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The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2018
Abstract
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2018
Footnotes
We are grateful for the discussion of this article at the 2014 EuroSEAS meeting in Lisbon, at a panel organised by Ricardo Roque and Warwick Anderson. Irfan Kortschak, Veronika Lipphardt, Dirk Moses, Ricardo Roque, and Christine Winter offered comments on an earlier version of this article. Antje Kühnast did most of the German translations; Hans Pols is responsible for the Dutch. We are grateful to Edwin Lerrick for hospitality in Kupang. This research was supported by Australian Research Council Grants FL110100243, DP0881067, and DP1096013.
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24 Eugen Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen: Anthropologische und ethnographiesche Studien am Rehobother Bastardvolk in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika [The Rehoboth bastards and the problem of bastardisation in human beings: Anthropological and ethnographic studies of the Rehoboth bastard tribe in German Southwest Africa] (Jena: G. Fischer, 1913). Fischer was director of the Anatomical Institute in Freiburg (1918–27), then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, Berlin (1927–42). He was elected rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität, Berlin (now Humboldt University) in 1933. After the Second World War, Fischer continued as emeritus professor at Freiburg University.
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28 This section is based on Rodenwaldt, Die Mestizen auf Kisar. See also Rodenwaldt, Ernst, ‘De mestiezen van Kisar [The Mestizos of Kisar]’, in Handelingen van het Vijfde Nederlandsch-Indisch Natuurwetenschappelijk Congres Soerabaja (Batavia: Kolff, 1927)Google Scholar.
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32 Rodenwaldt, Die Mestizen auf Kisar, vol. 1, pp. 108–10.
33 Ibid., p. 117.
34 On the first names of the Mestizos, see Rodenwaldt, Die Mestizen auf Kisar, vol. 1, pp. 91–97.
35 Ibid., pp. 438–9.
36 Ibid., p. 427. A translation of these tribal legends is given on pp. 450–64.
37 Ibid., p. 415.
38 Ibid., p. 426.
39 Ibid., p. 422.
40 Ibid., p. 415.
41 Ibid., p. viii.
42 Ibid., p. 415.
43 Van Schouwenburg announced the founding of the Eugenics Association of the Dutch Indies in an article in a widely read magazine of public opinion: van Schouwenburg, J.C., ‘Hollands taak in Indië: Beschouwd van een eugenetisch standpunt’ [Holland's task in the Indies: Viewed from a eugenic perspective], Koloniale Studiën 11 (1927): 45–56Google Scholar. See Pols, Hans, ‘Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies’, in The Oxford handbook of the history of eugenics, ed. Bashford, Alison and Levine, Philippa (London: Routledge, 2010), 347–62Google Scholar.
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59 Ibid., p. 372.
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61 Ibid., p. 372.
62 Ibid., p. 374.
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72 Anderson, Warwick, ‘Racial conceptions in the Global South’, Isis 105 (2014): 782–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Additionally, the career of Heinz Zeiss repeats this trajectory: see Solomon, Doing medicine together.
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77 Perversely and obsessively, Australian experts in tropical hygiene continued to see Kisar as an experiment in the acclimatisation of the white race in the tropics: see Cilento, R.W., The white man in the tropics, with special reference to Australia and its dependencies (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1925)Google Scholar; and Price, A. Grenfell, White settlers in the tropics (New York: American Geographical Society, 1939)Google Scholar. Geographer R.W. Gregory noted that Kisar ‘unquestionably affords a remarkable instance of the long survival of Europeans in the tropics, on a small island only 500 miles from the equator, in spite of specially unfavourable conditions’. Gregory, R.W., The menace of colour (London: Seeley Service & Co., 1925), p. 213Google Scholar.
78 From the late-1930s, race mixing was redefined as a sociological issue, a problem of race relations and prejudice. See Anderson, Warwick, ‘Racial anthropology and human biology in the island laboratories of the United States’, Current Anthropology 53, S5 (2012): S95–S107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
79 Edwin Lerrick in conversation with Warwick Anderson, 23 Jan. 2016, Kupang, Indonesia.
80 http://home.wanadoo.nl/lerrick/history/Dutch.html (last accessed 7 Dec. 2006).
81 http://www.indisch3.nl (last accessed 7 Dec. 2006).
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84 Rano Lerrick to Hans Pols, Facebook messenger, 11 Aug. 2017.