Is the Museum in Indonesia an Irrelevant Western Colonial Relic?

Prepared for the conference

Museum of Our Own: In Search of a Local Museology for Asia

Session: Museology Education in Southeast Asia

convened by Pim Westerkamp from the Museum of World Cultures in Leiden

Yogyakarta, Universitas Gadjah Madah, Indonesia, November 18-20, 2014.

Jonathan Zilberg, Ph.D. Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatulah, Jakarta.

Introduction

We know that Indonesians, as a general rule, do not visit their museums. In fact, they by

and large have so little apparent interest in museums that it begs the question as to whether they

might perceive them to be irrelevant colonial relics – or simply irrelevant to their lives? So to

begin with then you may have noted that I have modified the first sentence of my conference

abstract which linked problems in the performance in Indonesian museums to the issue of

whether such institutions are colonial relics or not. Public disinterest is at the end of the day the

biggest problem. But the situation is not as dark as my abstract appears for museums of our own

only become so when they matter to us and there are some excellent instances of this in

Indonesia. The purpose of this paper is then to bring attention to some of these and why these

particular museums, or activities within certain museums might work so well elsewhere so as to

solve the problem of indifference or ineffective use.

Decrepitude, institutional lassitude, yawning public disinterest, a lack of academic

research and publications. Despite all this, and aside from the various renovations following the

2010-2014 government museum revival program, certain museums and some parts of those

museums in particular are much loved, well visited and vital centers of activity. For instance, at

the center, the museum educators managing the best of the pre-arranged school visits at the

National Museum and especially a few social studies and history high school teachers are

performing very well. In instances, from new museums to old private museums, performance and

visitor numbers can be surprisingly high, and they are providing deeply compelling educational

and emotional experiences for the local community. There are many such instances of surprising

effectiveness and community engagement. Consequently, the question as to whether museums as

innately colonial institutions are relevant is perhaps not so much the important question at issue,

but rather what we can learn from such local successes. Why is it that these particular museums

matter?1 How can they be used to improve the quality of education in Indonesia and thus to

1 See Stephen Weil ed., Making Museums Matter, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2002.

contribute to academic and institutional reform and empower the youth towards a more open

society?2

Consider these instances. The visitor numbers to the Tsunami Museum are sometimes so

high that they have to control the flow and close the ticket booth over the weekends when the out

of town visitor numbers regularly exceeds the capacity. The decades long well-run family owned

Puppet Museum in Fatahilla Square almost always has people in it and the puppet shows are now

held outside the museum every Saturday night. They last all night adding an intimate Javanese

dimension to the increasingly hip youth scene participating in the revitalization of Old Town

(Kota Tua) Jakarta. And yet though the museum has had a complete makeover and is very much

alive, if truth be told, I much preferred the authentic colonial ambience of the museum and the

museum displays before the high modernist renovation. Consider the Danar Hadi and Sampoerna

Museums respectively in Solo and Surabaya, impeccably designed and managed, great

collections, manadatory but knowledgable guides, prime museum experiences. Consider too the

Geology Museum in Bandung, the Textile Museum in Jakarta and the History Museum in Jambi

in contrast to the Jambi Provincial Museum. Then there is the provincial museum in Makasar,

the former Palace in Bima Sumbawa used as an Islamic Museum in Sumbawa, the many

excellent museums in Bali or the deeply effective and exceedingly well used Rumoh Atjeh in the

Provincial Museum which survived the tsunami completely intact. I imagine that depending

upon ones familiarity with different museums across the archipelago, one could relate all manner

of instances similarly little known, sometimes surprising successes.

Though there are many such instances to be found across Indonesia, it is I imagine well

recognized that there is a serious systemic problem and that qualifications aside, for the vast

majority of Indonesians, the museum as an institution if not explicitly seen as an irrelevant

colonial relic, is at the end of the day an institution which amounts to that in unfortunate effect.

