Reframing Dutch Culture (Progress in European Ethnology)

Citation preview

REFRAMING DUTCH CULTURE

This page intentionally left blank

Reframing Dutch Culture Between Otherness and Authenticity

Edited by PETER JAN MARGRY and HERMAN ROODENBURG Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Netherlands

© Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Reframing Dutch culture : between otherness and authenticity. - (Progress in European ethnology) 1. Group identity - Netherlands 2. National characteristics, Dutch 3. Netherlands - Social life and customs 4. Netherlands - Civilization 5. Netherlands Ethnic relations I. Margry, P. J. (Peter Jan) II. Roodenburg, Herman 306'.09492 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Margry, P. J. (Peter Jan) Reframing Dutch culture : between otherness and authenticity / by Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg. p. cm. -- (Progress in European ethnology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4705-8 1. National characteristics, Dutch. 2. Minorities--Netherlands--History--20th century. 3. Netherlands--Ethnic relations. 4. Netherlands--Social life and customs--20th century. I. Roodenburg, Herman. II. Title. DJ91.5.M37 2007 306.09492--dc22 2007009699 ISBN-13: 978 0 7546 4705 8

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors 1

Introduction Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg

vii ix xi 1

PART I OTHERNESS AND IDENTITY 2

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles Hester Dibbits

11

3

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity Rob van Ginkel

37

4

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity in Newly Reclaimed Dutch Polders Albert van der Zeijden

59

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition: The Turkish-Dutch and the Imaginary Geography of East and West Hilje van der Horst

83

5

PART II PERFORMANCE 6

7

8

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society Peter Jan Margry

109

Crop Circle Tales: Narrative Testimonies from the Dutch Frontier Science Movement Theo Meder

135

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’: Negotiating Ethnic Inclusion and Exclusion Irene Stengs

159

vi

Reframing Dutch Culture

PART III HERITAGE AND AUTHENTICIY 9

10

11

12

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work: The Changing Mission of the Fraters of Tilburg in Secularised Dutch Society Martin Ramstedt

183

Vernacular Authenticity: Negotiating Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Netherlands John Helsloot

203

Singing in Dutch Dialects: Language Choice in Music and the Dialect Renaissance Louis Peter Grijp

225

Their Own Heritage: Women Wearing Traditional Costumes in the Village of Marken Herman Roodenburg

245

PART IV HISTORIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 13

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg

261

14

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology

273

Appendix: Map of the Netherlands Index

285 287

List of Figures 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 9.1 10.1 10.2 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2

Moroccan-Dutch boy (16) from the neighbourhood Amsterdam East Moroccan-Dutch boy (16) from the neighbourhood Amsterdam East The New Sunderklaas celebration as performed by Texel youth in the 1920s Texel’s Own Steamship Enterprise as a popular theme Closing the dykes during the draining of the Eastern Flevoland polder, 1956 ‘Ringrijden’ the Noordoostpolder, in 1950 Eating in the house of a return migrant in Central Turkey, 2005 Turkish Dutch interior with white and blue colour harmony Political messages applied to the statue of William the Silent († 1584) on Plein square, 8 May 2002 A sea of flowers, objects and documents in front of Fortuyn’s residence, May 2002 A copy of Fortuyn’s statue that had been decapitated in 2003 Croppies in a formation in Valkenburg in 2004 Jan Willem Bobbink with dowsing rod The memorial for Ali el Bejjati A march of mourning or a silent march? ZIN’s ‘cloister’ in Vught ‘A flower for Mother and our heart for Mother’s God’ Poster for the Mother’s Day campaign (1975) of the florist industry Normaal posing as rural types in the 1980s Ede Staal during a recording session for Omroep Noord, ca. 1982 Survey map of dialect music in the Netherlands Doing laundry outside on the island Marken, ca. 1950 Two Marker women in traditional mourning dress

17 24 44 48 62 68 92 96 114 122 128 137 146 163 165 186 207 218 228 232 238 247 253

This page intentionally left blank

List of Tables 11.1

11.2

Ranking of Dutch provinces according to the percentage of dialect speaking persons

239

Ranking of Dutch provinces according to number of acts per 10,000 inhabitants

240

This page intentionally left blank

List of Contributors Hester Dibbits (1965), ethnologist and historian, works as a researcher at the Department of Dutch Ethnology at the Meertens Institute. Her special areas of interest are material culture and ethnicity. After being awarded her PhD in 2001 for her dissertation Vertrouwd bezit. Materiële Cultuur in Doesburg en Maassluis, 1650– 1800, she shifted her focus towards material culture and lifestyle in contemporary, multi-ethnic Dutch society. Dibbits is co-author of Jongens uit de buurt (2001) and a contributor to Een buurt in Beweging (2002). More recently, she co-edited and coauthored the major volume Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950–2000 (2005). She is currently preparing a publication about the domestic interiors of twentiethcentury immigrants and their descendants in the Netherlands. [email protected] Rob van Ginkel (1955) graduated in sociology and cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (1988). In 1993, he obtained his PhD from the same university with a dissertation on fishing communities on the Dutch island of Texel. He is now an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. His academic interests lie in the field of history and anthropology, maritime cultures, European ethnology, national culture and identity, suburbia, and the ethnography of the Netherlands. His publications include seven books (in Dutch) and scores of articles in edited volumes and national and international journals. [email protected] Louis Peter Grijp (1954) studied musicology at Utrecht University and lute at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. His dissertation, which he defended in Utrecht in 1991, treated the mechanism of contrafact writing in Dutch songs of the seventeenth century. Although performance practice, organology and the theory of music are also fields of interest, Dutch songs became Grijp’s specialism as a research fellow of the Meertens Institute and as professor of Dutch song culture at Utrecht University. He supervised the development of the Database of Songs from the Low Countries, which forms the core of the recently founded Centre for Dutch Songs at the Meertens Institute. He has published dozens of articles and books, and was editor-in-chief of Een muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Grijp is also active as a musician in the Camerata Trajectina early music ensemble. He is member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received several prizes for both his scholarly and his musical work. [email protected]

xii

Reframing Dutch Culture

John Helsloot (1950) is an ethnologist. He graduated in cultural anthropology at Free University Amsterdam and took his PhD (1995) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His dissertation discusses the efforts to civilise and Christianise popular recreation in a Dutch town in the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the expression of sociocultural identities, he publishes on the history of calendar rituals (the feasts of St Martin, St Nicholas, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween) in the Netherlands and in the former Dutch East Indies. [email protected] Hilje van der Horst (1976) holds Master’s degrees in Sociology and Human Geography. She is currently a PhD student at the Meertens Institute and at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. Her main areas of research are material culture, and migration and ethnic studies. She has published articles in various journals, including Housing Theory and Society (2003), Home Cultures (2006) and Ethnologia Europaea (2006). [email protected] Peter Jan Margry (1956) ethnologist, studied history at the University of Amsterdam. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Tilburg (2000) for his dissertation on the religious culture war in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. He is senior research fellow in Religious Culture at the Department of Ethnology of the Meertens Institute. Before that, he worked as an archivist and became director of the Department of Ethnology. He has published many books and articles. Between 1996 and 2004, he edited the four-volume Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland on Dutch pilgrimage culture. His research is focused on rituals and on nineteenth-century and contemporary religious cultures in the Netherlands and Europe. He is vice-president of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF). [email protected] Theo Meder (1960), ethnologist, earned his PhD in 1991 at the University of Leiden with his dissertation on the 14th-century Dutch sprookspreker (‘tale-teller’) Willem van Hildegaersberch. In 1994, Meder joined the Department of Ethnology of the Meertens Institute as a researcher; he is now a senior researcher. He specialises in folk narrative research and coordinates the Dutch folk tale database (www. verhalenbank.nl). Along with Jurjen van der Kooi and Ton Dekker, he compiled a lexicon of fairy tales, called Van Aladdin tot Zwaan Kleef Aan (1997). In 2000 he published an anthology of Dutch folk tales entitled De Magische Vlucht. In addition to several shorter books, he has published two major volumes, namely Vertelcultuur in Waterland (2001) and Vertelcultuur in Nederland (2005, with Cor Hendriks); both concern an important collection of Dutch folk tales from around 1900. His book on crop circle belief (titled In Graancirkelkringen) was published in 2006. [email protected]

List of Contributors

xiii

Martin Ramstedt (1962), anthropologist and ethnologist, got his PhD from Munich University in 1997. Subsequently, he was European Science Foundation research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. His three-year research project ‘Negotiating Identities – Hinduism in Modern Indonesia’ focused on identity politics, religious policy and transnational relations. From 2001 until 2006, he was researcher at the Meertens Institute, working on ‘Detraditionalization and the normalization of alternative spirituality in contemporary Dutch society’. Since the end of 2006, he is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany), working on ‘Hindu Law and Hindu Values and Conflict Management in Commercial Relations between Indonesian and Indian Hindus’. [email protected] Herman Roodenburg (1951), ethnologist and historian, is head of the Department of Dutch Ethnology at the Meertens Institute, and professor of Cultural History at Leuven University. He has published on a wide range of subjects, including the cultural history of gesture and that of humour. His recent publications in English include The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004) and Forging European Identities, 1400-1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). [email protected] Irene Stengs (1959) is a cultural anthropologist and works as a researcher at the Meertens Institute. In 2003 she defended her PhD thesis on modern cults, material culture and social imaginary in urban Thai society at the University of Amsterdam. In her current position, she leads an interdisciplinary project on rituals, celebrations and festive culture in present-day Dutch society. In addition, she is conducting a research project entitled ‘The Monumentalisation of Dutch Society’. Her recent publications are ‘Ephemeral Memorials against “Senseless Violence”. Materialisations of Public Outcry’ (in Etnofoor 2003) and ‘The Commodification of King Chulalongkorn: His Portraits, their cultural biographies, and the enduring aura of a Great King of Siam’ in Commodification. Things, Agency, and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited) (2005). [email protected] Albert van der Zeijden (1957) is researcher at the Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur (the Dutch national institute for public folklore and public heritage). He is a historian and writes extensively on the history of public folklore in the Netherlands. He was awarded his PhD in 2002 for his dissertation on ‘Catholic identity and historical consciousness: W.J.F. Nuyens (1823–1894) and his nationalistic historiography’. [email protected]

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Introduction Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg

In October 2006, the Committee for the Development of the Dutch Canon published its eagerly awaited report on what all Dutch persons should know about their country’s history and culture, that is, how the Netherlands has developed over time, what achievements it has accomplished, and what it has represented and still represents in the world (Van Oostrom 2006). Although from an ethnological point of view the report offers a striking instance of the constructedness of heritage, of heritage, the committee wrote a balanced and well-considered document, one that presents an open and flexible canon, not a grim and straitjacketed one. The committee did not wish to boost feelings of national pride: in fact, it rather surprisingly dismisses the concept of national identity, which it deems deceptive and dangerous. Instead, it argues that a canon known by all Dutch persons and taught at all Dutch schools could substantially enhance citizenship. In its report, the committee surveys a few of the motives that led to its establishment by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science in September 2005. It mentions the Dutch schooling system, which in recent decades has left little room for teaching Dutch history and culture, and it points to the present mental climate in the Netherlands: the increasing fear of disintegration, of a nation threatened by both the unification of Europe and the comparably large numbers of immigrants, mainly arriving or rather having arrived from Turkey, Morocco, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles. As the committee explains, it does not consider its canon as an answer to the last-mentioned problem. It is not to function as a means to integration, as offering a sorely needed idea of the country in which these newcomers are now living. Nor should we see the canon as a means to induce the Dutch, who are confronted with the alleged threats of Europe (the Dutch voted against the proposed European Constitution) and of globalisation in general, to revalue their identity, to again pride themselves on what their nation has become and what it has achieved. The committee emphatically rejects such anxious calls for ‘cultural dyke watching’, arguing instead (and referring, for example, to Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism) for a confident and future-oriented role for its canon. Of course, the Dutch mental landscape has altered over the last ten to fifteen years. As the committee reminds us, a similar committee, one that had been established to draw up a canon of Dutch literature to be taught at all Dutch schools, was thoroughly tarred and feathered as recently as 1989. Until the 1990s, it was generally regarded (and sometimes still is regarded) as dangerous, as ideologically suspect, to discuss

2

Reframing Dutch Culture

concepts of national or regional identity, or of ethnic identity or cultural heritage. These and similar notions were chiefly studied by anthropologists and by European ethnologists, those folklorists who since the 1970s have successfully redefined their discipline in terms of the contemporary reflexive and linguistic turns in the humanities and social sciences. Since then, thanks to ethnologists and anthropologists and to increasing numbers of historians, sociologists and other social scientists, the concepts have become widely accepted, not only in academia but in society at large, where simultaneously the mental climate has changed considerably. Looking at the present-day Netherlands, it is evident that this mental break has accelerated in the past five years, partially as a result of two brutal political murders. In 2002, a new, charismatic right-wing politician – Pim Fortuyn – was assassinated by an animal rights activist; two years later, the movie-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist who had been born and raised in the Netherlands. Having shot van Gogh, the man used a butcher’s knife to affix his political and religious pamphlet to the victim’s chest. As the pamphlet’s text pointed out, van Gogh ‘deserved to die’ because he ‘insulted’ Islam in a movie that is highly critical of the social position of Islamic women. The film script was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former refugee from Somalia (where she had been raised as a Muslim) who had become a member of the Dutch parliament. In the pamphlet she was threatened with death. In retrospect, van Gogh’s murder may have resonated more strongly than Fortuyn’s because to politicians and political commentators on the right it seemed to underline the contradictions between ‘enlightened’ Judaeo-Christian civilisation and ‘backward’ Islamic civilisation, a point of view contested by other politicians and commentators. However, both murders undermined the self-confidence of the Dutch (Kennedy 2005), enhancing the fears of disintegration, as described by the committee, and the country’s political disorientation and instability (Van Luin 2005). The highly-praised ‘polder model’ of consultation and consensus, originally developed as a tool to manage a religiously ‘pillarised’ society, was seen to have failed as far as integrating into Dutch society the large groups of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants and their children (Model Making 2002). To many observers, the familiar image of a stable, open and liberal Dutch society had become barely recognisable (Carle 2006; Buruma 2006). It is this society in flux (if not in confusion) that is addressed in the eleven chapters of this volume. In recent years, journalists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars have sought to interpret the social and political contexts of both murders, situating the events within the large-scale processes of modernisation and globalisation and generally taking an etic perspective, relying mostly on extrinsic concepts and categories. In this book we present a different outlook, convinced as we are that a complex and rapidly changing society like the present-day Netherlands will never be properly understood unless one also looks at it from below, from the everyday. Ethnologists, without discounting etic perspectives, usually choose an emic perspective, focusing on everyday life and within these deliberate parameters on the intrinsic cultural categories that are meaningful to the individuals and groups

Introduction

3

being studied. In other words, they concentrate on the description and interpretation of the cultural categories that both shape our everyday practices and are shaped within these practices. European ethnology studies the familiar, the everyday practices that upon closer inspection often turn out to be less familiar, less selfevident, than people are inclined to think. In addition, it always theorises on the basis of grounded empirical findings: theory and ethnography are strongly intertwined. And although the discipline builds chiefly on fieldwork and participant observation, it is also anchored in historical approaches (Bennis 2006: 23–31). In fact, we set ourselves two objectives for this volume. First, by taking a careful look at a variety of everyday practices, both in the towns and in the countryside, we hope to provide a more detailed understanding of contemporary Dutch society, with all its social and cultural complexity. Second, we aim to provide an overview, a general impression, of contemporary Dutch ethnology, mainly presenting research from the Amsterdam Meertens Institute, the foremost locus of Dutch ethnology. By pursuing both objectives, we hope to contribute to a reframing of Dutch culture, to a fresh, clearly ethnologically informed perspective on the Netherlands by which we may circumvent the one-sided focus on the large-scale processes of modernisation and globalisation with all their implications of social determinacy, of a lack of human agency and, often, of a non-reflected teleological bias. It is precisely in its everyday dimensions that Dutch culture proves to be far more complex and dynamic than such theorizing suggests. Indeed, by adopting a perspective from the everyday we may well counterbalance the high-flown prose and overworked phrases of many a Dutch politician and political commentator. In their view, the Dutch are locked in a decisive battle between the Enlightenment and the forces of backwardness, in which these forces may variously refer to Islam (as argued by the political right) or to the Dutch countryside voting against modern times and globalisation (as argued by the political left). Rather than offering a neat and rounded monograph, we decided to invite eleven ethnologists to present case-studies taken from their latest research, thus hoping to do justice to the complexity both of contemporary Dutch society and of Dutch ethnology. The result is a book in which practice and performance approaches have been applied to quite divergent aspects of the Dutch everyday. Taken together the fourteen chapters testify to a society that is characterised by the softness, fluidity or fragility of its structures, by a certain amount of freedom from social determinism (expressed in academic parlance in terms of the ‘invention’, ‘construction’, ‘politics’ or even ‘doing’ of culture); in short, by what Zygmunt Bauman has described as ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2002; cf. Burke 2005: 38–39). Although the book is structured around three central themes – namely identity, performance, and heritage and authenticity – these themes are far from mutually exclusive. As the reader will notice, tied in with varying sub-themes (appropriation, inclusion and exclusion, otherness, tradition, etc.) they recur with more or less emphasis in nearly every chapter of the volume. Chapter 2 takes us directly to the heart of Dutch youth culture. Hester Dibbits considers the role of dress in group formation processes among Moroccan-Dutch boys. As she points out, their decision

4

Reframing Dutch Culture

to wear baggy street wear or Italian brand-name clothes seems related more to whether they construct a metropolitan or a Mediterranean identity than to creating a ‘Moroccan’ identity. In her analysis she also looks at language use and at aspects of physicality such as skin colour, hair colour or movements and gestures, arguing (against Ted Polhemus) that the construction of identity is not a feast of eclectic practices, and that one should always take account of an embodied past, of social and cultural constraints. Authenticity – or rather authentication – is another issue touched upon by Dibbits. As it turns out, credibility and authenticity are central notions to these boys. The ways in which they authenticate their dress determines whether or not they are included in a group. Given the latest trends in the world of fashion designers, Dibbits suspects that in the coming years Moroccan-Dutch youths may sport traditional ‘Moroccan’ garments, and add Western elements of their own. Issues of inclusion or exclusion also feature in Chapter 3, in which Rob van Ginkel looks at the Ouwe Sunderklaas festival on the island of Texel (for a map of the Netherlands, see the Appendix). Arguing that identity also encompasses unintentional behaviour and thoughts, he prefers to speak of the articulation rather than the construction of identity. Construction also resonates with the notion of cultural building. To Van Ginkel, identity is primarily a relational concept, as he convincingly demonstrates in his interpretation of the festival. Held each year on 12 December, it differs considerably from the national celebration of St. Nicholas (chiefly a domestic event) on 5 December. At the Texel festival one may witness all kinds of rhymes, songs and sketches performed in the streets by hundreds of masked and disguised islanders. However, since the 1970s the event has grown more and more inward oriented. Thanks to the localness of the themes addressed in the texts performed, only the islanders understand them. Freed from the tourists who infest the island in the summer, the festival epitomises a story the islanders tell about themselves. It is about ‘us’ and ‘them’, about localism both springing from and being directed against globalisation. While Van Ginkel objects to the notion of identities being constructed, in the newly reclaimed land investigated by Albert van der Zeijden, bricolage and eclecticism were very much what the literal invention of a new regional identity was about. In the decades following the Second World War, the drained Noordoostpolder (the job was completed in 1942) was considered a Dutch ‘frontier’, a challenging sociological experiment. Farmers carefully selected from all twelve Dutch provinces were brought in to build a new society. The new polder was declared a test plot for a Netherlands to come, for how regional and religious differences might be overcome. The experiment was steered and controlled from above and made a conscious appeal to public folklore, to the mediation of professional folklorists who, being chiefly past oriented in their research and contrary to the social geographers involved, played a fairly modest role. Looking in particular at the celebration of the popular feast of Van der Zeijden demonstrates how government officials, social scientists and the polder’s own weekly newspaper, though intent on building a new regional identity through fabricating a new regional folklore, were nonetheless convinced that folklore should not be controlled from above but remain authentic and spontaneous.

