The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia

Marieke Bloembergen is senior researcher at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), and Professor in Archival and Postcolonial Studies at Universiteit Leiden. She has published on the politics and mobility of knowledge in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, through the lens of policing and violence, material culture, and heritage practices within inter-Asian and transnational contexts. Martijn Eickhoff is senior researcher at NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies, and Professor in Archaeology and Heritage of War and Mass Violence at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. He has published widely on the relation between archaeology, politics, heritage formation, and mass violence, in Asia and Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Introduction: towards a mobile history of heritage formation in Asia; 1. Site interventions, knowledge networks, and changing loyalties on Java, 1800–1850s; 2. Exchange, protection, and the social life of Java's antiquities, 1860s–1910s; 3. Great sacred Majapahit: biographies of a Javanese site in the nineteenth century; 4. Greater Majapahit: the makings of a proto-Indonesian site across decolonisation, 1900s–1950s; 5. The prehistoric cultures and historic past of South-Sumatra on the move; 6. Resurrecting Siva, expanding local pasts: centralisation and the forces of imagination across war and regime changes, 1920s–1950s; 7. Fragility, losing, and anxiety over loss: difficult pasts in wider Asian and global contexts; Epilogue: heritage sites, difficult histories, and 'hidden forces' in postcolonial Indonesia.

'Bloembergen and Eickhoff demonstrate the Dutch roots of modern Indonesian conceptualisations of heritage, and how Indonesian practices stretch across Southeast Asia to India and beyond. This is a highly original and provocative contribution to global understandings of tradition and its ownership.' Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney