Confronting Caribbean Challenges researcher, Sanne Rotmeijer, is just back from almost a year doing fieldwork on Curaçao and St. Maarten. She shares her perspective on identity, belonging, and what Brexit and nationalist...
Walking through the entrance gate to the shopping street ‘Pasar Baru’, Jakarta, was like stepping into my favourite movie, says Jemma Middleton. I recognised the different shops, the old and new architecture, the way a shopkeeper was advertising...
Confronting Caribbean Challenges researcher Jessica Vance Roitman was recently in Havana, Cuba for the yearly Association of Caribbean Historians conference. In this blog, she contemplates her role as a tourist feeding...
The fasting month in Indonesia comes with new gadgets and ‘special offers’ advertisements. Chris Chaplin wonders whether or not this affects the pious character of fasting. On the 6th June the majority of Muslims across the world welcomed the start...
Historian Bart Luttikhuis examines the origins of the widely-used estimate of 100,000 Indonesian victims of the Dutch-Indonesian War of Decolonization (1945-1950), and calls into question its accuracy. Ultimately, he wonders, does the number really matter?...
Unlike social scientists, many historians do not very often engage in a dialogue with their research subjects. For, as far as we know, the dead don’t read or speak back. But what happens if a historian ...
Indonesia's democratisation process is a case of the half-full glass. Pessimists argue that elections have descended into an ugly spectacle of vote-buying and manipulation that does little to distribute power in...
At the end of his brief European tour (Germany, Belgium, the UK), President Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’) last Friday paid a one day visit to the Netherlands. He had breakfast with the prime minister, and visited a large scale ...
KITLV researcher Jessica Vance Roitman is just back from two weeks working in the National Archives of Curacao. She reflects on the art of history, working with archival material, and the glimpses she’s caught of the social history of the Dutch Windward...
Communist Cuba is changing at an unprecedented pace. But nothing is what it seems in Cuba. Gert Oostindie reports after making a television documentary on the eve of president Obama’s visit. Classic Cadillacs and other old timers are ...
Indonesians have forgotten the genocidal violence of 1965. Or have they? In this town in Central Java, locals and officials recently gathered for a remarkable commemorative service to the 1965 dead. Gerry van Klinken investigates. "Every time I visit Indonesia...
What’s not to love about a big Indonesian wedding? Food, socialization, and the chance to pull on your best kebaya. But, writes Jacqueline Hicks, for Indonesia’s political and economic elites, they are much more than that....
One-Tété Lohkay and Alida, the legend of the enslaved woman whose breast was cut off, have become folk heroines. What to do asks Jessica Roitman, an historian who wonders if these disfigurements occurred?...
This weekend Anne-Lot Hoek reports for NRC Handelsblad and Reporter Radio KRO-NCRV about the forgotten bloodbath in Rengat, Sumatra. The idea was to find out what happened. But what happened was not what struck her most. Every year a memorial service ...
Earthquakes resulting from the extraction of natural gas for decades on end are now taking a heavy toll on the people of Groningen in the north of Holland. Typically, according to Willem van der Molen, the Dutch government reacts to the demand...
To my surprise I encountered an old Oral History project of mine, the SMGI, featuring in a novel, writes Fridus Steijlen. And it plays its role with excellence. Between 1997 and 2001 I coordinated the oral history project...
Chris Chaplin reflects on recent debates about radical Islam in Indonesia and warns against the use of simplistic labels. Islam in Indonesia has recently been in media headlines for all the wrong reasons, as the ...
Thursday morning January 14, a terrorist attack in downtown Jakarta was on the news. Media contacted KITLV for comments. How did Dutch media react? Observations by Henk Schulte Nordholt and Fridus Steijlen....
Lotte Akkerman, Kimberley Bootsma, and Bente de Leede reflect on a public symposium held at the National Archives about the KITLV project Dutch Military Operations in Indonesia, 1945-1950. They explain that...
A little more than three years ago Ridho Reinanda joined KITLV as a researcher in the Elite Network Shifts project. Since then he found several things to be done that are unavoidable for applying computational approaches...
Matthieu Pereira reflects on the role of law and the use of legal discourse in rural contexts. He introduces one of the issues he tackles in his doctoral research. While statements about the lack of the rule of law in Indonesia and...
While the recent academic, public and legal attention for the decolonization of Indonesia rightly focuses on violence as one of its defining characteristics, we should not lose sight of the other aspects of the conflict....
White Dutch people have recently entered the second stage of grief over losing their colonial innocence: anger, says Paul Bijl. For decades they thought that racist injustice, slavery, colonialism and mass killings were more characteristics of the Germans, Americans, British and ...
…and no, Tom Hoogervorst is not referring to himself here. The late 19th-century Van der Pant expressed his discontent with the language skills of his compatriots. How much still rings true today?...