Introduction

5

In the last chapter of Part 1, the reader is taken back to the city. Hilje van der Horst explains how Turkish-Dutch families cherish their own notions of tradition and modernity, how through discourse and such dwelling practices as sitting, eating and sleeping they appropriate understandings of tradition and modernity (including the terms’ imaginary geography in which the East and the West are simply opposed) in their own lives. Following Pierre Bourdieu she construes these practices as habitual and embodied, thus (like most of the contributors to the volume) adopting a mild constructionist stance. Referring to Daniel Miller and Regina Bendix, van der Horst concludes that modernity and tradition through the aesthetic vehicle of authenticity are strongly intertwined. The use of vernacular objects and practices because of the ‘tradition’ or ‘authenticity’ they are felt to embody is also an appropriation of modernity, an articulation of a sense of loss inherent to the very concept of modernity. Part 2 of the book – ‘Performance’ – bears witness to the recent performative turn in the humanities and social sciences. Building on the dramaturgical model developed by Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman and Victor Turner (and profiting from ethnologists like Milman Parry and Albert Lord or, in the 1970s and 1980s, Roger Abrahams, the many-sided Dell Hymes and Richard Bauman), the present breakthrough into performance has moved even further away from textual approaches and from the linguistic turn in general, not only insisting that theatre is not opposed to everyday practices but also leaving latitude for the unexpected, for the generation of new practices and meanings. As Diana Taylor wrote, performance ‘suggests a carrying through, actualizing, making something happen’ (Taylor 1994: 276; cf. Burke 2005; Fischer-Lichte 2004; Bachmann-Medick 2006: 104–143). Often inspired by phenomenological approaches (as was Bourdieu), issues of habitus and embodiment have come to the fore as well (Roodenburg 2004). Dutch ethnology recently adopted the new performance perspective as one of its central research concerns (Bennis 2006: 29). In the first contribution to Part 2, Peter Jan Margry takes a look at the temporary and improvised memorial sites created after the assassination of Fortuyn. These sites were overloaded with flowers and images, as well as with texts and messages considered by Margry as active, integrated ingredients in the generation of new meanings. The texts and the other objects placed by the visitors instigated heated conversations in situ, a new style of communication, informed and strongly enhanced by the mass media of television and the Internet. It was such performativity that turned the sites into arenas of political resentment, into a non-violent uprising that seriously threatened the established power structures. Abrahams and Bauman introduced the concept of performance when they became dissatisfied with ethnology’s one-sided engagement with text-centred perspectives and proposed other perspectives concerned with the actual use of folk narratives and of folklore forms in general. Theo Meder, in his chapter on Dutch crop circle tales, takes a similar stance, but investigating the tales as exempla, as narrative testimonies to a spiritual truth, he includes insights from more recent research. Central to his analysis of this New Age subject is the notion of ostension, as introduced by Linda

6

Reframing Dutch Culture

Dégh and Bill Ellis. Ostension highlights how stories provoke events, how legends are literally lived. In his look at the world of ‘croppies’ and ‘cereologists’, Meder also refers to the metaphor of memes or mind viruses when he explains how such tales both spread and mutate, slowly moulding the views and practices of individuals and groups. In the subsequent chapter we return to acts of violence in contemporary Dutch society. Irene Stengs takes a look at the world of ‘senseless violence’ (zinloos geweld), a moral category that became prominent in the 1990s and is comparable with that of ‘random violence’ as evolved in the United States. Aiming to assess the roles of narrative and ritual in the construction of senseless violence as a societal issue, Stengs analyses a number of events, in each case carefully sorting out how the victims through narrative and ritual came to be framed (or not) as victims of ‘senseless violence’. Arguing, like van Ginkel (and Anthony Cohen), that community and identity are always about inclusion and exclusion, Stengs focuses on a march held following the violent death of a Dutch-Moroccan thief not far from where Theo van Gogh had been killed by a radical Muslim with a Moroccan background. As she points out, the march was seized upon by young Dutch-Moroccans to renegotiate their social exclusion implied in the narratives and rituals of ‘senseless violence’ related to the murdering of van Gogh. Finally, in Part 3, issues of tradition, authenticity and heritage are addressed. Like Meder, Martin Ramstedt addresses New Age spirituality, although he takes a rather different point of view. He notes the spiritual revolutions both in business and in Christian congregations, thus offering support for the thesis proposed by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead in their The Spiritual Revolution (2005). Ramstedt’s case-study is a former monastery in the south of the Netherlands that has been reinvented as the ‘Monastery for Spirituality at Work’ and now provides Dutch business corporations and government institutions alike with alternative spirituality. The monastery is just one example of many in the new spiritual economy, all adopting subjectivelife spirituality as a means to salvage the essence of their religiosity. Ramstedt situates his analysis against the background of such large-scale developments as the religious ontzuiling (‘depillarisation’) and ontkerkelijking (‘unchurchisation’) of Dutch society. Both testify to a massive process of detraditionalisation. Traditions are invented, the one more literally so than the other. Although Mother’s Day and Father’s Day were adopted in the Netherlands in the 1920s and the 1950s, respectively, as American ‘imports’ they have always been contested as being merely commercial inventions (good for the florists and the tobacconists) and therefore lacking in naturalness or authenticity. It is such vernacular understandings of authenticity (as opposed to the academic understandings) that form the subject of John Helsloot’s contribution. Agreeing with Anne Eriksen that tradition is always a discourse in the present, that it is best understood as a situated ‘act of authentication’, he analyses the yearly discourses on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as crystallised in newspapers, women’s and youth magazines, etc., looking in particular at the processes of authentication that inform the perception of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (on authentication, see also Dibbits and Van der Horst in this volume). As

Introduction

7

Helsloot concludes, the processes may be seen as an ongoing ‘frame dispute’, a persistent argument about what frame is relevant for responding to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Louis Peter Grijp addresses the paradox that while Dutch dialects are dying out or being blended (if not reinvented) as ‘regiolects’, the number of singers and music groups that use dialect is booming. So far, over one thousand singers and groups have been registered as doing so; most of them have adopted international music styles, ranging from rock, blues and country to schlager and chanson. In trying to explain this remarkable phenomenon, Grijp considers three models, namely those of dialect renaissance, of the musical construction of place (as developed by Martin Stokes) and of language choice in music. He presents two case-studies: he looks at the rock band Normaal – which sings in the dialect of the Achterhoek, a fairly remote region in the east of the Netherlands – and at Ede Staal, a ‘troubadour’ from the northern province of Groningen. Grijp analyses their music as a mode of glocalisation, as attempts to preserve one’s dialect or regiolect by merging it with global music styles, but he rejects the models of dialect renaissance and the construction of regional identity. In the present-day Netherlands singing in dialect is a matter of personal identity, of musicians feeling that they can best express themselves in their own dialect. They have unwittingly elicited a dormant supra-regional identity, a general ‘peasant feeling’, constructing the Randstad – the quadrangle formed by the country’s four largest cities (Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht) – as its ‘other’. The Netherlands is famous for the great variety of its traditional costumes. In this, it is renowned both among tourists and among ethnologists, who started in the last decades of the nineteenth century to search among their country’s peasants and fisherfolk for the nation’s ‘untainted’ essence. Herman Roodenburg takes a look at a group of women on the former island of Marken who until recently wore (and in some cases, still wear) the garments. Unhappy with the one-sided beholder’s point of view prominent in most of the ethnological research on traditional costumes, whether informed by heritage or older perspectives, Roodenburg prefers a wearer’s point of view, defining dress as a ‘situated bodily practice’ (Entwistle 2000) and adopting a Bourdieuan stance. Relating the wearing of the costumes to the women’s home dress-making, to the ever-recurring bodily practices of sewing, knitting, embroidering and mending the garments, and to the close interweaving of bodily and clothing memories, Roodenburg demonstrates how to these women discarding the costumes would mean discarding a whole way of life. The chapters collected in this volume cover a wide and exciting variety of subjects. They are the products of recent research or of research that is still in its infancy, which explains why some of the chapters form a fairly complete whole while others are more exploratory. Together with a closing historiographical and bibliographical section, these essays offer a fine and original impression of both contemporary Dutch ethnology and contemporary Dutch society.

8

Reframing Dutch Culture

References Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2006), Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Bauman, Zygmunt (2002), Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bendix, Regina (1997), In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bennis, Hans (2006), Dynamische Tradities. Onderzoeksplan [Dynamic traditions: research plan] Meertens Instituut 2006-2010. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Burke, Peter (2005), Performing History: The Importance of Occasions, in Rethinking History 9(1), 35–52. Buruma, Ian (2006), Murder in Amsterdam. The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. London: Atlantic Books. Carle, Robert (2006), Demise of Dutch multiculturalism, Society, March/April: 68–74. Entwistle, Jo-Anne (2000), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2004), Aesthetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heelas, Paul and Linda Woodhead (2005), The Spiritual Revolution. Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Kennedy, James (2005), De deugden van een gidsland. Burgerschap en democratie in Nederland. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998), Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Model Making (2002), Survey Netherlands, in The Economist, 2 May. Roodenburg, Herman (2004), Pierre Bourdieu, Issues of Embodiment and Authenticity. Etnofoor, 17 (1–2), 215–226. Taylor, Diana (1994), Performing Gender: Las Madras de la Plaza de Mayo, in D. Taylor and J. Villegas (eds), Negotiating Performance. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Van Ede, Yolande et al. (eds) (2004), Authenticity [special issue], Etnofoor, 17(1/2), 7–242. Van Luin, Ton (2005), Hoe nu verder? 42 visies op de toekomst van Nederland na de moord op Theo van Gogh. Utrecht: Spectrum. Van Oostrom, Frits (ed.) (2006), Entoen.nu. De Canon van Nederland. Rapport van de Commissie ontwikkeling Nederlandse canon. The Hague: OCW.

PART I OTHERNESS AND IDENTITY

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles1 Hester Dibbits

In late 2003 various Dutch newspapers reported a study revealing that MoroccanDutch youths aged 15 to 19 spent over twice as much on clothes than other youths their age. While people in this age group spend 768 euros a year in the Netherlands, Moroccan-Dutch youths average 1,680 euros. They prefer clothes from expensive Italian labels, such as Gucci, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Armani (Raatgever 2003; Pichotte and Goudappel 2004).2 At the time the findings were disclosed, Moroccan-Dutch youths figured in the news almost daily. Most reports concerned crime rates, school dropout, high unemployment and the rise of religious extremism. Moroccan-Dutch boys are especially likely to become or risk becoming socially marginalised. Their plight was no different in the years around 2003; among all young migrant groups in the Netherlands, Moroccan-Dutch boys are discussed extensively, possibly more than any other group. Only one other group of youths has a similar reputation, namely boys of Antillean descent. Impressions of Moroccan-Dutch boys are heavily defined by their styles of dress. Aside from their reputation as aficionados of expensive Italian brand-name clothing, they are often described as wearing baggy streetwear, a style also popular among that other marginalised group (Antillean boys). Italian brand-name clothes differ from baggy streetwear in that the former tend to be close-fitting, whereas the latter are very loose. Italian brand-name clothes are often more upscale and look more formal than baggy streetwear, although most Italian brands feature casual lines as well. In addition to these two styles, a third style is related sporadically to MoroccanDutch boys: the traditional jellaba garment, which is a very wide ‘dress’ that men use as outerwear. Only a small group of strictly observant Moroccan-Dutch Muslim boys wears this garb.

1 I am grateful to for his comments about this chapter. An earlier version of this article appeared in 2006 in Dutch as ‘Marokkaans-Nederlandse jongens en de authenticering van hun kledingstijlen’ in Migrantenstudies 22(2), 86–107. 2 The study was commissioned by Tijdschrift voor Marketing and Foquz Etnomarketing.

12

Reframing Dutch Culture

In this chapter I explore the connotations within youth culture of the three styles of dress described above. Presumably, research about these connotations may shed light on group formation processes and inclusion and exclusion practices. I focus exclusively on the repertoire of meanings related to styles of dress among MoroccanDutch boys. The next question that arises is how dress styles among Moroccan-Dutch boys, which are much discussed but rarely disputed, and discourses on the subject relate to the general contestation that appears to be emerging in the Netherlands with respect to dress styles among young adults. Youths with ultra-right-wing sympathies are supposed to wear clothes of the Lonsdale label, just as young Muslim girls are supposed to wrap themselves in chadors. Anybody who pays attention to the way specific groups of young adults dress and to discussions in the media about their dress styles cannot help but feel that differences in these styles have become progressively more pronounced over the past decade. My chapter is explicitly exploratory. Relatively few statements are included from the actual wearers. In addition to empirical data from previous studies and data from a few interviews, I have based my argument largely on Internet chat forums for young adults.3 These sources may be considered problematic, as Internet chatters tend to remain anonymous, and few or no contextual data are available about the participants. On the other hand, discussions relevant to our research question are conducted anonymously here, probably leaving participants greater freedom to share their views. The case studies, interview excerpts and Internet chat sessions show that the different clothing styles have various connotations reflecting both general variables such as ethnicity, age, class, gender and religion and the specific, social-cultural contexts in which the clothes are worn. This pattern also relates to use of language, attributing various context-based meanings to linguistic style repertoires (Eckert and Rickford 2001; Eckert 2003). Interestingly, ‘authenticity’ and ‘credibility’ issues figure prominently in the discourse of young adults. Acknowledgement and appreciation of self-presentation, including that of Moroccan-Dutch boys, appears closely linked to the presence of style elements that are regarded as distinctive and ‘personal’ by insiders and outsiders alike and are difficult or impossible to adopt. Such elements include skin colour, hair colour, movements and gestures and linguistic usage or vernacular. This brings us to the authenticity theme, which has been addressed extensively in cultural studies since the 1990s and has led to several studies indicating the crucial role of notions concerning authenticity in the construction of group identities and in inclusion and exclusion processes (Bendix 1997; Bucholtz 2003; Authenticity 2004). When people label certain cultural expressions as ‘authentic’, they automatically dismiss other cultural expressions as false, artificial or even illegitimate (Bendix 1997: 9). Authenticity, however, is not a given but emerges through an authentication 3 The chat excerpts used for this article are from the following Internet forums: Forums. marokko.nl, Mzine.nl/Forum, Maroc.nl/chat/forums, Forum.fok.nl and Nieuwrechts.nl/ forum.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

13

process, in which people actively construct an identity based on notions relating to authenticity and credibility (Bucholtz 2003; Reyes 2005). The value that youths appear to attribute to whether a specific style matches the wearer’s skin or hair colour or heritage contradicts the view that their group formation practices have become highly eclectic. This view has been expressed by scholars such as the American anthropologist Ted Polhemus. In his review of ‘street styles’ published in 1994 (now a classic), Polhemus described how since the 1970s the diversity of these so-called style tribes not only increased considerably but has merged continuously with all kinds of established style groups. In his book Style Surfing (1996), he elaborates on this fact and demonstrates that in the final decades of the second millennium growing numbers of young adults devised eclectic combinations of personal styles, resulting in a post-modern mix revolving around style, style tribes and style surfers. Choices have indisputably become far more diverse over the past fifty years. In practice this involves countless inclusion and exclusion mechanisms, based on conditions that outsiders find difficult or impossible to meet. Styles of dress are relatively easy to adopt, but skin colour is not. Subtle details such as motions and gestures are often impossible to emulate without appearing contrived. Habitual, prereflexive aspects of personal self-presentation are particularly difficult to assume as ‘natural acquis’, if one has not become accustomed to them at a very young age (Bourdieu 1979; Roodenburg 2004). Such observations remind us that in studying the construction of social identities, we need to consider notions of race and aspects of physicality and general bearing. Depending on the context, a specific aspect of personal identity or self-presentation may make the difference between inclusion and exclusion. It may be hairstyle or linguistic usage, as well as a person’s skin colour or motions and gestures. In addition, certain styles that may be adopted in theory can be regarded as ‘inalienable’ and as ‘personal’ in practice. People may adopt or appropriate a style, but does the group that originally ‘owned’ the style accept this appropriation as well? On this note, we might also wonder whether acceptance by the other is in fact always the purpose of adopting styles. Once they have been appropriated, style elements may acquire a different connotation and become part of a new style version, with new ‘authentic’ representatives forming their own new group and aiming to be acknowledged as such. Following a study of Turkish hip-hop youths in Berlin (Kaya 2001) and AsianAmerican youths using African-American slang (Reyes 2005), I argue in this chapter that most Moroccan-Dutch boys appropriating styles actively create new styles that they themselves and others ‘authenticate’. Besides their MoroccanDutch background, the metropolitan environment to which they generally belong, their social status and their familiarity with other ethnic groups are identified and acknowledged as distinctive, authenticating style elements. In the section below I describe the social-cultural context in which this takes place, and in the three sections that follow I review the styles and their connotations and analyse them.

14

Reframing Dutch Culture

The Multi-Ethnic and Transnational Context Like many other West-European countries, the Netherlands evolved rapidly into an immigration country since World War II (see e.g. Penninx, Münstermann and Entzinger 1998; Lucassen 2005). The first major migration wave in the Netherlands was from 1946 to 1964, repatriating about 300,000 people from the former Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies and 12,500 Moluccans. During the 1960s large groups of labour migrants arrived from Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Morocco. In the 1970s and 80s approximately 200,000 Surinamese and Antilleans came to the Netherlands, as well as the families of labour migrants, particularly those from Turkey and Morocco. This migration of ‘followers’ peaked in 1980. While one hundred thousand Turks and Moroccans reached the Netherlands between 1965 and 1973, almost 170,000 more joined them between 1974 and 1982. Around 2000 the Turks and Moroccans, together with the Surinamese and Antilleans, were the four largest minority groups in the Netherlands. These four groups comprise just under one million people, out of a total population of about sixteen million. Most migrants live in the major cities in the west of the Netherlands, although substantial migrant communities live outside this area as well. As they have done elsewhere (Hebdige 1979; Polhemus 1994; Crane 2000; Rubenstein 2001), ethnic minorities have often led trends in youth culture in the Netherlands. In Dutch post-war history, for example, boys from the Dutch East Indies introduced a new type of music and became trendsetters with their striking jackets, shirts and greased quaffs in the 1950s (Mutsaers 1989). They were the first with the courage to emulate white American rock singers such as Elvis Presley and white movie stars such as Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, thus clearing for other Dutch youth the path for a new style of dress, as agents of a ‘white’ American style that had previously been adopted from ‘blacks’. Then during the 1980s, Afro-Surinamese boys became pioneers in youth culture in the Netherlands. The Dutch anthropologist Livio Sansone has demonstrated how these youths, who were generally described as Creole-Surinamese at the time, deliberately cultivated ‘black’ styles of walking, talking, singing, dancing and dressing as their own group culture. They started with Rasta and disco and later moved on to the breakdance scene (Sansone 1992). Many Afro-Surinamese youths excelled at disco and were admired by their peers here. After the 1980s the context changed drastically. Not only did everything associated with ‘black youth culture’ become highly commercialised, but Afro-Surinamese youths increasingly encountered other groups of migrant youths and their presentation styles in their leisure activities. Moroccan-Dutch youths are the most substantial group. Their role in leisure circles is very similar to that of Afro-Surinamese youths in the 1980s. Just as AfroSurinamese youths invented and cultivated their own new versions of ‘black youth culture’, Moroccan-Dutch youths became trendsetters in contemporary metropolitan youth culture in the Netherlands in the course of the 1990s (Hoving, Dibbits and Schrover 2005; Nortier and Dorleijn 2006; Mutsaers 2006). They are also known for mingling with youths of other ethnic backgrounds, including youths of Surinamese,

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

15

Antillean or native Dutch heritage. Turkish-Dutch youths, for example, reach out less to other groups. Presumably, this is because Turks are linguistically far more homogeneous than Moroccans are. In Turkey, Turkish is the official language for writing and speech and is generally the native language of the inhabitants. People from different regions in Turkey understand each other easily and therefore need not switch to a different language in the Netherlands. Moreover, Turkish is regarded as an important marker of Turkish identity. Within the Moroccan community, on the other hand, many different dialects are spoken, and migrants from different regions do not always understand one another. In the Netherlands Dutch often becomes their common language (Bennis et al. 2002). The different versions of vernacular among young adults characterise the multiethnic nature of the metropolitan youth network within which Moroccan-Dutch boys figure so prominently. These versions are generally Dutch with a medley of words from Surinamese Sranan, Moroccan Arabic, Berber, English and occasionally Turkish and Papiamento. They vary depending on the context, although several key concepts are not local or nationally based. The international use of the term ‘respect’ is a case in point.4 In his study about the multi-ethnic area of Southall in London, Baumann observes how complex this term is. His analysis of the word respect enables us to identify various meanings. In both English and Dutch, the term tends to be associated with setting aside personal pride or even self-respect. In many other, nonWestern languages the term respect is synonymous with the word honour and is the counterpart to shame. To many young Southallians, however, Baumann argues, the term has another meaning: ‘honour (izzat) appears less as the absence of shame than as the fruit of respect (izzat) (…) It represents not the opposite of self-respect, but its fulfilment’ (Baumann 1996: 103). Young Southallians thus associate a person’s self-respect entirely with respectful treatment from others, or rather the respect one receives from others. The term seems to have a similar meaning in metropolitan Dutch youth culture, apparently combining its meaning during the struggle for black and women’s emancipation in the 1960s with the Mediterranean concept of honour. In the Netherlands the frequent pronunciation of the term by non-Moroccan Dutch youths as having a double ‘z’ (i.e.: rezzpect), regarded as Moroccan by many Dutch people, illustrates the prominent position of Moroccan-Dutch youths within youth culture in the Netherlands. Besides the term respect, various other concepts are used by several groups of young adults both in the Netherlands and elsewhere. One is the term ‘cool’ (Nortier et al., 2005: 63). In his study about Turkish-German hip-hop youths in Berlin, Kaya has noted the crucial role of this term within the transnational hip-hop culture (Kaya 2001). We will elaborate on this subject in the section about baggy style. My main 4 Public organisations aiming to appeal to young adults have used the term extensively since the late 1990s. In November 2004, for example, the foundation Respect 2All was established in response to the murder of the Dutch columnist and cinematographer Theo van Gogh by a radicalised fundamentalist Muslim. The foundation sold orange wrist bands featuring the message ‘I respect others’. Sales of these bands soon reached 1.5 million.

16

Reframing Dutch Culture

point here is that different groups of young adults in several cases share the same transnational linguistic repertoires. Such repertoires often deviate considerably from the ones current in general public discourse, such as the term ‘black’. In public discourse about multi-ethnic Dutch society, in addition to the term allochtoon (meaning non-indigenous) used to denote Afro-Surinamese, Antilleans and newcomers from non-Western countries among other groups, the term ‘black’ is used extensively, not to describe skin colour but to identify various socially disadvantaged ethnic groups (see also Baumann 1996; Wermuth 2002). Young adults in the Netherlands do not use the term ‘black’ themselves (see also Wermuth 2002). They do, however, often describe AfroSurinamese, Antilleans and other dark-skinned people as ‘negroes’, a term that has in fact become taboo in public debate. Turks and Moroccans are referred to as ‘people with black hair’. Depending on the situation, ‘people with black hair’ may denote Moroccans or Turks or Moroccans and Turks. Black-haired native Dutch people and Surinamese, for example, are not categorised as people ‘with black hair’ (Boumans, Dibbits and Dorleijn, 2001: 121). On the Internet and possibly in the non-virtual world as well, the designation Murken (a contaminated term for Turks and Moroccans) appears alongside the lexicalised ‘people with black hair’. A different type of categorisation that figures prominently in the chat excerpts is based on perceptions of masculinity and femininity. This is understandable, considering that the different styles refer to different representations of masculinity and femininity: baggy streetwear symbolises a virility associated with manual labour and physical strength, the traditional style is based mainly on Islamic-religious views of manhood, whereas the tailored styles of the Italian labels are intended to be sexually seductive. Often this last style is associated with femininity rather than with masculinity (Entwistle 2000). The wearers themselves can change nothing about this, except, perhaps their style of dress. Baggy streetwear is one of the alternatives. Baggy Streetwear In addition to low-slung baggy trousers, wearers of baggy streetwear often appear in big, hooded jerseys and preferably caps and sneakers as well. Some versions of this attire include large gold or silver chains. The baggy streetwear style tends to figure prominently in images of ‘Moroccan problem youths’. A poster advertising a play about tensions in the Netherlands between Moroccan-Dutch youths and the police features an actor dressed as a Moroccan-Dutch problem youth in a typical hiphop outfit including a large hooded jersey and a green printed sports shirt.5 Various Moroccan-Dutch rap singers appear only in baggy streetwear. The best known is Ali B, who discovered rap music through the white Dutch band Osdorp Posse, which was one of the best-known hip-hop bands in the Netherlands for a long time.

