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Oceania at the Tropenmuseum, by David van Duuren, Steven Vink, Daan van Dartel, Hanneke Hollander, and Denise Frank. Amsterdam: kit Pub- lishers, 2011. isbn 978-9068327526; 216 pages, illustrations, photographs, endnotes, references, index. Cloth, us$45.00.
This volume is one in a series of cata- logs designed to showcase and docu- ment the genesis of the spectacular collections at the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam's Royal Tropical Institute (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tro- pen). A dozen essays by curators and researchers familiar with the collection provide a substantial context for the images of artifacts and original photo- graphs, and the result is an engaging historical overview of Dutch colonial exploration and collection in Oceania. Oceania, as reflected in the Tropenmu- seum collection, largely means Nether- lands New Guinea. There are artifacts from Papua New Guinea, Australia, Fiji, Tonga, and Hawai'i, among other locations, but most of these appear to have been acquired from private collectors or through the exchange of materials between museums. New Guinea was the Netherlands' sole colonial possession in the Pacific, and the Tropenmuseum collection is above all a record of colonial endeavor.
The introduction provides an instructive genealogy for the Tropen- museum-its predecessor, the Colo- nial Museum, had been established in 1871 in Haarlem to educate the Dutch public in the achievements and potential of their colonies. It focused largely on plantation products until the introduction in 1926 of displays illustrating the material culture and lives of colonial populations. By then the collection had been transferred to the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, which was renamed the Indies Institute (Indische Instituut) in 1945, and then the Tropical Institute (Tropeninstituut) in 1950, after the final "loss" (from a Netherlands perspective) of...