch school in Vught, and found her way into the job market far more easily than most of her neighbours. In my conversations with her, it seemed that although she expressed sympathies both towards Lunetten’s samenhorigheid and to economic aspirations of broader Dutch society, this was no longer the irreconcilable conflict of cultures that it may have been a generation ago.

Defending Samenhorigheid

Lefebvre notices a highly political difference between planned space and lived space, or what he names ‘dominated’ and ‘appropriated space’ (1991 [1974], p. 164-167). In capitalist societies, businesses, state authorities and planners produce ‘dominated space’, rooted in technology and rationality. This in turn creates ‘abstract space’, which erases the history of place with formal homogeneity, in an expression of state authority. In order to make such spaces homely and livable, inhabitants appropriate it by adapting space in such ways that it is more suitable for their daily needs, and may be able to develop an identification with it. As a Marxist intellectual writing at the peak of high-architecture and urban planning, Lefebvre imagined the production of space to be an embodiment of class struggle in which, simply put, ‘dominated’ or planned space is the space of the bourgeoisie, and appropriated space is the working class’s. Looking through a Lefebvrian lens, Lunetten’s Moluccan history has seen two forms of planned or ‘dominated’ spaces, the first being perhaps the ultimate dominated space – the former concentration camp barracks – and the second being the suburban private homes built after the demolition of the barracks during the early 1990s. This is paired with two phases of appropriation, firstly through the resident-led private usage of newly empty rooms. The second phase, concerning attempts to reclaim the ‘ambiguous zones’ and the sense of samenhorigheid and sociale controle have been discussed in this chapter.

Conclusion

This chapter has been concerned with the sociality-enabling qualities of spatial boundaries, and the complex meaning attached to the negotiation of those boundaries throughout Lunetten’s history. In tracing the transition in belonging from diasporic longing to developing the enclave in the previous chapter, that has allowed me to explore the construction of nostalgic narratives about the pre-demolition Lunetten, and how that has influenced current

56 struggles. While the impact of ambiguous zones on public familiarity has been debated among geographers and anthropologists of space and place, this chapter examines how forms of public familiarity have been incorporated into the politics of belonging. Some findings here provide nuance to the debates, arguing that spatially-enabled weak social ties in the case of Lunetten were made more staying by a) the consistency of residents, and b) the fact that sociale controle and samenhorigheid had become integral to the identity of Lunetten.

Additionally, this chapter has offered a late and partial response to the first chapter’s problem of tracing the end of the affective influence of the ‘thinness’ of the camp space. In the first chapter I argue that the disciplinary function of the camp space had contributed to a sense of transience and an inability to settle, along with contextual factors that made the KNIL families’ stay in the Netherlands seem temporary. In this chapter I show how the first phase of privatization may have constituted an appropriation of previously ‘dominated’ space, and the limiting state-designed form of the camp space was adapted into a space more suited to its everyday use by residents. This nevertheless complicates the notion of the enclave, as two essential elements collide – the self-definition that comes with appropriating space, and the weakening of social ties in the enclave due to the shrinking of liminal zones.

Conclusion My two-month fieldwork was an exploration of finding home and homeland in Lunetten. I was curious to learn how Lunetteners dealt with the history of the camp space, and how they conceptualized and constructed their space in an effort to become locally settled. My interest was piqued by the potential contact points between domesticity and the past trauma of the space, what they ‘knew’ and didn’t, how they interpreted that knowledge spatially in the absence of a collective culture of Holocaust remembrance. I subtitled this thesis Finding Home and Homeland, and by this I mean ‘home’ referring to the locally social, material, and affective dimensions of belonging, while homeland is based upon territorialised notions of political solidarity and purpose. As I have shown throughout my thesis, the configuration of everyday life and domesticity that constructs ‘home’ has influenced the development of a political solidarity at the local level. Many of the inhabitants of Lunetten I spoke to have been actively involved in the transnationalist struggle of the RMS in the past, but were now more concerned with the active maintenance of the sources of their belonging to Lunetten.