5 htm.

The show premiered in early 2006. See: http://www.denieuwamsterdam.nl/frameset.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

Figure 2.1

17

Moroccan-Dutch boy (16) from the neighbourhood Amsterdam East

The boy is wearing a New Era cap, a Replay lammy coat, Japan Rags trousers and Timberland shoes. The New Era cap and lammy coat in particular are regarded as typical hip hop garments, 2007. Photo: Floor Kuiper

18

Reframing Dutch Culture

Although Ali B raps in Dutch, his lyrics are laced with Surinamese and Moroccan words (Mutsaers 2006). In the paragraphs below, we will explain that many young adults regard baggy streetwear as a ‘negro style’ and associate it mainly with Surinamese and Antilleans in the Dutch context. Incited by fast-paced raps about the mean streets in the ghettoes of New York, Afro-Surinamese youths were the first in the Netherlands to appropriate the baggy style compatible with rap music and hip-hop. While Afro-Surinamese who moved to the Netherlands at first focused explicitly on Suriname and Sranan Tongo, English-speaking Afro American culture became the main cultural frame of reference for the younger generation. ‘Being black’ was far more important to them; identifying with the mythical ‘super blacks’ was both a way of being ‘modern’ and a means of distinguishing themselves from the white Dutch population (Sansone 1992).6 In the course of the 1980s hip-hop and the corresponding styles of dress rapidly gained popularity among other groups of young adults, particularly because the leisure market and mass media embraced hip-hop culture, and because everything related to hip-hop became commercialised all over the world (Sansone 1992; Wermuth 2002). Hip-hop evolved from an explicitly Afro-American centred subculture into a broad youth culture, with huge commercial successes for white rap singers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem. Alongside a more political movement of Public Enemy and Black Nation of Islam adherents, a movement has emerged with a far broader appeal, in which black and white bon vivants sing about non-political themes, such as sex and fancy cars (Arnold 2001: 40-42). Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, hip-hop and everything associated with it has become part of a transnational, metropolitan, multi-ethnic youth culture, known as urban culture. Although this youth culture is definitely multi-ethnic, Surinamese and Antillean youths remain prominent on the hip-hop scene and the corresponding styles of dress in the Netherlands. Some brands are associated exclusively with Afro-Surinamese and Antilleans. This is the case, for example, for Karl Kani attire. In the Netherlands, this brand has a distinctive militant-black connotation since unrest between Karl Kani wearers and ultra-right wing Lonsdale wearers was covered at length in the Dutch press and instigated public debate about prohibiting certain fashion labels in public places.7 Might we argue that Moroccan-Dutch boys wear baggy streetwear because they identify with ‘black’ American streetwear wearers, or do they identify with ‘black’ 6 Transnational relations with Surinamese migrant communities in places such as Florida are likely to have guided the cultural orientation of the Dutch-Surinamese community toward the United States as well. 7 The Lonsdale label is now the counterpart to Karl Kani in the Netherlands and in various other West-European countries as well (see Kramer 2005). The brand has been popular among young adults with ultra-right wing sympathies for several years.The letters ‘nsda’ in the middle of the word Lonsdale greatly appeal to ultra-right wing youths. They regard it as a reference to Hitler’s NSDAP. In Germany youths switched to the Consdaple label after Lonsdale was prohibited. See http://www.lbr.nl/?node=3048.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

19

streetwear wearers in general? And do they regard the baggy style as inextricably linked to that group? Or are they trying to create and authenticate a new style uniquely their own? And how are Moroccan-Dutch boys in baggy streetwear regarded by their peers? As noted previously in my introduction, authenticity is not a given but a cultural construction realised through an authentication process. Thus, various definitions may determine what is to be considered authentic. Research on popularising hip-hop and the adoption of ‘black’ styles by ‘white’ native youths has already demonstrated that people wear baggy streetwear for various reasons, and that reactions to the wearers cover a similarly broad range (Wermuth 2002; Nayak 2003). Some care only whether the style is fashionable. Others associate the style with roughness and at most question whether the appearance does justice to this attribute. Still others identify explicitly with the black population in the United States. They consider the American ‘original’ to be the most authentic. These wearers may be regarded as ‘consummate connoisseurs’, although, like other non-black wearers of baggy streetwear, they risk being labelled as wannabes or wiggers (= white niggers). Many white wearers are aware of this and accept such designations as a sobriquet (Wermuth 2002; Nayak 2003). Little research has been conducted about the adoption of ‘black’ styles among groups of young adults that cannot be regarded as white or black or about the discourses of such groups. The theme has received consideration in the field of anthropo-linguistics, for example in the study by the anthropo-linguist Angela Reyes. Based on field research, Reyes describes how Asian Americans appropriate the slang of Afro-Americans and observes that while many Asian Americans become affiliated with Afro-Americans, they construct their own group identity as well: ‘... instead of passing as fluent AAVE [i.e. African American Vernacular English, HD] speakers or trying to “act black”, many Asian Americans use AAVE features to lay claim to participation in an urban youth style (...), much like most European Americans do’ (Reyes 2005: 511). In his study about Turkish hip-hop youths in Berlin, Kaya reaches a similar conclusion. He states more generally: ‘Hip-Hop is a youth culture that enables ethnic minority youths to use both their own “authentic” cultural capital and the global transcultural capital in constructing and articulating their identities’ (Kaya 2001: 165). The Turkish-German hip-hop youths that Kaya observed in his study share a general image of coolness with other hip-hop youths; a ‘serious’ and ‘masculine’ image, which, according to Kaya, capitalises on stereotypes that outsiders have about the attitudes of migrant youths: ‘By looking so [cool, HD], the youngsters are [...] challenging, at a symbolic level, the stereotypes of the outsiders about their indifference to life [...]’ (Kaya: 170). In combining general, transnational style elements with their ‘own’ locally based style elements, they create a new version of their own. The same is likely to hold true for most Moroccan-Dutch boys who wear baggy streetwear. Their aim is not to appropriate an ‘authentic negro identity’ but to participate in and in some cases also to create a new youth style in response to

20

Reframing Dutch Culture

their surroundings by combining hip-hop elements with elements from other styles. This effort becomes clear when in addition to examining their choice of attire, we consider the versions of youth vernacular they use and cultivate deliberately. While these versions vary depending on the context, most are a medley of words from mainly Dutch, Sranan and Moroccan Arabic and Berber (e.g. Appel 1999, Bennis et al. 2001; Nortier 2001; Vermeij 2002). Moroccan Arabic or Berber is included here, we might argue, to authenticate the style. The general acceptance of this practice by their surroundings comes to the fore in conversations that Afro-Surinamese youths in Rotterdam had with a SurinameseDutch linguistics student about youth vernacular (Cornips 2004). In addition to youth vernacular, baggy streetwear is mentioned in these conversations. Dutch people who act ‘negrified’ are distinguished from other groups, such as Moroccans. The following is said about Dutch people: M: Some want to act negrified. Interviewer: How do you act negrified? M: I don’t know how they act, you can tell by the way they dress. I don’t know, but they’re like fake negroes. M: You can tell by the way they dress. W: Some wear Cango. The Cango brand is designed for Surinamese. M: You can also tell by the way they talk: you hear their accent change.8 Another Surinamese boy, part of the same group of friends, remarked about Dutch speakers of youth vernacular: R:

Dutch people who use it [i.e. a version of youth vernacular] think they are negroes. Interviewer: How do they act? R: They dress like negroes. Interviewer: Mention some styles of dress. R: Their trousers are slipping, and they wear lammy coats. Interviewer: What about their conduct? R: Their speech becomes coarser.9 8

9

‘M: Sommigen willen vernegerd doen. Interviewer: Hoe doe je dan vernegerd? M: Ik weet niet hoe ze doen, je ziet het dan ook hoe ze zich kleden. Ik weet niet, gewoon nepneger zo. M: Je ziet het aan hun kleding. W: Sommigen dragen Cango. Het merk Cango is voor Surinamers gemaakt. M: Je hoort het ook hoe ze praten, je hoort dat hun accent verandert.’ ‘R: Nederlanders die het [i.e. een jongerentaalvariëteit] gebruiken denken dat ze negers zijn. Interviewer: Hoe doen ze dan?

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

21

These boys obviously automatically regard native Dutch people as outsiders (see also Hewitt 1986). One of the boys in this group is not of Surinamese origin but is from Eritrea. The others accept his use of Surinamese words: ‘he’s a negro boy, we’ve known him for years.’ This might suggest that skin colour determines whether one is accepted. Reaching a similar conclusion, Cornips remarks about the speakers in the excerpt above that the youth vernacular spoken among this group serves not as a marker of multi-cultural or multi-ethnic identity but symbolises – as Cornips describes it – a ‘negro identity’ (Cornips 2004). Regarding Moroccans and Turks who use youth vernacular, however, the interviewees said: ‘them is flex’, and: ‘they are brilliant at street vernacular’. In virtually the same words, a third person from this group of friends answers affirmatively when the interviewer asks him whether he speaks ‘street vernacular’ with Moroccans as well as with the Surinamese and Antilleans he already mentioned: ‘yeah, Mokros [Moroccans] are brilliant at it’ (Cornips 2004). This reveals how a vernacular used by a group that because of the skin colour of its members is not automatically regarded as pertaining to the in-crowd is acknowledged as ‘genuine’ or in effect authenticated. These boys thus regard Moroccans and Turks as linguistically convincing. Since language and attire are inextricably associated with one another in the circle of these boys, this assessment presumably covers the rest of their presentation as well, especially their style of dress. Their attire is less likely to be considered ‘fake’; their vernacular acknowledged as ‘authentic’ enhances the credibility of their style of dress. The question remains however, regarding the extent to which Surinamese boys, during the phase of the conversation about Turks and Moroccans, continue to regard vernacular as a marker of a ‘negro’ identity. At the moment the interviewer started discussing Moroccans and Turks, could they have subconsciously altered their frame of reference, shifting street vernacular from a marker of ‘negro identity’ to street vernacular as a marker of multi-ethnic identity? At any rate, the three Afro-Surinamese quoted above clearly feel differently about white, native-Dutch youths than they do about Moroccan-Dutch youths. Considering the attitude in terms of exclusion and inclusion, we might argue that the Moroccan-Dutch youths are included. Presumably, the Surinamese boys regard them not as negroes but nevertheless as ‘one of them’. And this is probably exactly as some Moroccan-Dutch boys intended. Youths who wish to distinguish themselves from this group but would nevertheless like to position themselves as trendsetters may wear Italian labels as an alternative. In the section below I will demonstrate that Moroccan-Dutch youths who choose to

R: Interviewer: R: Interviewer: R:

Ze dragen kleding die negers dragen. Geef eens voorbeelden van bepaalde kleding. Hun broek is dan afgezakt en ze dragen lammycoats En gedrag? Ze gaan dan grover praten.’

22

Reframing Dutch Culture

wear this style, however, encounter another group with which most would prefer not to be associated: homosexuals. Italian Labels Italian brand-name clothes are very popular among both men and women all over the world.10 Many associate these brands primarily with social and economic prestige. This is understandable; clothes from leading Italian brands such as Prada and Armani look very distinguished and tend to be expensive. In the Netherlands many different groups wear such clothes, but the young Moroccan and Turkish-Dutch wearers are talked about the most. Some chatters believe that they never appear in baggy streetwear and dress exclusively in Italian brand-name clothes. This view surfaces in the dialogue below, which has figured on a chat site called FOK! since January 2005.11 The following excerpt reveals not only how different groups are attributed their own style of dress, but also how concepts are defined and redefined whenever necessary in youth vernacular. The discussion in this case is about the term ‘Murk’, which the first speaker uses as a designation for Turks and Moroccans: Hugster (15.23): ‘Murks don’t wear urbanwear.’ Youp (15.28): ‘Don’t they? Take a look over here if you’re a tough wigger or a tough murk, you wear pyjamas…’ Hugster (15.39): ‘Murks here wear Boss, Versace, Armani and D&G, sometimes fake and sometimes real.12 Antilleans and others from [the Caribbean] islands wear Urban Wear.’ Youp (15.45): ‘They are also murks to me.’ Hugster (15.57): ‘Murks are really Moroccans and Turks, of which Turks are the best of the bunch, some are really cool.’13

10 A recent online consumer survey conducted by ACNielsen among 45.000 consumers in 42 countries in Europe, Asia, the United Arab Emirates and North and Latin America identified Armani, Gucci and Versace as the most popular brands in the world. See http:// www.fashionunited.nl/nieuws/armani.htm. Downloaded on 5 March 2006. 11 Forum.fok.nl/topic/660949/11/25 (downloaded on 10 February 2005). 12 Hugo Boss, like the Valentino brand, is part of the Italian Marzotto Group. 13 Hugster (15.23): ‘Murken lopen niet in urbanwear.’ Youp (15.28): ‘Oh nee? moet je eens hier komen kijken als je een stoere wigger bent of een stoere murk loop je in je pyjama rond...’ Hugster (15.39): ‘De murken lopen hier in Boss, Versace, Armani en D&G, nep danwel soms echt. In Urban Wear lopen hier Antillianen en ander volk wat van [Caraïbische] eilanden komt.’ Youp (15.45): ‘Dat zijn bij mij ook murken.’ Hugster (15.57): ‘Murken zijn toch echt Marrokanen en Turken, waarvan Turken het minst erg zijn, zitten soms echt toffe kerels bij.’

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

23

Hugster is very clear: Antilleans wear wide hip-hop clothing, Moroccans and Turks (‘Murks’) prefer tailored Italian brands. Additional research is necessary to identify exactly how the different groups of youths relate to the different styles. My impression at this time is that Turkish-Dutch boys are less inclined to wear baggy streetwear and prefer the tailored styles of Italian brands, while Moroccan-Dutch boys wear both styles. My impression appears to be confirmed by the twenty-year old student and MC14 Moa in a study by Nabben, Yesilgöz and Korf (2006). In his description of two networks of Moroccan-Dutch boys wearers of Italian brand-name clothes and wearers of baggy streetwear are easy to distinguish. Moa refers to them as slickers and ghetto dudes, respectively. The slickers, according to this Moa, are active participants in Dutch society and attend school or have jobs. He explains: ‘the slick guys are the trendsetters within the Moroccan community, because they have made it in Dutch society. Ghetto dudes are jealous and call them faggots, for being so slick’ (Nabben et al. 2006, 38). Later I will elaborate on the final sentence in the section quoted. First, I will consider in what measure young adults associate Italian brand-name styles with social prestige. This is certainly the case among some young adults, especially those who care about their career.15 Many youths, however, are less interested in exuding their social achievements than in other things. In metropolitan, multiethnic settings, in which these so-called ghetto youths manifest themselves, ethnic and gender connotations of Italian brand-name clothes prevail over social ones. Contrasted with the loose clothing associated with the black ghettoes in New York and with a masculinity that revolves around physical strength, the tailored Italian styles are associated with the Mediterranean and with a type of virility that is about seduction. This classical juxtaposition of styles is based on stereotypes that arose from the nineteenth century in Europe about Africans, Asians and people from Mediterranean countries; these stereotypes reflect all kinds of notions about race, virility, sexuality and physicality (Hoving 2005). ‘Dark men’, including men from Mediterranean countries, were qualified in various terms, such as wild, perverse, virile, stylish or refined.16 Several clothing items have now become known as ‘Moroccan’ among white, native Dutch young adults. Sociology student Leonie Hoebe (age 23), who conducts research on fashion and dabbles in fashion design as well, explains that several of her native Dutch friends have recently purchased ‘Moroccan shoes’:

14 A rapper at dance parties. 15 See the quotation from Guray in Boumans, Dibbits and Dorleijn 2001, p. 70: ‘See, a year or a year and a half ago, I was just, what do you call it, a freestyler, relaxed. I wore whatever I felt like wearing, pumps, sportswear. But now, because of school, or maybe also because I’m older, I dress less casually.’ 16 Examples relating to nightlife in the Netherlands appear in: Best, Blokker, Hoving and Pennings, 2005.

24

Figure 2.2

Reframing Dutch Culture

Moroccan-Dutch boy (16) from the neighbourhood Amsterdam East

He is dressed in Armani trousers and, as the label shows, an Armani coat. On his jersey the Lacoste label is visible. His shoes are from Replay. The bag in the boys’ right hand comes from Tip de Bruin, a renowned store in Amsterdam for designer brands such as Armani, Hugo Boss, Versace, Burberry and D&G, 2007. Photo Floor Kuiper.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

25

They proudly presented their new shoes and remarked: ‘See my new shoes! They are a bit like Moroccan shoes, but aren’t they lovely?’ Everybody can visualise Moroccan shoes: they look expensive and may be made of smooth, beige leather and have a tiny heel that makes noise at every step.17

The last addition to this passage highlights the importance of physicality aspects with this style, just as with hip-hop styles; styles of dress and physicality are impossible to disassociate from one another (Entwistle 2000; cf. Roodenburg 2004). The connotations associated with clothing are determined not only by the way that clothes model physical presentation. Labels and suggestions about the value of clothes are important as well. As far as the style discussed here is concerned, it also matters whether the brand-name clothes are genuine – and therefore valuable – or whether they are cheap imitations; the Moroccan word zehma (fake) is often used in this context in contemporary Dutch youth vernacular (Chorus 2006). The subtle qualifications in the brands discourse emerge clearly in a case study from 1999 about dress styles, music preferences, vernacular and night life among a multi-ethnic group of friends from Utrecht (Boumans et al. 2001). The group comprised four Moroccan and three Turkish boys, as well as a HindustaniSurinamese one. All eight boys cared about fashion and clothing brands to say the least. Most regarded fashion as a hobby to which they devoted a lot of time, and which they discussed at length with one another. Youth centre staff regarded the friends as fashion trendsetters. One of the staff at this centre identified a clear group style in the attire of the boys: I have noticed that they all have the same taste in clothes and choose the same fashions as well. They like sportswear and casual and dressy styles. They usually wear denim jackets, jeans, smart sneakers, fashionable shoes, caps. Always brand-name fashions. Adidas shoes, Diesel trousers, they all have a Levi’s denim jacket. They are regular … casual. Many of the other, somewhat younger boys who come here a lot are more interested in Armani styles. They wear those tight black trousers and shinier clothes. That’s different.’18

17 ‘Zij lieten dan trots hun nieuwe schoenen zien met als commentaar: ‘Kijk eens, ik heb nieuwe schoenen! Het zijn wel een beetje Marokkanen schoenen, maar ze zijn wel mooi hè?’ Iedereen weet wel wat je je moet voorstellen bij Marokkanen-schoenen. Het zijn duur uitziende schoenen van bijvoorbeeld glad, beige leer met een klein hakje, dat bij iedere stap geluid maakt.’ Interview by Dibbits, March 2005. 18 ‘Wat ik wel bij hun heb gemerkt, is dat ze allemaal dezelfde smaak hebben wat betreft kleding en ook dezelfde keuzes maken wat betreft kleding. Beetje sportief, beetje casual, gekleed. Meestal spijkerjasjes, spijkerbroeken, vlotte gympjes, vlotte schoentjes, petje op. Merkkleding, in ieder geval. Adidas-schoentjes, Diesel-broekjes, ze hebben allemaal een Levi’s spijkerjackje. Ze zijn gewoon.....casual. Veel van de andere, wat jongere jongens die hier vaak komen gaan meer naar de Armani-kant toe. Die dragen van die strakke zwarte broeken en meer glimmende kleding. Dat is weer anders.’

