S cientists observed
When their lives collide, an unlikely friendship blooms. Aided by her sisters and Symo, her surly but loyal neighbour, Botille hides Dolssa from her pursuers. But all of her tricks, tales and cleverness can’t protect them forever, especially when the full wrath of the Church bears down upon them.
The novel starts off a little slowly, but really starts to pick up after Dolssa and Botille meet. The twist-filled plot ensured that I found it very difficult to put the book down.
Berry has a wonderful eye for detail and really makes the world of medieval France come alive with her vivid and colourful descriptions. The author is a stickler for realism: many of her characters often use terms in Latin and Old Provencal, two of the languages of that time. This can be confusing in the beginning but the reader slowly grasps the meaning through context.
Berry’s characters are also very welldrawn, particularly the protagonists. Botille is always fun to read about: a clever woman aware of how much people underestimate her, and who uses that to her advantage. Dolssa, on the other hand, is a sheltered, pious woman who slowly discovers that determining good and evil may be more difficult than she thought. A major plot point regarding her is how she may possess miraculous gifts; the book is ambiguous about their true nature, which adds a nice mystery to the character.
Also delightful to read about is Father Lucien, a conflicted priest out to convict Dolssa for heresy. In his quest to root out evil, he inadvertently tears Botille’s peaceful village apart, and reading about his methods ALTHOUGH the immediate readers of Racial Science And H uman Diversity In Colonial Indonesia will be academics and scholars of history, anthropology, or some intersection between the two, the book also has much to offer the curious non-academic reader.
Written in clear and accessible style, the book avoids the complex theorizing and jargon that is typical of academic work.
It enlightens readers on one of the little known social mechanisms by which colonial powers secured their position in this region, a discipline loosely known to us as anthropology and which this book further specifies as “racial science”.
The book is not so much a study of scientific grounds for racial categorisation in colonial Indonesia as a study of the scientists who researched this discipline, their methods and principles, and their interactions with locals.
Author Fenneke Sysling readily acknowledges stereotypical images of the connection between anthropology and the more violent methods of colonial subjugation, as the opening chapter introduces us to a caricature of a fictional colonial anthropologist who threatens to murder an indigenous person and put his body on display in a museum.
Sysling, who is a historian specialising in European colonial history and the history of science, not only avoids any similar caricatures but also applies the same amount of scientific objectivity and neutrality to her subjects, the colonial scientists, as they had to their own subjects.
The book is firmly rooted in the empirical examination of historical sources, piecing together a narrative about a group of scholars genuinely interested in the physical and biological make-up of the diverse ethnic groups found across the Indonesian isles.
The book reveals the discussions and debates that they had about the categorisation of their subjects, the manner in which they acquired specimens and recorded them, and the apparatus used.
The contributions of prominent Dutch Author: Pub lisher: racial scientists such as the Kleiweg de Zwaan family and Hendrik Bijlmer are noted and they come across to readers in the way that they must have imagined themselves to be: as scientists observing the world, curious and passionate about their subjects.
Nevertheless, the book also reveals the arbitrariness of the scientist’s sense of scientific thought, particularly concerning the categorisation of human beings – for instance, ethnic groups were determined to be similar or different to one another by characteristics and features vaguely described as “pure” or “athletic”.
In spite of its contentious subject matter, the study touches on the ethics and attitudes of the racial scientists to their subjects only very briefly, maintaining as neutral an approach as possible to the problematic but complex range of values that influenced the racial scientists’ decisions.
For academics and those interested in the history of anthropology or colonisation in this region, the book fulfils the important function of filling in the gaps of our understanding of colonisation as an industrial complex.
For non-academic readers, however, the book’s intended academic reach may translate into a dry read.
The subject matter is, nonetheless, very interesting, and if any academic were to write a book with a more populist approach to the topic, I think that there may be sufficient interest from South-East Asia’s reading populace.
Also, as a non-specialist in the history of anthropology in this region, I am curious to know how deeply the actions and motives of these scientists were influenced by colonial sentiment and the European public’s reactions to their findings and conclusions.