Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death

Abstract

Nineteenth-century, private collections of ethnographic artefacts have a bad reputation in anthropology. Appearing to comprise ‘a haphazard assemblage of junk’ (Gathercole 1978:276), anthropologists and others interested in ethnographic objects and collecting have ignored private collections for some time. While Jean Louis Henri Beijens’s collection resembles at first glance a haphazard assemblage not worthy of attention, a closer inspection reveals its historical and contemporary significance. In this article, we offer a glimpse into Beijens’s private military collection, which contains artefacts originating from the Dutch colonies in both the East and West, as well as from Belgian Congo. Highlighting the colonial self-fashioning that occurred while he was assembling his ‘haphazard’ collection, we elucidate the colonial dispossession and violence that is at the heart of Beijens’s and other private and public collections. In doing so, this article attempts to address the enduring legacies and responsibilities of colonial collecting and collections.