As I spoke to more residents and former residents of Lunetten, I came to the realisation that belonging is more than an involuntary feeling, but is also possibly composed through a conscious structuring of social life. I argue that belonging in Lunetten required the diasporic nostalgia for kampong life, entailing the active maintenance of cultural, religious and legal traditions that allowed a state-defined ghetto to become a self-defined Moluccan enclave. However, over time the enclave itself became a source of belonging, constructing relationships of dependence between residents based on the consistency of the population, as well as the development of extended neighbourly social constellations, based in ambiguous zones between public and private space that have become an integral part of residents’ identification with Lunetten.

Domesticating a ghetto, defining the enclave

Lunetten residents have been actively creating an enclave, but it was not always for the enclave’s sake. As shown in the first chapter, the active creation of domestic space and homely feeling was prevented by affective constraints that were partially based on cultures that Moluccans had brought with them – such as the frequent movement of the military from nondescript camp to nondescript camp and the attitude to camp space that engenders, as well as the ghostlore that interprets the sites of violent deaths as haunted by malevolent spirits. It is not clear what allowed for the weakening of the first spatial affectivity – ‘thin space’ – that, combined with legal and economic precarity led Moluccans to believe they remained in a transient zone, at the will of the Dutch state. The banishing of ghosts was simply an act

58 intended to create a safe living space and neighbourhood, not for any higher purpose of enclave-creation. Nevertheless, in banishing ghosts, Lunetten residents began the development of a secure territorial zone and, just as importantly, were beginning to define the meaning of the space themselves rather than being constrained by its affectivity, ‘thick’ or ‘thin’.

As part of the diasporic longing for homeland, the maintenance of cultural, legal and religious traditions allowed for the development of ethnic homogeneity, especially through rumah tua. The enforcement of Moluccan inheritance laws in a small village in the Netherlands might give tabloid newspapers a story to run with, but as evidenced by my conversations with Eunice and Tanu, it has allowed residents to shape the future composition of what was previously a state- defined ghetto, as well as ensure a consistency of residents from a particularly ethnic group (South Moluccans) that contributes to the development of public familiarity. Living for decades in the geographically isolated space formerly known as Kamp Vught was not something that those KNIL families who arrived in 1951 had foreseen or had chosen, yet the development of peoples’ belonging to Lunetten is peppered with tactical interventions in the social organization of the space to make life more comfortable and familiar, and it is through these sorts of interventions that the enclave emerges seemingly, as Eunice and Tanu have been told, resembling a Moluccan kampong.

There are of course times where these interventions weaken the enclave and the sense of belonging. The appropriation of empty rooms in the old barracks increased the private space in Lunetten, at the expense of some ambiguous zones of sociality that have become part of the politics of belonging in Lunetten. However, as I argue at the end of the last chapter, this could still be seen as a form of enclave-creation if viewed through a Lefebvrian lens, as the ‘dominated’ or state-defined camp space is reshaped and reinterpreted to suit the everyday comforts of residents, thus allowing residents to self-define the material space and the way they use it. This could be something of a late explanation for the weakening of the affective qualities of ‘thin space’, as residents literally broke through the walls that were previously formed by military function rather than suburban domesticity. In the sense of affectivity’s influence on action-potential, it could be argued that this phase of appropriating camp space for private use marked the end of the coerciveness of ‘thin space’. There is nevertheless not enough evidence from this research to explore how this may have come about in the long run.

The uses of nostalgia

The later period of Lunetten’s history – especially after the demolition of the old barracks and the construction of private houses – has seen the enclave itself become a source of belonging.

While the earlier period saw the unintended construction of an enclave through the often banal domestication of a ghetto, the latter period’s sense of belonging was more constructed in the light of the enclave, often by blurring the distinction between, on the one hand, diasporic longing for the Moluccan kampong and, on the other, nostalgia for how social life was structured around Lunetten’s barracks before they were demolished. The consistency of residents in the village, with many of the first generation and their families staying, has been allowed by the establishment of rumah tua traditions of inheritance that are allowed to be enforced in the enclave. As I argue in chapter two, the experiences shared by residents who have known each other for decades has resulted in memories that have formed the self’s relation to place. This consistency – especially the fact that so many of the original families to arrive in Lunetten still live there – has become a source of pride for some younger residents that I spoke to, who compare the village to the transience of Dutch towns, and even other Moluccan neighbourhoods.

