Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia by Fenneke Sysling (review)

Fenneke Sysling’s new monograph examines the practices of Dutch physical anthropology in colonial Indonesia (the Netherlands East Indies) between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Histories of physical anthropology have been dominated by studies of the German, French, and British empires, making Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia a fresh contribution to the histories of science, medicine, and colonialism.

Sysling shows how the efforts of Dutch physical anthropologists in colonial Indonesia coalesced around the methods of collecting skulls and bones, making plaster casts, and taking photographs. They also focused on particular geographies such as Timor, attractive for its biological diversity, and Dutch New Guinea, appealing for the ostensible purity of racial “types” living there. In New Guinea, as late as the 1950s, “salvage” anthropology was even briefly allied with environmental conservation. Key practitioners lobbied colonial authorities to protect indigenous people here as extensions of nature reserves, a proposal which Sysling shows was ultimately blocked by the government.

While interested in the politics, writings, and material and data collections of colonial anthropologists, Sysling is primarily focused on how her sources reveal the process of “encounters” between Dutch researchers and their indigenous subjects. Sysling argues that physical anthropology was the definitive “‘first contact’ science, because … data could be obtained without further knowledge of language or customs” (150-1). Her approach preserves the processes by which anthropologists gathered information and produced research, and gives voice to indigenous responses and refusals to participate in western knowledge making. Inevitably, the book gives more space and detail to the Dutch side of the anthropological encounter, but Sysling employs a nuanced and empathetic narrative that reveals the complexity of indigenous motives and actions in assisting with and participating in anthropological studies. In assessing the collective and individual endeavours of colonial anthropologists, Sysling avoids both glib glorifications and caricature.

Sysling provides new evidence from the Dutch empire which shows that while some indigenous subjects willingly gave European physical anthropologists access to their bodies for measurement, the standard practice of colonial anthropologists was to use stealth, connivance, coercion, and violence to collect data. Dutch anthropologists did so within the authority of colonial institutions like prisons and hospitals, and via military and scientific expeditions, often because they could not get consent for invasive or insensitive procedures from indigenous communities in situ.

Sysling examines how ethical breaches in the collecting phase resonate in the present as well as the past. The Dutch museums and institutes that are the custodians of colonial physical anthropology collections today remain implicated in the violent origins of their procurement. Further, the widespread refusal of indigenous people to participate freely as subjects in colonial science, or to do so only under duress, tainted the conceptualization and execution of physical anthropology, even at its powerful (if brief) apex in the 1920s and 1930s. Sysling’s main argument, made convincingly, is that while Dutch anthropologists in colonial Indonesia were prolific generators of large but disparate data sets, they failed at advancing the aims of their own field, neither producing conclusive results nor achieving consensus among themselves on methods for collecting information and explaining its meanings. The human diversity of the Netherlands East Indies simply defeated these practitioners, but so did their own haphazard and exploitative approaches.

Sysling attends to the gendered practices of Dutch anthropology in late-colonial Indonesia. She identifies the small number of European women who assisted (and, very occasionally, produced independent research towards) an otherwise masculine project. It was the social intelligence and cultural knowledge of some anthropologist’s wives, for example, that led to encounters with indigenous people. Sysling makes evident, however, the structural forces that privileged the physical and social mobility of European men, enabling those with careers in medicine, government, or the military to pursue anthropology at the frontiers of the expanding colonial state.

Sysling raises new questions concerning the undeclared motivations that drove anthropological research. She...