26

Reframing Dutch Culture

The boys differ from stereotype hip-hoppers, in that they despise tracksuits and large gold chains. Interviews with the boys themselves, however, reveal stylistic differences within the group as well. Moroccan-Dutch Badir stated explicitly: ‘I do not look for labels anymore. I just like clothes that look nice.’ Turkish-Dutch Mustafa favoured Diesel and Armani, whereas Moroccan-Dutch Rachid, who said that Armani styles ‘did not suit him’, preferred Diesel and Replay brands. He also liked more upscale brands, such as Donna Karan and Prada. Nike shoes and Australians ‘are out’, according to him. In early 2001, Rachid, who owns twenty pairs of shoes, said: ‘Puma is back in fashion. That brand has made a smashing comeback.’ This reveals that the changing status of specific brands makes for all kinds of sub-networks within a larger one. As for the group of friends mentioned in the case study above, in addition to their strong interest in clothes, the boys are all Islamic and are children of migrants. Several other multi-ethnic groups of friends also include non-Islamic, native Dutch boys. Tjibbe, age fifteen, a native Dutch secondary school student in Amsterdam, belongs to such a group. Tjibbe lives with his mother and her girlfriend in the centre of Amsterdam. He describes his school as eighty percent allochtoon (nonindigenous). His group of friends consists in part of somewhat older Moroccan-Dutch schoolmates, school dropouts and truants and in part of boys from the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood, an area where he has lived since primary school. In the course of the conversation the group proves to be a motley collection of Dutch people (known as tatas or cheeseheads), Antilleans, Africans, Turkish Dutch and Moroccan Dutch. Seated at his kitchen table at home, he describes how he recently switched from hiphop clothes to the more sophisticated and fashionable Italian style: I used to be a hiphopper, I wore Karl Kani and stuff, then a year ago I went back to wearing close-fitting trousers. Now I dress to impress girls. I just want to look stylish. When you reach a certain age, like fourteen, you know, you start to appreciate style. And you want a nice watch, a nice armband, a nice ring, like around two hundred euros. I spend three hundred euros on a pair of trousers. And these shoes [Pradas, HD] cost three hundred euros as well.19

According to Tjibbe, his desire to impress girls was an important factor in switching from one style to another. Since most hip-hop boys presumably aim to attract girls as well, we might wonder whether the rising prestige of Italian brand-name clothes could have led him to change his style of dress. He is basically switching from one type of ‘masculine’ style to another. 19 ‘Ik was eerst hiphopper, Karl Kani enzo droeg ik, maar ja, een jaar geleden begon ik weer strakke broeken te dragen. De kleding is nu gewoon meer om meisjes te versieren. Gewoon om er stijlvol uit te zien. Op een bepaalde leeftijd, bij veertien, begint dat, weet je, dat je gewoon stijl wil hebben. En dat je een mooi horloge wil, mooi armbandje, mooie ring, gewoon van tweehonderd euro ofzo. Ik koop ook een broek voor driehonderd euro. En deze schoenen [Prada’s, HD] ook, voor driehonderd euro.’ Interview with Tjibbe by Dibbits, 18 February 2005. Tjibbe is not his real name.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

27

Tjibbe was unable to answer which of his friends were the trendsetters in his group. He found the question odd: ‘it varies; sometimes one, sometimes someone else.’ In addition to his friends, he lists his sources of inspiration as Internet, shop windows and R&B clips on television. His casual remarks nonetheless suggest that Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch boys are high on the list in terms of Italian brand-name clothes. Tjibbe does not believe that Turks and Moroccans wear a variety of clothing styles the way Dutch youths do, comprising subcultures such as Gothics, skaters and Lonsdalers: ‘what matters most is to look well-groomed and stylish.’ While Tjibbe indicated in the section above how important brand-name clothes are to him, he explains that labels matter less to allochtonen: ‘brands such as Evisu and Prada are associated more with allochtonen, because they wear them more than Dutch people do, but it’s really all about appearing well-groomed.’ The imitation Armani shirts that some of them wear after purchasing them for ten euros in Turkey or Morocco do not tarnish their image. ‘Everybody can tell the clothes are fake,’ mentions Tjibbe, ‘but they do know how to dress.’ ‘They know how to dress’; this remark shows that he believes that Turkish and Moroccan boys have a natural or rather an authentic sense of style. This is the source of their prestige, at least within a certain circle. Gays On the site of the political party Nieuw Rechts [New Right], Sibrenjulius asserts that ‘increasing numbers are emulating Moroccan youths, they join their group and suddenly like the same music, wear the same clothes and even bugger about with us.’ This statement led a boy who went by the name of Bomberman to write on 25 April 2004: ‘A few months ago it became and still is a gay vogue. Purchasing Puma shoes, wearing effeminate hairstyles, keeping up with fashions. Good thing it’s starting to subside.’20 In this excerpt about the alleged influence of Moroccan-Dutch youths on nativeDutch youths the presentation style of Moroccan-Dutch youths clad in fitted Italian brand-name clothes is described as effeminate and inappropriate for heterosexual males. In the previous section we observed a similar stereotype in the excerpt quoted from Moa from the study by Nabben et al. (2006). This stereotyping is very current;

20 ‘...steeds meer mensen meelopen met Marokkaanse jongeren, ze sluiten [zich] bij hun groepje aan en houden opeens van dezelfde muziek, zelfde kleding en gaan mee kloten tegen ons.’ And: ‘Een paar maanden geleden en nu nog steeds is het een soort van homotrendy geworden. Puma schoentjes kopen, verwijfd kapsel dragen en met de mode meelopen. Gelukkig begint dit weer een beetje weg te trekken’ http://www.nieuwrechts.nl/forum/onderwerp/21/start/15/bekijk/7104.htm. (Downloaded on 10 October 2005.)

28

Reframing Dutch Culture

so current, in fact, that it figures on sitcoms as well.21 The association arises in part from the popularity of fitted, expensive Italian brand-name clothes among gays. The two groups cultivate common codes in both attire and physicality. Internet chat sessions reveal that the, according to some, effeminate aura of certain groups of fashion-conscious Moroccan-Dutch boys is a recurring subject of conversation within the Moroccan-Dutch community. On 4 November 2000, for example, Samira placed a notice on the Maroc.nl chat forum expressing disgust at the dress styles of Moroccan-Dutch boys and girls alike in the Netherlands.22 She wrote: Hi, I’m Samira and have a question for the kills [= chaps] here, why do I keep seeing more mokers [Moroccans, HD] who just look queer, I mean weird tight trousers with no space to breathe and a faggot hairstyle, maybe tattas [native Dutch people] get off on that, but, trust me, almost every moker chick thinks they look horrid!!! And you wonder why we go for negroes!! The guys of the guys, that’s why! I’m not lumping you all together, since 99% wears regular botticelli shoes and a fake Armani, too bad some mokers haven’t the foggiest idea of what original means, the same is true for lots of moker chicks, with those tiny heels, harem pants and little skirts over their trousers, well if your folks won’t let you wear short skirts… that’s what you do, right!! It looks so ugly to me, but tell me, I’m dying to know, ciao.23

This female chat room participant contrasts Moroccan-Dutch boys as ‘faggots’ with ‘negroes’, who in her view are the ‘guys of the guys’. Based on this excerpt we might infer that Moroccan-Dutch boys are competing against ‘negroes’, and that their competition relates to the two styles of dress.

21 See e.g. the Dutch sitcom Shouf Shouf! where a Dutch girl tells the Moroccan-Dutch Rachid: ‘you know what’s so awful? That I’m always attracted to gays!’ Rachid, who fancies the girl himself, is perplexed (Shouf Shouf! episode 5, 29 January 2006). 22 See also the question from Appies on the Moroccan-Dutch Mzine.nl site on 19 March 2003: ‘What image do Moroccans have in fashion etc.? In Den Bosch these youths are known as extremely stuck up and pompous and even pansies!’ (Downloaded on 20 December 2005.) 23 ‘He ik ben samira en ik heb effe wat te vragen aan de kills [=jongens] hier, waarom zie ik steeds meer mokers [=Marokkanen, HD] die gewoon een flikkerachtige uitstraling hebben, ik heb het dan over rare strakke broeken, waarin ze gewoon niet kunnen luchten en dan ook nog een flikkerkapsel, misschien kicken tatta’s [autochtone Nederlanders] daarop, maar ik zeg je bijna elk moker-chick vind dat gewoon kapot lelijk!!! en dan afvragen waarom we op negers vallen!! de mannen der mannen gewoon daarom! ik scheer jullie niet over 1 kam, want 99 % draagt gewoon botticelli schoenen en een neppe armani, ja helaas kennen sommige mokers het woord originaliteit niet, trouwens dit geldt ook voor vele moker-chicks, met die hakjes, pantalonbroekkie en die rokjes boven hun broekjes, jaaa als je thuis geen rokje mag dragen.. dan maar zo he!! damn wat vind ik dat lelijk, maar reageer maar, ik ben benieuwd, ciao.’ http://maroc.nl, downloaded on 18 November 2000. Thanks are due to Louis Boumans, who sent me this excerpt, as well as the next one.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

29

The severity of the contrasts will also depend on the context. Aficionados of Italian brand-name clothes differ in terms of the extent to which they cultivate the style. Attitudes toward a certain style may be age-related as well. Finally, changes in the fashion industry may transcend contrasts. In 2005, for example, Armani, which became known for tailored suits, introduced a line of wide baggy jeans. At any rate, the excerpt above unmistakably reveals competition between two style groups, with Moroccan-Dutch boys that prefer fitted Italian styles emerging as the losers in some circles; they are no longer regarded as real men in these circles. Anouar largely agrees with Samira but also mentions that he tailors his appearance to match the setting; he distinguishes his daytime look from his night-life appearance, where he deliberately wears ‘fitted styles’. Wallah Samira, you’re right, wallah they’re turning into queers … tfoee Bloody faggots dressed like streetwalkers. Tfoe I sometimes see them in town/alateef: First ) dressed like streetwalkers, that’s how I call it Second ) wearing streetwalker’s shoes Third ) faggot hairstyles. They make monkeys out of us. Take me: I’m a true Moroccan. Long hair, gold tooth, bomber jacket, g-star and regular shoes Those are the real Moroccans … iwa look, when I go out, I wear Also like those faggots … once every two months. Truly wallah [= I swear] … I look like a true Moroccan … I’m proud of it.24

The tone and content of this message makes readers wonder whether to take this chatter seriously. His description of what he regards as truly Moroccan (i.e. ‘long hair, gold tooth, bomber jacket, g-star and regular shoes’) may be ironic. The image certainly does not bring to mind a conventional Moroccan presentation style. If we take the rest of his response seriously, we may conclude that neither Samira nor Anouar regards fitted Italian brand-name clothes as authentic Moroccan attire. Both chat room participants regard the interest in this style as a new and recent 24 Wallah Samira je hebt gelijk, wallah ze worden flikkers....tfoee Kankermietjes met hun hoerekleding. Tfoe ik zie ze soms in de stad//alatief : Ten eerste ) met hoerekleding, zo noem ik dat Ten tweede ) met hoereschoenen Ten derde ) flikkerkapsle [sic]. Ze zetten ons voor schut. Neem voorbeeld van mij, ik ben een echte Marok[k]aan. Lang haar, goude tand, bomberjack, g-star en normale schoenen Dat zijn de echte Marok[k]aan..iwa kijk als ik uitga draag ik me ook zo als die flikkers..een keer in de twee maanden. Normaal wallah [=ik zweer het]...ik zie eruit als een echte Marok[k]aan...ben ik blij om.’ http://maroc.nl, downloaded on 18 November 2000.

30

Reframing Dutch Culture

phenomenon. Apparently, they sense a break with the past. Invoking history, another excerpt from the same website specifically identifies as ‘Moroccan’ a style dismissed as ‘demasculate’. These boys wear ‘high-water trousers’ with ‘stains all over, an earring, faggot blazers. They’re not real men. Ezhma modda [Awful fashion].’25 Abdenour responds: ‘we invented trousers up, so it is Moroccan.’ Men’s clothes that were not adopted from others but were conceived by Moroccans are truly Moroccan and cannot possibly be ‘demasculate’ is the message in both cases. History authenticates a style and thus makes it socially accepted. In the next section we will consider the possibilities that this idea offers. We will also see, however, that once again, the context determines the ultimate connotation. Traditional Style In addition to being associated frequently with homosexuals, aficionados of tailored Italian men’s fashions face the problem that these brands are popular all over the world, suggesting that their taste is common. This would not necessarily be a negative attribute, were it not that individuality and originality are highly esteemed in many countries in Western Europe. Chat room participant Samira quoted above, for example, accuses Moroccan-Dutch youths of not having ‘the foggiest idea of what original means.’ The case study of the group of friends in Utrecht’s Lombok neighbourhood offers several examples of how youths deal with these views. One of the ways is to play pranks with clothes; one of the boys, for example, went out wearing his jeans inside out. Another decided to do the same with his denim jacket. Especially MoroccanDutch Rachid seemed intent on doing ‘something special’ with his clothes. At the time of the study he attended the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Polytechnic for Fine Arts) in Utrecht. Inspired by the success of Aziz, a Dutch fashion designer of Moroccan heritage, he planned to enrol in a seminar on fashion: ‘I saw his work and realised that such things really are possible.’ He had no immediate plans, however, to highlight his Moroccan heritage in his clothing designs, except for one small proviso: But I could imagine doing it some day. A while ago I noticed a lot of youths wearing those Moroccan shirts. I mean one of those T-shirts in a jellaba style. That would be fun (Boumans et al., 2001: 65).26

Rachid mentioned ‘Moroccan shirts’, but his answer reveals that he is aware that this is not traditional Moroccan garb but a hybrid fashion combining Western and 25 http://forums.marokko.nl/showthread.php?t=3951. (Downloaded on 30 March 2005.) 26 ‘Maar ik kan me wel voorstellen dat ik dat ooit nog eens een keer doe. Een tijdje geleden zag je veel jongeren lopen in van die Marokkaanse shirtjes. Dat is zo’n T-shirt met het model van een djellaba. Zoiets is wel leuk.’

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

31

non-Western styles of dress. The conversation with Rachid took place around the start of a fashion trend featuring Moroccan, Oriental and Arabic overtones, and the shirts he mentions were probably part of this trend (Dibbits and El Kaka 2005). The major Italian fashion labels followed the trend as well. Gucci, for example featured Moroccan men’s tunics and jellabas for the summer of 2005.27 Rachid’s intention to produce similar designs in the future reflects recent fashion trends, in which fashion designers of non-Western heritage produce designs based on their ‘own’ culture. Some manifestations of this trend were recently featured and described in an exhibition catalogue about globalisation of fashion (Brand and Teunissen 2005). Some designers specialise in traditional garb with Western fashion highlights, while others design Western clothes and add non-Western elements. The practice seems limited to women’s fashions. At any rate, the exhibition catalogue mentioned contains photographs of and texts about women and women’s clothing, and nearly all the scarce scholarly research on this trend is focused on women’s fashions (Niessen, Leshkowich and Jones 2003). Examining the role of traditional wear in contemporary men’s fashions would nevertheless be interesting, especially attitudes among Moroccan-Dutch boys toward traditional Moroccan menswear or styles of dress that prevail in many Islamic countries. At this time, few Moroccan-Dutch boys wear such garb, except for strictly observant Muslims. Those that do, wear them at traditional celebrations or during performances. One is the rap singer Ali B, who is famous in the Netherlands and, although he wears urban outfits, performs regularly with a band in which some players dress in traditional jellabas. Jellabas are regarded neither as tough and masculine, like urban streetwear, nor as sexy and seductive, like tailored Italian brand-name clothes. Moroccan-Dutch boys wearing jellabas in everyday settings are automatically associated with radical-orthodox Islamic movements. This may be why the style is not very popular among Moroccan-Dutch boys. Orthodox Muslims take their style of dress very seriously and observe written rules that stipulate what is compulsory, recommended, prohibited (haraam) or reprehensible. The rules address physical aspects as well. Many Muslim scholars advise, for example, that Muslim men should grow beards to emphasise the difference between men and women and to distinguish themselves from the unbelievers. Islamic dress requirements may also guide self-presentation among more moderate Muslims, although not to the same extent as they do with orthodox Muslims. Islamic dress prescriptions also prohibit many Islamic youths of Moroccan-Dutch heritage from wearing gold jewellery. But while orthodox Muslims do not wear silver jewellery either because travesty and wearing clothing or accessories suggesting hubris are haraam, many youths outside orthodox circles wear silver chains and bracelets.28 27 See http://www.gaynews.nl/article04.php?sid=1096: ‘Gucci fashions for men have clearly taken root in Morocco, considering the ethnic tunics and jellabas richly decorated with small mirrors and beads. Seventies Berber chique.’ (Downloaded on 1 March 2006.) 28 A brief account of Islamic dress requirements and examples of the different practices among Islamic youths appear in: Boumans, Dibbits and Dorleijn 2001, pp. 72–74. There is a

32

Reframing Dutch Culture

Such accessories give the wearer prestige within the broader, metropolitan, multiethnic network of young adults, and this is the network with which most MoroccanDutch youths identify. Conclusion In this chapter I have focused on a group that is discussed frequently within Dutch society, i.e. Moroccan-Dutch boys. Positioning themselves among other youths, they appropriate styles of dress with varying significances. They attribute new meanings to the garments as well. Many youths are aware of this cultural innovation and dabble in it. In the course of this group interaction, which may turn into a competition, some Moroccan-Dutch youths wear baggy streetwear, while others prefer Italian brandname clothes. I believe that this range of choices arises from the current discourses about these styles among youths, including those on the Internet. Baggy streetwear is considered masculine and tough but – according to some – has the disadvantage of being known as a black style. While Moroccan-Dutch youths devise styles of their own, in part through youth vernaculars containing many words from Berber or Moroccan Arabic, they still risk being labelled as blacks or as wannabe blacks, rather than as Moroccan-Dutch youths. Fitted Italian styles are an alternative that may cultivate stereotypes that have existed since the nineteenth century about ‘Mediterranean males’. Concepts such as stylish and refined are central in these stereotypes. Moroccan-Dutch and TurkishDutch boys are regarded as authentic representatives of this style among youths in general: ‘they know how to dress’, as one of the interviewees said. Clad in fitted, stylish Italian brand-name clothes, however, men may be labelled as effeminate or gay. Wearers of Italian brand-name clothes are also reproached for being unoriginal. After all, the style is popular among many others all over the world. Traditional Moroccan styles of dress might be a viable alternative. Few MoroccanDutch boys regard this style as an option, though. It is certainly not fashionable at this time, for several possible reasons. One is that the most obvious garments – jellabas – are directly associated with radicalising Islamic youths. By identifying with this group, they make exceptions of themselves (at least in the present context) in a manner that compromises the prestige that Moroccan-Dutch youths have in metropolitan, multi-ethnic youth culture. The metropolitan element of their identity then becomes subordinate to their religious identity. At that moment, the opposite is more likely to be true for most Moroccan-Dutch boys: religious identity has virtually no part whatsoever in their external appearance. Their decision to wear baggy streetwear and Italian brand-name clothes seems more instrumental in whether

reference to Qardawi 1993.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

33

they construct a metropolitan or a Mediterranean identity than in constructing a ‘Moroccan’ identity. Given the changes in the world of fashion designers, Moroccan-Dutch boys may in the near future become increasingly interested in traditional ‘Moroccan’ garments made fashionable, for example through different tailoring or the addition of stylish Western highlights. This trend is perceptible in women’s fashions and is also compatible with the authentication process I have described in this chapter. In this process, Moroccan-Dutch boys use their specific Moroccan background to personalise their performance or authenticate their style. They do so primarily through language, although physical aspects may come into play as well. Research on the meanings attributed to styles of dress among young adults should not be limited to the clothes but should also take into consideration the exact relationship between clothes, physicality and vernacular. References Appel, René (1999), Straattaal. De mengtaal van jongeren in Amsterdam, in: Thema’s en trends in de sociolinguïstiek 3. Toegepaste taalwetenschap in artikelen 62, 38–55. Arnold, Rebecca (2001), Fashion, Desire and Anxiety. Image and morality in the 20th century. New York: I.B. Tauris & Cold Ltd. Authenticity (2004), [special issue] Etnofoor, 17(1/2), 1–242. Baumann, Gerd (1996), Contesting Culture. Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bendix, Regina (1997). In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bennis, Hans et al. (eds) (2002), Een buurt in beweging. Talen en Culturen in het Utrechtse Lombok en Transvaal. Amsterdam: Aksant. Best, Simone, Nienke Blokker, Isabel Hoving and Lucie Pennings (2005), Sexy. Interetnisch flirten van 1960 tot nu: de coaches en de concurrenten, in Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover (eds), Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950–2000. Cultuur en Migratie in Nederland V. Den Haag: Sdu, 165–196. Boumans, Louis, Hester Dibbits and Margreet Dorleijn (2001), Jongens uit de Buurt. Een ontmoeting met Güray, Naraen, Hasan, Youssef, Mustafa, Azzadine, Badir en Rachid. Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG. Bourdieu, Pierre (1979), La distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit. Brand, Jan and José Teunissen (2005), Global Fashion / Local Tradition. Over de globalisering van de mode. Warnsveld: Terra. Bucholtz, Mary (2003), Sociolinguistic Nostalgia and the Authentication of Identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7, 398–416. Chorus, Jutta (2006), Klik, klik, scooter toto. Jongeren spreken hun eigen Nederlands

34

Reframing Dutch Culture

op straat. NRC Handelsblad (28 and 29 January), 35. Cornips, Leonie (2004), Straattaal: Sociale betekenis en morfo-syntactische verschijnselen, in Johan de Caluwe et al. (eds), Taeldeman, man van de taal, schatbewaarder van de taal. Gent: Academia Press, 175–188. Crane, Diana (2000), Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago/London: Chicago Press. Dibbits, Hester and Imad el Kaka (2005), Hoe de vetkuif in Nederland kwam, in Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover (eds), Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950-2000. Cultuur en Migratie in Nederland V. Den Haag: Sdu, 27–58. Eckert, Penelope and John R. Rickford (eds) (2001), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope (2003), The Meaning of Style. On-line article: http://www.stanford. edu/~eckert/PDF/salsa2003.pdf. Entwistle, Joanne (2000), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Londen/New York: Methuen. Hewitt, Roger L. (1986), White Talk Black Talk: Inter-racial Friendship and Communication amongst Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoving, Isabel (2005), Inleiding, in Paul van Gelder, De Wallen. Vriendjes en pooiers, wakaman en loverboys; nieuwe vormen van pooierschap, in Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover (eds), Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950–2000. Cultuur en Migratie in Nederland V. Den Haag: Sdu, 273–277. Kaya, Ayan (2001), ‘Sicher in Kreuzberg’. Constructing Diasporas: Turkish HipHop Youth in Berlin. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Kramer, F. (2005), Ik ben het beu voor racist te worden uitgemaakt. Algemeen Dagblad (14 November). Lucassen, Leo (2005), Een kort overzicht van de immigratie naar Nederland in de twintigste eeuw, in Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover (eds), Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950–2000. Cultuur en Migratie in Nederland V. Den Haag: Sdu, 415–428. Mutsaers, Lutgard (1989), Rockin’ Ramona. ’n Gekleurde kijk op de bakermat van de Nederpop. Den Haag: Sdu. Mutsaers, Lutgard (2006), De doorbraak van de Marokkaans-Nederlandse hiphop, in Louis Peter Grijp (ed.), Een muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Een vervolg, 2000–2005. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 954–959. Nabben, Ton, Birfin Yesilgöz, Dirk J. Korf (2006), Van Allah tot Prada. Identiteit, leefstijl en geloofsbeleving van jonge Marokkanen en Turken. Utrecht: Forum, Instituut voor Multiculturele Ontwikkeling. Nayak, Anoop (2003), Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Oxford: Berg. Niessen, Sandra, Ann Marie Leshkowich and Carla Jones (2003), Re-oriënting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. Oxford/New York: Berg.