In short then, except for the type of illustrative exceptions such as those noted above, for most

museums the main source of visitor numbers are due to school visits. Not only are these visits

typically of very little educational value but they effectively represent the last time “the average”

Indonesian will ever return to an Indonesian museum, except perhaps to go to the popular Taman

Mini Indonesia theme park complex.

On Why? And on What Can be Done.

Why do Indonesians do not go to their museums? How can they be encouraged to use

their museums? One solution to the problem could be state and local programs for integrating

into the school and university curriculum, local and national. Museum collections and

explanatory materials would allow for citizen engagement in which they could actively learn

about their history and develop their research skills. Another solution would require a social

movement in which individuals, cleaners, professors, and principals, teachers and families, 2 See Terence Hull, “Institutional constraints to building social science capability in public health research: A case study from Indonesia.” Acta Tropica 57, 1994: 211-227.

communities to make more deliberate effort to engage their museums. And finally, in the context

of the rising religious intolerance that has been taking place in Indonesia over the last decade, by

using the diversity exhibited in all these museums the state could bolster their efforts in the new

curriculum to foster the pluralist national ideology of Pancasila. Effective use of such museums

for educational and political purposes could thus be used to support a core constitutional

principle perceived as under threat.

This brief essay prepared for this conference, Museum of Our Own: In Search of a Local

Museology for Asia is based on a decade of intermittent long term ethnographic observation of

the performance of the National Museum of Indonesia and several other museums in the capital

and in various provinces. It included observations and case studies for comparison for instance at

the Museum Istiqlal and Textiles Museum both in Jakarta, at the Aceh Provincial Museum and

the Tsunami Museum in Banda Aceh and at three museums in Jambi, these being the Provincial

Museum, the History Museum and the site museum at Muarajambi, an all important

archaeological complex. Some of these case studies have been published in local journals in

order to support the principle that museum based knowledge should ideally be an important

component in what is known as the knowledge sector in the development community.

The last four years of the study took place in the context of observing the emerging

results of the 2010-2014 Government of Indonesia revitalization program. Besides documenting

some of the changes, the emphasis has been to note how budgets have been very largely used for

infrastructure and exhibition renovations rather than for capacity building. In my view, as

important as it has been to improve some facilities, especially at the National Museum excluding

the problematic new wings, the ethnographic hall and the forthcoming additions, the most

important issues have been completely ignored although they were indicated as required

elements in the original budgeting for the project.

What Indonesia really needs in my view is for curators and academics and students to

more vigorously conduct research, write up accessible reports and publish their results in local

and international journals, books and blogs. As the growing digital archive becomes more and

more content rich with active web sites and blogs, intellectually productive facebook and twitter

activity, expanding data bases with open access to such publications and information that already

exists, museum performance, civic engagement and academic reach improve in tandem.3 In the

case of my own work on and in Indonesian museums, to make such obscure publications

accessible to the public and academia, I have posted them to academia.edu and scribd. At the

same time, as an applied digital humanities experiment, much of the photographic documentation

of these museum projects has been posted either in photo folders on facebook or by way of

3 See Kristen Mapes, “Scholarly Social Media Adoption: Locating Medieval Studies Scholars On-line” Paper presented in Digital Frontiers, Texas Women’s University, Denton, Texas, September 18, 2014. Also see for a best practices model on open access productive history resource platforms, the Portal to Texas History at http://teachtexas.org.

conference power points archived at scribd so as to promote the use of the cloud and social

media as vital tools for open access, sharing information and creating community.

Indonesian museums inspire curiosity about diversity and history in a plural society. By

using museum material based web data, educational programs could link these museums into the

national and local curriculum at all educational levels, K-12 and university.4 It is here that we

face a broader problem and if it is not resolved the issue of relevance cannot be overcome.

