Kampong Dreams
Exploring the construction of belonging for Moluccans
living in Lunetten
Sam Toogood 11338814
samtoogood93@gmail.com
Amsterdam – 16th January 2018
Master thesis submitted to the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science,
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology Word count: 23,943
Supervisor: Dr. T. Harris
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Plagiarism Declaration
I hereby declare that this thesis meets the rules and regulations for fraud and plagiarism as set out by the Examination Committee of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. This thesis is entirely my own original work and all sources have been properly acknowledged.
Sam Toogood 16-01-2018
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Acknowledgments
PolYou were the assistant I couldn’t afford. They should put your head on Easter Island for your stoic patience.
Mum and Dad
The second time might not be the charm, but you trusted me. Tina
You have a talent for giving advice to those who aren’t much good at taking it. This thesis might not have been written without your relentless optimism.
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There's a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place, And I know that it's the Spirit of the Lord; There are sweet expressions on each face, And I know they feel the presence of the Lord.
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Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter 1: Opening the Baggage 19
Chapter 2: Kampong/Compound 20
Chapter 3: Resisting Suburbia 45
Conclusion 58
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Introduction
The seed of this thesis lies in a previous project, in which I investigated the contemporary construction of ‘Indo’-ness in the context of Dutch multiculturalism. ‘Indo’ refers to Eurasian people who experienced colonialism as subjects of the former Dutch East Indies. It was originally a term used by the colonial administration to refer to people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian descent, and more generally to those who had European and Asian ancestry in the former Dutch East Indies. As colonial subjects of mixed ancestry, Indo people benefited from a racial hierarchy in the colonial administration that favoured European parentage, and gave them privileged access to rank, salary and favours that were unavailable to the wider population. As Indonesia gained independence, the racial construction of Indo-ness was maintained in the Netherlands through the cultural capital provided by their previous education in colonial Dutch schooling, granting access to better housing and jobs than their Indonesian compatriots.
Speaking to many Indo people young and old, I found that many took pride in being regarded as “model immigrants” or “good immigrants”, speaking about how they had integrated. Indeed, although being Indo was a point of identification for them, so was the oft-quoted idea that they have become “more Dutch than the Dutch”. Some participants occasionally compared Indo people to other types of immigrant, such as those from Turkey and Morocco, perceived as ‘troublemakers’ who, they argued, were not interested in integrating into Dutch society. In particular, Moluccans were singled out for criticism. At the centre of their comparison of Indo people to Moluccans was a notion of belonging. Every association – anger, ungratefulness, violence – seemed, for my interviewees, to be rooted in their inability to lay down roots. Displaced to the Netherlands from the Moluccan islands in Eastern Indonesia after independence, the Moluccan diaspora had laid their hopes on stoking the fire of a future republic, the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS). Many led second lives maintaining communication with their families and the whole kampong they had grown up in. Kampong is Malay for ‘village’, but it is also the origin of the English word ‘compound’, an added layer of meaning that adequately describes the form of territorial belonging explored here. Members of the second generation diaspora went on pilgrimages to keep the flame bright, yet in spite of political terrorism during the 1970s, the years saw the RMS turn to cinders. The Indo interviewees I spoke to about Moluccans described how Moluccans were stuck in a purgatory, unable to return but equally spurned by the host culture who viewed them with suspicion. However, in the research towards this thesis, I found a diaspora community that built a new fire on top of the ashes of the RMS, and in its glow called it the kampong.
6 Setting and historical context
Moluccan position in colonial Indonesia
Similarly to Eurasian Indo people, Moluccans received preferential treatment during the colonial period compared to much of the rest of the Dutch East Indies population. The Moluccan Islands were the first part of the Indonesian archipelago to be conquered by the Dutch, prized for the precious spices that grew there. As is often the case with colonisation, the colonial power skewed the existing economic infrastructure towards a single tradeable resource, but once the spice trade collapsed the Moluccan Islands were never to receive significant investment to balance the economy (Steijlen 1992, p. 780). Although the Moluccan population was somewhat equally split between Christian and Muslim followers, it was the former who were to be given employment opportunities by the Dutch colonial power, as clerks, teachers, and later as soldiers in the Colonial Army (the KNIL, Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger). Many of the Christian Moluccans were to grow into a middle class society, being payed better than their Muslim neighbours, and educated in Dutch schools. As the Moluccan islands had been colonised first, and most thoroughly, a career in the KNIL was popular among Protestant Moluccan islanders.
The KNIL was established to defend Dutch assets in the Indonesian archipelago and maintain order amongst locals. Due to the religious bond and upbringing in Dutch education, soldiers from these islands were regarded by the Dutch as particularly reliable, fearsome and loyal (Amersfoort 2004, p. 154; Manuhutu 1991, p. 498). It should be noted that in the Dutch administration the term “Ambonese” was used to count not only people from Ambon, but also other Moluccan islands and Christians in Eastern Indonesia and the Mcnadonese. Moluccans nevertheless provided a very high proportion of the soldiers. The KNIL was organised along ethnic lines, what was known as the landaarden, and “Ambonese” recruits were paid more than the Muslim Javanese soldiers in the army. The Ambonese were seen as a counterweight to the majority Javanese, and were often ideologically defined in relation to the special bond held with the Dutch.
7 War and the RMS
Following the Pacific War and the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, the KNIL was integral to the Dutch plans to restore their influence over the archipelago. Nevertheless, Indonesian nationalism had grown since World War Two broke out, and European nations were under pressure to commit to decolonisation. The Netherlands was forced to relinquish sovereignty on 28 December 1949 to the Republic Indonesia Serikat, a republic with a federal structure. Subsequently, as the KNIL had to be disbanded, 62,000 native soldiers had to choose between demobilisation or joining the ranks of their former enemy, the Republican Army. By October 1950, 8,000 men had still refused to make a choice, frustrating the Dutch government’s attempts at decolonisation.
Concurrently, the nationalist government of President Sukarno changed the constitution in order to move from a federal structure, which was perceived to be a colonial relic, to a more centralised republic. This demanded that federate states disbanded themselves and join the central state, but among the Christian population of the Ambonese islands it met much resistance. This resulted in the proclamation of the independent Republic of the South Moluccas (RMS: Republic Maluku Selatan), which was perceived to be an anti-nationalist rebellion by the Indonesian government. For the remaining KNIL soldiers, 90 per cent of which were Ambonese, the RMS was a new cause to fight for after the collapse of the colonial administration. According to their contract, KNIL soldiers had a right to choose where they would be demobilised, and after the proclamation of the RMS, many demanded to be discharged in Ambon. The Indonesian government embargoed Ambon to any military personnel, and when pockets of resistance popped up in Ceram, soldiers were forbidden to go there as well. A Dutch court prevented the Dutch government from non-consensually discharging former KNIL soldiers, by now made members of the regular Dutch army, on any Indonesian territory. Finally capitulating to external pressure, the Dutch government transported the 3,578 soldiers to the Netherlands in order to discharge them there. Between March and June 1951, soldiers and their families – around 12,500 people – were transported in a month-long voyage to the Netherlands. As a last resort, temporary transportation to the Netherlands was hope to change the mood of Moluccans soldiers after a few month, and request return. The Moluccans on board were also optimistic about a swift return. For both parties, however, events in Indonesia and the Moluccas were beyond their control.
