Burdens of Proof Photography and Evidence of Atrocity during the Dutch Military Actions in Indonesia (1945a-1950)

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Abstract

There is but a limited scholarship on photographic sources from the Dutch military actions during the Revolusi Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Revolution) (1945-1949), and what exists almost entirely neglects perhaps the largest component of the archives: Dutch soldiers' amateur photographs. Yet this category of photographs has simultaneously attracted much public and media controversy. This article contends that a narrow range of soldiers' amateur photographs have thus far borne an anomalously weighty burden of proof to substantiate the nature and limits of extreme violence during the National Revolution, one that is brittle and difficult to sustain unless historians begin to broaden the focus of investigations into photographic archives. This article also investigates what it may mean for present-day Indonesians to see their ancestors as perpetrators as well as victims of violence and, importantly, as occupants of the ambiguous categories between both ends of this spectrum. What are the ethics of looking at and reproducing these photographs, and to whom do they belong?
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)240-278
JournalBijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
Volume176
Issue number2-3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes

Funding

Research for this article was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant ( DP 170100948, 2017–19) and the Tholenaar van Raalte Fellowship in Photography at the Research Centre for Material Culture (2018). It was first presented as a paper at the 2016 ASEASUK Conference at SOAS at the invitation of Alex Supartono, and as part of the panel ‘The (Post)Colonial Archive: Re-imag(in)ing Southeast Asia’. It was refined as a public lecture for the KITLV Seminar Series in 2018. For their thought-provoking questions and feedback, I am grateful to all the participants at those two presentations, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for BKI . Thanks also to Timo de Jong for research assistance, and to René Kok and Harco Gijsbers at NIOD for great archival support.

FundersFunder number
Australian Research CouncilDP 170100948

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