Institutions such as museums are inherently linked to libraries, universities and schools. Without

well functioning inter-connected libraries and committed continuous research and education

programs in museums and universities, without curious students interested in research and

writing, without highly motivated and productive educators and curators, museums simply

cannot fulfill their missions. Though I am of-course preaching to the choir here, the point is that

for Indonesian museums to become relevant where they are not and even more relevant where

they, for them to not be colonial relics, institutional and educational reform would be needed to

solve the problem.

Ultimately then the question is this: Is the general public disinterest in Indonesian

museums due to the fact that in essence these institutions are, or are perceived, to be colonial

relics? Or might the problem lie elsewhere? In asking such a question I think it would be

potentially interesting to survey public attitudes to the museums before theorizing museology in

Indonesia as well as to conduct observations and comparisons of the situation in a range of

museums. Finally, it might be useful to determine what relevant information is currently

available to anyone who wants to know more about specific items in these collections so that one

could assess the current state of knowledge at both the general and specialist level and thus how

museums are performing or not.

On Reflection

On reflecting upon these questions, I find my analysis unexpectedly upbeat. First, and

closest to my heart, take the case of the Rumoh Atjeh. This museum is a re-creation of a pre-

colonial traditional Acehnese house raised on stilts. It is beautifully curated with fine objects and

has a deeply satisfying overall feel. One feels as if one has gone inside a museum of your own

which after all it is and more. Underneath it one will often find young Indonesian school children

eating their snacks and preparing for the visit to this and the main museum. The girls are given

different colored Putri (Queen) crowns to divide up their groups as you can see in one of my

facebook research photographic folders if you like. Sitting by the canons in the shade of the

4 See for example again the state of the use of digital archives and museums in producing and teaching

history at The Portal to Texas history at http://teachtexas.org. More generally, see A Guide to the Digital

Humanities, Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Humanities, Evanston, Northwestern

University at http://sites.library.northwestern.edu/dh/.

traditional house they are very much at home. Later you might observe them taking careful notes

on the Islamic materials on the ground floor of the main museum. On the second floor, they

witness their colonial past, shocking KITLV conquest photographs. It is a powerful thing to

observe and wonder what must be going through their heads, to see the past meet the present.

And then there is the manuscript room which is very carefully attended to and for which there is

a catalog and active research taking place, particularly by visiting Malaysians.

It is very much a museum of our own. Compare it to the Tsunami Museum. Though there

is much to be said for that very under-effectively used museum despite the extraordinary visitor

numbers and my critique of the relevance of that museum and how it dominates the center of the

city, there are some very positive aspects to this new museum. For the teenage boys and girls of

Banda Aceh, the best thing about the museum perhaps is that they were able to use it as a hip hop

zone for practicing their break dancing. There are problems too lengthy to address here for this

or any of the other museums mentioned. As in this case, the problems all ultimately concern the

question as to whether this is a museum of their own or a neo-colonial type irrelevant relic

foisted on Aceh by the central government? Similarly one might ask if the Provincial Museum is

an irrelevant colonial relic? Or are they both something very different? The answers are complex

and various for each museum in Indonesia.

Moving east, a similar comparative and complex situation exists in Jambi. While the

renovated Provincial Museum might seem at first more important, of the three museums, that is,

including the site museum at Muarajambi it is the one with the least effective connection to

society and thus relevance though it has received all the funding and attention. From what I have

seen, locals consider the Provincial Museum an utter irrelevance extremely sad as that is. It is

invariably empty or closed despite the elaborately expensive renovations and the exceptionally

well done treasure room and ceramics section. On the other hand, the Jambi History Museum

performs extraordinarily well, and yet virtually without any funding, or did so under the previous

director recently replaced. Perhaps it is a combination of the relevance of the contents to the

interest that the students have in their nationalist history and perhaps it was also a function of a

highly effective museum team and director. Students not only visit this museum on their own

volition but they actively use it for their classes. They socialize in the museum. They love it.

