Indonesian Tourism Workers on Volcanoes and Geotourism’s Colonial Origins: Making a Subaltern History Visible

Indonesia’s volcanoes are places of recreation, aesthetic production, and scientific knowledge-gathering, as well as sites of pilgrimage, spirituality, and natural disasters for locals as well as international travellers. In this article, I focus on volcanoes as historic sites of labour to demonstrate the entanglement of colonial tourism and science with local forms of work and knowledge, and to reveal the origins of the porting and guiding work that takes place on Indonesia’s volcanoes to this day. Using Tina Campt’s method of “listening to images,” I show how colonial photographs, albeit partial sources, make modes of subaltern labour visible that written sources routinely minimised, restoring porters, guides, and what I call “camp domestics” to histories of service, science and geotourism in Indonesia. Recognising the homosocial setting of the colonial scientific expedition and the peculiar physical challenges of the volcano environment, I also examine the negotiation of Indonesian and European masculinities and their intersection with class and racial hierarchies on the volcano. The article thus reflects on how Javanese workers’ spatial and social mobility entailed the negotiation of opportunity as well as exploitation on tour.