Moroccan Dutch Boys and the Authentication of Clothing Styles

35

Nortier, Jacomine (2001), Murks en straattaal. Vriendschap en taalgebruik onder jongeren. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Nortier, Jacomine, Femke Conradie and Hester Dibbits (2005), Leuk. De gasten die het Nederlands veranderen, in Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover (eds), Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950-2000. Cultuur en Migratie in Nederland V. Den Haag: Sdu, 59–76. Nortier, Jacomine and Margreet Dorleijn (2006), ‘Het is een grappige accent, weet je.’ Het opvallende prestige van de Marokkaanse tongval. Taal en Tongval 75(2/3), 47–49. Penninx, Rinus, Henk Münstermann and Han Entzinger (1998), Etnische minderheden en de multiculturele samenleving. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Pichotte, J. and H. Goudappel (2004), ‘Wat me goed staat, dat koop ik gewoon.’ Scholieren besteden véél geld aan kleding. Contrast 10, 30–32. Polhemus, Ted (1994), Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. Londen: Thames and Hudson. Polhemus, Ted (1996), Stylesurfing: What to Wear in the 3rd Millennium. Londen: Thames and Hudson. Qaradawi, Yusuf (1993), Halal en haram, Vol. 1. Delft: Noer al ‘ilm. Raatgever, Stefan (2003), De Marokkaan is een merkenjunk. Algemeen Dagblad (24 November). Reyes, Angela (2005), Appropration of African American Slang by Asian American Youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4), 509–532. Roodenburg, Herman (2004), Pierre Bourdieu: Issues of Embodiment and Authenticity. Etnofoor 17(1/2), 215–226. Rubinstein, Ruth P. (2001), Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture. Boulder/Oxford: Westview Press. Sansone, Livio (1992), Schitteren in de schaduw. Overlevingsstrategieën, subcultuur en etniciteit van Creoolse jongeren uit de lagere klasse in Amsterdam 1981–1990. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Teunissen, José (2005), Global Fashion / Local Tradition. Over de globalisering van mode, in J. Brand and J. Teunissen (eds), Global Fashion / Local Tradition. Over de globalisering van mode. Warnsveld: Terra-Lannoo, 8–23. Vermeij, Lotte (2002), De sociale betekenis van straattaal: interetnisch taalgebruik onder scholieren in Nederland. Pedagogiek 22, 260–273. Wermuth, Mirjam (2002), No Sell Out. De popularisering van een subcultuur. Amsterdam: Aksant.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity Rob van Ginkel

Introduction Many anthropologists and ethnologists agree that there is a close connection between the celebration of festivals and processes of identity formation.1 Festivals seem to be excellent vehicles for the manifestation, enactment, affirmation and articulation of identities because they are expressive, integrative, relational, interactive, communicative, distinctive and dynamic. They are expressive in that they convey and are a charter for a collective sense of self; they are integrative in that they can reinforce the social cohesion and the sense of belonging of their participants; they are relational in that celebrations entail the inclusion of insiders and the exclusion of outsiders; they are interactive in that there is interaction between performers and an audience; they are communicative in that they contain meaning and moral messages; they are distinctive in that they mark symbolic boundaries and aspects of otherness; and they are dynamic in that they can be charged with new meanings and their form and content can change. Festivals are public, clearly marked off from daily life, and practised through a combination of participation and performance (Gradén 2003: 10). Such cultural acts therefore lend themselves par excellence to the identity formation and identity politics of, for example, ethnic groups and at national, regional and local levels. As anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain remarks: ‘One of the most traditional and effective ways to stress the identity of a group is to celebrate a fête or ritual together. In doing so, one can feel “at home” among each other. One creates a “face” vis-à-vis other groups. The celebration of festivals is not only a reflection of one’s own identity; it is at the same time a model for the manifestation of an identity’ (1983: 12).

Thus, festivals show participants who belong to the ‘we’ group and outsiders who constitute this ‘we’ group. They provide ‘anchorage in a rapidly changing world, an incontrovertible identity’ (Boissevain 1991a: 5). 1 See, for instance, Esman 1982; Boissevain 1983, 1991a, 1991b; Cohen 1985; Badone 1987; Errington 1987; Magliocco 1993, 2001; Santino 1994; Brandes 1998; Guss 2000; Gygli 2001; Mitchell 2001; Gradén 2003; Stacul 2003.

38

Reframing Dutch Culture

Although anthropologists have repeatedly demonstrated the integrative functions of rituals, festivals and feasts, less attention has been devoted to the fact that fêtes can also be ‘an arena for the symbolic naturalisation, mystification, and contestation of authority’ (Dietler 2001: 71). In other words, such festive events link people into a variety of relationships and are latently or manifestly important in ‘creating, defining, and transforming structures of power’ (Dietler 2001: 70). They can both legitimise and confirm established social order (Gradén 2003: 10) and challenge it. Folk festivals are arenas of social action that do not just reflect social change, but can also be conducive to transformative processes. They often express and mediate social issues and conflicts. Through such celebrations, participants are able to articulate certain beliefs, values, tastes and power relations in an encounter with themselves, onlookers and the powers-that-be (Dietler and Hayden 2001: 16-17). Consequently, it is important to study festivals and identity formation from a diachronic perspective. It is, as the Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren stresses, the ‘dynamic and dialectical approach to identity management that is important’ (1989: 9). This chapter describes and analyses the development of the Ouwe Sunderklaas (Old Sunderklaas) festival on the Dutch island of Texel.2 The Sunderklaas celebration, which is celebrated on 12 December, takes pride of place on Texel’s festive calendar. It is a cultural enactment in which the islanders articulate and communicate by means of festival and display what they feel is genuinely Texelian. Through its performance they show a sense of belonging in time and space, and it is one of the ways in which they ‘make place’. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, the Sunderklaas celebration has undergone remarkable changes in form, content and meaning. These transformations can be understood only in the context of the islanders’ changing self-awareness and notions of identity, which in turn must be viewed against the background of developments in the wider society and their consequences for the lives of the islanders. The transformations in the Ouwe Sunderklaas celebration not only reflect the response of Texelians to what happened in the world without; they have also contributed to a growing self-consciousness and assertion of local identity. In other words, the islanders simultaneously derive meaning from and give meaning to the Sunderklaas festival through their cultural performances. More generally, ‘festival explores and experiments with meaning, in contrast to ritual, which attempts to control it’ (Stoeltje 1992: 262). The Sunderklaas festival is an important means of articulating Texel as a special place – a local ‘world apart’, similar to yet different from the rest of the Netherlands. The Sunderklaas celebration is one of several ways in which the islanders express their localism, a feeling that can be captured in one phrase: Texelians belong to Texel, and Texel belongs to Texelians. Anthropologist Jane Nadel-Klein states that localism refers to ‘the representation of group identity as defined primarily by a sense of commitment to a particular place 2 The chapter is based on folkloristic literature, reports in the local newspaper (Texelse Courant, published since 1887), interviews with Texelians, and my own observations during the Ouwe Sunderklaas celebrations of 1989, 1990 and 2005 while I was doing anthropological fieldwork.

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

39

and to a set of cultural practices that are self-consciously articulated and to some degree separated and directed away from the surrounding social world’ (1991: 502; see also Nadel-Klein 2003: 95). I subscribe to this definition. I prefer the concept of ‘articulation’ above the perhaps more usual notion of ‘construction’ of identity, because the latter seems to imply that people lend meaning to their identity in strictly intentional ways. This, however, is only partly true: identity formation is also the result of unintentional behaviour and thought. Identities are made and remade, but not necessarily knowingly and willingly. Thus, people usually celebrate festivals not with the explicit intent to construct their identity, but for other reasons. Yet, they can become important referents of identity. Moreover, the concept of construction could easily bring to mind the idea that people work with cultural ‘building blocks’, chosen more or less at will, to create identity. Appealing though this idea of bricolage may be, it obfuscates the fact that identities cannot be created wilfully. What is important is that identity can change, that it is a relational concept both socially and temporally: it refers to the process of becoming conscious of ‘others’ and ‘self’. As such, it is part and parcel of historical transformations in the wider society. Localism, national culture formation and globalisation are thus complementary rather than opposing trends. However, the degree to which local identity is either stressed or de-emphasised may vary in particular situations and contexts (see e.g. Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Featherstone 1990; Cohen 1982, 1985, 1987; Sandsdalen 1988; Herzfeld 2003). The way in which the Sunderklaas festival has been celebrated over the past century casts a clear light on the islanders’ changing awareness and assertion of identity, particularly in dialectic with national developments such as growing economic, social and cultural integration. Texel – ‘The Golden Knoll’ Texel is the southern- and westernmost of the Frisian Islands, a chain of islands stretching along the Wadden coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. It is situated some ninety kilometres north of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. The island is approximately twenty-five kilometres long and, on average, eight kilometres wide. Of its roughly 160 square kilometres, nearly a third was reclaimed from the sea during the nineteenth century. Its core consists of boulder clay and wind-borne sand deposits from the Pleistocene age. Sand dunes protect the island from the North Sea on its western side, while dykes protect it on the eastern side from the Wadden Sea, a shallow coastal sea consisting of channels and gullies, sandbars, mudflats and salt marshes. The variation in landscape is such that Texel is often dubbed ‘the Netherlands writ small’. The island is separated from the mainland by the Marsdiep, a three-kilometrewide sound. A frequent ferry service, provided by two modern double-decked roll-on, roll-off vessels, connects the island with the mainland. The boat trip from Den Helder to the southern tip of Texel takes just twenty minutes. Today, Texel has approximately 13,750 inhabitants, who fondly refer to their island as Het Gouden Boltje (The Golden Knoll). There are seven villages, the largest of

40

Reframing Dutch Culture

which is Den Burg (some 6900 inhabitants), the smallest De Waal (400 inhabitants). The other villages are Oosterend (1400), Oudeschild (1275), De Cocksdorp (1250), De Koog (1220) and Den Hoorn (965). The remainder of the population live in hamlets or in the countryside. There are no recent statistics concerning religious denominations, but my rough estimate is that over forty per cent of the islanders are without a religious affiliation. Roman Catholics and Protestants comprise the largest congregations (representing thirty and twenty per cent, respectively, of the island’s population); various branches of orthodox Calvinists and Baptists make up the remaining several per cent. Agriculture and fisheries have long been important sectors of the local economy. Half of Texel’s land area is used for agriculture, which has a gross annual turnover of €55 million. The fisheries have a turnover of €32 million. There has never been any large-scale industry on the island. Since the Second World War, tourism has assumed enormous proportions and now dominates the island’s economy: the gross annual turnover of tourism is €90 million. At the height of the tourist season there are some four holidaymakers for every islander. Sandy beaches and the island’s nature and culture attract many tourists from the mainland, mostly from Germany and the Netherlands. The villages on the North Sea coast (Den Hoorn, De Koog and De Cocksdorp) are especially popular. They have geared themselves to the tourist industry by providing a host of such facilities as campsites, bungalow parks, hotels, bars and restaurants. Currently, tourism employs some twenty-five per cent of the population directly, but the indirect impact and dependency on tourism are much higher, amounting to no less than seventy-five per cent (Van der Duim and Lengkeek 2004: 264). The island is a municipality and, on the face of it, Texel seems to be not only a geographical and administrative unity, but also a socioculturally homogeneous one, a place where all inhabitants reckon themselves to be members of a ‘we group’ vis-à-vis a generalised ‘they group’, to wit overkanters (‘other-siders’), as Texelians call them. The term overkanter is interesting in itself. It evidences a Texel-centric world view: from the perspective of mainlanders, Texel’s location is eccentric and on the other side of the Marsdiep. However, the idea that Texel constitutes a homogeneous sociocultural unity is a myth carefully maintained vis-à-vis outsiders. Relative to ‘other-siders’ Texelians see themselves as a unity, but within the island society a plethora of social and symbolic boundaries are drawn. The distinction between ‘genuine Texelians’, ‘Texelians’ and ‘import’ is an important one – at least to the first category. The ‘import’ category consists of newcomers who have settled on the island fairly recently. ‘Texelians’ are those who were born on the island and have been bred there, but whose parents or grandparents were not born there. ‘Genuine Texelians’ are those who pride themselves on having many generations of ancestors who lived on the island.3 3 This is not a uniquely Texelian phenomenon. Strathern writes with regard to the English village of Elmdon: ‘Out of the amorphous and generalising image that “villagers” are all related, there is a precise equation between being a “real” villager and being a birth member of one of the “old” Elmdon families’ (1981: 5). See also Nadel-Klein (1991: 506) for an example with regard to the Scottish village of Ferryden.

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

41

The notion of ‘genuine Texelian’ could only develop because there has been considerable immigration to the island. It is a relational concept that presupposes differentiated social knowledge of who can be ascribed to which category. The term ‘genuine Texelian’ appears to refer to roots in blood and soil. It also has a symbolic value, because those who count themselves as such take pride in it and feel that they belong to an in-group, which gives them the opportunity to distinguish themselves from others. In addition to the differentiation between ‘genuine Texelians’, ‘Texelians’ and ‘import’, the members of the first two categories distinguish categories among the inhabitants of the villages. They say that each village has its own character and that the mentality of the inhabitants of the respective villages differs markedly. Of course, there are several other domains of distinction, for instance based on residence in a neighbourhood, religious affiliation, occupation, age, gender, and so on. The consciousness and the articulation of local identity gained real momentum after the Second World War, when tourism increased and hundreds of ‘other-siders’ immigrated to the island. Many elderly people told me that so much ‘import’ has settled in their village, that these days they hardly recognise anyone. In the past, they knew their fellow villagers quite well, and they miss the days when they could count on solidarity and neighbourliness. Although such stories are not devoid of exaggeration, many newcomers have established themselves in the villages during the past few decades. Especially (but certainly not exclusively) the older islanders experience this as a loss of community and regard the newcomers as intruders in their insular world. They often express a nostalgic longing for a ‘better past’. But it is not just nostalgia that is indicative of a strong sense of localness. It is evident in local politics, too: a local political party – Texels Belang (Texel’s Interest) – has won every municipal election since 1966. In the past two decades, it gained between twenty-five and thirty-seven per cent of the vote. Local interests are central to the party programme. Its vision of Texel’s future clearly emphasises this localism: ‘In these times of levelling and globalisation, there is a need for a characteristic Texel singularity, which requires that Texel remain recognisable yet not turn into a museum.’4 The islanders, especially those from old Texel lineages, are quite proud of their island and ‘genuine’ Texel products,5 while the green and black island flag is flown in many places. Another source of local pride is the island’s ferry company – TESO or Texels Eigen Stoomboot Onderneming (Texel’s Own Steamship Enterprise) – the vast majority of whose shareholders are Texelians. The islanders’ most important public celebration (Ouwe Sunderklaas) is, as we shall see, also expressive of their localism.

4 http://www.texelsbelang.nl/inhoud/programma.php, accessed 14 July 2005. 5 Meanwhile, there is a whole range of such ‘authentic’ products, including duvets made of ‘Texelaar’ sheep-wool, cheese, various brands of liquor, beer, soft drinks, bread, soap, honey and so on. There even is an organisation, Echt Texels Produkt (‘Genuine Texel Product’), that represents the interests of local producers.

42

Reframing Dutch Culture

Ouwe and Nieuwe Sunderklaas The most important day of the year for many Texelians is undoubtedly 12 December, which is when they celebrate a festival called Ouwe Sunderklaas. Each of the island’s seven villages maintains its own Sunderklaas celebration. A fairly large number of villagers figure as ‘Sunderklazen’; they disguise themselves and wear masks. Garbed in their curious attires, they process through the village streets enacting performances, or speulen (plays). That is, they perform sketches, sing songs, and display or recite rhymes and other texts relating to Texel or village events of the past year in an original way. The ‘players’ may perform individually, in pairs or in larger groups. Children perform in the afternoon, adults in the evening. Many of the Texelians who do not participate as players join the crowd of onlookers, where they comment on the quality and originality of the performances and try to identify the Sunderklaas mummers. The festivities may last into the early hours of the morning, especially in the island’s main village of Den Burg. Hundreds of masked and disguised islanders walk a fixed route through the village’s centre. Often, the larger tableaux vivants meet with much appreciation, although particularly original individual and duo acts can also count on applause. A jury keeps score of the quality of the play-acting. Following the performances, most players and onlookers visit the cafés, and soon a carnivalesque atmosphere dominates the scene. Late in the evening the prize-winning participants are announced in local hotels or village social centres; the same will have been done in the afternoon for the youth. Old Sunderklaas is the yearly highlight in the celebration of calendar feasts and rituals on the island. Scores of Texelians who have migrated to the mainland return to the island to take part, and the following day the local newspaper devotes to the event several pages richly illustrated with photographs. Until about 1955, there was also a Nieuwe (New) Sunderklaas festival, held on 5 December. It too revolved around a masquerade and a procession through the villages, and was basically the same in form and content as old Sunderklaas. In the afternoon, the disguised youngsters walked through the streets singing, shouting and blowing horns. They were dressed up as Pierrots, clowns, cowboys, Indians, old men or women, and so forth. There were recurring figures, such as ‘charivarians’, bear-leaders, barbers and chimney sweeps. At dusk, grown-ups in their symbolic role of streetfegers (street sweepers) appeared and chased the youth from the streets. These street sweepers were wrapped up in a gunnysack, carried a broom and clanked tremendously with chains. Once the youngsters had fled, the masked Sunderklazen made their appearance and went from house to house. Many doors were left open so that the Sunderklazen – operating alone, in pairs or in groups – could access the houses, where they were treated to delicacies and hot chocolate or alcoholic beverages. Obviously, they disguised themselves in order to be unrecognisable to the observers – often neighbours, friends and relatives – who had to guess their identity. To remain incognito, the Sunderklazen also distorted their voices. The masquerade per se constituted the core of the event and people from all walks of life participated in it. The performances were often combined with collecting money for charity (e.g. funds for widows and orphans). Late at night,

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

43

the players went to one of the pubs where a band played dance music. The celebration lasted until around midnight and was sometimes followed by a démasqué (bekend maken, or revelation), although many preferred to remain incognito.6 Little is known about the origin of either the New or the Old Sunderklaas festival. Nor is it clear why the adjectives ‘old’ and ‘new’ were used. Folklorists point to the family resemblance to similar celebrations elsewhere in the Netherlands and Europe, and establish a connection with the midwinter solstice and pagan fertility rites. They hold the view that these fêtes are relics of pre-Christian times (e.g. Van der Ven 1923, 1928). I will not go into these speculative arguments, which seem to originate in romantic nationalism rather than sound empirical evidence. Suffice it here to say that the earliest mention of Sunderklaas dates back to 1816. Nor will I deal with the function and meaning of noise and certain recurrent figures.7 With respect to my argument, it is important to deal only with the changes in form and content of the Old and the New Sunderklaas celebration since the early decades of the twentieth century, and with how these transformations came about and must be understood. In the 1920s, a new trend gradually emerged: themes relating to international, national or Texel events of the past year were enacted in playful performances, whereas previously this had not been the case. For example, in 1926 many islanders discussed the introduction of electricity. Several players paid attention to this matter, some of them critically, in the Ouwe Sunderklaas celebration of that year. For instance, someone carried a text reading ‘The people propose, but the councillors dispose’ (Het volk wikt, maar de raad beschikt). Apparently, not everyone was pleased with the novelty. The mayor was not amused by such criticism and threatened to prohibit future Sunderklaas masquerades. Although local themes would henceforth crop up in the Sunderklaas celebrations, the majority of performances remained limited to the masquerade per se. Another trend was that the ‘street sweepers’ and other traditional figures – like the bear-leader, the chimney sweep and the barber – gradually disappeared from the scene. In addition, collecting money for charity became outdated as a result of the rise of the welfare state. During the inter-war period, the desire to participate in the Sunderklaas festivals declined strongly. Especially the New Sunderklaas celebration was neglected. It survived longest in the main town of Den Burg. However, fewer and fewer people 6 Similar celebrations took and take place on the other Dutch Wadden Islands (Vlieland, Terschelling, Ameland and Schiermonnikoog) on 4, 5 and 6 December. They include the aspects of masquerade, procession, specific characters, noise and revelation (see Van der Ven [1923]; Oskam [1986] and Vlaming and Witte [1980]). For a description of the Ameland version, dubbed Sunneklaas, see Verplanke (1977), Bus (1985) and De Jong (2004). On the Texel Sunderklaas festival, see also Dekker (1864) and Van der Vlis (1949: 215–219, 1977: 477–478). 7 On these aspects, see Van der Ven (1923, 1928). The folklorist Van der Ven has paid attention to the celebration of Sunderklaas on Texel and other Wadden Islands. His documentary, entitled Zuiderzeefilm, includes images of Texel’s Ouwe Sunderklaas festival of 12 December 1927. Though in a brochure accompanying this film Van der Ven claims that they are factual, commentators say that they were staged (see Van der Vlis 1949: 218; Texelse Courant, 14 December 1927).