Whether it be the gun running plane in the front yard, the great gun collection or the

diaromas of important battles for independence against the Dutch or whether it be the remarkable

collection of newspaper reports and mass media materials from the independence period and

shortly thereafter on the second floor, it is without a doubt a museum of their own. As for the

excellent small archaeological museum within the site and village of Muarajambi, the villagers

are deeply and intimately connected to it. Its collection complements the collection in the

Provincial Museum. They live in what was once an enormous pre-Islamic Buddhist university

complex which linked education in China, India and Tibet between the 8th

and 14th

Centuries.

Connected to it, villagers such as from those from Desa Muarajambi are the ultimate

stakeholders and future Indonesian museum professionals.

One future for far reaching development and change which would make these museums

truly our own is to build educational reform effectively into pre-existing local community

museum connections. Unfortunately the contents at this site museum and the Provincial

Museum, as well as the relevant connected Sumatran materials in the National Museum, are not

used in the formal local educational system, never mind at the national level. And had it not been

for the collaborative Sriwijaya project between Leiden and the National Museum of Indonesia

which resulted in the publication of the Sumatra: Crossroads of Cultures catalog (Brinkgreve

and Sulistianingsih 2009), that all important collection of chapters on the established and

emerging knowledge of the archaeology and art history of Sumatra, non-specialists would have

been very much still in the dark about what we know or do not know, what are the big questions

and their histories. Were it not for Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from

Indonesia (2007) by Natasha Reichle, the knowledge needed for understanding the importance of

Muarajambi and Jambi in the context of Sumatra and Java, China and India in that period would

be effectively impossible to know of or access except in part by a very limited number of

university based specialists.

This type of international collaboration could allow for better links between the center

and the periphery, the local and national. Sumatrans should be able to know which specimens in

the National Museum are from where in Sumatra. They should be able to have access on-line to

materials that would be useful for developing local historical knowledge. Quality content relating

to its specimens should be made freely and easily available by museums, in their libraries and

on-line. What is ultimately required is that such material enters the classroom and the

community. Though that is the job ultimately of the museum, integrating the library, the school

and the university as well as civil society, this is where we face the biggest obstacle - how to

make these materials our own - how to put them to productive use for the nation.

The current state of the use of the knowledge that we do have on the collection in the

National Museum, whether it be the Sumatran materials or any other such as with the excellent

ceramic collection, never mind the materials in the other museums in the capital and in the

provinces, except for some splendid exceptions which often take place around the iconic

Bhairava from Padang Roco, is to put it bluntly abysmal as far as I can tell. It is perhaps here

important to situate my comments and critique of the concept of what is a museum of our own in

terms of my own context. Married to an Indonesian I have lived here for over a decade, not as an

expat but within Indonesian society. During that time I have periodically taught or been based in

a varied educational contexts thus having some experience with a range of Indonesian

educational and other institutions in some minor sense from the inside. I am speaking then to this

problem as something of a citizen-like insider of sorts and as a member of The Indonesian

Heritage Society expatriate community which has a profound and active interest in museums as

useful repositories of Indonesian cultural heritage worth visiting and contributing to.

At the end of the day it is the Museum Istiqlal at Taman Mini that most concerns me.

Why? Indonesia is the largest Muslim community in the world. It is a deeply religious country.

Conceived as part of a nation building project by President Soeharto, it provided a context for

celebrating the state’s new relation to Islamic organizations, an emerging sense of a heightening

Islamic identity. Yet I have only met one Indonesian scholar who has ever been to this museum.

For the life of me I cannot get anyone, anyone in any study group or think tank, school, or

university or pesantren, any one at all, to go and see for themselves why it is so important - never

mind to engage it for pedagogical or political purposes. What to do? Why does such an important

museum with such excellent content receive such little interest? It is an excellent resource and

context for building national Islamic unity in diversity and tolerance. Despite all this, it is

however most certainly a museum of our own. If only it functioned effectively. In the end, to

make museums matter, build them into the curriculum.

