ABSTRACT
Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam was involved in the production of a pack of playing cards. The game comprises twelve sets of four cards each, illustrated with a photograph, a drawing and some keywords. The complete pack of 48 cards provides a thesaurus of what was regarded as traditional culture in the Indonesian archipelago. In this chapter I explore these cards as a dialogic relationship between the imaged and the material. They enable us to investigate how photographs that once were made in an equal act between a photographer and his subject during specific encounters in the Dutch East Indies are transformed through the material form of a set of playing cards into a series of timeless icons of otherness for children in the Netherlands. Designed to teach Dutch families a ‘known-unknown world’, this miniature image-world of Indonesia can be seen as an aspect of the social and discursive relations through which the Colonial Institute formulated and disseminated a ‘homecolonialist culture’ to Dutch families. Grounded in Dutch society, this home-colonialism endured beyond Indonesian independence and is indeed still an active force within Dutch society. After first focusing on the cards themselves and considering what happens when photographs became playing cards, I shall consider the meanings created in the cards as a series of images-objects and the material engagements in the very act of playing with them. Finally, I shall reflect briefly on the relationship of these cards to other classes of ethnographic objects and the shifts in their understanding in the discourse of ‘authentic objects’ within the museum.
