The colonial table: Food, culture and dutch identity in Colonial Indonesia

Australian Journal of Politics and History

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 346-357

  Protschky, Susie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 50849107877     PISSN: 00049522     EISSN: 14678497     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8497.2008.00501.x     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. See, for example, the excellent work on British India by Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (London, 2005).
2. Important exceptions include Onghokham's pieces on rijsttafel and tempe in The Thugs, the Curtain Thief, and the Sugar Lord: Power, Politics and Culture in Colonial Java (Jakarta, 2003);
3. Adel P. den Hartog, "Acceptance of milk products in Southeast Asia: The case of Indonesia as a traditional non-dairying region" in Katarzyna Cwiertka and Boudewijn Walraven, eds, Asian Food: The Global and the Local (Honolulu, 2001) -a case study of the long-term impact of Dutch food preferences on Indonesian diets; and in the same volume, a study of how colonial foodways have travelled into the post-colonial age by Anneke H. van Otterloo, "Chinese and Indonesian restaurants and the taste for exotic food in the Netherlands".
4. See also Elsbeth Locher-Scholten's short study of colonial consumption and modernity, "Summer dresses and canned food: European women and western lifestyles in the Indies, 1900-1942" in Henk Schulte Nordholt, ed., Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia (Leiden, 1997).
5. On the significance of eugenic discourses in the Netherlands Indies, see Ann Laura Stoler, "Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in 20th century colonial cultures" in Jan Breman, ed., Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam, 1990). For a broader discussion of race as a pervasive component of culture, politics and economic life in late nineteenth-century Europe,
6. see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London, 1995).
7. Jean German Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison, Wis., 1983), Chs. 1-3.
8. This interregnum was imposed on the Netherlands Indies while the British decided how to respond to the ill-fated Dutch "alliance" (not entirely voluntary) with France during the Napoleonic wars. It was ultimately decided that the Dutch would retain the Indies (and Melaka) as colonial possessions. Other Dutch colonies, stretching from South Africa to the Malay Peninsula, were ceded to the British.
9. For a discussion of the effect of British rule on colonial society in Java, see Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, Ch. 4. For a treatment of shining cultural attitudes and official policies toward social mixing and intermarriage in British India, see E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c 1800-1947 (Cambridge, 2001).
10. Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 165.
11. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London, 1995), p. 116.
12. Ibid.
13. See the "Interviews" in Joost Cote´ and Loes Westerbeek, eds, Recalling the Indies: Colonial Culture & Postcolonial Identities (Amsterdam, 2005),
14. and an oral history study by Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, "Memory-work in Java: A cautionary tale" in Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2002).
15. "What work do such statements perform?" Stoler has asked of how discourses on race and sexuality in the Netherlands Indies function in the title chapter of her book, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 46.
16. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 99.
17. See, for example, Robert Gregg, "Apropros exceptionalism: Imperial location and comparative histories of South Africa and the United States" in idem, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History (London and New York, 2000).
18. Ibid., pp. 99-100.
19. See also Stoler, "Rethinking colonial categories" in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 24.
20. As mentioned above, an 1884 statute ruled that to gain European-equivalent status required a demonstration of suitability for European society, which included having been brought up as a European in European surroundings and demonstrating an inability to live in Native society: Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 116. In the same volume,
21. see Stoler's discussion of how appearance alone was deemed to "poorly index" "internal traits, psychological dispositions, and moral essence": pp. 133-4. See also Stoler's title chapter in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 43;
22. and in the same volume, "Sexual affronts and racial frontiers", p. 84. On state and public interest in private lives
23. see Stoler, "Genealogies of the intimate" in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 6.
24. Stoler, "Carnal knowledge and imperial power", pp. 55, 68.
25. See Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating (London, 2003) for an excellent and entertaining recent history of feasting in European history. Onghokham also notes a history of elite eating in Europe
26. (see his The Thugs, the Curtain Thief, and the Sugar Lord, pp. 315-16), but insists that Indonesian meals have always been egalitarian -an inaccurate generalisation. R.E. Elson has been more careful, in his description of the foodways of early nineteenth century Java, to note that simple
27. th century Java" in David P. Chandler and M.C. Ricklefs, eds, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Indonesia: Essays in Honour of Professor J.D. Legge (Clayton, Vic, 1986), p. 58.
28. Further, seventeenth-century European accounts of feasts in the court of the great Islamic ruler of Aceh (Sumatra), Sultan Iskandar Muda, noted hundreds of dishes being served on plates of precious metal: see Anthony Reid, "Elephants and water in the feasting of seventeenth-century Aceh" in An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore, 2005), p. 126.
29. Today, middle-class Indonesians retain cooks and other servants, and eat out in restaurants -luxuries that many poorer Indonesians cannot afford.
30. Onghokham, The Thugs, the Curtain Thief, and the Sugar Lord, p. 302.
31. Ibid., p. 307.
32. Stoler and Strassler, "Memory-work in Java", p. 199.
33. "Interviews" in Recalling the Indies: Mrs Sch., p. 118; Mrs K., p. 121.
34. Ibid., p. 123. Indisch means "of the Indies", and can refer either to Eurasians or to people of Dutch origin whose customs were a hybrid of European and Indonesian traditions. It is used in a pejorative sense here, but this is not always its meaning.