The Indonesian Textile Museum is a highly symbolic case of one museum that has

performed particularly well at building community, interest and attendance. Despite the very

large community of people interested in textiles, it is equally difficult to get people to visit and

use the Textile Museum in Jakarta though the situation has vastly improved there so much so that

its management and function represents a model case. During the course of this decade long

research, a fundamental transformation took place at this museum due to the work of an excellent

director. Recently retired, he had vision and capacity and built an effective team and strategy for

community engagement. It helped of-course to have an elite group of local and international

patrons supporting these activities. But it does highlight certain problems all museums face.

First, the performance of these institutions very much depends on the quality of the director

rather than on the individual capacity and motivation of the curators. The top down Suharto era

legacy casts a long shadow on capacity building and results. To add to that, and many other

points that could be made, Indonesians might perhaps sometimes see even this museum as

irrelevant in the case of their own traditions because their textile traditions are alive and well.

They have their own collections that they use. Why go to a museum? Why not go to the mall

instead as they do? Why not just go shopping?

So even in the case of textile exhibitions, except for a small but active patronage circle, it

is difficult to get even a member of the non-museum going cultural elite to visit this very fine

and effective museum. Exhibits rotate monthly. There are lectures and fashion shows and book

launches and fairs and the batik classroom workshop which draws a more diverse user

community. There is enough activity at all levels (except research and publication) to highlight

this museum as not just one of our own but as a best practices model at that time for Jakarta.

Sometimes such spaces are made less local, less alive rather than more. Consider for

instance the new state of the art display and preservation of the heirloom collection there which

displaced the old mechanical looms on display. It is a space that used to have real aura and sense

of locality and history, open and fascinating. It is now a space as dead and as soulless, in some

sense a perverse post-colonial alien relic. And naturally, the video player does not work. But I

have been at pains in this paper to only highlight the positive. My point here is that even well

intentioned modernist projects led by elite patrons and corporate funding, and executed in the

most professional way, can fail to improve museums. In fact, they may achieve the exact

opposite effect of what is needed. In this case, the new special collection best expresses the

vision of the cultural elite as to what a museum of their own should be. In my view however this

is the complete antithesis of what is needed in terms of engaging a better sense of connection

between the museum and society at large through the collection as happens everyday in the batik

workshop and at every opening fashion show.

Moving much further east, consider the way in which the honors high school students in

English enrichment classes in the capital city of Bima in Sumbwawa (West Nusa Tenggara –

NTB) are using the Paruga Nae, Bima Sutalanate Palace, effectively a local Islamic history

museum, to advance their English skills, their presentation and thus future docent skills. It is very

exciting and there is absolutely no doubt that this is a museum of their own. In choosing this

venue for their high school English enrichment classes, they are forging practical and emotional

connections to their local history. In this kind of museum and educational reform, students are

participating in the production and sharing of knowledge. Each museum has a particular history

and type of connection to the local, national and global community, active or latent. Take for

instance, by way of final notable example, the museum in Makassar, Sulawesi. Built upon the

walled grounds of the residence of the king, later the center of colonial government control, it is

at once an impressive colonial structure and an institution with great potential being the regional

capital of a province with a new airport and a rapidly expanding economy.

Museums are unquestionably relevant to the community, to the region and nation, and the

world. So to end then with the Geology Museum in Bandung, it is most certainly not a colonial

relic, an agent of control and domination. It is a best practices model. Everyone is friendly,

genuinely so. The library is immediately accessible, its new reading rooms, the maps, everything.