Behind much of the self-definition of Lunetten’s enclave is a critique of modernity, and especially individualism. In the introduction chapter, I wrote that Indo people in my research viewed Moluccans as people stuck in a purgatory, unable to belong to their Moluccan nation, nor to the Netherlands. The critiques of individualism I heard from Tanu and Jimi were fundamentally about rootedness, and how a lack of roots in a place can erode communities, engendering neighbourhoods in which there is no common ground for trust and solidarity. The weakening distinction between the diasporic longing for a Moluccan kampong and the nostalgia for social life in the old barracks may have been catalysed in part by their mutual suspicion of individualism, prioritising the fact of rooting oneself, rather than where. For Tanu, the cultural and residential consistency the enclave provides is a solution to the sweeping power of individualism, as has been noted in the final chapter’s exploration of spatial boundaries. Efforts to reconstruct the ‘ambiguous zones’ that engender the social constellations of samenhorigheid and sociale controle are facilitated more easily by the politics of belonging of the enclave. When an enclave’s notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is so influenced by the nostalgia and longings for neighbourhood living before individualism, there is a far greater momentum behind such projects to expand ambiguous zones, and in general to protect those aspects of Lunetten that seem most fundamental to it.

Relevance beyond the page?

As the anthropological and geographical concept of belonging is fairly saturated, this research was not primarily concerned with making a theoretical contribution to the field. Nevertheless, there is a small body of work dealing with the process of developing a sense of territorial

60 belonging to traumatised spaces. I have shown the relevance of including affect as a factor in studies of territorial belonging, even in non-traumatic spaces. My research points to the limiting influence of affect upon the action-potential of an individual attempting to engage in a process of place-belonging. The desire to settle in a place and make it more comfortable for everyday living can be constrained by a space’s affective qualities, and these can be ‘thick’ – rich in meaning – but they can also be ‘thin’. By failing to include affect in his framework for studying territorial belonging, Antonsich arguably forgets much of the materiality and meaning of space. In this research, the ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ qualities of the camp space have a profound impact upon the development of belonging, especially with the development of a feeling of security that is so integral to feelings of ‘home’. In any future studies of belonging that attempt to take a more holistic approach, I would recommend exploring the relationship between the affective qualities of space and place-belonging, perhaps even on individual factors of place-belonging.

Although this thesis will probably not go further than this, it could be an opportunity to communicate the complexity of ethnic enclaves to a Dutch audience. At the beginning of this thesis I aimed to present some of the push-pull of agency and structure, as well as contextual factors that influence the creation of enclaves. In Dutch media, and in my own native British media too, the ethnic enclave is presented as a foreign territory in which the rule of law does not apply, no-one speaks the language of the host country, and which is maintained entirely because an ethnic minority wishes to stay as far away from others. Enclaves are to be treated with suspicion. While there is always a taste of truth to these images, I hope that this thesis managed to present enclaves with more complexity. My previous interviews with Indo people suggested an image of Moluccans as unwilling guests that have hidden themselves away from Dutch society. The case of Lunetten has been an example of an enclave that could rarely have offered more of that complexity. The questions many Dutch people had for me when I explained my research was “why would anyone want to live there?” This was a good opportunity to explore how a ghetto in a former concentration camp can turn into an enclave that “follows kampong life the most”.

In the microcosm that is Lunetten, the worldly questions of migration, cultural plurality, and the politics of postcolonialism are discussed constantly. Modernity, and especially individualism, are critiqued. In the upcoming years, even the most ardent communitarians see the inevitable erosion of community in their village. Until then, they will protect the enclave, despite its critics. Somewhere in the history of Lunetten, the Netherlands realised that it is a country of migration; yet there is little evidence of that here. Lunetten began its existence as a Moluccan village by being forgotten, and it has planned on staying that way ever since.

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