8 Kamp Vught
Only after the first ship arrived in the Netherlands were soldiers told that they had been discharged with immediate effect from the Dutch army. The humiliating loss of rank, purpose, and the security they had caused unrest, and several lawsuits contesting the discharge were brought to court, but had limited success. It seemed that the Netherlands, still in shock from the devastation of World War Two, had no succinct strategy to deal with the new arrivals. The government hurriedly prepared camps around the country that were intended as temporary accommodation for Moluccans until their swift repatriation (Bartels 1989, p.13). Fearing backlash from the rural Dutch population who were already suffering under the flooding of the countryside, the government regularly anncounced the impermanence of the Moluccans’ residence here and “maintained that they would be returned to Indonesia as soon as possible” (Amersfoort 2004, p. 156). Sixty hastily equipped camps, spread out and isolated both from each other and from urban centres, served as accommodation. Often in a state of disrepair, they included two former Nazi camps – Kamp Westerbork and Kamp Vught – and their segregation from Dutch society would prove to be one of the government’s biggest mistakes in their own terms, halting any possibility of integration for a generation (Bartels 1989, p. 13).
During the four-year Japanese occupation of Indonesia, thousands of islanders and Dutch civilians were imprisoned in camps where they faced malnourishment, severe overworking, scant medical care, and infamous “death marches”. As loyal soldiers of the Dutch Crown, Moluccans had suffered greatly under Japanese occupation, and the act of being sent to camps immediately after arrival in the Netherlands was for many a sign of betrayal and of being “sold out” (Ibid, p. 14). Kamp Vught had already gone through several different iterations before housing Moluccans. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, it was used to house Jews, political prisoners, Gypsies, homeless people, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexuals, and black market traders. It was primarily used to take pressure off the transport camps of Westerbork and Amersfoort, which were used to move prisoners to larger camps such as Auschwitz and Mauthausen. During its use between January 1943 and September 1944, it held nearly 31,000 prisoners. Of those, 420
Kamp Vught and surrounding Dutch rurality, 1944. Source:
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died of hunger, abuse, or sickness, and a further 329 were murdered in the execution site just outside the camp. For a few years after the war, the camp was used to hold German and Dutch collaborators.
The 1951 refurbishment of Kamp Vught divided the communal dormitories and dining areas by a corridor, which led onto small rooms measuring 2.5 by 5 metres. The dividing walls were cheaply made from thin pressed straw, which did little to insulate rooms from the new chill of the Netherlands or the sound of neighbours. Every family was allocated one such room, or two in cases where there were many children. The sleeping area of straw mattresses on bunk beds was partitioned off with a curtain. The one hot water tap on site had to be shared between 3000, located at Barrack 1B. Kitchenettes were added to the exterior of one side of each residential barrack.
The Dutch Ministry of Welfare set up the Directorate for Ambonese Welfare (Commissariaat
Ambonezen Zorg) which was responsible for state policy towards Moluccans, including food,
clothing, and education. Adults were taught skills in Malay that would make them more employable back in Indonesia, and children were often taught in Dutch as Dutch education was more highly valued in Indonesia than Malay. In Kamp Vught and other large camps, the schools were often located on-site. However, as it became clear that swift return to the
Back of the residential side of the barracks with attached kitchenettes, 1956-1966. Source: J.J. de Lima, Collectie Molukse Historisch
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Moluccas wasn’t possible, the government shifted its policy to the principle of so-called “self support” in 1956. The Moluccans in the Netherlands spoke very little Dutch, yet they were expected to earn a living. This policy shift also demanded that all camps had to close, but this wasn’t finally executed for many years. Between 1958 and 1982 many residents of Lunetten migrated to other towns, often where factories provided accommodation for workers, or the government offered newly built residential districts. Over this period, around 60 families moved to Capelle aan de Ijssel, 130 to Moordrecht, 110 to Leerdam, 40 each to Breda and Culemborg, and 30 to Alphen aan de Rijn. Their departures led to an increase of living space in Lunetten per family, which will be addressed in a later chapter.
While the RMS had been a rallying point for many Moluccans in the Netherlands, the 1970s hostage crises had shown both to Moluccans and the Dutch government the importance of improving the living conditions and the social position of the Moluccan population. In the 1980s, the government attempted to force the residents of Lunetten to move elsewhere, under the pretence of poor maintenance. This was resisted by the Camp Council, under the leadership of the young Chairman Ton Latuhihin. Rather than appealing on the grounds of old KNIL rights, the Camp Council was by this point using Dutch rent control laws as their point of reference. The struggle to return to the Moluccas was being usurped by the second generation’s desire to improve their living conditions in the Netherlands.
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Against years of resistance by Lunetten’s residents, the camp buildings were demolished by the Dutch government, with the hope that they would finally take the offer of newly built districts elsewhere, closer to native Dutch people. However, the demolition was finally agreed to only on the condition that new homes would be constructed on the site of the camp. This is exactly what the government did. In what appears almost like a simple restoration job, the houses were built, connected to each other in barrack form, on the exact site of the previous buildings. A museum was opened there, the National Monument Kamp Vught, in the early 2000s, and stood between the museum and Lunetten’s residential district is Nieuw Vosseveld high security prison, which houses some of Europe’s most dangerous criminals. All this, nestled within the beautiful forest of Vughtse Heide and quaint houses that form Vught’s wealthier neighbourhoods.
Research question and theoretical concepts
Although I wanted to delve deeper into the history of Moluccans in the Netherlands, my bachelor thesis on Holocaust postmemory initially sidetracked me. I would nevertheless soon find that these two paths would unexpectedly cross. Lunetten popped on my radar while reading about the various ways in which former concentration and internment camps have
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been appropriated after World War Two. I was fascinated with ways of engaging with the materiality of the Holocaust without musealising atrocity sites. Begin somewhat familiar with Foucault’s studies of discipline and prison architecture, it wasn’t a surprise that many had been converted into prisons, or even hospitals. One, until recently a museum, was in 2014 bought by a Hungarian millionaire and converted into a hotel. But while I saw the hotel as simply a rich man’s eccentric ostentation, it was Kamp Vught’s use as a refugee camp that I found insulting, both to the new residents and the old. I discovered that living there are still members of the first generation, who arrived a mere six years after the prisoners of the Nazis had been evacuated. I became intrigued, seeking to find an answer to the mystery I saw at the centre of it: how does one feel at home in such a place? Thinking more critically, I rephrased it slightly:
How have Moluccans developed a sense of belonging to Lunetten?