44

Figure 3.1

Reframing Dutch Culture

The New Sunderklaas celebration as performed by Texel youth in the 1920s

The masquerade is the core feature. Illustration by Sjoerd Kuperus.

participated even before the Second World War, and by 1955 this public Texel fête had been completely replaced by Sinterklaas, a popular 5 December event that was celebrated in the private domain on the mainland. But on Texel, Sinterklaas was not celebrated until the early twentieth century, when more and more islanders began to adopt the mainland custom and Nieuwe Sunderklaas gradually had to make way for it. Despite sharing the same date on the festive calendar and almost being namesakes, Nieuwe Sunderklaas and Sinterklaas are unrelated. Neither Nieuwe Sunderklaas nor Ouwe Sunderklaas had anything to do with the way mainlanders celebrated Sinterklaas. The Dutch Sinterklaas celebration – a children’s festival – was immensely popular throughout the country and is characterised by the exchange of gifts. Its protagonists are Saint Nicholas (the Bishop of Myra) and his Moorish servant, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). These mythical persons play no role whatsoever in Texel’s Sunderklaas festival and the latter lacks the gift-giving aspect. This fact notwithstanding, among the islanders the popularity of Sinterklaas had been on the rise well before mid-century. In the early 1950s, the Texelse Courant and the Vereniging voor Volksfeesten en Texelse Folklore (Association for Folk Festivals and Texel Folklore) had attempted to revitalise the Nieuwe Sunderklaas festival, but to no avail. Saint Nicholas and Black Pete had gained a firm foothold on Texel. The newspaper was more successful in the revitalisation of Ouwe Sunderklaas. As of 1937, it put up a challenge cup and cash prizes for the best and most original performances, as a result of which the number of players rose

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

45

again. Village and other committees began to take part in preparations for the festival, too. However, it was mainly the ‘anonymous’ Texelians themselves who brought Old Sunderklaas back to life through their participation and performances. The celebration of the festival became so successful that some even saw opportunities to develop it as an event that might attract tourists during the winter season. Sunderklaas Turning Local The Texelse Courant not only played an important role in the revitalisation of the Ouwe Sunderklaas celebration, but also stimulated the depiction and performance of themes concerning island life. Since December 1965, it has published lists of events of the past year, which can be used as themes in the Old Sunderklaas play. That is why local issues came into the limelight. Besides, the newspaper stimulated the ‘localisation’ by indicating that the festival could be ‘genuinely Texelian’ only if themes relating to Texel were employed. The paper explicitly stated that the celebration should mask some deeper sense or meaning and should be ‘“food for thought” concerning Texel events and situations’ (8 December 1967). After some hesitation, this appeal gained support. The themes of the performances increasingly acquired a Texel character, and the number of participants and onlookers grew again. At the same time, the performances were relocated to the streets and pubs. With the exception of the celebration in De Cocksdorp, fewer and fewer players went from house to house to play. Moreover, the performances grew in scale and large groups started to dominate the Sunderklaas celebration, often performing on carts pulled by tractors. Thus, reporters working for the local newspaper – native islanders – stimulated the development towards the localisation of Sunderklaas themes. Village committees and the Foundation for Folklore also encouraged performances related to local subjects.8 In judging the various performances, they seriously considered whether these related to Texel or village matters and expressed wit and originality. If so, they stood an excellent chance of winning a prize. Ten years after the initial call in the Texelse Courant to put ‘Texelian matters’ at the core of the Sunderklaas play, the newspaper wrote, not without satisfaction: The time-honoured folklore festival increasingly comes up to its modern ideal: an extremely playful comment on Texel’s ups and downs of the year gone by. We hardly discovered any performances with a national or international character. Even among the youngsters home-related performances were favourite. [...] Once more, the established Texel institutions and persons were strongly criticised. (13 December 1977)

The turn towards island and local themes in the Sunderklaas performances shows that the topics of play needed reflection. It became an important goal to consider who

8 It may seem obvious that Texel bar owners have stimulated the revitalisation of Ouwe Sunderklaas to serve their own economic interests. However, I have found no indication that this is indeed the case. Nonetheless, the local cafés’ turnovers on 12 December are considerable.

46

Reframing Dutch Culture

or what could be poked fun at in subtle or less subtle ways. The celebration provided a legitimate opportunity to satirically comment upon island affairs. Through the introduction of humour, this moral mirror became acceptable even to those who were poked fun at. This development towards an esoteric localism implied that the event was not suitable to attract holidaymakers and ‘other-siders’. Although some Texelians had perceived outsiders as a way to provide the tourist sector with a fillip during the winter season, most islanders were loath to encounter such a ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990) when celebrating their festival. They despise those who visit the island to participate in the Sunderklaas celebration, because these pryers mistake the fête for ‘a kind of Carnival’ arriving dressed up in curious attires but not participating in the play or understanding the finesses of its contents. The trend towards localisation continued in the 1980s and subsequent years with the performance of village (rather than Texel) events of the past year, making the celebration recognisable and comprehensible only to insiders in the villages. This development intensified, also among younger players, under the influence of juries of village committees that awarded prizes almost exclusively to strictly local performances. Today, the festival is thriving. It has become an important vehicle to project the identity of Texelians to both the island society and, albeit indirectly, the outside world. The Sunderklaas festival is a clear example of a ‘display event’ as defined by Abrahams: a planned for public occasion ‘in which actions and objects are invested with meaning and values are put “on display”’ (1981: 303). A display event ‘provides the occasion whereby a group or community may call attention to itself’ and, perhaps more importantly, wishes to display itself (Gradén 2003: 10). The individual and group performances lend themselves par excellence to the expression of self-consciousness and to imaginative comments on local society. The Sunderklaas celebration is a dramatic enactment of local affairs, local problems and local conflicts (see also Esman 1982: 206). The Sunderklaas performances are rarely without moralistic and critical purport. The function of the masquerade and the play has shifted from disguise per se to exposing local affairs and ‘abuses’. The festival has increasingly acquired critical content, especially since the 1960s. It is now replete with playful comments, imaginative acts of satire and mockery, political messages and elements of parody, hyperbole and play with authority. In this respect there is a strong ‘politicisation’ of the festival. During every Sunderklaas celebration, several players ridicule officialdom. It thus entails a ‘contestation of authority’ (Dietler 2001: 71). The local government and the island’s main institutions usually get it in the neck. The mayor and aldermen, the municipal council and local civil servants are rewarding subjects even though they are – with the exception of the mayor – locals. In the mid 1960s, for example, several performances mocked the local government’s alleged squander-mania (symbolised by a player dragging along a cardboard hand with a huge hole in it) and idleness (a group of young people had converted a mobile workmen’s hut into a ‘town hall’ decorated with catchy, often vicious and dubious slogans. One could peek inside it and see members of the council, dressed in odd costumes, dancing round an antique gramophone under the influence of alcohol).

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

47

The critical stance towards local government is especially notable in the island’s main town of Den Burg, where intricate group performances are held and people from the outer villages gather late at night to continue the celebration. In these villages, performances relate mainly to local matters and persons, though in the past few years political decisions that have an impact on village life are also increasingly critiqued. Other favourite topics are the Texelse Courant and TESO (the ferry company). As I was able to observe, these subjects were also great favourites during the Sunderklaas fêtes of 1989, 1990 and 2005. In 1989, for instance, there was a performance by a group on a cart who imitated the renovation of the town hall. The building was decorated with many critical texts, the most striking of which ran: ‘Finally some people are working in the town hall.’ Several players poked fun at TESO. In a survey carried out by a national newspaper, the quality of the coffee served on the island’s ferries gained the poorest mark possible. This induced several Texelians to rub salt into the wound on 12 December. They carried a coffee machine connected to a urinal. In the accompanying text, the acronym TESO was corrupted to Texels Eigen Slootwater Onderneming (Texel’s Own Ditchwater Enterprise). During this Sunderklaas celebration, many Texelians denounced the increase in the ferry fares. Also holidaymakers and tourism policy are usually tackled in one way or another. Tourists and ‘other-siders’ are not welcome to participate in or watch the Sunderklaas event.9 During the 1990 celebration, one man expressed this quite clearly by displaying a text that read: ‘I am genuine Texelian, because I do not perform with mainland folk.’ Other performances relate to more private events, as in the case of plays referring to a somewhat obese woman who had been unfortunate enough to injure her bottom when she used the chamber-pot at night and the object broke. Another instance of such a performance has a strong moral dimension. Near Den Hoorn, a villager neglected the maintenance of his typical Texel sheep’s shed (schapeboet) because he planned to demolish it. Much to the dismay of his fellow villagers, the building rapidly dilapidated. When the man and his spouse were away for a weekend in the autumn of 2005, some of the villagers decided to carry out repairs. It was the talk of the town for weeks, and during the local Ouwe Sunderklaas celebration players in several performances poked fun at the owner, rubbing it in again. The message was that it is unacceptable to waste much appreciated material heritage. The vast majority of performances, however, have something to do with important island institutions, and over the past few decades, these themes have been firmly consolidated. They seem to fulfil the need for a symbolic levelling, whereby the high and mighty or otherwise prominent are put in their place through usually mild forms of ridicule. Referring to local events as they do, the Sunderklaas performances lack meaning for outsiders but are saturated with meaning for the islanders and villagers: A local population can possess a largely unique culture that remains distinctive in that its symbolic manifestations convey meanings that are commonly understood only among

9 The island of Ameland’s Sunneklaas celebration on 4 and 5 December is also fiercely protected from the prying eyes of tourists (Wim Rosema, personal communication).

48

Reframing Dutch Culture

Figure 3.2

Texel’s Own Steamship Enterprise as a popular theme

This photograph shows players in a 1963 performance who criticise the relocation of the ferry harbour. They poke fun at the island’s new double-decked ferryboat and the ferry terminal, which has a flight of stairs to reach the boat’s upper deck. The text reads: ‘TESO advises you to go to Tirol for a week before the ferry starts sailing for you will experience that it’s hard to climb the stairs particularly with a rough sea.’ Photographer unknown; photo from the author’s private collection.

those people. Performances in such esoteric cultures relate only to the local milieu that shares a specifically local social knowledge. (Mewett 1982: 222, italics in original).

The fact that the festival is celebrated after the holiday season only adds to this. The event is concealed from the gaze of outsiders and tourists and the Texelians are among themselves, which facilitates the re-establishment of old ties and an expression of ‘weness’. But to understand the developments in the local festival, one should not look exclusively at the local level. The changes in the Sunderklaas celebration described above are inextricably intertwined with transformations in Dutch society and culture as

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

49

a whole and their consequences for Texel and the islanders’ awareness of their identity (see also Van Ginkel 1995). In the following section, I will go into these interrelated developments and point out how they can explain the changing form and content of the Old Sunderklaas fête. Sunderklaas as a Referent of Local Identity Around 1900, Texel was a relatively isolated island. This does not mean that it was a static and self-sufficient society, only that it was relatively isolated. For example, mainland novelties and influences penetrated the island in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but did not lead to dramatic changes in local sociocultural life. It was the establishment of the regular ferry service by TESO in 1907 and the subsequent streams of migrants, officials and tourists to the island that brought about far-reaching transformations.10 Since then, the islanders have been increasingly able to note mainland acquisitions and achievements, either by going there or through the influence of the many newcomers and holidaymakers who invade the coastal villages and beach resorts during the summer season. Processes of state and nation formation also had an important impact. It was precisely because of this confrontation that the islanders could and did become aware of the singularities, the specificity of Texel’s culture, and develop a stronger sense of their own identity. This process was strengthened when national newspapers found their way into more households, and radio and television became popular. A former local minister, J.J. Buskes, said about island society during the inter-war period, ‘Suddenly [Texelians] encountered the culture of the mainland. ... They began to consider this culture as genuine and developed a sense of inferiority with respect to their own Texel culture’ (Texelse Courant, 6 August 1952). Apparently, Texelians wanted to adapt to Dutch society as soon as possible. In 1955, Buskes’s colleague Janse wrote that ‘the characteristically, typically Texelian is disappearing more and more’ (1955: 259). This process of cultural homogenisation was also evident elsewhere in the Netherlands. Various sociocultural differences between rural communities were increasingly eliminated (Knippenberg and de Pater 1988; Van Ginkel 1999). In the mid nineteenth century, the Dutch countryside was a mosaic of communities, each with its own habits, customs, costumes and other cultural characteristics. The horizon of the rural population was limited. The members of a community oriented themselves primarily towards their own village and the surrounding area. Through the development of transportation and communication, mass production, increasing trade, tourism and the growing influence of the central government as well as the involvement of larger and larger groups in national politics, local and regional cultures gradually gave way to a national Dutch culture. The inhabitants of different areas 10 Between 1850 and 1880 the number of inhabitants increased from approximately 5700 to nearly 6500. The figure declined to 5800 in 1903. Since then the population has increased continuously, as a result of the positive balance of births and deaths and – especially – through immigration.

50

Reframing Dutch Culture

came into contact more often and more intensively; they became more interdependent and increasingly seemed to resemble each other in a sociocultural sense. Thus, the condensation of networks of dependence and communication – and the concomitant increased economic, political and cultural integration of social formations into national, international and supranational units – appeared to bring about the demise of local cultures. In this process, civilising and disciplining offensives emanating from the urban bourgeoisie were also important. Through churches and schools, associations and municipal councils, among other institutions, the values and norms of the urban bourgeoisie spread to the countryside. With regard to Texel, these developments may have led to the disappearance of the Nieuwe Sunderklaas festival. The Texelians adopted mainland habits and customs with alacrity. On the mainland, the celebration of Sinterklaas was a long-established tradition. The islanders felt that they could not be left behind, and began to celebrate Sinterklaas. The fact that they could not celebrate the Sinterklaas and Nieuwe Sunderklaas fêtes at the same time undoubtedly had an important impact on the waning of the latter. During the period between the wars, the Ouwe Sunderklaas festival also became less popular, but it did not coincide with a dominant mainland fête, as was the case with Nieuwe Sunderklaas. This fact seems important to understanding why one festival has disappeared while the other has not. On the contrary, there has been a revival of Ouwe Sunderklaas. Initially, national unification was attended by adaptation at the local level, but in the course of time people became aware of a possible demise of the local material and immaterial heritage. On Texel, this awareness clearly came about after the Nieuwe Sunderklaas festival had been replaced by the celebration of Sinterklaas. In spite of attempts to revitalise the Nieuwe Sunderklaas fête, Texelians chose to keep celebrating the mainland festivity of Sinterklaas. According to anthropologists Vlaming and Witte – who were born and bred on the island – Texelians in the 1950s and 1960s showed ‘a remarkable alacrity with regard to integration in and adaptation to the rest of the Netherlands’ (1980: 12). They hold the view that the broadening of the horizon of Texelians through rapid modernisation and integration with the mainland and the economic needs that could be alleviated by the tourist industry explain a lot in this respect. They say that ‘it [would seem] to follow naturally from these developments that people would identify less with old customs and habits’ (ibid.). In this connection, sociologist Mike Featherstone contends that processes of cultural homogenisation should be linked with processes of state and nation formation. In his view, unifying a culture requires ignoring – or at best synthesising and blending – local differences (1991: 46).11 However, such processes need not be unilinear and ‘a segmentary perception of social and cultural relations does not necessarily conflict with the unifying demands of statist ideology’, as anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (2003: 306) shows with regard to Crete. What is true for nation-states also applies to 11 In a note, Featherstone adds that regional, ethnic and local differences need not be eliminated (ibid.: 55–56, n. 5). We can see the same dynamics at work in the dialectic between the European unification process and the upsurge of national/nationalist sentiments (see Van Ginkel 1999).

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

51

regional and local cultures and identities. It is precisely processes of nation and state formation – and of European unification – that contribute to growing awareness in local communities of their own identity vis-à-vis other communities and the nation or other encompassing entities as a whole (see, for instance, Badone 1987: 186; Hastrup 1993: 180). In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, counterpoints developed as a dialectical response to national homogenisation and cultural unification. There has been a rise of movements aiming to protect or strengthen regional or local cultures.12 Anthony Cohen points out that where political control, economic power and information management are increasingly concentrated at the centre and where the veneer of a homogeneous identity is distributed through fashion, mass production and the national media, ‘one can expect to find an ever greater imperative among the constituents of society to emphasise and assert their distinctiveness from each other’ (1986: viii). This applies especially where this distinctiveness is continuously threatened by disappearing structural boundaries – in a geographical sense through infrastructural developments, and in a cultural sense through standardisation and the denigration of local differences by those in power at the core. ‘The more complete grows the concentration of power at the centre, the more vulnerable the periphery becomes, expressing its anxiety in a localism which stresses the distinctiveness of its character’ (Cohen 1982: 7).13 This is exactly what has happened on Texel. It is precisely because of increasing external influences – not least tourism – that Texelians have become aware of the unique character of their island culture. The islanders began to realise that there were negative sides to adopting mainland fads and fashions. The increasing integration of the local community into larger social formations led to the feeling of a loss of autonomy and to an awareness of the imminent danger that their own culture and identity could fade into oblivion. The Texelians became aware that something valuable – but about which they previously had hardly reflected – was in danger of disappearing. This insight was reinforced under the influence of tourism. It can do miracles for self-consciousness and the appreciation of one’s own culture and identity when outsiders show an interest in local society. At the same time, the presence of so many tourists increased the need to draw boundaries: … the ‘we images’ and ‘they-images’ which are generated within local struggles to form an identity and exclude outsiders cannot be detached from the density of the web of interdependencies between people. Such struggles between established and outsider 12 In some places this revival of regionalism or localism came about ‘spontaneously’, as for example on Texel. Although the local newspaper and a folklore association were catalysts in the revitalisation of the Ouwe Sunderklaas celebration, I would hardly regard them as real localist ‘movements’. 13 However, the revival of cultural variety through the sharpening of symbolic boundaries does not mean that the process of nationalisation or homogenisation of culture and identity stagnates or is even reversed. This process can be understood only when studied through local contexts, since ‘[l]ocal experience mediates national identity, and, therefore, an anthropological understanding of the latter cannot proceed without knowledge of the former’ (Cohen 1982: 13; italics in original).

52

Reframing Dutch Culture groups ... will therefore become more common with the extent of contact with others, which bring groups of outsiders more frequently into the province of local establishments (Featherstone 1991: 50).

However, the islanders are too dependent on tourism to indulge continually in symbolic boundary-marking. A large proportion of the island’s population has to make a living by selling ‘uniqueness’ and ‘authenticity’. As it is celebrated when the number of holidaymakers is at a low point, the Sunderklaas festival offers an excellent opportunity to take stock of who is knowledgeable about island and local affairs, knowing literally ‘what is at play’ (wat er speelt) in the performances. This shared awareness creates in performers and audience alike a sense of place and a feeling of belonging to the island and village communities. Conclusions Localist responses to the levelling dimensions of processes of integration and unification are not uncommon in the Netherlands (Van Ginkel 2003) or in the rest of Europe (Cohen 1982, 1986; Badone 1987; Nadel-Klein 1991, 2003; Herzfeld 2003; Stacul 2003). There has recently been a widespread ‘heritage boom’, which is part of ‘an international preoccupation with reclaiming, preserving and reconstituting the past’ and a national and local ‘quest for defining identity’ (Nadel-Klein 2003: 173). Heritage productions appear to be ‘the quintessence of the particular and the local, a statement of uniqueness’ (ibid.). There seems to be a dialectical relationship between the growing concentration of power at political centres and the increasing awareness of local people who experience cultural loss and resist this development politically and symbolically. In Dutch society this is evident from the rising popularity of locallevel political parties as opposed to branches of national political parties, and from the emphasis on local uniqueness – usually with a focus on time-honoured traditions or neo-folklore. In this sense, the Texel case is hardly unique. What makes it stand apart, however, is the specific way in which localism has found its expression and its strong inward-directedness. The islanders express a growing sense of their own identity through, for example, the celebration of Ouwe Sunderklaas. The festival marks and reinforces local identity in an era when adaptation to mainstream culture seems to lead to a loss of local culture. The process can be regarded as a counterpoint triggered by the increasing integration into Dutch society and, in a later stage, the European polity: ‘celebrating a shared identity can convince members [of a local or ethnic community] of the primacy of their common heritage’ (Esman 1982: 207). As a result of the growing number of players and the localisation and politicisation of the performances, in its turn this identity was made, remade and strengthened. The implicit message of the festival, for participants as well as spectators, appears to be ‘We are Texelians and we know what’s going on here’, as the critical comments embedded in the texts and performances are comprehensible only to insiders. For the islanders, they are stories ‘they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geertz 1973: 448). It is precisely the display of knowledge pertaining to one’s own

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

53

island society that can bring about and reinforce the feeling of belonging, of being part of a community. Through this performance, symbolic boundaries are drawn that indicate who does and who does not belong to the community. Whereas in the past the Ouwe Sunderklaas masquerade could be understood by everyone – including outsiders – this is no longer the case because of the growing localness and thus idiosyncrasy of the performances’ themes. Consequently, through the dramatic enactment of local themes in the Ouwe Sunderklaas celebration, the festival has become an important referent of identity for Texelians. Interestingly, the fête is strongly inward-oriented, whereas more generally speaking cultural performances are often aimed at attracting outsiders, including tourists (Esman 1982; Gradén 2003). The fact that holidaymakers overrun the island for most of the year is important in this regard. Texel depends on tourism to a large extent. In the summer months, island life is geared towards catering for the tourists and the local people do not see each other very often. To some extent, the social fabric of relationships is temporarily unwoven. This changes once the tourists have left. The islanders relish ‘being among themselves’ again for a brief period of time, and the Sunderklaas celebration offers an opportunity to re-establish old ties. This is also the reason why Texelians who migrated to the mainland often return to Texel to participate in the event. The islanders are of the opinion that outsiders have nothing to do with the festival since they cannot make sense of it. For most of the year, island folk have to ‘stage authenticity’ (MacCannell 1973) in a variety of ways, but they regard the Sunderklaas celebration as genuinely Texelian – as an experience in which they ‘feel themselves to be in touch both with a “real” world and with their “real” selves’ (Handler and Saxton 1988: 243). Ouwe Sunderklaas is a way to act out the ideals and values that are central to local society, a reflective statement for the islanders of what it is to be Texelian. Through the politicisation of Ouwe Sunderklaas, the islanders symbolically express and resist growing supranational, national and local government influence and the accompanying loss of self-determination. They use their performances to focus attention on an important source of tension: local officialdom, which is usually the vehicle through which decisions made at higher levels of integration affect the islanders. The powers-that-be are thus challenged in a playful but unequivocal way. This kind of protest started hesitatingly in the 1920s, when a text like ‘The people propose, but the councillors dispose’ was still exceptional. But along with the increasing impact of forces from without, the performances and the texts displayed have turned into an unvarnished commentary, often poking fun at or ridiculing and criticising the local authorities – representatives of impersonal central authority. In this manner, the festival provides an opportunity to vent grievances in a ludicrous way but with serious undertones. This implies a sharpening of the symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, further inculcating local pride and articulating the islanders’ identity. The Sunderklaas performances seem to be a register of knowledge about the island’s events of the year gone by. Those who can tap into this resource and understand what is literally ‘at play’ on Texel and in its communities show themselves to be fully fledged community members. Playfully enacting to be

54

Reframing Dutch Culture

in the know is an important way of creating a sense of belonging, of articulating distinctiveness and of making place in an island society that is firmly embedded and integrated in larger socio-political figurations. The Sunderklaas fête thus provides anchorage in a world of estrangement, real or imagined. References Abrahams, Roger D. (1981), Shouting March at the Border: The Folklore of Display Events, in Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (eds), And Other Neighborly Names: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 303–321. Badone, Ellen (1987), Ethnicity, Folklore, and Local Identity in Rural Brittany. Journal of American Folklore, 100, 161–190. Boissevain, Jeremy (1983), Inleiding: Identiteit en feestelijkheid, in Adrianus Koster, Yme Kuiper and Jojada Verrips (eds), Feest en ritueel in Europa. Antropologische essays. Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 9–14. Boissevain, Jeremy (1991), Nieuwe feesten: ritueel, spel en identiteit, in Jeremy Boissevain (ed.), Feestelijke vernieuwing in Nederland? Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut, 1–11. Boissevain, Jeremy (1991), Ritual, Play and Identity: Changing Patterns of Celebrations in Maltese Villages. Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 1, 87–100. Brandes, Stanley (1998), The Day of the Dead, Halloween, and Mexican National Identity. Journal of American Folklore, 111, 359–380. Bus, Guus-Anke (1985), Levende Waddenfolklore op Ameland. Waddenbulletin, 20, 172–175. Cohen, Anthony P. (1986), Preface, in Anthony P. Cohen (ed.), Symbolising Boundaries. Identity and Diversity in British Cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press, viii-x. Cohen, Anthony P. (1982), Belonging: The Experience of Culture, in Anthony P. Cohen (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures. St. John’s: ISER, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1–17. De Jong, Marita (2004), Sunneklaas: het feest van de bittere ernst. De Moanne, 3, 6-12. Dekker, Dirk (1864), Het huisgezin van Jan de With. Nederland 2, 43–71. Dietler, Michael (2001), Theorizing the Feast. Rituals of Consumption, Commensal Politics, and Power in African Contexts, in Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden (eds), Feast: Archeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 65–114. Dietler, Michael and Brian Hayden (2001), Digesting the Feast: Good to Eat, Good to Drink, Good to Think. An Introduction, in Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden (eds), Feast: Archeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1–20.

