The importance of the Dubois collection cannot be separated from the colonial past of the Netherlands and Indonesia.
By placing the cultural history of the collection at the centre of the provenance research (alongside its scientific value), a narrative emerged in which all facets of the (post)colonial past become visible: from the oppression of the local Indonesian population, to the development of contemporary scientific disciplines in the Netherlands, the Dutch East Indies, and Indonesia, as well the ambiguous postcolonial relations between the Netherlands and Indonesia in the second half of the twentieth century.
Courtesy Naturalis Biodiversity Center. CC0 1.0.
The case addressed in this blog shows that – although often seen as purely scientific and therefore “neutral” – natural history collections cannot be viewed as separate from cultural and political developments nor do they hold solely scientific value. Furthermore, it raises important questions regarding the traditional division made between culture-historical (or ethnographic) and scientific (or natural history) collections.
For this reason, the current restitution debates on items collected or looted in colonial times should expand to include not only cultural items but also other types of collections.