Much of the theoretical basis of this research was established in Marijn Ferier’s master thesis on the development of belonging in urban ethnic enclaves, Making Home: An Inquiry into the
Everydayness of Migrant Belonging (2016). Her research introduced me to Marco
Antonsich’s framework for understanding and studying territorial belonging. The perspective of space upon already established notions of belonging is what Antonsich (2010) refers to as ‘territorial belonging’. Up until his point of writing, he argues, studies of belonging have been hampered by vagueness in the definition of the concept, often relying on intuitive notions. In developing an analytical framework, he identifies varying dimensions of belonging. This begins with recognition of the tendency to use belonging as a synonym for identity, especially collective identity and citizenship. This highly political notion of belonging ignores the importance of emotions that people attach to places, such as a sense of ‘home’. To account for this difference, Antonsich defines belonging as including both place-belongingness, i.e. “a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place”, and politics of belonging, i.e. “a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion” (2010, p. 4).
Similar categories have been presented by other authors, such as Yuval-Davis (2006) who differentiates between ‘belonging’, which he defines as ‘feeling at home’ or ‘feeling safe’ in an entirely apolitical sense, and politics of belonging, which refers to the construction of belonging through various political projects often designed to protect a notion of collective identity when it is threatened. Likewise, Fenster (2005) divides belonging between explicit and official interpretations of belonging tied to notions of citizenship and group-membership, and more intimate expressions that rely upon personal experience.
13 Place-belonging
Place-belongingness is a highly subjective relationship to place, whereby one ‘feels at home’. Home is context dependent, and can vary in scale, but here Antonsich defines it as “a symbolic space of familiarity, comfort, security, and emotional attachment” (Antonsich 2010, p. 6). He outlines five factors that he argues help establish a feeling of home in an individual: auto-biographical, relational, cultural, economic, and legal. Auto-biographical factors are about the personal experiences, relations and memories that entangle a person to a place. Often related to childhood memories, these factors refer to the history, temporality, and symbolism of individual-place relations. Relational factors range from strong to weak personal and social ties that contribute to the individual’s life in a given place, from friends and family to encounters with strangers. Economic factors refer to the existence of safe and stable material conditions that may not only allow a good quality of living standards, but also provide other perks that come with employment such as purpose, or the fulfilment of a social role in the family.
Cultural factors emphasise language as part of a semiotic universe that, on the one hand, demarcates ‘we’ from ‘them’, but also creates the warm feeling of having the meaning, not only the words, of speech being understood. Antonsich argues that “language can be felt as an element of intimacy, which resonates with one’s auto-biographical sphere and, as such, contributes to a sense of feeling ‘at home’” (2010, p. 648). As well as language, such a feeling can be generated from other cultural expressions and habits, such as particular clothing, food consumption, and religion. Legal factors such as citizenship or resident permits create and remove the feeling of security that is inseparable from belonging. Unlike Indos – migrants to the Netherlands from other parts of the Netherlands who upon arrival were almost immediately granted citizenship - Moluccans had struggled for decades in a legal quandary that effectively made them stateless and denied them many legal rights.
All of these cultural practices will prove to be relevant to the development of belonging in Lunetten, but this thesis will particularly focused on the dynamics and effects of auto-biographical, relational, and cultural factors. A factor which does not fit into Antonsich’s categories is that of the affective qualities of space. I will argue in the first chapter that this is an integral part of the failure to develop a sense of place-belonging in the first decade or so for residents of Lunetten. Rather than simply being tied to auto-biographical factors, I argue that to some degree all space is affective. All these factors may contribute to a meaningful and worthwhile life, which Antonsich argues is essential to the development of place-belonging.
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In contrast to place-belonging, the politics of belonging is concerned with the power relations involved in belonging to a group of people. The concern here is with the creation and maintenance of boundaries that defined membership (to a group) and ownership (of a place) (Trudeau 2006; Antonsich 2010). Through a policing of processes of inclusion and exclusion in what Trudeau calls “the imagined geographies of a polity”, the politics of belonging attempts to define ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Trudeau 2006, p.422). Rather than the intimate, individual relations that shape place-belonging, the politics of belonging regards the intentional, active arbitration of inclusion and exclusion in a placed community. While this conceptual difference is important to maintain, the two processes are deeply interdependent (Antonsich 2010, p. 649). Antonsich argues that “one’s personal, intimate feeling of belonging to a place should always come to terms with discourses and practices of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion at play in that very place” (ibid.). In this thesis, some of the points of contact between these two concepts of belonging will be traced and analysed.
Structure and Agency
While the phrase ‘I belong here’ will always be rooted particularly in a personal, intimate feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness), this sense of belonging is nevertheless learned and qualified by the arrangements of power relations (politics of belonging). Acknowledging this, Antonsich argues that any studies of feelings of territorial belonging must account for the full complexity of such feelings, in both their individual and social dimensions. Favouring one approach over the other could misinterpret belonging as solely personal matter, vacuuming the process away from the social context in which it is entangled; alternatively, it could put all the emphasis on social dimensions, essentializing belonging as solely the outcome of socializing structures, discourses and practices. Any further studies of (territorial) belonging must carefully map the points at which these two forces meet if they are to benefit from such perspective, just as other fields of anthropology have debated the influence of structure and agency in various contexts, both individual and social.
Regarding this methodological plea that Antonsich brings to the fore of his approach to belonging, structuration theory may help to further conceptualise the potential for favouring neither structure or agency. Structuration theory argues that the world is “simultaneously shaped by and shaping an external field of forces” (Burawoy 1998, p. 15). In the context of the process of belonging to Lunetten, it may be useful to account for the limitations over residents’ actions created by the meaning and the materiality of the place, as well as the choices taken to shape the environment to their needs and desires. To take one example, the affective qualities of the space, both as a barrack “non-place” and a deeply haunted place, constrain the
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behaviour of everyday home-making and the domestication of the space. There may be a point at which Lunetten residents realise they are not returning to the Moluccas and wish to settle in their Dutch village, but the materiality and meaning of space limit them in that choice. Or in another example, the growth of private space in the village in previously semi-public space is perceived to have led to a weakening of ties between neighbours. Yet there are some residents who are struggling against this invisible force and attempting to protect this intimate semi-public space through various initiative such as neighbourhood barbecues. Giddens’ model of structuration theory attempts “to reconcile the idea of the free, voluntary act and the idea of systematic coercion” (Eriksen 2010, p. 92). Place and belonging are always a process, not a state of being, and structuration theory believes that place is “continually in the state of becoming via the actions of human subjects in everyday life” (Warf 2011, p. 182).
