Marianne Hulsbosch’s richly illustrated account of dress systems in colonial Ambon seeks to expose the ways in which Dutch and Ambonese men and women internalized, expressed and shaped cultural and social messages through clothing, accessorizing and bodily regimentation. Relying heavily on Arthur Frank’s 1991 “Typology of Body Use in Action” model, which predicts the ways in which bodies react to and shape social situations using objects, Hulsbosch focuses her argument on four dimensions of dress in the colonial central Moluccan islands.Footnote 1 Rather than focusing on fashion alone, which implies a temporally and geographically defined upwardly mobile track, Hulsbosch analyses all parts of visual identification: clothing as well as posturing, tattoos as well as gait. Within this complex system, the author is right to point to the reciprocal relationship of Dutch and Ambonese style: “Without each other,” she claims, “each was deprived of its existence” (183). Throughout the book, two key arguments become clear: first, European and Ambonese men and women actively negotiated their social and economic status by adopting certain styles of dress; and second, men and women existed in disparate dress systems, held to varying levels of scrutiny and aspired to very different conditions.
Ambon’s place has been largely ignored in other histories of colonial Indonesia, its story typically relegated to seventeenth and eighteenth century accounts of clove cultivation and the long reign of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie’s (VOC) monopoly on trade. While Hulsbosch does not attempt to fill any major gaps in Indonesian history, her careful consideration of the intimate and daily effects of colonialism works towards a broader understanding of ethnic identity in the central Moluccan islands. Drawing on Foucaultian discourse, this book makes a case for the complicated embodied experiences of colonialism and social change. Hulsbosch argues that not only did clothing styles and materials change with every iteration of Dutch involvement in Ambon but that bodily regimentation—from hygienic habits to patterns of walking and sitting—shifted to reflect new realities of social mobility (or lack thereof). Despite her careful attention to detail in exploring the inextricable networks of religion, ethnicity, class, gender and age, Hulsbosch devotes little space to non-European influences on Ambonese identity construction. Arab Muslim, Chinese, and even diasporic dress systems are mostly lost on readers and what one gets is a mostly European story.
Following Frank’s model, Hulsbosch arranges the typologies of colonial Ambonese dress into four “dimensions”, each allotted its own chapter. Her first chapter glosses over several hundred years of colonial intervention in the Moluccas, ranging from the Catholic Portuguese arrival at the turn of the sixteenth-century to VOC and Protestant Dutch rule from the seventeenth-century on. From here, Hulsbosch turns her gaze to the dimensions of colonial and indigenous dress, moving from disciplined dress (chapter 2) to dominating dress (chapter 3)—acted on by regimental and forceful actions—and then to mirroring dress (chapter 4) and communicative dress (chapter 5)—expressing drives toward consumption and cultural recognition. Within each chapter, Hulsbosch points to important class-based, religious and gender-based variations in dress and bodily control that advance beyond the simplistic colonizer/colonized divide. For instance, she illustrates how footwear served as a clear demarcation of female wealth and status throughout the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.
In attempting to parse the complex social negotiations at play in every layer of dressing, Hulsbosch draws on a variety of sources—most clearly photographs and illustrations but also oral history interviews (primarily conducted in the Netherlands in the early-2000s), material objects and European anthropological accounts. While her range of source material is striking, it is difficult to ignore the constructedness in the slew of posed photographs that she employs as evidence (e.g., Ambonese families, lined up in front of their homes in perfectly arranged ensembles, staring into the eyes of Dutch anthropological cameras).
More convincing, perhaps, are Hulsbosch’s analyses of dress items themselves: a printed sarong, a beautifully pleated skirt, or a paper-bark cidako, for example, mostly held in the author’s private collection. Hulsbosch elegantly traces subtle changes in these dress objects as the tenor of Dutch involvement changed in the central Moluccas as socially mobile Ambonese clans and social groups adopted outside styles and bodily regimes. As Dutch men increasingly adopted the breezy “colonial-style” white suit towards the end of the nineteenth-century (as both a matter of fashion and practicality), some Ambonese men who identified as Christian donned baniang, similarly white and buttoned-up shirt-jackets. Hulsbosch’s background in design education shines in her deconstructions of these singular clothing items—accompanied by simple line drawings, she beautifully describes the intricate details of the materials and how they were worn.
Although this book makes for a hefty coffee table book—its large size, numerous illustrations and interspersed marginalia contributing to a pleasurable aesthetic reading experience—Hulsbosch’s historical strengths come through in two areas. First, the author makes a valuable and necessary contribution to the place of both European and Ambonese women in Indonesian colonialism. Citing prominent gender historians like Jean Gelman Taylor, Hulsbosch explores the incredible social and cultural changes driven by the arrival of Dutch women in the central Moluccas. Disrupting the role of Ambonese women who married VOC officers in efforts to secure their family’s financial and educational future, European women (totoks) arriving in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries drew firmer racial and ethnic boundaries clearly impacted Ambonese women.
Second, Hulsbosch makes a powerful argument for the intimacy inherent to colonial rule. In a final chapter, which draws on her previous work, the author considers both underwear and bridal wear as negotiations of Ambonese identity. Underwear, in particular, provides a compelling example of how closely colonial intervention drove changing ideas of reproduction, womanhood and hygiene. By the mid-twentieth-century, Ambonese visual representations of ethnicity reached a troubled place common to broader narratives of decolonization—one of men violently separated from their ethnic identities and of women held to impossible imaginings of ancestral fantasies that may never have existed. Hulsbosch’s work reaches beyond the world of fashion and into the territory of changing visual cultures, of embodied reactions to foreign intervention and of gendered negotiations of the intimate effects of colonialism.
