When it comes to colonial museum collections, gifts are a tricky category. The objects on display may not have been looted, but how voluntary were such gifts in a system characterised by coercion and inequality? Professor Alicia Schrikker has been awarded an NWO SSH-L grant to investigate the significance and role of gifts in colonial contexts.
Alongside her work at the university, Schrikker is a member of the Colonial Collections Committee, which is examining whether objects that came to the Netherlands during the colonial era should be returned to their countries of origin. Whilst in some cases it is crystal clear that the objects in question are looted art, in other cases the situation is more nuanced. 'I kept being asked about the issue of gifts,' says Schrikker. 'To be honest, we don't have a clear picture of how that culture of gift-giving developed throughout the entire colonial period.'
An NWO SSH-L grant will enable Schrikker to map out that development from 1600 to 1950. During the project, she will work together with a number of student assistants and three postdocs: Lennart Bes, Pichayapat (Toh) Naisupap, en Melinda Susanto. 'This research is entirely separate from my work on the Committee, where we examine each case individually to determine whether restitution is appropriate,' she emphasises. 'In this project, we are taking the information about gifts in the archives as our starting point, rather than the objects in contemporary collections. Naturally, far more gifts were exchanged than can now be found in museums. Through this project, we aim to develop a typology of gifts that will help us understand what sort of relationships the gifts embodied and how these changed over time. It would, of course, be wonderful if other researchers could eventually use our databases to investigate the provenance of collections.'
Important role
It is already known that gifts played an important role in pre-colonial Asia, a practice which the Europeans subsequently adopted. 'Gifts played a sort of intermediary role between trade and politics,' explains Schrikker. 'Sometimes, for example, they took the form of tribute payments, through which Europeans demonstrated their subordination to the Chinese emperor or the Japanese shogun. In other cases, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) enforced annual gift-giving as a condition in peace treaties.' The VOC, and later the colonial authorities, meticulously documented all these exchanges. Schrikker: 'A great deal of money was spent on the gifts, but the VOC also received a great deal in return. This ranged from sugar and rose water to animals and even people - that is, enslaved individuals.' The latter point is important, as one of the central questions in the project revolves around the relationship between gifts and violence.
Network of gifts
One of Schrikkers' ambitions is to map out the routes these gifts took. Thanks to the digitisation of archives and handwriting recognition, it is now possible to process data on gifts on a large scale. In addition, the project draws on archives from local sultanates and kingdoms, such as those on Java and in the Moluccas. The project integrates various perspectives: political, economic, but also that of the gift itself. 'We want to know what happened after the moment of giving,' she explains. 'When the VOC was the recipient, items were often sent to Batavia. Sometimes they became merchandise there, but it also regularly happened that a gift was re-presented as a present. We know, for example, that elephants given as gifts in Sri Lanka were shipped to Batavia and subsequently presented to the Japanese shogun.'
The Dutch envoys took things to an even more extravagant level in Kandy and Colombo, in what is now Sri Lanka. 'When the Dutch envoys visited the king in Kandy, they were all presented with a kastane, a sabre,' explains Schrikker. 'Six months later, the king's envoys came to visit in Colombo. They, too, were each gifted one of these kastanes. I find that very interesting: are these objects that go back and forth? And if so, what is the significance of that?'
Underlying meanings
The history of gift-giving is steeped in underlying messages. 'It was not uncommon for something highly inappropriate to be given,' says Schrikker. 'This happened due to cultural awkwardness; for example, when the Sultan of Madura wanted to present King William I with a large quantity of bird's nests as a delicacy, this was prevented by the Governor-General in Batavia, because it was forbidden to give foodstuffs to the king. But certainly during the colonial era, this was also sometimes done deliberately. In this way, gifts could actually have a subversive effect, as a form of resistance. There has been very little historical research into the exchange of gifts in the late colonial period. I'm really curious to find out how it all works when you take a closer look.'