Lunetten has many characteristics that are associated with enclaves, which constitute an important part of literature discussing belonging and migrants. Enclaves are territorial clusters of a particular population, and often self-defined in terms of religion, ethnicity, etc. This spatial concentration is often interpreted as a path to social, political, economic or cultural development, as well as simply offering ‘signs of recognition’. The functionality of enclaves have a tendency of framing a causal relationship between the enclave and the residents – that enclaves are formed entirely voluntarily. Many authors distinguish between voluntary and involuntary segregation (Marcuse 1997; Peach 1999; Logan et al 2002; Knox & Pinch 2010; Galonnier 2015), but the dominant image is of migrants consciously creating safety in numbers. This view fails to account for cases of forced segregation entirely, such as most Moluccan camps that were set up in the 1950s, and provides insufficient complexity with regards to those voluntary aspects. As with the politics of belonging, even involuntary enclaves are not static or permanently stable spatialised communities, but must be maintained through conscious processes of inclusion and exclusion.
It is important to note that the Netherlands has been a reluctant ‘country of immigration’. For many years after the first wave of various post-colonial migrants had arrived, the Dutch government explicitly denied that there were immigrants in the Netherlands (Amersfoort & Niekerk 2006, p.324). Putting forth an image of the Netherlands as ‘overpopulated’, the government promoted emigration to Canada and the United States, which they considered ‘countries of immigration’ (ibid.). While this was partly a concern over housing and employment, it was also an attitude that was informed by the notion of ‘pillarised society’, which promoted certain groups to voluntarily segregate themselves in a context of complete legal absorption (citizenship) into Dutch society. The paradox that is obvious here resulted in vastly different approaches to the inclusion and exclusion of migrant populations. In the arrival of totoks from Indonesia – people who had family and other contacts in the
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Netherlands, and many of whom were Eurasian – was followed by a policy of swift absorption into society, being granted citizenship almost upon arrival (ibid, p.326). On the other hand, Moluccans were encouraged to segregate themselves from the rest of society, and denied citizenship for many years after it was clear they weren’t able to leave.
In this thesis, I wish to highlight these debates of voluntary and involuntary segregation, and draw them out into the context of broader notions of structure and agency that are often implicit in discussions of segregated communities and the development of territorial belonging.
Methodology
Interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and anthropologists has led to new topics of investigation, methods of inquiry, and interpretive strategies to bleed into each other. Still, distinctions remain, as Peter Burke has written in The Historical Anthropology of Early
Modern History (1987), between historical anthropology and social history. Burke puts
emphasis on the former’s tendency to be qualitative rather than quantitative. Instead of large populations over sweeping periods of time, historical anthropology focuses on small communities as its units of analysis through an interpretation of symbolic dimensions of culture rather than narrative explanations of change (Ten Dyke 1999, p. 39). The so-called “memory boom” in both history and anthropology in the past two decades is in part a testament to this cross-germination. For this study, an historical anthropological research paradigm allows for a re-evaluation of methodology, since the study of the (albeit fairly recent) past weakens the empirical relevance of one of the primary research methods of anthropologist: participant observation. Nevertheless, everyday life must be observable if the social use of space is to be properly studied.
In this research I employed a mixture of interviewing styles. Both oral histories and in-depth interviews use individuals as the basis of research, on the understanding that patterns may emerge from detailed and elaborate descriptions of the social life of participants. However, while in-depth interviews are primarily issue-oriented, focusing on a particular topic, oral histories attempt to cover a significant portion of the participants’ life story. The former was especially useful in drawing out details in the current social life of Lunetten, such as how social conditions such as samenhorigheid and sociale controle show themselves in everyday encounters, as well as hot-button issues like the spread of individualism. However, the issue-focused nature of in-depth interviews simply had insufficient sprawl as the topic – dwelling practices in former WWII camps – required both breadth and depth. Only oral histories grasped the web of seemingly unrelated experiences and memories and places that would have
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occupied the lives of former residents, perhaps throughout their childhood and further on (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2011, p. 133). The latter approach unearthed most of the anecdotes that contribute to the first chapter’s focus of affective space.
I invited some participants – residents and former residents – to discuss as a group some of the experiences they had, as well as specific talking points. As extra stimuli, I sometimes asked participants to present photos and historical documents about life in the camps. One reason for conducting focus groups is that it allows different voices to contest and confirm each other, justify themselves through clarification and change their minds.
“What makes the discussion in focus groups more than the sum of individual interviews is the fact that the participants both query each other and explain themselves to each other….[S]uch interaction offers valuable data on the extent of consensus and diversity among participants” (Morgan 1996, p. 139)
There was nevertheless very little conflict or contradiction between participants in discussions of camp life. Some people in different interviews even used the same phrases, suggesting that the issues I was questioning them about was something that was frequently under discussion. Focus groups are also supposed to contribute to a denaturalization of life in the camps, which makes culture much more observable for the researcher; however, I found that generally residents were relatively self-conscious, and this may have been due to the presence of the Barak 1B museum in the neighbourhood, or more generally the demands by outsiders to explain themselves.
The method of the walking interview may prove invaluable in studying the social meaning of space. In their work on ‘everyday’ and ‘unusual’ walks, Ingold and Lee (2008) argue that walking with interviewees may have three productive effects: walking as action establishes association with the environment; the selection of routes to take supports a dynamic and mobile understanding of places; walking with others can create a different kind of congeniality or rapport with them. By contrast, the ‘natural go-along’ sees the researcher shadow the participant on their everyday routine, whilst the guided walking interview is led by the researcher on a route they have probably planned out before, but certainly one in their control, because it is deemed best suited to answering a pre-set question (Carpiano 2009; Kusenbach 2003). The go-along is more useful for finding hidden or unnoticed habitual relations in familiar environments for the participant. I occasionally invited some participants to guide me around the camps, asking them at certain points how they experienced these spaces on the walks, and this often brought childhood memories to the surface.
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It is usual to describe methods of access, as well the broad occupations and brief biographies of one’s participants in an ethnography. However, as Lunetten is such a small community, I feel that this may be at the expense of participants’ anonymity. Instead, I will simply say that Loes, Eunice, Isaac, and Tanu are aged between 60 and 70, while Joy is in her late 40s, and have lived in Lunetten all their life. Jeroen is in his 70s, and left Lunetten while in his 20s to move to another Moluccan wijk. Anton is in his late 50s, and has never lived in Lunetten but frequently visits the village in a religious capacity. Jimi is in his late 20s and only lived in Lunetten until he was three years old, but has often returned for friends, church events, and neighbourhood gatherings.
