ABSTRACT
129This chapter is a detailed, diachronic study of nineteenth-century popular illustrated publications that depict people living in the Netherlands. It investigates the various functions that national categories had in captions and comments to images of people: “Dutch” could have a bracketing function and refer to the presentation of the Dutch as nation of ethnic variety; it could be used to present a single figure as an example of the Dutch, or, in the later nineteenth century, even meld the category (the Dutch) and a specific instance (people along the Zuiderzee and inhabitants of Zeeland) to a fixed motif that became the cliché. In popularized anthropological publications, images function mainly to accentuate authenticity, the “typical” and the traditional, while elements considered “modern” are rejected as “unauthentic” and usually not described with the term “Dutch”. This conceptualization lends itself to exclusion on the basis of nationality and “race” as observed in early twentiethcentury illustrated publications.
