Conférence
Notice
Lieu de réalisation
campus condorcet
Langue :
Anglais
Crédits
Vianney Escoffier (Réalisation), Elena Vezzadini (Organisation de l'évènement), Domenico Cristofaro (Organisation de l'évènement), Marleen Reichgelt (Intervention)
Crédit image : CNRS
Conditions d'utilisation
Droit commun de la propriété intellectuelle
DOI : 10.60527/wm52-s556
Citer cette ressource :
Marleen Reichgelt. EHESS. (2024, 31 mai). Zooming In: Children as Guides and Informants in Merauke, West Papua (Colonial Netherlands New Guinea), 1905-1910 , in Photography as a source for social history. [Vidéo]. Canal-U. https://doi.org/10.60527/wm52-s556. (Consultée le 12 février 2025)

Zooming In: Children as Guides and Informants in Merauke, West Papua (Colonial Netherlands New Guinea), 1905-1910

Réalisation : 31 mai 2024 - Mise en ligne : 25 juin 2024
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Descriptif

At the heart of this presentation is the presence of Papuan children in photographs taken by Dutch Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Netherlands New Guinea (present-day West Papua, Indonesia) in the early twentieth century. Departing from the simple but critical realisation that ‘children were there too’ afforded by the act of digitally zooming in on high-definition scans of photographs, this article attempts to methodologically ‘zoom in’ on traces of children acting intermediaries in other sources in the colonial archive as well. Inspired by Ariella Azoulay, I use the active presence of children as historical subjects participating in processes of colonisation in the photographs to offset the dominant missionary discourse which presented children as passive objects of adult governing – thus obscuring how the mission depended on the knowledge, skills, and networks of these children. Engaging the paradox of absence and presence of colonised children in both visual and textual sources in the colonial archive, three different intermediary roles adopted by children involved with the Catholic mission are analysed: guiding and escorting the missionaries when travelling, assisting the missionaries in daily chores, and instructing the missionaries in the local language and customs.

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