Thesis overview
While each chapter is thematically distinct, they chronologically follow each other in tracing the development of belonging. In the first chapter, I will explore an aspect that was frequently on the tip of my tongue throughout the fieldwork: the affectivity of the camp space, and how that was dealt with in order to domesticate the space. What emerges is an unexpected form of affectivity – the disciplinary yet transient military barrack space, as well as the haunting of traumatised space. Central in this chapter is the relevance of affect to the development of territorial belonging, and how they limit practices of domestication. I will furthermore argue that the banishing of ghosts from Lunetten is the beginning of a story of Lunetten residents’ efforts to define the village beyond the coercive circumstances.
The second chapter will start where the last chapter left off, revolving around further efforts by Lunetten residents to define the meaning and uses of space. Through the preservation of various legal, religious and cultural traditions, Lunetten residents further take control over the meaning and uses of space, and the village begins to develop aspects of the enclave. This chapter sees the diasporic longing for a distant republic become directed toward the creation of kampong life. In the third and final chapter, this localization of belonging is taken further, as the enclave and its past become sources of nostalgia that influence how Lunetten residents interpret the village’s politics of belonging. Here we see how Lunetten’s past is constructed as an era of community, compared to the unrooting effects of individualism that are perceived to be sweeping across Dutch neighbourhoods and even other Moluccan neighbourhoods. This self-image of Lunetten has heavily influenced recent initiatives to reinvigorate neighbourhood life through the negotiation of spatial boundaries. Subsequently, I wish to highlight a complication of the notion of the self-defining enclave that emerges in the appropriation of space.
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Opening the baggage
Lingering military habits and ghosts
Introduction
While studies of belonging have become more prevalent in anthropology, geography, and urban studies, there has been very little work that establishes its relationship with another strand that has seemingly risen in tandem: affect and space. Rather, belonging has been primarily used as a synonym for identity, especially within studies of national and ethnic identity (Antonsich 2010, p. 644). As Antonsich notes, it is telling that belonging does not even have its own entry in a widely used dictionary of human geography (Gregory et al. 2009). Yet the feeling of being “at home”, and the affects of security, comfort, familiarity and emotional warmth that are tied up with that, are necessarily spatial. “Home” and the ability to say “I belong here” is dependent not only upon a subjective mood or atmosphere within certain places; the affectivity of the space also denotes what kind of activities are possible in that place, including the countless everyday actions that create a feeling a homeliness and safety (Massumi 2002, p. 27-28).
In other words, affect and space in the context of the home rely upon each other, and this chapter will deal with how this problem was encountered and dealt with. Affect is a particular sign of the body’s “power of acting”, its action-potential (Deleuze 1988, p. 50) as each instance of affect is experienced both as a particular emotion or feeling state and as a “distinctive variation in one’s willingness or capacity to act” in response to that emotion or feeling state (Duff 2010, p. 882; Hardt 2007, p. ix-x). Affective atmospheres shape the experience of place and the routines in the lifestyle of a place (Anderson 2009, p. 78-81; Thrift 2004). This chapter deals with the influence of the camp space’s ‘baggage’ on the ability to domesticate and secure the space.
Form, function, and habitual transience
A potential point of departure here is to take a closer look at how the residents of Lunetten related to the history of the camp. In studying the development of belonging in Lunetten, it is important to contemplate how residents felt living in the space at the beginning of their stay, before there was a chance to develop local networks. Consider this conversation with a second-generation couple, who arrived as young children to Lunetten in 1951:
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Tanu We see [the barracks] differently than you do. Our parents were in the military, and
they were used to barracks in Indonesia. There they also had to travel everywhere as soldiers. This place is a bit like an army camp. We experienced this as kazerne [military encampment].
Eunice We call that a tangsi. That is another word for kazerne. Because the soldiers who
lived there took the families with them.
Tanu So if they had to go somewhere, they went together. So the families go with them, and
they also lived in the kazerne. As part of the army, they were often stationed in Java, not the Moluccas.
Interviewer So it’s a very familiar lifestyle.
Translator And you felt like you were kind of exporting that to the Netherlands?
Tanu We didn’t look at it as a concentration camp as all, not with the baggage the people
here see it with. I do know it, we just don’t experience it like them. It’s been a kazerne, it’s in the shape of a kazerne, and this is how it’s been seen.
This final sentence is particularly interesting in the context of place-construction – “It’s been a kazerne, it’s in the shape of a kazerne, and this is how it’s been seen”. Returning to the dialectical relationship between practice and meaning in the construction of place, it is important to recognise the influence of materiality. Materiality is often framed as a context for practice – enabling and constraining it. For example, as we will see in chapter three, public space in the camp allows for many intimate encounters with neighbours that contribute to a feeling of trust. Tanu and Eunice explain how the materiality of the camp – the fact that their home was in the shape of an army barrack – influenced the meaning of the camp. Yet for the families of KNIL soldiers, especially the first generation, the meaning of army barracks was already well-established, and was tied to many familiar practices. As spaces where families grew up and worked, barracks were places of discipline and mischief, purpose and listlessness. They were also places of constant motion; with families moving frequently to various different barracks around Indonesia at a moment’s notice, living in Lunetten must have felt similarly precarious. Indeed, with the belief that they would be returning to the Moluccas at any moment, and no attempts by the Dutch government to integrate and desegregate Moluccans, residents were more inclined to interpret the materiality of the space as they had known it – not as a home, but as a place where they would be stuck in a temporary holding pattern. It seems that, for Tanu and Eunice at least, even in the knowledge of the events that took place in the camp, the camp space could be primarily understood as a generic military space. This begs a question about space and what Tanu calls the “baggage” of place. Without the collective memory through which Western Europeans interpret the details of the space - the barbed wire, the railway tracks, the cramped dorms that have been so much part of our cultural education
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on the Holocaust – there can only be space and subjectivity. To what degree was belonging to Lunetten made possible by the perceived culturelessness, even affectlessness of Kamp Vught? Edward Casey provides a modus operandi for sketching the relationship between place and affect, characterising ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places.
Thick places are composed by the layering of habit, meaning, and affect, inviting the self’s ‘concernful absorption’ in place while offering the potential for ‘personal enrichment’ and an intensifying of affective experience (Casey 2001, p. 684-685). Thick places embellish the individual’s sense of belonging and personal meaning, cultivating a variety of affective and experiential connections in place (Duff 2010, p. 882). Thin places, by contrast, lack the “rigor and substance of thickly lived places” (Casey 2001, p. 684). They provide no means of rooting the self in place, and no meaningful grasp of placed experience. Thick places are made of affect and the practices in which it is imbricated; in the sense of placing the self, thick places are created as much as they are found.
