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The Raffles Museum in the Shift from Nature to Culture by Semine Long

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The Raffles Museum in the Shift from Nature to Culture by Semine Long The Raffles Museum in the Shift from Nature to Culture by Semine Long-Callesen BA in Art History University of Cambridge, 2018 Submitted to the Department of Architecture in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Architecture Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology May 2020 © 2020 Semine Long-Callesen. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: ____________________________________________________________________ Department of Architecture May 8, 2020 Certified by: __________________________________________________________________________ Arindam Dutta, PhD Associate Professor of Architectural History Thesis Supervisor Accepted by: _________________________________________________________________________ Leslie K. Norford Professor of Building Technology Chair, Department Committee on Graduate Students Committee Arindam Dutta, PhD Associate Professor of Architectural History Advisor Timothy Hyde, MArch, PhD Associate Professor of Architecture Reader 2 The Raffles Museum in the Shift from Nature to Culture by Semine Long-Callesen Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 8, 2020 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Architecture Studies Abstract This thesis examines the formation of a national culture through the case study of the Raffles Museum in the late 1950s. Today, the institution is known as the National Museum of Singapore. In contrast to what we might assume from the museum’s current status, it was not obvious that the museum would become a “cultural,” “national,” and “Singaporean” institution. The Raffles Museum was established in the early nineteenth century and was instrumental in the British colonial search for revenue and resources. In collecting specimens and samples, the museum invented Malaya’s distinctive “nature.” Importantly, the natural history collections included anthropological and archaeological artifacts. In the early twentieth century, such objects were extracted and separated from the category of natural history to aid the colonial administration in defining a distinctive Malayan “culture,” which served governmental purposes. During the period of decolonization, the colonial notion of “Malaya” – and its nature and culture – was adopted by anti-colonial nationalism. The Raffles Museum became part of the endeavor of transforming the synthetic colonial category of “Malaya” into one of national self-determination. The Raffles Museum simultaneously created, destroyed, and preserved Malaya’s nature and culture. The museum blurred the lines between the colonial and national, the natural and cultural, the British Malayan and Malayan, taxonomy and preservation, the traditional and modern, the exterior world and the inside of the museum, and other and self. What eventually became Singapore’s national culture was initially Malayan, colonial, and natural. Thesis Advisor: Arindam Dutta Associate Professor of Architectural History 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 The Raffles Museum in the Shift from Nature to Culture 6 1. From Colonial to Nationalist Malaya 13 2. From Nature to Culture 33 3. Preserving Malaya’s Nature 54 Conclusion 73 Bibliography 76 Figures 83 4 Acknowledgments Thank you, Arindam Dutta, for encouraging me to trust my voice; Timothy Hyde, for thinking with me about historic change and continuity; and Caroline A. Jones and Nasser Rabbat, for our formative talks about my research direction. Thanks also to Elizabeth Fox at the MIT Writing Center for consistently supporting me during my time at MIT. Thank you to the staff at the National Library, the National Museum, and the National Archives, who guided me during my fieldwork in Singapore. In particular, Stephanie Yeo, Chor Koon Tan, Mr. Lim, and Iskander Mydin, you hosted me with generous hospitality. My deepest thanks to my MIT family: Zainab Taymuree, Nancy Valladeres, Ayesha Shaikh, Rachel Hirsch, and Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman. Og selvfølgelig til dig, Seh Ghee, fordi vi gør alting sammen. 5 The Raffles Museum in the Shift from Nature to Culture The Raffles Museum was founded in the early nineteenth century on the island of Singapore, located at the tip of the Malay peninsula. The museum was established by British officers as part of the colonial search for revenue potential, a search that prompted the collection of natural history such as specimens of botany and minerals [Fig. 1]. In the nineteenth century, the museum space functioned primarily as a site of scientific experimentation and object collection that served the industrial demands of the colony. Moreover, the museum was part of a larger colonial infrastructure that eventually created Malaya’s distinct “nature”: the artifacts and samples rendered the colonized territory readable and governmental to civil servants. Christopher Hooi served as curator of the Raffles Museum in the years 1957-1967 and was director of the museum in the period of 1973-1983. During his position at the museum, Hooi witnessed significant changes within and outside the institution. Colonial officers had initially named the natural history collection after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the British East India Company official who supposedly founded Singapore in 1819. In 1960, however, a few years after Hooi’s appointment, Raffles’ surname was abandoned and the museum was renamed the National Museum, a change that announced the conversion of the colonial institution into a national one. On a state level, Hooi’s career overlapped with Singapore’s long-term transition from British colony to independent nation. This transformation materialized in numerous phases, one of which was the attainment of full self-government in 1959. While Singapore had been a Crown Colony of its own since 1946, historically, the island had formed part of the British Straits Settlements and British Malaya. Indeed, Singapore had long been imagined as part of a greater Malaya by both colonial officers and local nationalists. Thus, before Singapore became an 6 independent national entity in the region of Southeast Asia in 1965, the island was part of various territorial imaginations, not least that of Malaya. Hooi was among the first two local civil servants to be appointed as senior museum staff. His position at the museum was facilitated by the “Malayanisation” scheme, a political program that advocated for the inclusion of locals in the civil service. As the name suggests, “Malayanisation” was conceived during the period when Singapore was conceptualized as part of Malaya prior to the separation of the two territories. While Hooi entered the museum by way of “Malayanisation,” he nevertheless insists on claiming the museum as a national Singaporean one. Looking back at his career at the museum, Hooi describes the institution as a “repository of the nation’s heritage”: to him, the museum always reflected the soul of the Singaporean nation.1 However, keeping the shifting territorial affiliations in mind, the Raffles Museum translates directly into neither a “Singaporean” collection nor a “national” one. Quite the contrary to Hooi’s statement, it was not obvious that the Raffles Museum would become a national museum. Hooi’s assertion then urges the question: what does it mean to say “national”? This study of the Raffles Museum during the late colonial period underlines a shift from “colonial” to “national” and from “nature” to “culture.” The thesis reveals a genealogy of the national as one that is rooted in colonial imaginations. Further, the collection’s shifting geographic associations suggests that nothing is inherently “British,” “Malayan,” “Singaporean,” or “Malaysian”: the category of the “national” is an unstable one. Indeed, most of the museum’s objects do not “belong” to the territory of Singapore as the boundaries look today. The artifacts 1 Christopher Hooi, From the oral history interview of Christopher Hooi. Accession No. 001382, reel 4., 1992, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. 7 were largely collected in the Malay peninsula and not on the island of Singapore: the Malay peninsula provided the island’s natural and cultural contents. Another fact unsettles Hooi’s nationalist claims to the museum: the Raffles Museum presents a largely randomly assembled collection. The museum aspired to reflect Malaya comprehensively, yet this encyclopedic endeavor was rarely achieved. The museum collection suffered from constant shortage of staff and funds. Further, the collections were formed by colonial officers, amateur “experts,” and eccentric individuals whose collecting patterns were determined by their respective hobbies as much as they were determined by commercial commissions to collect samples of seeds and soil. The objects were not systematically assembled but rather extracted from territories based on accessibility: the location of British settlements in Malaya dictated the destination of collecting parties. Thus, the coming into being of the museum suggests a somewhat accidental visual creation of British Malaya from which Singapore ultimately emerged. Despite the arbitrariness of the accumulated artifacts, colonial officers entrusted the objects with reflecting a truth: the collection supposedly represented the “real” colonized territory. This “reality” was supported by the science of taxidermy and the collection’s
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