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

55

Errington, Frederick (1987), Reflexivity Deflected: The Festival of Nations as an American Cultural Performance. American Ethnologist, 14, 654–667. Esman, Marjorie R. (1982), Festivals, Change, and Unity: The Celebration of Ethnic Identity Among Louisiana Cajuns. Anthropological Quarterly, 55, 1 99–210. Featherstone, Michael (ed.) (1990), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage. Featherstone, Michael (1991), Global and Local Cultures. Vrijetijd en Samenleving, 9, 43–57. Frykman, Jonas and Orvar Löfgren (1987), Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Gradén, Lizette (2003), On Parade: Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas. Uppsala: Studia multiethnica Upsaliensia. Guss, David M. (2000), The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gygli, Karen L. (2001), A Community Performed: St. Nicholas, Lucifer, and Invented Tradition. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 24, 129–138. Handler, Richard and William Saxton (1988), Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in ‘Living History’. Cultural Anthropology, 3, 242–260. Hastrup, Kirsten (1993), The Native Voice – and the Anthropological Vision. Social Anthropology, 1, 173–186. Herzfeld, Michael (2003), Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan Reflections. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 281–310. Janse, C.J.J. (1955), De Waddeneilanden’, in W. Banning (ed.), Handboek pastorale sociologie, vol. 2. Den Haag: Boekencentrum, 259–295. Knippenberg, Hans and Ben de Pater (1988), De eenwording van Nederland. Schaalvergroting en integratie sinds 1800. Nijmegen: SUN. Löfgren, Orvar (1989), The Nationalization of Culture. Ethnologia Europaea, 19, 5–23. MacCannel, Dean (1973), Staged Authenticity. Arrangements of Social Space in Tourism Settings. American Journal of Sociology, 79, 589–603. Magliocco, Sabina (1993), The Two Madonnas: The Politics of Two Festivals in a Sardinian Community. New York: Peter Lang. Magliocco, Sabina (2001), Coordinates of Power and Performance: Festivals as Sites of (Re) Presentation and Reclamation in Sardinia. Ethnologies 23, 167–188. Mewett, Peter G. (1982), Exiles, Nicknames, Social Identities and the Production of Local Consciousness in a Lewis Crofting Community, in Anthony P. Cohen (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 222–246. Mitchell, Jon P. (2001), Ambivalent Europeans. Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta. London: Routledge.

56

Reframing Dutch Culture

Nadel-Klein, Jane (1991), Reweaving the Fringe: Localism, Tradition, and Representation in British Ethnography. American Ethnologist, 18, 500–517. Nadel-Klein, Jane (2003), Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss along the Scottish Coast. Oxford: Berg. Oskam, G.A. (1986), De Sinterklaasfeesten op de Waddeneilanden. Uitgave van de Historische Vereniging Texel, 1, 19–21. Sandsdalen, Unni (1988), Identity and Local Society: Setesdal Today. ARV. Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, 42, 159–74. Santino, Jack (1994), All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stacul, Jaro (2003), The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Stoeltje, Beverly J. (1992), Festival, in Richard Bauman (ed.), Folklore, Cultural Performance, and Popular Entertainment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 261– 271. Strathern, Marilyn (1981), Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-West Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urry, John (1990), The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Van der Duim, René and Jaap Lengkeek (2004), All Pervading Island Tourism: The Case of Texel, The Netherlands, in Jeremy Boissevain and Tom Selwyn (eds), Contesting the Foreshore: Tourism, Society, and Politics on the Coast. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 261–279. Van der Ven, Dirk Jan (1923), Merkwaardige Sinterklaas-gebruiken op onze Waddeneilanden. Ons Eigen Tijdschrift, 41–49. Van der Ven, Dirk Jan (1928), Zwarte Piet, Sinterklaas en het Kerstkindje. De Vrouw en Haar Huis, 8, 351–357. Van der Vlis, J.A. (1949), Texel. Land en volk in de loop der eeuwen. Amsterdam: C.V. v/h de Boer jr. Van der Vlis, J.A. (1977), tLant van Texsel. Een geschiedschrijving. Den Burg: Langeveld & De Rooy. Van Ginkel, Rob (1995), ‘Texelian at Heart’: The Articulation of Identity in a Dutch Island Society. Ethnos, 60, 265–286. Van Ginkel, Rob (1999), Op zoek naar eigenheid. Denkbeelden en discussies over cultuur en identiteit in Nederland. Den Haag: Sdu. Van Ginkel, Rob (2003), Hollandse tonelen: een etnologische verkenning, in Thimo de Nijs en Eelco Beukers (eds), Geschiedenis van Holland. Vol. IIIB. Hilversum: Verloren, 621–694. Verplanke, A.A. (1977), Het verhaal van de Sinterklazen op Ameland. Neerlands Volksleven, 26, 196–211. Vlaming, M. and F. Witte (1980), Van demonen en ander gedonderjaag... (unpublished manuscript).

Celebrating Localism: The Festive Articulation of Texel’s Identity

Primary Sources Texelse Courant, 1887–2005.

57

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity in Newly Reclaimed Dutch Polders Albert van der Zeijden

The view that the study of folklore, since its genesis as a scientific discipline in the 19th century, has always been characterised by an important political-ideological component – related to nationalism, and to the construction of national and regional identities – is presently generally accepted among ethnologists. That the political use of folklore is however not without its problems became clear chiefly in the National Socialist era in Germany, where the discipline was employed on behalf of an aggressive racial politics (Dow and Lixfeld 1994). Since then this problematic past of folklore studies has been subject to evaluation in both Germany and in the Netherlands (Gerndt 1987; Dekker 2002; Henkes 2005). All of these developments have led to ethnologists being very hesitant about allowing folklore studies to become linked with cultural politics. Such a relationship is widely seen as a trap that is best avoided (Van Ginkel 2000). It is thus remarkable that in recent years the socio-political functions and dimensions of culture and folklore have again been given a place on the political agenda. For the Dutch situation, we can say that the important turning point was the ministerial memorandum Pantser of ruggengraat (Armour or backbone), which the Dutch government propounded with regard to culture for the period 1997-2000, and in which it was proposed that everyday culture should be given a central role as a medium for social cohesion (Pots 2000: 341–349). In neighbouring Flanders (Belgium) a campaign entitled ‘The Culture of the People Today’ was established, the purpose of which was to realise ‘a dynamic application of popular culture for social development’ (Adriaenssens 2002; De Munck 2005). There are various reasons behind this renewed attention for the political potential of popular culture and folklore. The large-scale migration of Turkish and Moroccan guest workers to the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s, and of large groups from regions such as Surinam and the Dutch Antilles, which were formerly Dutch colonies, has caused Dutch society to fragment on ethnic lines.1 ‘Managing ethnicity’ and integration policies have become important cultural-political objectives as a result 1

See on this subject also the contribution of Hester Dibbits in this volume.

60

Reframing Dutch Culture

of such developments in Western Europe (Bendix and Roodenburg 2000, Dekker 2000). Moreover, cultural heritage and folklore have been promoted as means for fostering social cohesion. In recent years this cultural-political trend has received further encouragement from the UNESCO convention adopted in 2003 for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which is intended to protect and promote folk culture, as well as protecting world-wide cultural diversity. In this context popular culture becomes a part of what in America is termed ‘public folklore’, ‘the professional mediation of folklore for the public’ (KirshenblattGimblett 2000: 1). This mediation is more than merely popularising folk culture for a wide public (Feintuch 1988; Baron and Spitzer 1992). There is also an aspect of maintaining, restoring, or creating social cohesion. In 2005, when hurricane Katrina left a trail of physical destruction in New Orleans and its vicinity, folklorists in America were also called in to heal the wounds that the hurricane had also inflicted on the society. This new cultural-political discourse obviously calls up questions of all sorts, not only with regard to issues of authenticity and whether or not ‘traditional’ folk culture should be kept ‘alive’ by artificial means (Van der Zeijden 2004), but also about the political role that is being assigned to heritage, something about which historians in particular have had critical things to say (Lowenthal 1996; Van der Laarse 2005). Indeed, involving the history of public folklore more emphatically in these reflections – a history which is largely still to be written, with regard to the Netherlands – would be worthwhile. There are various possible approaches for doing this. Until now, an institutional or biographical approach to the historiography of folklore studies in the Netherlands has generally been chosen (Dekker 2002; Henkes 2005). One can, for example, elicit the history of public folklore through the biography of an important public folklorist (Bronner 1996) or the history of a public folklore institution such as the Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur (Dutch Center for Popular Culture) (Van der Zeijden 2000). For this contribution I have chosen another approach, namely to examine a large governmental project: the land reclamation and cultural organisation of a large portion of the Zuiderzee (the arm of the North Sea which penetrated deep between the provinces of North Holland and Friesland, Overijssel and Gelderland), today the province of Flevoland. The Province of Flevoland, created in the 1940s, is the youngest province of the Netherlands; it has an area of 2343 square kilometres and presently has a population of about 350,000. The reclamation of the Noordoostpolder, the oldest section, with Emmeloord as its chief city, was completed in 1942. Eastern and Southern Flevoland, respectively, followed in the 1960s and 1970s, with the new cities of Lelystad (the provincial capital) and Almere. Thus we are dealing with newly created land, with a new population of what have been called ‘pioneers’, who came from all sections of the Netherlands. To date, almost nothing has been published on this subject from an ethnological perspective. At any rate, for the older ethnologists the folklore in this new province was not an object for research. According to the prevailing opinion in that day, ‘traditional’ folklore simply could not exist there (aside from the two Zuiderzee

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

61

islands of Urk and Schokland, which were enclosed in the polder). The subject of ‘social organisation’ has been a research theme in the historiography of Flevoland (Flokstra 2000). But until now, however, there has been no discussion of how folklore was also propagated as a part of this social organisation, as a manner of fostering solidarity among a population from very heterogeneous geographic and religious backgrounds, thereby becoming part of a complex process of ‘public folklore’ and shaping identity. When the planners presented their ideas about the Zuiderzee Works, the dike building and reclamation, they placed the emphasis on its great significance for the nation as a project in which the new Netherlands would be taking shape (Te Velde 1992). Furthermore, comparisons were regularly made with the concept of pioneering in the United States: this polder was the Dutch ‘frontier’ (De Pater 2000). The project was set up as an example for the whole of the Netherlands, and was a magnificent opportunity for social engineering, which fit pre-eminently in the then prevailing social democratic ideology of the potential for reshaping man and society, using the insights of sociology as a scientific developmental discipline (Jonker 1988). It was also decided to involve several ethnologists, both professional and amateur, in the project. Diverging from the usual definition (Baron and Spitzer 1992), but resulting from the above remarks about folklore and social development in the Noordoostpolder, in this chapter ‘public folklore’ will be, more or less in line with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2000), understood as the initiatives by governmental authorities and professional ethnologists, whether working in collaboration or not, to shape and promote solidarity in a group or society by means of an applied folklore. With regard to the Noordoostpolder this will involve not only initiatives by the government and ethnology, but also unofficial initiatives by the migrants themselves, and from the media. The central question that I wish to answer here is, in what way was public folklore employed as an instrument to shape a new regional identity? And what was the role of other social scientists, for example of social demographers? The Politics of Settlement One must realise that the reclamation of the polder, and the cultural development of the Noordoostpolder which followed, was rigorously controlled from above. Both as a place, and as a society, the Noordoostpolder is ultimately a construct. The physical dike building and reclamation was in the hands of the Zuiderzee Works Authority. The Wieringermeer Polder Board, already a part of this Authority, was assigned responsibility for social-economic development (Van Dissel 1991). This Board had been the most important organising force behind the reclamation of the Wieringermeer Polder in North Holland in 1935. They were given the new task of developing the cultural and social organisation for the Noordoostpolder. The settlement or population policy was focused on encouraging the formation of a group identity in the new polder, and guiding this in the proper course. To this end, social scientists were brought in at all phases of the planning. This involved social

62

Reframing Dutch Culture

demographers such as Sjoerd Groenman, who during the war years worked for the Directors of the Wieringermeer, and wrote widely on social development and on settlement and cultural policy for the Noordoostpolder (Groenman 1953; Van Dissel 1991: 158).

Figure 4.1

Closing the dykes during the draining of the Eastern Flevoland polder, 1956

On the initiative of H.N. ter Veen, who had received his doctorate in 1925 with a dissertation on the Haarlemmermeer polder as a settlement area, the Foundation for Population Research in the Reclaimed Zuiderzee Polders was founded in 1936. It was the task of this foundation to use information gathered from diverse disciplines to provide a scientific foundation for the projected settlement policies. It is interesting to note that in their remit dialectology and folklore were specifically mentioned as sub-fields from which it would be useful to assemble information.2 The secretary of the Dialects and Ethnology Committees of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts

2 The purpose of the Foundation was ‘to collect and arrange for the collection of, and to study and arrange for the study of data involving the population of the settlement areas in the reclaimed Zuiderzee, in the fields of anthropology, psychology, genetics, dialectology, phonetics, domestic science, folklore, social demographics, jurisprudence, social hygiene and other sciences, as much as possible in mutual interrelationship.’ Cited in: Heinemeijer 1986: 12.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

63

and Sciences, P.J. Meertens, had a seat on the board of the foundation, and directed the separate department on dialectology and folklore.3 In practice, the research in this department focused primarily on dialectology. In the 1930s it concentrated on the dialect in the Wieringermeer, and from the 1950s on the colloquial speech of the Noordoostpolder.4 Folklore research was limited to the two former Zuiderzee islands. The most important result was a monograph on Urk which appeared in 1942 (Meertens and Kaiser 1942). Already in the first sentence of this book Urk is described ‘in terms of its folklore, one of the showpieces of the Netherlands’. In the introduction Meertens writes that he wished to record ‘what typified its people, both in language and in usages and customs’ before the construction of the polder would threaten them with ‘decline and erasure as rapid as it is certain’. He adopted the approach of folkloristics in that day, which since the last decades of the nineteenth century was devoting attention to fishing and farming communities such as Urk which were threatened by progress and the process of modernisation. By being swallowed up in the new polder, the island was indeed going to encounter modernity in a very direct manner. The ethnologists therefore saw it as their most important task to record its ‘traditional’ folk culture for posterity. The book described ‘dying folklore’, before it would definitively become history (Van der Ven 1932; Van der Ven 1930). The then scientific habitus of the ethnologist was primarily to look back. We shall see in the next sections whether they also saw a role reserved for social engineering. The practical application and implementation of the settlement policy initially took place through institutions such as the Noordoostpolder Cultural Committee, under the aegis of the national government; after residents began to move into the villages, its tasks were taken over by town associations. In general, these town 3 The notes of the Department of Linguistics, Phonetics and Ethnology are preserved in the archive of P.J. Meertens, residing in the Meertens Institute, Foundation for Population Research for the Reclaimed Zuiderzee Polders, inv. nr. 250, binders 1 through 12. The notes of the Department are in binder 4. 4 For the most important results, see the dissertation by Jo Daan, Wieringer land en leven in de taal (Alphen aan den Rijn 1950) and the monograph by M.Ch. van de Ven, Taal in Noordoostpolder. Een sociolinguïstisch onderzoek (Amsterdam 1969), both published by the Foundation for Population Research for the Reclaimed Zuiderzee Polders. In the latter collection there was originally supposed to be space reserved for the folk culture and the folklore in the boundary areas; see a letter by P.J. Meertens, March 13, 1957, ‘Aan de medewerkers aan de monografie over het taalsociologisch onderzoek in de Noordoostpolder’. This letter is found in Meertens’s archive in the Meertens Institute, inv. nr. 250, binder 2. The subjects listed in this letter are: feasts and customs, traditional costume, meals. By and large, ethnology fell short of fulfilling its promise. Efforts were still being made in 1965, through the appointment of a separate subcommittee for ethnological research, to have this aspect to emerge rather more clearly. See the ‘Notulen van de vergadering van de sectie Taalkunde, Fonetiek en Volkskunde van de Stichting voor het Bevolkingsonderzoek in de drooggelegde Zuiderzeepolders op woensdag 10 maart 1965’, in Meertens’s archive in the Meertens Institute, inv. nr. 250, binder 5. The initiative had little result. In research the main attention continued to be given to dialects. Meertens left the service in 1968.

64

Reframing Dutch Culture

associations were set up as independent initiatives by the residents themselves, although there were individuals, named by the government, who could effectively encourage the process of community building (Flokstra 2000). Regional Associations As of 1941 the practical initiative for cultural development lay with the local cultural committees, guided by regional and national authorities. With that year, the land had to literally be dried out, and prepared for exploitation. This was done by labourers hired in especially for the task, who were housed in workers’ camps. A good deal was done for these camps by way of cultural education, because they were to exist for a good many years (the last of the camps was only closed in 1960). Among the many things the cultural committees in the camps were responsible for were the St. Nicholas festivities, the most popular children’s celebration, observed on December 5. In the period after 1950, when all the facilities in the villages were in place, the folklore of the ‘old land’ was kept alive primarily by local cultural associations set up by the migrants themselves. Sociologists saw the growth of these associations as an expectable response in the first phase of settlement, namely an attempt to maintain oneself in an environment where there were not yet any social relationships that were larger than the family (Groenman 1953: 29-30). The Frisian Association, established in 1950, organised both parties and theatre performances, which of course were in their own Frisian language (Flokstra 2000: 218-219). This Frisian initiative was quickly copied by migrants from the province of Groningen. In 1955 they founded the ‘Oet en Thoes’ association, Groningen dialect for uit en thuis (out and at home). As Tjeerd Flokstra demonstrated in his book Samenleven in het nieuwe land, the association wanted to emphasise that ‘in totally different surroundings solidarity with the language of our birthplace remains strong’ – which however, as was stressed at the founding meeting, did not mean that they wished to ‘encourage apartheid in the polder’ (Flokstra 2000: 222). What were termed ‘regional sports’ offered a mixture of tradition and recreation. These were sports which represented an ‘old tradition’ for the participants, which was connected with the cultural identity of the region from which they had come. The best known of these were ringrijden (tilting at the ring) and kaatsen (fives – a variant of the game of squash), the former typically from Zeeland, and the latter typically Frisian. Tilting at the ring is a test of skill in which a rider, seated bareback on a galloping horse, seeks to run his lance through a ring hanging from a rope. Both kaatsen and ringrijden had their own place in the Noordoostpolder. In the summer of 1950 several farmers who had originally come from Walcheren organised ‘ring-riding on horseback’ at Marknesse. The news and information weekly De Noordoostpolder reported that several farmers from Zeeland ‘couldn’t simply abandon their old customs just like that’. A comment added to the announcement of the event is interesting: ‘The idea that led to the organising of these festivities is certainly a good one. The new land will have to develop its own traditions, and when it can draw

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

65

from a source as rich as this, it is certainly worth the effort.’ A year later the initiative took on a larger form, and the hope was expressed ‘that this custom may become a tradition, in the new land as well’. Not long thereafter a contest was organised in Emmeloord and, finally, in 1956, there was even a polder-wide championship in ringrijden organised (Wolffram 1995: 84). What ringrijden was for the Zeelanders, kaatsen was for the Frisians. In July, 1952, De Noordoostpolder reported that two ‘polder men’ from Marknesse and Emmeloord, who had originally come from Friesland, had won first prize during a kaatsen contest in the province of Friesland, and at the same time, that the Noordoostpolder’s own kaatsen association, It Suderleech, had been organised. It appears that rather than using the name Noordoostpolder, the Frisians preferred It Suderleech (Frisian for South Polder), to strategically express the thought that the Noordoostpolder really formed the new, southern part of the province of Friesland (Flokstra 2000: 217). This naming process makes it clear that regional political aspirations could play a role in the process of shaping identity. It also points to the existence of certain tensions, while the new polder was supposed to be one and united. The authorities did not find holding fast to an old, separate cultural identity to be desirable. The existence of organisations in which cultural roots to the provinces of origin were cultivated was therefore regarded as unwelcome. When the Frisians wanted to begin their own cultural association, De Noordoostpolder reacted with a slap: ‘No, Frisians, join hands with us and build a fresh, new polder community!’ According to the editor, the Frisians must show that they were prepared to ‘build a [collective] new future for this, our new land’, and not separate themselves. The Case of the Feast of St. Martin The feast of St Martin, observed on November 11, 2004, provides a clear example of the way in which the cultivation of an individual’s own roots was combined with the process of shaping identity. In practice, the feast generated tensions that had an unfavourable effect on the desired cultural solidarity. Today St. Martin’s Eve is a popular children’s activity throughout the whole province of Flevoland, on which children go from door to door with lighted lanterns, singing one or more St. Martin songs in exchange for candy. The first mention of the introduction of St. Martin’s Eve into the Noordoostpolder is found in the first volume of De Noordoostpolder, on November 16, 1945: Emmeloord. On the evening of 11 Nov. the attention of many residents was attracted by hearing children singing along the street. Upon looking out they saw a number of children, each with a lantern, going along the houses singing about St. Martin, in hope of being rewarded for their song with a cookie or other refreshment. This is an old folk custom which is fashionable particularly in North Holland and Groningen, and which has been introduced here by former residents of those provinces. The children enjoyed considerable interest on this first Polder St. Martin’s Eve.