Casey characterises thin places as expunged of the local specificity that could allow individuals and groups to actively engage with place, to have a ledge to grasp. Instead, thin places trade unique qualities for functionality, navigability, and compatible uniformity. Although Casey remains stubbornly cryptic and fails to name specific examples of thick and thin places, Duff attempts to identify some thin places, noting “the strange consistency of international airport terminals, shopping malls, and fast-food restaurants, which increasingly resemble one another no matter which corner of the globe one encounters them in” (Duff 2010, p. 886). Army barracks could in most cases be added to this roster. Their space is intended to be universally familiar to those who have spent time in such places before, with simple and impersonal public space dominating over the private and the idiosyncratic. For many Moluccans who first arrived in Lunetten, Kamp Vught may have been structurally familiar, yet it seems few had the inclination to call it home:
Tanu I think it’s important to know… our elders were promised to stay here for at most 6
months. So that is where we always get our ideas from. We stay here for 6 months. They stayed here longer than 6 months but they still had the idea that “Sooner or later we’ll go back”. So they say “okay, our luggage is always on standby, all the time, every year, it’s always on standby, then when we get the signal to go back, we go back.”
For Tanu’s parents, this camp space and the Netherlands in general was a place they had been temporarily exiled to. Even after the hope of returning to the Moluccas dwindled in the years after their arrival in Lunetten, it was nevertheless impossible to settle in the camp space, in a
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material and presumably affective way. While the affective qualities of materially marking and claiming space will be discussed in another chapter, the quote above nevertheless illustrates the thinness of the camp space for many of the first generation of Lunetten’s residents. It suggests residents were trapped in limbo, unsure if they would be allowed to return home tomorrow or in twenty years or never, and as such were unable to relate to the space beyond what they knew of it, being a barrack, a place of permanent displacement.
Being denied the stability of a firm date of departure back to the Moluccas was only the start of their precarity. Legally, Moluccans were also in limbo, being denied citizenship both by Indonesia and by the Dutch government. A government in exile was established in other camps in the Netherlands after the nationalist struggle in the Moluccas stalled following the execution of the Moluccan President Soumokil. Yet this government never received official recognition, and by 1968 more that 80 per cent of the Moluccans in the Netherlands were stateless, having no official citizenship (Amersfoort & Niekerk 2006, p. 331). Antonsich’s legal factor in place-belonging is clearly missing, denying Moluccans the legal stability required to develop a sense of rootedness.
Yet as I have already outlined, this precarity is not simply a legal matter: it also plays out in the meaning ascribed to space and how the space is used. It is impossible to say decisively whether the inability to domesticate the camp space in early years was entirely due to the political situation Moluccans were stuck in. It is my view that, alongside these legal and economic deterrents against belonging, the meaning of the camp space had a pronounced impact upon the lifestyle of residents. Thin places designate its routines through its functional design and, as may be the case with Lunetten, that, along with fickle government inaction, made it difficult for residents to feel able to begin to develop a more settled life or a sense of stability or home. At the very least, the perceived precarity of their position in the Netherlands prevented Moluccans from marking and claiming their living space materially, which may stunt any development of “homeliness”.
Ghost stories, ancestors, space and thickness
It would seem that Kamp Vught for the Moluccans who lived there was never the sacred monument to the Holocaust that contemporary European musealization has designated for most such spaces. It should nevertheless be emphasised that European cultural memory around the Holocaust, and its accompanying reverence for the sites of atrocity, as it is recognised today was not developed until several decades after World War Two, beginning with the Eichmann trial in 1960, the German student movement in 1968, and reaching a wider public by the American 1978 TV miniseries Holocaust (Dreisbach 2009). Just as many of the
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camps had existed before the Nazis appropriated them, in the aftermath of World War Two they were repurposed for various functions such as prisoner of war camps, make-shift schools, and hospitals to supplement the damage of the war and necessary building costs. At this point in history, these camp spaces were uniformly functional and unspecific not only to the Moluccans who had to move there, but to the various European governments who repurposed them. Their thinness to Moluccans in terms of a barrack lifestyle can therefore come as little surprise. Nevertheless, the history of the camps was felt in other ways. Many of the people I interviewed spoke about the trauma their parents faced from forced migration, immediate military discharge upon arrival, and subsequent abandonment by the Dutch government. The crutch that so many families leaned upon, according to my interviewees, was their belief in ancestors.
Anton [Every Moluccan] father gave a special ancestor’s name to a child, and the story
goes that if you have problems, if you have something happening that you cannot solve, you must ask your ancestor with that name, asking for help. So that is very important. My father also gave me the name of an ancestor. He wrote it, under three or four pages he wrote the name of his ancestor, my ancestor. “If something happens, just call his name”. So ancestors are very important.
Interviewer As a way of being supported in day-to-day problems?
Anton Yeah, but the message is that if there’s something happening that you cannot solve
alone, then you must ask for help. With this name [taps on the table]. Until now I haven’t used it.
Anton professed his belief in ancestors, but claimed that he’s “not busy with it”. As a devout Christian, he has seen what happens when people are in crisis, and where or who it is they turn to for help. I asked him where, as a Christian, he thought Moluccans’ loyalties lay in regards to religion or ancestors; after denying that there was a preference, he later confessed that ancestors are a far less “learned” form of faith, and so must be felt more fundamentally. Ancestors and spirits are also far more tangible than the Christian god, in the sense that they can occupy and possess specific places and objects, animate or inanimate. The Moluccan belief in the environmental presence of ancestors and spirits was described by Anton in contrast to Christian belief in an omnipresent God that is nevertheless distinct and separate from Earthly material.
Anton Faith [in the Christian God] is very easy to be accepted by the Moluccan people
because of their belief in ancestors and uh… what do you call that… animism?
Interviewer Animism, yep, yeah.
Anton So, yeah, when [the Christian] God came it has the same spiritual connection. It’s
only God, but it was normally trees, the sun, mountain, sea. Those were the gods, up to the great fish and beasts in the water.
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Ancestors are nevertheless not considered a threat to Christian orthodoxy, as they are perceived to occupy the non-divine sphere alongside living human beings (Strijbosch 1993, p. 54). The meaning of the concept of ‘ancestors’ (in Malay nenek mojang) is broad. It tends to include all members of a social group who have passed on; yet two categories of ancestors are particularly important for Moluccans. The first type is comprised of members of the oldest groups of the deceased, in particular those whose names have become mythic and are often heard in stories. Sometimes they have become legendary due to their importance as brave or strategically-minded war leaders (capitan) or as the founder of a Moluccan village. The other type consists of the recently deceased: members of generations immediately preceding the present one, who are known from personal knowledge and memory. Both categories of ancestors are treated with respect and, crucially, they are considered as actively present – albeit not visible – members of the current Moluccan community, occupying the non-divine world (Strijbosch 1993, p. 53).
