ABSTRACT

In the uncertain early 2000s when violence between Muslims and Christians racked the Malukan islands on Indonesia's eastern edge, a handful of Protestant ministers waged an iconoclastic attack on a museum collection dedicated to Seram Island's ancestral headhunting culture and centred upon statues and portraits of mythical war captains. I track the heterogeneous sites and incidents that came together in the attack, including the animation of the museum's headhunter collection, as the past exceeded the ways in which it had been previously engaged and managed materially, existentially, and in its effects. Drawing on understandings of assemblage, archive, and cinematic animation, I explore the regime of secrecy and revelation that constituted the driving force behind the museum's continually expanding collection, was embedded in the complex of buildings and artifacts of which the museum forms a part, and entailed in its aesthetic and museographic practices. Taken together, they intimate how escalation, in this ethnographic example, was an always present potentiality – one that became disclosed when headhunting's secrets burst into the world with devastating consequences. What enabled these events, among other factors, was the materiality of the collection and the matter of scale or, more precisely, the visibility of scale such that it is deemed capable of attracting the gaze – directing attention within the spiralling inter-religious violence and turmoil to the headhunter statues and portraits of the museum, triggering a ‘crisis of faith’ in its director, and leaving torn canvases and broken statues in its wake.

摘要

在不确定的2000年代初，穆斯林和基督教徒之间的暴力袭击席卷了印度尼西亚东部边缘的马鲁坎群岛时，少数新教部长对博物馆收藏品进行了反传统的攻击，该博物馆收藏着关于Seram岛的祖先猎头文化，并以神话般的战争船长的雕像和肖像为中心。我追踪了这次袭击中涉及的各种地点和事件，包括博物馆猎头馆收藏的动画，因为过去超过了以前对其进行实质性，存在性及其影响的方式。借助对组合，档案和电影动画的理解，我探索了秘密和启示的制度，这些制度和因素构成了博物馆不断扩大的收藏背后的动力，博物馆被嵌入建筑物和人工制品的复杂结构中，并伴随着其美学和博物馆学实践。总而言之，在这个人种学实例中，他们密切了解升级是如何始终存在的潜力–当猎头的秘密突然爆发并带来毁灭性后果时，这种潜力就被揭示出来。除其他因素外，促成这些事件的因素是收藏的重要性和规模问题，或更确切地说，规模的可见性使其被认为有能力吸引目光，从而在宗教间的暴力冲突和博物馆的猎头雕像和肖像发生动荡，引发馆长的“信仰危机”，并留下残缺的画布和残破的雕像。