The governing body of world soccer, FIFA, has suspended the Indonesian Soccer Union (PSSI) for being taken over by Indonesian politics. Nico van Horn says: yeah, like sports and politics never go together....
Colonialism and its legacies: a highly sensitive topic, no matter how and what ones writes about it. This surely applies to the decolonization war in Indonesia and the issue of Dutch war crimes. Gert Oostindie reflects ...
Kolonialisme en de nasleep ervan: wat en hoe je er ook over schrijft, het ligt altijd gevoelig. Dat geldt zeker voor de dekolonisatieoorlog in Indonesië, en de vraag naar Nederlandse oorlogsmisdaden. Gert Oostindie ...
One of the films screened at a recent conference about Indonesia’s 1965 mass killings was the Australian (Hollywood produced) The year of living dangerously (Peter Weir, 1982). David Kloos saw it for the first time...
While countries that experienced the Holocaust have reached reconciliation, Indonesians are still struggling to acknowledge the mass killings between 1965-1968. Grace Leksana reflects on conferences...
KITLV’s ever expanding “audiovisual archive of everyday life in Indonesia”, has among others produced documentaries. What it hasn’t done is engage with visual art. David Kloos sees opportunities for the future....
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ wrote L. P. Hartley. Hidden in a park on the outskirts of Arnhem lies such a country, Bronbeek. Being both monument, veterans’ retirement home and ...
Last week more than 500 scholars convened in Vienna for the 8th conference of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies. Previously held every three years and from now on biannually,...
A couple of weeks ago, as part of a holiday in the Balkans, my girlfriend and I visited the Dalmatian island of Hvar in the Adriatic Sea. According to our guidebook, Hvar is “a perfect getaway for people who want to enjoy...
President Jokowi is a source of inspiration for future new leaders in the districts of Indonesia. A friend of mine on the island of Sumba in Eastern Indonesia tried to register as an independent candidate for the December ...
To be or not be (called) Dutch: is that the question…? The media can’t have it both ways: we are Dutch, or we are not. It is a fact that in times of failure, the media writes about the ‘Curaçaoan’ that lost,...
‘Oh my land Papua’: Izäak Samuel Kijne, 1899-1970: Missionary teacher in New Guinea. In the autumn of 2013 a Papua fanatic visited the KITLV. The Papua fanatic is an elder Dutch male social anthropologist and ...
You can’t miss the official monuments in Indonesia. They are are everywhere. Statues of Diponegoro or General Sudirman gaze out over busy traffic, which takes little notice of them. The story of national ...
In March I had the privilege to visit one of our PhD students, Prio Sambodho, who is currently doing fieldwork in West Java. Prio’s research is part of a larger project on citizenship in Indonesia and investigates...
Historians such as myself have cause to rejoice, if recent American political rhetoric is anything to go by. History, that heretofore scantily-funded discipline of the humanities known (along with English and ...
As 2014 came to an end, I began a four-week tour of Southeast Asia, taking in Jakarta, Manila, Hanoi and Singapore. Together with young local researchers, I interviewed 21 young people aged 18 to 20 about their lives, hopes and ambitions...
‘Mi no ta Charlie’ (I am not Charlie) in four different languages on the front page of Bon Siman, a weekly newspaper in Bonaire. A cover statement like this might be somewhat unexpected for a local paper?...
Any historian and social scientist will have his or her collection of missed opportunities: an interview going into an unexpected direction, or a source with no direct value for your actual research, yet, highly...
“I am so proud to be a Dutchman. Our country stands for developmental aid. Please, newly appointed government, keep this going. Our world will never be safe if we do not help to decrease the scandalous...
President Obama’s announcement about the lifting of the Cuban embargo /bloqueo will have great economic consequences for the entire Caribbean. Cuba’s possible membership in CARICOM might breathe new life ...
This Christmas it will be ten years ago that a huge tsunami struck the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, India and several other countries surrounding the Bengal Bay and the Indian Ocean. The huge waves...
KITLV is involved in a program called ‘Governance, Markets and Citizenship’. It consists of economists working on regional economic developments, public administration people looking at ...
Which country is doing better in economic terms, Indonesia or the Philippines? Not many people will hesitate when answering this question: Indonesia, of course. In 2011, Indonesia’s Gross Domestic ...
Suddenly there were parking meters on Jalan Sabang in the centre of Jakarta. I saw them after I checked into a hotel around the corner and went for dinner. A novelty in an Indonesian city where tukang parkir (parking men) dominate the...
“Are you a pessimist or an optimist?” one of the examiners asked at my recent thesis defence. The question caught me by surprise. In my thesis I argue that the colonial state in the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s...
Since 2012 KITLV has been engaged in the project ‘Dutch military operations in Indonesia 1945-1950’. At first it was to be a project of three institutions; NIOD (War Documentation Institute, Amsterdam), NIMH (Institute...