There are nevertheless many other spirits that may occupy the non-divine environment just as ancestors do: witches frequently possess objects and people, and occasionally other ancestors. One example in Northern and Eastern Moluccan folklore is the suanggi, a cannibal witch spirit who has many local variants across the region. Bubandt (2008) describes how, when rumours of the presence of the suanggi in Tobelo spread throughout the North Moluccas in 2004, parents of children who attended school in Tobelo sent money for them to leave town, or implored them not to go out at night. In other words, these spirits have specific spacialities and temporalities just as western notions of hauntings do. The suanggi of Tobelo, locally known as the o tokata, had several origin stories, but all had the themes of every malevolent spirit in the Moluccas: a violent death and the lack of a proper burial ritual. The fate of prisoners of Kamp Vught was not known in detail during the early years of Lunetten’s Moluccan residency, but some had childhood stories of discovering the shallow mass graves of former prisoners, as well as signs of violence: guns would occasionally be salvaged, and the execution platforms a short distance outside the village had remained for some years after the war ended.
I met Loes at the Museum in Lunetten, Barack 1B, which details the various generations who have occupied Kamp Vught from the decades prior to World War Two until contemporary Moluccan neighbourhoods. As one of the museum’s volunteers, she was an open and eloquent interviewee, sharing many stories that she often told to groups of schoolchildren. Prior to her work as a guide, Loes admitted that she didn’t know much about the past uses of the camp, only the broad strokes. What she did know, she mostly learned from her father, whom she describes as having always believed the Moluccans would be unable to return home. It was her
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father who moved her at an early age from Lunetten’s Moluccan school to the Dutch school in Vught.
As we sit in a room for teaching to large school groups behind the museum, Loes tells me about various differences she experienced being schooled in the Dutch way instead of staying in Lunetten’s own Moluccan school. In her fourth year of elementary school, the class was asked to write an essay on any topic of their choice. Knowing that Lunetten was not quite like her friends’ neighbourhoods, Loes decided to write the essay about her home. She asked her father “What is this place where we live?”, to which her father replied mystically “You live in a concentration camp”, without explaining what exactly such a thing was:
Loes And then everyone asked where do you live, and of course I would say that I’m living
in a former concentration camp, but not knowing what has happened here. Okay, the Jews were captured here, I know that, but I didn’t know what happened. Well something happened in the camps, something magic, mysterious happened and sometimes our parents say “oh maybe it’s this”, “maybe it’s that”
Other people describe childhood encounters and affects that made them feel that there was something unusual about the camps. Although some of my interviewees told me that they knew about the past uses of the camps even in their childhood, there is nevertheless a significant difference in how people, and children in particular, were affected by the space. As explained in the last section, some residents felt the camp space as mundane and familiar, albeit unhomely; however, others experienced, as Loes puts it, the “magic” and “mystery” of the space. Thus, it is essential to acknowledge that residents’ affective experience of Lunetten’s space was far from homogenous. As becomes clear, however, the outcome was much the same: Lunetten could not be domesticated.
During the 1970s, when Loes was in her late 20s, Loes was sitting in front of her barrack feeding birds when a white man approached her. He told Loes he lived in Germany, and that he was a prisoner here decades ago, and with Loes’s permission he explored her barrack. He returned, remarking that the barrack had totally changed, that it was far more cramped and uncomfortable during his days here. They walked around Lunetten, talking about what he remembered of camp life. Loes’s barrack – Barak 9 – was for men, and the barrack she lived in before was Barak 24, which was a women’s barrack.
Now the mystical bit comes. Because when we came to live here in 1951 it was spookte (haunted). When I was little it was spooky. The Jews lived here, and they died. And we people from the east, the Asians, are sensitive. So my mother told me later when I was a bit grown up – so she arrived here very young and we were small children – that at night when she would finish the housekeeping. You need to imagine there’s a barrack, a long hallway with lots of little rooms, and the washing facilities was at the end, and at night my mother would wash the clothes of her children, rinse them and such. So she walks to the washing
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room and sometimes she would hear someone singing. She would wash them around midnight. Sometimes it would be singing, sometimes crying, or the tap was open and the water came out but there was no-one. Lot’s of things happened there in the barrack, but that from that lady, my mother said that you hear a woman singing or a woman crying. And then the visitor came, the Jewish visitor, and he said “That Barrack over there (where I lived), barrack 24 – that’s a woman’s camp when the Jews were here”. You understand? So it makes sense! So that was in the beginning. Lots of goings-on back then.
Interviewer Did you hear a lot of these stories?
Loes Yes, a lot. And the people in Westerbork or Schattenberg, they can tell you the same
story. But I don’t think you want to hear about that.
It might be expected that those who occupy thin places would attempt to maintain daily contact with familiar cultural habits, and practices that would have been normal had they been able to stay in the places that are more rich in personal and collective meaning. What might then be expected is for Moluccans living in Lunetten to make frequent contact with the ghosts that are closest and most familiar to them. Yet the spirits that residents had such a hostile relationship with were wholly embedded in the story of the place itself, not Moluccan culture. The fact that Moluccans were troubled by spirits of past prisoners of the place suggests that, although the belief may be structured by Moluccan culture, the way that ghosts were related to and dealt with was inseparable from local history, and from the internal logics of the barrack space itself. What this ghostlore suggests to the researcher of affective space is that, rather than the history of the camps being overlooked, ignored, or forgotten in the thinness of the space, the first few years of camp life saw an antagonistic relationship between the space and the residents, even for those who knew little of the history of the camp. There is thus a conflict between the assumption of thinness and the haunting of the camp space.
In her study of Thai airport staff’s preoccupation with ghosts in the building, Ferguson (2014) considers how such hauntings can be seen as place-making within what Auge would call the ‘non-place’ ([1995] 1992), a concept which studies the low-level affectivities of certain characteristic spaces of kinds of modernity, which overlaps closely with Casey’s ‘thin places’. Ferguson attempts to show how “ghostlore can be locally embedded, but also intrinsically trans-local as well” (2014, p. 48). “Hauntings might take specific cues from ‘local’ culture, but appeasing the spirits, and hedging one’s bets, as well as the actions of spirits themselves can make use of regional logics, as well as the logistics of global aviation” (ibid.). During the building of Suvarnabhumi Airport, several construction workers suffered sudden, violent, and ‘unnatural’ deaths, the symbols and places of which have been incorporated by airport staff into practices of malevolent spirit appeasement for fear of terrible repercussions. Other ghosts that haunt the area include the cao thi, who was the original owner of the land upon which the airport was built. Ferguson argues that “this use of spirits taps into a broader critique of
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local social organization, and interpellates folk culture as well as the area’s past within the supposed ‘non-place’ of the airport terminal” (2014, p. 56). Anton explains how this was not limited to Lunetten, but spread to Kamp Schattenberg, another former Nazi camp:
Anton When Moluccans arrived in the Netherlands they all went to Amersfoort. They got
a health check-up, and then they were sent to Schattenberg, Vught, Eijsden, Woerden. In the places that were barracks, Schattenberg and Vught, they were aware of the Jewish people has lived there. Because there are stories. They are very sensitive to ghosts, spirits. So, they knew. Last night I was thinking about if they were aware of the Jewish people who were there, because in… when I was a boy, the kids who lived in Lunetten, they told also stories about ghosts. Maybe they weren’t true but there were always stories about ghosts, and “you mustn’t go there or there”, and “that place is bad”. So I think they were aware, because children heard it from the adults. So they know that many people died here. Only the adults were aware and knew for sure what has happened there. So, I think they were aware in Kamp Lunetten and Schattenberg, and they were very aware of spirits.