The collection is excellent. The first floor exhibit materials were collected during the colonial era

and even include ammonites from Dover. One feels as if one is in an intimate version of the

American Museum of Natural History. The gift shop is professionally run. Everything works,

especially the media exhibits in the new exhibits on the upper floor, including the earth quake

simulator. People come on their own volition and they very closely observe and interact with the

collection, fathers with infants, mothers with daughters, my son and I. It is as it should be. It is

closely linked physically and practically with government and university departments. There is

an air of effectiveness, seriousness and contented pride, a kindly old professor passing by with a

pile of reports under his arm, good citizens enjoying the front gardens leading across through the

town up to the main university plaza. Understated, colonial yes, relic not. Agent of colonial and

post-colonial control?

There is an openness of spirit in these performing museums. They are accessible places

of learning for everyone including foreigners. After all, a museum is a place for research and

learning, a place for sharing information so as to continually advance knowledge. Take another

provincial instance, the Jambi History Museum. During the period of this research, with a minute

budget, the former director and curators prepared and provided effective educational materials

for visitors. They had an active education program in an inviting room running along one side of

the building. Inquisitive students consistently come into this museum on their own volition. They

use it as a library and a place for collecting information for their school history projects.

Everyone is friendly. The place really works. The community appreciates it and uses it. Is it a

post-colonial relic, an instrument of control?

The same goes for the Textile Museum in Jakarta but in a different way. It is a place for

learning and pleasure albeit for a mainly elite Jakarta audience. As with the other colonial era

buildings, it has a special charm, every month new exhibitions accompanied by fashion shows

and talks, leisurely lunches in the back courtyard garden planted with the trees used for

producing natural dyes. Welcoming, effective, the bathrooms impeccable, it is the kind of place

you want to go to and relax and learn more about textiles, to take a batik making class in the

back corner of the property in the traditional Javanese wooden bungalow home setting, the smell

of wax melting, pleasant activity in the air. Is it a colonial relic? Yes and no.

Discussion

Here are a few responses that come to mind as regards the above mentioned museums

and the overarching questions which this conference addresses.i Those questions re-ordered and

slightly reduced for my own purposes are: 1. Why are Indonesian museums not valorized? 2.

What is a museum of our own? 3. How can we mobilize museum histories to inform local

practices? 4. How do we meet local needs through training programs? And finally, 5, how can

we rethink museological practices so as to make the museum our own?

The definition of what is a museum of our own is I believe as self-evident as to why

Indonesians typically do not go or care to go to their museums. The museum is a public place for

specimen based learning. It is all at the end of the day about education and this serves to

highlight the key question for this fifth topical session on Museology Education in Southeast

Asia, convened by Pim Westerkamp from the Museum of World Cultures in Leiden which is

similar to the first topical session on Writing Museum Histories in Southeast Asia, convened by

Bambang Purwanto. In the Westerkamp session, the question concerns how education informs

relations between national and regional histories in terms of the development of the various

museums. It thus circles naturally back to the Purwanto session both in the context of the

museum as an instrument of colonial control as well as in terms of how the Indonesian

Government has after independence sought to create new national narratives through new

museums, one might add ultimately for some, similar political ends, post-colonial control.

So why do Indonesians as a rule not go to their museums? Is it because they are innately

foreign institutions? Is the limited valorization of local museums based solely on the fact they are

innately Western institutions? Or are there are other more practical reasons for their

shortcomings? Which ones are working well, how and why? With these and other best practices

models in mind such as the Endangered Ancient Manuscript Project at the British Library, how

can training programs be developed which best respond to local needs? What local histories have

been mobilized and how have they informed these museums?

Museums in Indonesian suffer the same problems as universities and libraries and many

state run institutions, funding and accountability, capacity and capacity building, productivity in

research and publication, in performance. Museum cultures will have to change just as the

universities and other institutions need to change according to the Hill and Wie

recommendations. As they write:

Academic cultures will need to change – to provide greater incentives for

excellence in teaching and research, to open up recruitment processes and

facilitate greater staff and student mobility, to encourage stronger peer review

mechanisms, to establish the notion of contestability in resource allocation and to

foster engagement with the regional and international educational mainstreams

(2003: 178).