35. Marguerite Schenkhuizen, Memoirs of an Indo Woman: Twentieth-Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad (Athens, Ohio, 1993), p. 156.
36. Onghokham, The Thugs, the Curtain Thief, and the Sugar Lord, p. 319.
37. Ibid., pp. 312-17. For an account of rijsttafel being served aboard a steamship travelling to the Indies in the early twentieth century,
38. see Augusta de Wit, Java: Facts and Fancies (Singapore, 1989) [First published 1912], pp. 20-3.
39. De Wit notes with pride her adaptation to the spiciness of Indonesian food, with the qualification that "that first meal was a shock". For an account of rijsttafel being served as an entre´e to a European course, see Schenkhuizen, Memoirs of an Indo Woman, p. 92.
40. Schenkhuizen also made regular mention of rijsttafel being eaten at home, often with guests, both in the Indies and in California, where her family eventually settles: pp. 147, 219.
41. In Indonesia, the exceptions are religious feasts, where many dishes are presented and eaten with rice. Balinese ceremonies are a famous case in point, but Javanese Muslim festivals and selametans also often involve feasting.
42. Onghokham, The Thugs, the Curtain Thief, and the Sugar Lord, p. 311.
43. Ibid., p. 313.
44. Ibid., p. 314.
45. Ibid., p. 318.
46. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, 1991) [First published 1987], p. 152.
47. Ibid., p. 190. Indeed, brewing was a staple of the Dutch economy, and Holland was central to the European wine trade during the seventeenth century: p. 193.
48. Ibid., p. 165. The pineapple, apparently, was also cause for suspicion. Being of tropical origin, it was feared that it carried beri-beri and other intestinal diseases from the East: p. 171.
49. Ibid., p. 153. For a good example,
50. see the Jan Steen painting on p. 154.
51. Ibid., p. 160. The pleasures of eating were not entirely absent from such tableaux -Schama notes that foods were often shown partially eaten: p. 161.
52. One presumes this was not just to afford the artist the pleasure of describing the transection of a halved lemon.
53. See also Julie Berger Hochstrasser, "Feasting the eye: Painting and reality in the seventeenth-century 'Bancketje'", in Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek, eds, Still-Life Painting from the Netherlands 1550-1720 (Amsterdam and Zwolle, 1999).
54. Ibid., p 163.
55. See also Jozien Jobse-Van Putten, Eenvoudig maar Voedzaam: Cultuurgeschiedenis van de Dagelijkse Maaltijd in Nederland ("Simple but Nourishing: A Cultural History of the Daily Meal in the Netherlands") (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 259. Here the author states that the bread-based meal, for instance, remained a staple for "all social classes" in the second half of the nineteenth century, even if wealthier households could afford meat.
56. The phrase "horrors of digestion" is here taken from the amusing title of an eighteenth-century caricature of the English Prince Regent by James Gilray, "A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion" (London, 1792):
57. see the front cover illustration of Timothy Morton, ed., Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
58. The Indies cartoon was by "Billy Cam" and appeared in D'Orient, 24 December 1935: reproduced in Joop van den Berg, Zo was Indië 1850-1950 (Luitingh, 1976), p. 97.
59. Collingham, Curry, p. 130.
60. Stoler, "Making empire respectable", pp. 55, 59.
61. See Gerard Termorshuizen, "P.A. Daum on colonial life in Batavia" in Kees Grijns and Peter J.M. Nas, eds, Jakarta-Batavia: Sociocultural Essays (Leiden, 2000), p. 127.
62. See also E.M. Beekman's "Introduction" to the English-language edition of P.A. Daum, Ups and Downs of Life in the Indies (Singapore, 1999), pp. 1-2.
63. Other scholars who have noted this feature of Dutch colonial literature include Rob Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, Mass., 1982), p. xxvi;
64. E.M. Beekman, Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies, 1600-1950 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 7-8
65. Rob Nieuwenhuys notes that some characters in Ups and Downs were based on real people recognisable to Daum's contemporaries in the Indies: Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, p. 117.
66. See also Beekman, "Introduction" to Ups and Downs, pp. 3, 38.
67. P.A. Daum, Ups and Downs of Life in the Indies (Singapore, 1999) [First published 1890], p. 125. Sarong/Sarung is a wrap skirt; kabaya/kebaya is a long blouse; sambal is a condiment, usually spicy; gudang is a storeroom or pantry; toko is a grocery store.
68. Ibid., p. 127.
69. Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, pp. 255-6.
70. Johan van der Woude, Maria Dermoût: De Vrouw en de Schrjfster ("Maria Dermouˆt The Woman and the Writer") ('s-Gravenhage, 1973), p. 70;
71. Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, pp. 255-6.
72. Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, pp. 483, 485.
73. Maria Dermouˆt, De Tienduizend Dingen ("The Ten Thousand Things") (Amsterdam, 1959) [First published 1955], p. 85.
74. Stoler, "Carnal knowledge", in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 43.
75. Stoler, "Sexual affronts", in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 90.
76. The effigy was there when the author visited the museum in 2004.
77. This statement was originally posed as a question by Ann Laura Stoler in "Genealogies of the intimate: Moments in colonial studies" in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 12.
78. On the development of a professional bureaucracy in the Netherlands Indies see Heather Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese "Priyayi" (Singapore, 1980).
79. The historical centre for the study of Indology (and for Dutch studies in Orientalism) was in the university town of Leiden, but an academy for training colonial civil servants was also operational in Delft during the latter half of the nineteenth century: J.L.W. van Leur, De Indische Instelling te Delft (Delft, 1989).
80. See, for example, Augusta de Wit, Java: Facts and Fancies, pp. 20-3.
81. See, for example, John L Comaroff's work on the social origins of British South African clergymen, "Images of empire, contests of conscience: Models of colonial domination in South Africa" in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1997), pp. 166, 168-9.
82. See also Ann Laura Stoler's discussion of class in the Netherlands and the Indies, "Cultivating bourgeois bodies and racial selves" in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, pp. 117-18.