Anton did not grow up in Lunetten, but his recounting of stories told whilst growing up with friends from Lunetten tells us that, while ghostlore is a significant part of how Moluccans relate to the environment, it seems that Lunetten was particularly saturated with hauntings, whether or not they were consciously related to the history of the camps. It suggests that, rather than maintaining the practice of ghostlore solely for the sake of keeping hold of cultural norms identity, this ghostlore was uniquely shaped by the space in which the Moluccans lived. As a reaction to the space, Moluccans used the belief structures that they knew to deal with what they didn’t.
Clearly, the haunting of Lunetten influenced not only the affective qualities of the space, but how it was used and occupied as a home. Returning to Deleuze’s conceptualisation of affect as an indicator of the body’s action-potential (1988), the presence of hostile spirits in Lunetten not only created an atmosphere of fear: it also seems to have prevented the camp being further domesticated. In many stories, the children are told that they cannot play in or around particular barrack buildings; in other stories, the ghostly encounter takes place in the middle of a domestic task such as washing clothes or preparing food. The affect felt by Moluccans about the space of Lunetten prevented the development of comfort, security, routine, and freedom that would have been required for a sense of belonging. Thus, the haunting of Lunetten shaped and restricted the possible lifestyles for several years, before the spirits were finally purged:
Loes I was always a bit afraid. Now I’m going to tell something that I’ve never told to
anyone. Just you and I, we know it. At a certain moment there was a period when baracks would catch fire. In total there were three or four barracks that would catch fire. And then men, under which my father in law, men who came home pretty late, they suddenly saw a lady in white with long dark hair… I’m getting chicken skin … a lady with long hair would
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come into a barrack and out of a barrack, floating. They saw that. So when the lady would visit a barrack, it would catch fire. And they would pay attention. They would see that she’d been to barrack 7, and later the barrack would catch fire, and later it would be barrack 6. The fire would usually happen about a month after the lady’s visit. Quite short. Then you understand that the lady is something to do with that. And then the men would be guarding and at a certain moment they saw a lady at barrack 9 floating from the front to the back – it wasn’t a real lady – and in a certain way they caught it. So they took her by the hair and left her outside the camp, and from that moment the fires stopped.
And so do the stories. From this moment onwards there were no encounters with malevolent spirits that were recounted to me. I believe this was a significant turning point in the development of belonging in Lunetten, as the security and comfort that are so important to a sense of belonging were able to be developed in the absence of hostile spirits. This act ensured a secure territorial zone and, I would argue, would constitute the first step in developing an enclave that is able to exercise the agency to define the meaning and use of space.
Conclusion
The Netherlands could have given Moluccans a better welcome, to say the least, even if their stay would only be for several months. Yet the government of the war-torn Dutch state chose one of the few short-term residential that were available and that they deemed formally appropriate – the military barrack. I hope to have shown that the ‘baggage’ of the barrack, both in their functional form and their history as part of a great atrocity, has limited the action-potential of residents, stopping them from engaging in practices or developing feelings of belonging to Lunetten for years. Though it has been ignored by Antonsich, the relevance of affect to studies of territorial belonging should be considered in any future research.
A central finding in this chapter was that both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ space are in some way affectively influential. While thin space does not necessarily inspire feelings of fear or disgust, the functional form heavily limits the possibility of feeling comfortable and able to settle in such spaces. That does not mean thin space is anti-affect, oppressively neutral, but rather that the affective qualities of thin space are often disciplinary and transient.
These affective restrictions are eventually removed, and their removal clearly contributes to the development of home and belonging. In banishing the malevolent spirits from the living space, Moluccans ensured a secure territorial zone, and began the first act of defining the meaning and use of the space – the first act of creating an enclave. The end of thin space’s influence is more difficult to trace, as it was so much more tied up with contextual factors such as Moluccans relationship with the Dutch government. However, by the 1960s there would be a large wave of migration out of Lunetten, and the remaining residents developed a habit of
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knocking through the wall they shared with their previous neighbour and adopting it for themselves. In doing so, they were also defining the meaning and use of the space they occupied.
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Kampong/Compound
Defining the enclave and re-placing diasporic belonging
Introduction
In Chapter 1, I have shown that making a home in Lunetten is a lifestyle shaped by the affective qualities of the space, affectivity that allows for or prohibits attaching feelings of homeliness and security to the space and their accompanying routines. In this chapter, I will show how the concepts of community and collective identity have developed to shape a sense of belonging, and how the geographical, social and political isolation of Lunetten has served as a catalyst. Building off the eradication of ghosts from the space in its first decade of occupancy by Moluccans, the residents were granted a new freedom to develop the space as they wished. The history that residents of Lunetten have shared have strengthened the notion of community felt in Lunetten to a point where it is a dominant part of a sense of belonging.
A genealogical approach to examining Lunetten’s community could be useful to some extent. There is an enormous amount of pride taken in residents being able to trace themselves and each others neighbours’ ancestors back to their original kampong. From that point of origin they can identify their pelas and the historic relations between different villages. Compared to Indonesia, Lunetten still ensures that these blood ties and historic alliances between villages remain important in the everyday. Yet a genealogical approach would still leave unexamined the modern community, and how it has dealt both with the Dutch context, and with other Moluccan communities in the Netherlands. Lunetteners often compare themselves to Dutch neighbourhoods, which they feel are in many ways opposite to Lunetten’s neighbourhood: emotionally cold, non-religious, and socially distant from each other. A key phrase that Lunetteners used to talk about their own neighbourhood was sociale controle, which is not quite what it seems to mean in English. It refers to the obligation to ‘keep an eye out’ for one another, such as enquiring when you don’t see an older neighbour for a while, or making sure that children playing in the street can do so safely, and in many ways having an ‘open house’ where one is welcome without prior notice. Of course, this sociale controle has an overbearing side which recently has seen younger residents move out of Lunetten. This raises the question for many Lunetten residents as to how the perceived essence of the village, of what sets it apart no only from Dutch but also Moluccan villages, will survive.
The conflict over sociale controle will be addressed in the third chapter. In this chapter, however, I will explore how Lunetten residents identify themselves within the context of Dutch neighbourhoods, as well as other Moluccan neighbourhoods, and how collective identity is