And finally, with similarly relevance they add that:

Access needs to be broadened to students from lower socio-economic classes

through the provision of merit-based scholarships and, at some future time,

income-contingent student loans. These changes will take time, and they will

require a fundamental change in the mind-set of politicians and senior education

officials (ibid., 178-79).

When applied to museums, and the goal of connecting Indonesians to these museums of their

own, all the same necessary changes and more.

Referring to the changes in the field of archaeology, Edward McKinnon writes: “Issues of

responsibility and accountability are coming to the forward so that, in time, change will

inevitably occur, and - I hope for the better.”(2014: 101). And yet there are these surprising

examples of excellence in responsibility and accountability. There are instances in which the

institution is intrinsically local such as the Rumoh Atjeh or made local and effective in the case

of the memory tower in the Tsunami Museum, or the Nias museum for that matter. They are

museums that matter. The Rumoh Atjeh and the Aceh Provincial Museum could use more

dynamic interactive web presences, the Tsunami Museum could use more books in the library

and for the earthquake simulator to work. What the textile Museum on the banks of the Ciliwung

river in Tanah Abang needs is more research and publication and a better on-line presence. Each

museum has its strengths and weaknesses. But all of them have the common problem of an

absence or limitation in research and publication activities, and limited funding for educational

programs and outreach. Fortunately digital environments provide a solution - social media and

electronic archives, digital publications and on-line videos, on-line collections and supporting

content, participatory platforms for student, visitor and research engagement – tools for

participating in the making of museums of our own

Conclusion

To end, what is a museum of our own in Indonesia or anywhere? In my view, it is one

that promotes research into the collection and thus encourages reading and writing, learning. Its

purpose should be to ignite curiosity. Like a library, it connects schools and universities, the

public and the state, the nation and the world. Perhaps if the Indonesian museums functioned

more effectively they would not be seen as colonial relics but instead as vital parts of the

information infrastructure and the national future. Innately colonial to be sure, vital post-colonial

infrastructure, they could provide contexts for instituting educational and institutional reform.

Indonesian museums could have better web resources, more active outreach through

social media and collaborative knowledge producing digital platform. They could have a real

presence in the education system instead of the often ineffective school visits. While these visits

provide the sufficiently high visitor numbers needed to justify the existence of the museums,

often little learning seems to be taking place, barring the wonderful exceptions. If fact, usually

these are the last times an Indonesian will go to an Indonesian museum. The most effective way

to support the expanded reach and relevance of these museums of our own, to expanding a future

museum going public, is to make it such that the ordinary citizen wants to visit their museums.

These and the other museums could be integrated not just into university museum studies

programs but into the entire educational system if their collections were used in local and

national curriculums. Their collections could inspire engagement, reading and writing about

history, culture and science, religion and issues concerning nationalism. Unlikely as it might be,

collections of past and emerging relevant research by Indonesians could ultimately be made part

of open-access archives, masters theses and doctoral dissertations too, part of projects like the

recently launched government open data project, the Indonesia Data Portal (Salim 2014). To get

there, museums, libraries and universities would have to become more open rather than closed

institutions, impelled to produce and share information willingly and freely rather than to control

it.

Through using the connective power of social media and information sharing, and

through effective education programs connected to universities and schools, museums in

Indonesia could serve the state the practical purposes of educational and institutional reform

through stimulating problem based collaborative knowledge production (see Karim 2013,

O’Brien and Hamburg 2013). At the same time, they would participate in the requisite reforms

that Hill and Wie (2013) conclude with in their study of problems in education in Indonesia

today and as equally suggested by Terence Hull (1994). Hull makes a number of observations

about the nature of and use or lack thereof of libraries that are equally relevant to museums.

Describing the central library at the University of Indonesia in the early 1990’s as “moribund”

(1994, p. 216), he demonstrates bureaucratic and psychological barriers to overcoming the

clannishness and the culture and system which has led to this state in the museums as well.

