ABSTRACT
It was a festive occasion when, on October 10, 2008, staff of the Museum Kapuas Raya in Sintang, West Kalimantan, opened the museum’s doors and welcomed its various stakeholders and guests from Indonesia and the Netherlands for the first time. The opening provided a meeting place for an audience from different social and cultural backgrounds, made even more evident by the wide array of colorful costumes, from Dayak, Chinese and Malay traditional dress to Western outfits, each expressing a distinct cultural identity (Figure 9.1). The different groups present at the opening mirrored both present-day and past relationships between regional ethnic groups, between Indonesia and the Netherlands and between East and West: relationships entwined, of course, in histories of colonialism.
