Seminar | Facts care about colonial feelings: The Gobang-Rapport and the practice of quantifying colonial subject | Gani Jaelani

In an extraordinary meeting of the Raad van Indie on October 26th, 1932 which resulted in a reduction in money circulation as a response to the sugar crisis in the Dutch East Indies, the Director of Binnenlandsch Bestuur, A. Mühlenfeld, made the statement that 2.5 cents a day was sufficient for one native person to feed himself.

This statement received a lot of reactions and became the subject of ridicule in the Dutch and Malay media. The Volksraad meeting also requested clarification of this statement and suggested further research. The information from Mühlenfeld was based on the experiments conducted by the Agriculture Department on the natives’ daily diets since early 1932. The reactions were followed by an invitation for nutritionists and public health experts to determine whether the funding effectively met nutrition and health requirements. The outcomes from the research, known as the Gobang-Rapport, were published two years later and confirmed the statement that the native could live a day with a gobang.

This seminar will problematize the Gobang-Rapport as a practice of experimenting on bodies to conceal the natives’ misery resulting from colonial politics. It will question mainly to what extent the report was used to vindicate the impoverishment by quantifying the bodies and daily diet. Through a reading of the reactions to the report in the newspapers and the Volksraad meetings, I will show how this quantified scientific fact was incontrovertible in maintaining the colonial order.

Speaker

Gani Jaelani teaches history at the Department of History and Philology, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia, while conducting research on the history of sciences and medicines in colonial Indonesia. He is also the main editor of a Bandung-based independent publication, Pustaka Pias. He is currently a visiting fellow at KITLV where he works on biochemical issues and the intersection between religion, class, and race in late colonial and early postcolonial Indonesia: ‘The bodies that built the nation: Biochemical research in late colonial and early postcolonial Indonesia’.

Moderator

Marieke Bloembergen is a cultural historian and senior researcher at KITLV, and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the political dynamics of cultural knowledge production in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, in relation to objects, non-human species, heritage practices, art, and notions of (environmental) care, and in their local, inter-Asian and global dimensions.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 21 November from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET).

Registration

If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: [email protected].

If you wish to join this seminar online, please register here.

Image

Caricature on the first page of the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad on April 8, 1933.