As for questions in museum studies about what is a museum of our own and how to make

museums more effective, Hull provides some interesting relevant insights: “Too often students

are so intent on applying the lessons of Western research results to Indonesian problems, that

they forget to apply the scientific principles of analysis and logic to define their problems in a

broad Indonesian context and design a system of analysis which is relevant” (1994, p. 224).

Towards solutions for these kind of problems and what would be required for institutional

change, he cautions that the “cultural chasms separating international researchers and their

national colleagues are not soluble with reference to a ‘key program’ of collaboration or a

‘magic bulletin’ of agenda setting, but rather through an open, two-way process of negotiation . .

. . and thus compromise” towards what is really needed – “major substantive reform”(Ibid. p.

225). Hull’s difficult to achieve hope in 1994 came down to a vague hope that local reformers

would link up with outsiders who could recognize and reinforce their research and thus assist

them to make change things as they can, an unlikely scenario considering that for those who did

try they would be “quickly reminded of their position as small cogs in a very large system” (ibid.

p. 219).

And as is probably the case with museums too, he notes that the structural barriers to

research that are endemic in state universities are most intractable in the largest and most

established institutions. In that perspective one can clearly see the problem. In one way or

another all Indonesian museums are for telling “the truth” about different pasts. They are state

organs for making and telling history and yet that past is increasingly being contested. In the

current historical context in which we are witnessing the emergence of the first human’s rights

oriented museums in Indonesia, and various unsuccessful attempts to create such museums, this

is where the real future frictions probably lie as to making museums of your own (see Fromm,

Golding and Rekdal, 2014). And finally, just as Hull argues for universities and libraries, that

they have to become more productive and internationally oriented research institutions, the same

surely goes for museums. Indeed, if one were able to build social science capability, to overcome

the institutional constraints which limit use, openness and accountability, these museums could

empower citizen engagement by participating in what was the new museology in the late 1980’s

(see Weil 1990).

Through applied projects in the digital humanities, through the use of social media to

bring people to the museum, there are many new ways for generating interest in museum in

Indonesian civil society. What is in these museums and why is it useful to know about them and

their contents? How can we generate interest in these collections? For myself, as an action

research museum anthropologist, these are crucial problems. Like Kenneth George in his article

“Putting the Quirks and Murk to Work: Disciplinary Reflections on the State of Indonesian

Studies” in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies, edited by Eric

Tagliacozzo (2014, p. 41), I am not upbeat. For instance, in four years of effort I have been

unable to convince even a single Indonesian Islamic scholar or any other Indonesian to visit the

Museum Istiqlal. Whenever I am there, I find myself utterly alone. Yet there is room for hope.

Consider for instance the recent TVRI television show which celebrated the most popular prize

winning Indonesian museums such as the Bicycle Museum and the Non-Alligned Movement

(NAM) Conference Museum.

Yet by and large, it is a truism perhaps to say that the status and value of the museums are

not improving despite the infrastructural investments in the 2010-2014 national museum

revitalization program. This is cause for pause. Museums do not have to be colonial relics. Even

if for most Indonesians they sadly are, it might be possible that the investment and media

attention and particularly the current expansion of the National Museum of Indonesia will raise

the profile and thus raise the performance bar down the road. Either way, at the end of the day, a

spirit of openness and inclusion, accountability and stakeholder involvement, these are the keys

to building effective museums specifically and institutions in general and this is where the real

challenges for building museums of your own lie.

Acknowledgements: I thank the Abby Cohn and Kaja McGowan of the Center for Southeast

Asian Studies at Cornell University for the opportunity to have been able to discuss and draft this

paper there, extending instances and ideas from a related earlier paper “The Potentials and

Limitations for the Digital Humanities in Asia and Africa” given in the session “Problems in

Digital Methods for Cultural Memory at the Digital Frontiers conference at Texas Women’s

University, Denton, Texas, September 18, 2014.

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