Collecting Kamoro
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Karen Jacobs Collecting Kamoro Objects, encounters Collecting Kamoro and representation Collecting The story of ethnographic collecting is one of cross-cultural on the southwest Kamoro encounters. This book focuses on collecting encounters in the coast of Papua Kamoro region of Papua from the earliest collections made in 1828 until 2011. Exploring the links between representation and collecting, Karen Jacobs the author focuses on the creative and pragmatic agency of Kamoro people in these collecting encounters. In early European encounters, the Kamoro people were described as producers of an abundance of artefacts. Subsequently, the presence or absence of artefacts has remained central to Kamoro representations throughout their ‘contact’ history. These historical representations have structured the most recent collecting practices within the region. Collecting by explorers, colonial officers and missionaries, and the multi-national mining company PT Freeport Indonesia are explored as well as various collecting contexts such as exchanges, auctions, and exhibitions. By considering objects as visualizations of social relations, and as enactments of personal, social or historical narrative, this book combines filling a gap in the literature on Kamoro culture with an interest in broader questions that surround the nature of ethnographic collecting, representation, patronage and objectification. ISBN 978-90-8890-088-4 Sidestone Sidestone Press ISBN: 978-90-8890-088-4 Bestelnummer: SSP55960003 Artikelnummer: SSP55960003 9 789088 900884 Sidestone Press / RMV 4 0 Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden This is an Open Access publication. Visit our website for more OA publication, to read any of our books for free online, or to buy them in print or PDF. www.sidestone.com Check out some of our latest publications: COLLECTING KAMORO Sidestone Press COLLECTING KAMORO Objects, Encounters and Representation in Papua (Western New Guinea) Karen Jacobs Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden No. 40 Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde No. 40 ISBN 978-90-8890-088-4 © 2011 K. Jacobs and National Museum of Ethnology Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com Sidestone registration number: SSP SSP55960003 Published in Cooperation with the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden www.volkenkunde.nl Head of Publications Committee: Fanny Wonu Veys Lay-out: P.C. van Woerdekom, Sidestone Press Cover design: K. Wentink, Sidestone Press Object photography: Ben Grishaaver Cover photographs: Moving a spirit pole (mbitoro) up and down is a manner to invite ancestors to enter the pole before erecting it, Kamoro Arts Festival Pigapu 2005 (Photo: K. Jacobs). Inset: detail of a yamate held in the National Museum of Ethnology (NME 2990-10). Contents Preface 1 Acknowledgments 7 1 Introduction 11 Meet the Kamoro 11 Representational encounters 14 Agency of representation 16 Collecting Kamoro 19 What is collecting? 19 What is Kamoro? 27 Outline 34 What is collected? A brief note on ‘material culture’, ‘objects’ and ‘art’ 34 PART ONE: INTEGRATION 37 2 Exploring and settling 41 I. ‘Discovering’ Kamoro objects: early expeditions 41 II. Establishing Dutch presence 49 1) Establishment of the Roman Catholic Mission 50 2) Administration 52 3 Colonial collectors 57 I. Competing institutions and their collectors 57 1) Carel M.A. Groenevelt 57 2) Jan Pouwer 63 3) Field collecting: methods and motivations 68 II. Mission(s) of Integration 70 1) Mission patronage 71 2) Franciscan mission of integration 76 III. Salvaging integration? 78 IV. Further integration: the Vatican Council 80 PART TWO: REPRESENTATION 87 4 Becoming part of a nation-state 93 I. Indonesia’s national policy (1945-98) 93 1) Creating a national feeling 94 2) Cultural policy as a tool for ‘Indonesianization’ 97 II. Economic development: Freeport 99 1) A history of controversy 101 v III. Freeport as patron 104 1) Cultural preservation 107 2) Patronage or patronising? 110 3) Exhibitions in Jakarta 113 IV. Corporate businesses and the nation-state 117 1) Pancasila and development 117 2) Unity in Diversity: the Irian Jaya Room 120 3) Nation-state responsibility? 122 5 Kamoro Arts Festival 127 I. Kamoro Festival: the beginnings (1998-2000) 127 II. The fourth Kamoro Arts Festival: April 26-29, 2001 131 1) The selection process 131 2) The auction 134 3) Dance performances 136 4) Canoe races 138 5) Preparation and distribution of traditional food 139 III. Festival as forum for representation 139 1) Organisers 140 2) Audience 146 3) Participants 148 4) Complementary objectives? 