Esther Helena Arens studied Economic History and English Literature in Bonn and Warwick. She wrote her PhD thesis in history at the University of Cologne about Re-ordering: West German and Dutch “development aid” for Indonesia in the 1960s. Her postdoctoral project Things Colonial and Colonial Regime: Material Culture Between Amsterdam and Ambon in the 18th Century is situated within the interdisciplinary DFG-funded project Circulation in Spaces of Knowledge Between Asia and Europe: G.E: Rumphius and his Texts, circa 1670–1755 led by Prof. Maria Leuker at the Institute of Dutch Language and Literature, University of Cologne. Esther is speaker of the bilateral Workgroup German-Dutch History (ADNG/WDNG) and blogs at botanical.hypotheses.org.
Fields of interest: Material Culture, Colonialism and History of Knowledge, Postcolonial Theory, Dutch-German Contemporary History, History of European “development aid”
Locals, Knowledge and Force. Rumphius’ Rariteitkamer and Kruid-boek as Colonial Contact Zones
(joint presentation with Charlotte Kießling)
Abstract:
In the second half of the 17th Century Georg Eberhard Rumpf from Hanau in Germany found himself a permanent migrant on the Moluccan Island of Ambon. First soldier, then merchant, later natural scholar in the service of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Ostindische Companie, VOC), he had married a local woman and chose not to return to Europe.
Once he had finished writing the history of Ambon that focused on the political ecology of the Moluccas during the colonisation period, the VOC granted him time, books and services to research wildlife in the region. Rumphius’ biological opus was published in the first half of the 18th century in Holland, the Amboinsche Rariteitkamer (Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet) in 1705 and the Amboinsche Kruid-boek (Ambonese Herbal) from 1740 onwards. Highly influential in contemporary European conchology and botany, both his books also belong to the European literary canon of the Dutch East Indies and are thus connected to colonial contact zones in different times and spaces.
These contact zones have been defined by Mary Louise Pratt as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery”. By means of two case studies we are going to analyse the specifics of knowledge production on Ambon and the resulting coloniality as it is described in Rumphius’ texts.
The first case study (Arens) focuses on slave work as a foundation of knowledge production in colonial territories, connecting the human body and scientific objects. It analyses how Rumphius referred to slaves, and how they contributed to his research. The second case study (Kießling) focuses on locals as mediators of knowledge and examines exchanges that included asymmetrical trade-offs. It examines how Rumphius gathered information from the local people, and how these exchanges were portrayed in his texts.
