Ethnography’s Shadow Archive: Untangling Indigenous Information, Interpretations, and Images of Eastern Indonesia in 19th-Century Colonial Anthropology, c. 1880

This presentation explores the textual fragments of a shadow archive that informed a Dutch colonial administrator’s ethnography of eastern Indonesia from the late nineteenth century. Found in the National Library of Indonesia, these archival papers consisted, not of the administrator J.G.F. Riedel’s own writings and fieldnotes, but that of an unnamed Indigenous figure’s handwritten manuscript and sketches detailing the material, religious, and ritual aspects of everyday life in and around the island of Ambon. Entitled “The Customs of Ambon,” the Indigenous figure’s Malay-language report described the beliefs and traditions of the island’s people, from marriage laws to the construction of communal houses and local boats. It also included information about ritual spiritualists’ methods of healing and understandings of disease: a constellation of beliefs resembling supernatural etiology bridging the realm of the seen and unseen, the magical and the medicinal. These interpretations of Ambonese customs would ultimately be translated, reinterpreted, and integrated into the colonial administrator’s printed ethnography, De Sluik- en Kroes-harige Rassen tussen Selebes en Papua (The Straight- and Curly-haired Races between Celebes and Papua). While the identity of the Indigenous writer remains elusive, this paper attempts to read along and against the grain of these two sets of sources—the shadow archive and the printed ethnography—to analyze changing discourses around race, ethnicity, and autochthonous customs which emerged with secular interpretations of religious life in the eastern archipelago. Rather than tracing a unidirectional process from Indigenous source to printed book, this presentation attempts to untangle how mediation of vernacular life, texts, and images introduced subtle changes of interpretation on both ends of knowledge formation and collection.