156 PART THREE: OBJECTIFICATION 159 6 Festival auction 163 I. Art auctions as performances 163 II. A Kamoro auction uncovered 166 1) Catalogue 167 2) Viewing 168 3) The sale 169 III. ‘They have to learn’: picking pieces 182 7 Displaying Kamoro 191 I. Displaying commodities 191 1) Exhibiting commodities 192 2) Collecting commodities 194 II. Contact objects 200 1) Stories 203 2) Absence versus presence 207 III. Representational encounters: an epilogue 214 Bibliography 225 Index 265 vi Preface This book is based on doctoral research conducted between 1999 and 2003, supplemented by additional collections research and two further visits to Papua in 2005 (to hand over my thesis) and 2011. During more than a decade of involvement with Kamoro people, children have grown up, elders have passed away, relationships have been strengthened and my own initially naive understandings of Kamoro art have been enhanced. Although the theoretical approaches and basic structure of this book are similar to those of my doctoral thesis (Jacobs 2003a), my visits in 2005 and 2011 have allowed me to adapt and update my original research find- ings, providing a more diachronic perspective on the circumstances of the Kamoro in recent years. My PhD was undertaken at the Sainsbury Research Unit for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, within the framework of a Kamoro research project based at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. The original proposal emerged from my awareness of a lack of recent research into Kamoro art and material culture. A general ethnog- raphy had been provided by the Dutch anthropologist Dr Jan Pouwer, who conducted extensive research among the Kamoro in the 1950s, but the latter part of the twentieth century was barely documented. Only one general, collection-based overview of Kamoro arts had been undertaken by Simon Kooijman, published in 1984. Since the hand-over of the territory now known as Papua to Indonesia in 1962, the Kamoro received virtually no anthropological attention until Todd Harple’s research between 1996 and 1998, mainly as a consultant for a nearby mining company (Harple 2000). From my perspective as a new doctoral student, while an ‘update’ on Kamoro arts would ideally involve long-term fieldwork, this was not straightforward in a politically delicate area such as Papua. Given that prospects for fieldwork in Papua were uncertain, I decided to focus on ‘fieldwork’ in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom by searching for Kamoro material in archives and collections and by tracing people who had worked in the Kamoro region. I was overwhelmed by the wealth of information available. Fortunately, in addition to this study of archives and collections, I was also able to do fieldwork in Papua, because the recently inaugurat- ed (1998) annual Kamoro Arts Festival offered me a legitimate reason to visit Papua and observe this dynamic development. I was able to attend the three festivals held in 2000, 2001 and 2002; the later trips in 2005 and 2011 focused on the festival’s development and aftermath. Several relatively short fieldtrips are not comparable to long-term fieldwork of 1 Collecting Kamoro eighteen months or more. However, even though the latter was not politi- cally possible, the festivals enabled me to meet the same people every year, build up friendships, and discuss and verify my data. ‘Fieldwork’ in the Netherlands continued when a small group of Kamoro people visited the Kamoro Exhibition in Leiden for several weeks in 2003. The wealth of information deriving from fieldwork, and archival and library research, collection-based study, and interviews with missionaries, ex-mining company (Freeport) staff, art collectors, and government of- ficials outside Papua, encouraged me to focus on the diachronic impact of outside influences and the notion of collecting. The book is, to use Douglas Cole’s words (1985: xi), a ‘contact history’, not an ‘ethnohis- tory’. Inspired by Steiner (1994), I chose to take the transfer of the objects themselves as the focus of research, as Kamoro collections had not previ- ously been linked to the historical framework in which they were collect- ed. Elaborating further on Kopytoff’s proposition (1986) that objects have different biographies, I aspired to locate Kamoro material culture and its collection by outsiders in a rigorous historical framework. The variety of information sources that helped to shape this book will now be listed. The National Museum of Ethnology (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde) in Leiden holds the largest Kamoro collection. As ear- ly as 1828, artefacts were acquired for this museum during the Triton Expedition. During subsequent expeditions more material was collected, for example by Captain W. de Jong, who travelled with Assistant Resident J.H. Kroesen in 1903, and during the First Military Exploration of New Guinea (1907-1915). Substantial additions to the collection were made by Dr Jan Pouwer in 1953-54,