66

Reframing Dutch Culture

Two years later the same De Noordoostpolder reported that the feast was still unknown to many: ‘Many residents who do not know this custom were startled from their rest by the doorbell, and did not understand what was going on and what they were expected to do.’ The new residents very quickly heard from the children themselves, who were going door to door, what this was all about.5 Nevertheless, a flyer was put together for those who were not familiar with the custom. For the strategic purpose of encouraging a sense of solidarity, the need to share information was paramount. After all, the new polder was comprised of a varied collection of people who had to learn to live with one another. Knowledge of one another’s culture and folklore was therefore necessary. It was not only this brochure that contributed to this; it quickly appeared that De Noordoostpolder itself would play an important role in providing information. The editors had actually already expressed the intention that lay behind this. In its first issue, on Friday, June 22, 1945, the weekly announced that it sought to be ‘an element that brings together the people of the polder’, ‘translating that which is on our minds and that which binds us together’. To that end they tried to offer as complete a listing of all the activities that were being developed in the various communities as possible. To receive the paper, one had to take out a subscription. Since almost everyone was a subscriber, the paper grew into an important source for information.6 It was published by a printer/publisher in the nearby Frisian town of Balk, who also published the Balkster Courant. It was one of the few private initiatives in a field where everything was rigidly structured and organised from above by the polder authorities (Hoekstra 1998 and Hoekstra 2000). The polder board gave permission for the publication, and went a step further by henceforth placing its own official notices in the paper. In special columns the paper also assumed an advisory and educational role, in which folklore in the polder was regularly a topic. The subject was very frequently touched upon in the column ‘De Poldervrouw’ (The polder woman), which was intended to inform the housewives in the polder about specific topics. In 1949, a week before St. Martin’s Eve, ‘De Poldervrouw’ provided information about the feast for ‘those who do not know about it from their own experience’, and might be asking themselves whether ‘it is a good thing to send children out to beg’. This feast was not the only one on which guidance and information was given; other popular celebrations passed in review. Regarding the feast of St. Nicholas, the columnist suggested that it was best observed ‘in the bosom of the family’, particularly from the point where children no longer believed it was St. Nicholas who brought them 5 S.J. van der Molen calls this the most important explanation for the rise of the St. Martin rounds in the Noordoostpolder. ‘Internal migration’ often makes children ‘small propagandists in places where the youth did not yet know the custom’ (Van der Molen 1961: 16). Another example is Deventer, where the custom made its entry through migrants from Groningen; see ‘St. Maarten oud en koud vraagt niet een turfke. Migranten herinnerden stad aan een oud gebruik’, in: Deventer Dagblad, November 10, 1961. The newspaper article is found in the cutting file of the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. 6 Oral communication from regional historian Kees Bolle, January 24, 2006.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

67

their gifts, and began to make gifts to give to others. Seen from this perspective, the advice of ‘De Poldervrouw’ can be characterised as an attempt to instil such values as politeness and self-sacrifice, with as its most important motive that ‘the experience of being together as a family should remain in our children’s memory as a warm and beautiful time’. The advice that St. Nicholas should not be used to scare children into good behaviour also fit into this sphere. An important purpose of this educational folklore was to inculcate bourgeois values such as deference and a sense of family responsibility. In that sense, introducing folklore into the process needs to be understood as both a part of a civilising offensive and as an encouragement to unity and civic responsibility. But there was still another significance that comes to the fore in De Noordoostpolder: an element from which identity is derived. For example the feast of St. Martin would become widely accepted in the Noordoostpolder because of the many tints it represented. This emerges emphatically in the following quote from De Noordoostpolder, from Friday, November 18, 1949: For those who come here as strangers, it is most wonderful to see how an old tradition is still observed in this new place. It is typical that every corner of our land has different variations on the same St. Martin customs. Thus in the singing of the children one can hear that our new land has a very mixed population.

The mixture of the various dialects in which the songs were sung can been seen as a symbolic representation of the identity of the new polder province: unity in diversity. Public Folklore There was a growing realisation among governmental institutions that folklore could make an important contribution to the construction of the society in the Noordoostpolder. Soon this became a part of the cultural politics of the authorities. In the town of Marknesse, a study committee was set up to guide ‘the development of cultural life’ along the proper lines. Under the telling headline ‘Each town must develop its own folklore’, in late 1951 De Noordoostpolder reported on this. The Committee had been inspired by the St. Martin’s Eve rounds and the initiative in Marknesse to introduce Zeeuwse ringrijden to the polder. With these in mind, the Committee reported the following: The committee regards initiatives to develop folkloristic manifestations as very much to be applauded. These initiatives deserve the support of the whole population because they can enrich our village life. Already some attempts have been made in this direction, namely ringrijden on horseback, a custom which comes from Walcheren. The St. Martin’s Eve rounds have thus far only appeared tentatively, but deserve encouragement. Playing musical chairs on horseback, which has already been done at some village festivals, appears to be popular, and also deserves to be supported. The Committee regards the imposition of such customs from above to be useless. They must arise from the population

68

Reframing Dutch Culture spontaneously, but if they prove popular then deserve support. Every region, yes, indeed perhaps every town in the Noordoostpolder will have to develop its own folklore. Because of the very mixed population, simply importing things from the old land will lead to nothing.

Figure 4.2

‘Ringrijden’ the Noordoostpolder, 1950

Photo Collection Roel Winter.

In this way, as a means to foster cohesion, folklore was drawn into the terrain of cultural development. But unavoidably one ran into the following contradiction: folklore must also be spontaneous, and not imposed from above. All those involved felt that this question of spontaneity was of great importance. Artificiality was wrong. De Noordoostpolder also had its say on this, as emerges unambiguously in this short notice on the St. Martin celebrations: Less successful however was the well-intentioned attempt by the school personnel to give some direction to this and make a sort of pageant of it, thus guiding the belling around at homes in certain channels. Their attempt to involve all of the children is also of course praiseworthy; still, those who did not know the songs well enough got little out of it. What we heard was a potpourri of St. Martin’s songs from the provinces Limburg, Groningen and North Holland. In this manner the individual character of these songs is lost, which is to be regretted, and is also not the intention. A spontaneously celebrated St. Martin’s Eve therefore seems to us to correspond better to its folkloristic character.

The Amsterdam educator and amateur ethnologist J. Kruizinga, who after the war wrote a considerable amount in newspapers and weekly magazines about

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

69

St. Martin’s Eve customs and was also the author of a well-known handbook on folklore, ‘frowned on playgrounds or youth centres, educators or parents organising St. Martin’s processions.’ On the other hand, he suggested that some guidance was not necessarily bad, particularly when cultural organisations would intervene to see that St. Martin’s Eve activities should not end up in ‘drinking parties, begging processions and rowdiness’ (Kruizinga 1953: 10). It was precisely in the case of children’s celebrations such as St. Martin and St. Nicholas that Kruizinga saw the potential for ‘measured canalisations’ (Kruizinga 1953: 10). Kruizinga found himself on the knife edge between the pragmatic practice of folklore and education, and was therefore much less averse to ‘canalisations’ than professional ethnologists in the Dutch Folklore Committee, as we will see below. Greater attention to cultural development work in the Noordoostpolder fit within a national trend in the 1950s, in which cultural development efforts were in vogue throughout the Netherlands (Pots 2000: 265-272). Parallel to what was happening in the mid-1950s in other provinces, the Cultural Council for the Noordoostpolder was established in 1955. These councils were intended to stimulate cultural activities among the population. They initially focused on what was termed ‘regional’ culture. In practice, this regional culture was chiefly reduced to ‘folk culture’. For instance, the councils developed various initiatives to investigate the St. Martin’s day observances and breathe new life into them.7 This cultural development work was important in all the provinces, but in particular in the Noordoostpolder, where the regional culture had to be built from the ground up. That the cultural development of the polder was also an important point for the above mentioned Foundation for Population Research was proven by a conference organised in 1953 on the cultural aspects of the land reclamation and settlement policies. The importance of the vernacular language (dialect) and folklore for the organisers was evident. The ‘existing folk culture, which people brought with them to the polders, was according to them the foundation from which a new culture can blossom’ (Verslag 1953) The ethnologists in the Linguistics, Phonetics and Ethnology Department discussed well in advance the contribution that ethnology could make at this symposium.8 This department was comprised of several of the most prominent Dutch ethnologists of the day: P.J. Meertens, W. Roukens (director of the Netherlands Open Air Museum and also holder of an endowed chair in ethnology at the Catholic University in Nijmegen) and S.J. Bouma (at that time director of the 7 An example of the interest in ethnology from provincial Cultural Councils is found in the article ‘Sint Maarten’, in: Maandblad Noordholland, Uitgave van de Culturele Raad Noordholland 3 (1960). See also the initiative in 1981 by the Cultural Council of Overijssel for research into St. Martin customs in the province of Overijssel. See ‘Sint Maarten’, in: Meppeler Courant, November 11, 1981. Both cuttings are in the cutting archive of the Meertens Institute. 8 Department members Winand Roukens, S.J. Bouma and P.J. Meertens themselves took the lead in this. See the ‘Verslag Vergadering Sectie voor Taalkunde, Phonetiek en Volkskunde op 26 Juni 1952 te Amsterdam’, in Meertens’s archive at the Meertens Institute, inv. nr. 250, binder 4.

70

Reframing Dutch Culture

Zuiderzee Museum). Roukens proposed ‘to understand cultural aspects as broadly as possible’, while it was Bouma’s opinion that both the old and new folklore must be part of the discussions, specifically referring to the observation of St. Martin’s Eve.9 At the conference itself however folklore was barely discussed. Only Meertens gave a lecture on dialectology. The terminology used at the conference indicates it was chiefly focused on the politics of culture and settlement. The lectures were presented as ‘preferential recommendations’ and it was the intention that ‘guidelines for future policy might come out’ of it.10 In his presentation Meertens reveals he was primarily interested in the process of dialect change in a new environment. He noted that it was inevitable that in the new land dialects would evolve in the direction of a standard Dutch, in the course of which he also referred to a number of social factors, such as the fact that migrants in a new pioneer society would want to make a totally new start ‘that does not tolerate continuing in the old ways’ (Meertens 1952–1953: 364). The lecture demonstrates that ethnologists and dialectologists were seriously interested in the process of adaptation and change in the new polder land. But Meertens offered no opinion on the question most relevant to policy, whether the government should follow a particular political course on language, for instance focusing on discouraging dialects or, on the contrary, on preserving them. He deemed this aspect touching on the politics of language, ‘a somewhat dangerous field’, which he wished to avoid as a dialectologist and ethnologist. He did however note that when it comes to discouraging or breaking the use of dialect, caution was advised, because for the speaker the dialect has a great emotional value (Meertens 1952–1953: 376–377). Meertens did have a certain interest in policy and cultural-political questions that were connected to his discipline. As secretary of the Consultation for Dutch National Folk Life, an advisory group associated with the Ministry of Culture in which issues of this sort were discussed, he exchanged experiences and ideas with, for instance, the tourist sector (Van der Zeijden 2000: 24–26). But in his contribution he ignored policy questions of all sorts, although according to the sociologist who wrote the introduction to the collection, H.D. de Vries Reilingh, they should be the guideline for the research that was being addressed by the Foundation for Population Research. Meertens also did not take up the more generally debated question, namely the manner in which the new polders would affect the old folklore. De Vries Reilingh said the following about this: ‘With a radical change, one can conceive either that in response people stubbornly cling to old traditions, or will let go of them in the face of more homogenising outside influences.’11 In his introduction De Vries Reilingh spoke of the objective of the applied sciences, ‘namely, building bridges

9 ‘Vergadering van de Sectie voor Taalkunde, Phonetiek en Volkskunde op Vrijdag 20 Februari 1953’, in Meertens’s archive at the Meertens Institute, inv. nr. 250, binder 4. 10 From the folder for the ‘Congres over de culturele aspecten van de inpoldering der Zuiderzee’, on Saturday, September 26, in the Krasnapolsky Hotel in Amsterdam. 11 H.D. de Vries Reilingh, ‘Inleiding’, in: Elburg afgesloten van open water, xv.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

71

between science and policy’.12 According to De Vries Reilingh it was the task of the government to ‘balance on the knife edge’, to be energetic but also restrained, so that it did not endanger the ‘fundamental freedom’ of the citizens. But: ‘thought must be given to the future, and plans will have to be made’.13 Meertens preferred to maintain academic distance, and not move too much in the direction of what is now being termed ‘public folklore’. He wanted to investigate, but not guide. In this, he increasingly distanced himself from the social demographers, who were primarily oriented to underpinning political and policy choices. Nevertheless, some of his listeners detected a certain disappointment on Meertens’s part over the threatened loss of separate dialects (Verslag 1953: 54). This indicates that for Meertens, the idea of a ‘dying folklore’ still haunted him. Managing Religious Diversity In the Netherlands of the 1950s, ‘public folklore’ was primarily a complex combination of initiatives from the people themselves, the government’s cultural politics and, although the ethnologists were restrained about it, a dash of applied ethnology. Folklorists such as Kruizinga, mentioned above, fulfilled an educational role in articles in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in which they comprehensively discussed the background of folkloristic feasts. Such articles also appeared in De Noordoostpolder. In addition to St. Nicholas (December 6) and St. Martin (November 11), national holidays such as the Queen’s Birthday celebration (April 30) and the regional Polder Day, on September 8, marking the draining of the last water from the polder, were also used to generate social cohesion. Creating a basis of support among the heterogeneous population was not always easy, given that the local festival committees were regularly subject to considerable criticism from the residents. Emmeloord’s observance of the Queen’s Birthday in 1947, for instance, was not patriotic enough for some, because only one verse of the national anthem was sung (Flokstra 2000: 234-235). Folklore thus did not always function as a binding factor, and could also be a cause of interdenominational discord. The planners of the Noordoostpolder had deliberately opted for a population that was as diverse as possible: the residents of the polder were to be a cross section of the population of the whole of the Netherlands, not only geographically but also in terms of religion (Van Dissel 1991: 149-150). Because there was the risk that religion could be divisive for the new community, special plans were developed in regard to it. The idea was even proposed to aim for a total religious segregation, in which each village would consist of only one confessional group. In a certain sense that would have been a reflection of the situation in the Netherlands as a whole, where in the south the Catholics were entirely dominant. Ultimately the choice was made for an equal division of the denominations over the Noordoostpolder. As it happens, most of the migrants were from the adjoining Protestant provinces, and from Protestant 12 De Vries Reilingh, ‘Inleiding’, xiii. 13 De Vries Reilingh, ‘Inleiding’, xii.

72

Reframing Dutch Culture

Zeeland. This created a less preferred overrepresentation of Protestants. This in turn became an important political issue, with the Catholic People’s Party in Parliament keeping a close eye on whether Catholics were not being given too small a share of the pie (Van Woensel 1996: 42–47; Van Dissel 1991: 150, 171–172). The Catholic archdiocese however made considerable efforts to motivate as many Catholics as possible to move to the Noordoostpolder. It was precisely in the 1950s that religious discord would again increase in the Netherlands. The division of Dutch society into ‘pillars’ on the basis of religion or ideology (in Dutch, verzuiling) was still more or less intact (Luykx 2000: 186-210). In 1953 the celebration of the reestablishment of dioceses in the Netherlands in 1853 was seized upon to anchor the Catholic segment of the population still more strongly in Dutch society. In this period, folklore was being used as a weapon in the process of Catholic identity politics too. At the initiative of the Catholic youth movement Jong Holland – which not by chance had chosen St. Martin as its patron saint! – St. Martin parades were organised in Utrecht, into which the folklore associated with the St. Martin’s Eve practices was consciously integrated (Helsloot 2001). In the Noordoostpolder this and other initiatives would lead to increased tension, which came to the surface during the St. Martin’s observances on November 11, 1951. That year, by chance, St. Martin’s Day fell on a Sunday. A neutral sounding notice in De Noordoostpolder observed that in such a case, it was customary to ‘hold the St. Martin’s Eve on the preceding Saturday’. That was chiefly a Protestant wish: for Protestants, Sunday rest was an unquestioned obligation.14 The Catholic authorities saw things differently. The notice drew an angry response from Pastor Koopmans, the priest at one of the local Catholic parishes, who in a letter to the editor reminded everyone that St. Martin was a Catholic saint, and that the feast of St. Martin was thus a Catholic feast, and thus a feast that would best come into its own on a Sunday. Pastor Koopmans (1900–1969) was an untiring propagandist for the interests of the Catholic population of the Noordoostpolder. Among other things, he went into action for recruiting Catholic farm labourers for the polder, because they would be most suitable for working for the Catholic farmers.15 It is evident from a strong reaction to Koopmans’s letter to the editor a week later that the subject was no less sensitive among Protestants. Mrs. W. EissensBakker, a teacher, wrote that in connection with St. Martin’s Eve she had organised a contest at school, in which the most beautiful St. Martins lanterns were awarded prizes. In the course of this, she had also told something of ‘the ancient tale of St. Martin’. For the children, and for herself, the celebration had a more general 14 The questions were tabled by parliamentarian Bruins Slot. From the answer by Minister Struycken it appears, though, that various provinces had exemptions, not only for customs such as palmpaas processions and carnival celebrations, but also for the feast of St. Martin: J.H. Kruizinga, ‘Sint Maarten is nog springlevend. 11 november lichtjes avond’, in: Het Parool, Saturday, November 9, 1957. 15 Beginning in 1945 Koopmans was the pastor for the Noordoostpolder, first in Emmeloord and between 1949 and 1958 in town of Krabbenburg. Regarding him see De Bruin 1995: 15–26 and 78.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

73

significance. In the words of Mrs. Eissens, ‘Don’t think that the children who were singing on that evening were thinking for even one moment about an old bishop. They were celebrating the feast for its own sake, for the glow and the good cheer, which is precisely all the more important in these sombre autumn days. They knew the origin of this traditional observance, but it does not go beyond that.’ Further, she subtly twisted the knife by noting that she had reason to believe that the custom of St. Martin’s Eve had been introduced to the Noordoostpolder by Protestants from Groningen and North Holland. ‘I don’t know who introduced St. Martin’s Eve in the other towns, I only know what happened here. I also know that it was precisely most of the Roman Catholic children from the South of our country who were unfamiliar with the custom of “lights”.’ In short: Pastor Koopmans shouldn’t complain and shouldn’t try to claim the feast to his own denomination. In the same year in which the question of St. Martin played itself out, there was also a conflict in Emmeloord over the Corpus Christi procession in May, which was being held in the Noordoostpolder for the first time. Protestants asked indignantly if there had been permission given for such a public Catholic display. At the time religious processions in public space were forbidden by law, and often were the causes for interconfessional conflict. Relations between Catholics and Protestants in the Noordoostpolder were especially sensitive because of the rapid growth of the population there, with the eyes of the nation on it to see if the religious groups would indeed eventually find a balance. The editors of De Noordoostpolder did their best to allay the conflict around the St. Martin’s observance. In a commentary from 1951 the editor suggested that the origins of St. Martin’s Eve may well have been Catholic, but that His Reverence should not take offence that for those who think differently, this meaning [namely, that it is the feast of a Catholic saint] has moved to the background and that for them the celebration of the feast of St. Martin is a folkloristic, and not a religious event. His Reverence should rejoice with us that in Emmeloord, and perhaps elsewhere in the Noordoostpolder, an old tradition is being maintained by children from all segments of the population, and from all denominations, and that this St. Martin’s feast is being celebrated in a way that we all learned at a tender age.

As it happens, the publishers of De Noordoostpolder where themselves Protestant. However, they saw folklore as separate from religious differences. The editors were of the view that St. Martin’s Eve had become an innocent folkloristic custom, practised without reference to its religious roots. This being the case, it could function as a feast for all residents of the polder. This view was further supported by projecting the origins of the St. Martin festivities back into Germanic antiquity, to a period in which there had been no Christianity, let alone the confessional polemics that eventually developed. Not only this feast was provided with prehistoric, Germanic roots, but Easter and other traditional customs were brought in De Noordoostpolder into relation with Germanic rituals, with the egg folklore as the most striking example. The question which remains to be answered is the background of this way of explaining things. German ethnologists call it Rücklauf, the process by which old

74

Reframing Dutch Culture

theories about the Germanic origins of popular cultural usages which have long since been disregarded by professional ethnologists as incorrect, are nevertheless still embraced – sometimes even more fervently – by the media and amateur ethnologists (Moser 1962; Moser 1964). The popularity of the ‘Germanic’ explanation must be placed in the much broader perspective of what is termed ‘brokering modernity’ (Köstlin 1999; Roodenburg 2000: 101–103) – the supposition that in folklore changes are in a certain sense neutralised and made acceptable by exposing a quasideeper traditional substratum, which can go back to prehistoric times. In this way, as we saw, folklore offered a way of overcoming religious differences, a method of ‘managing religious diversity’, which was no unnecessary luxury in a religiously divided society like the Netherlands. ‘A Bit of National Pride’ The high point of the application of folklore in the Noordoostpolder, and also of the various regional associations, lay in the 1950s, extending into the 1960s. After that it slowly receded. By the late 1950s the Frisian association was already facing a crisis. Only the Drentse association, ’t Nije Landschap (the New Landscape), still exists today. According to Flokstra, this can be attributed to the fact that this association increasingly developed into a theatre society with a general character, which from as early as the 1970s already counted members who did not have a Drentse background (Flokstra 2000: 224). The second generation of migrants had less need for regional associations, and became members of general theatre societies and sports clubs. They did not feel the connection with the old land that the first generation had. Born in the Noordoostpolder, a ‘land of origin’ had less meaning for them. Beginning in the 1960s, St. Martin also got his feet on the ground in the new parts of Flevoland. According to the newspaper De Flevolander, we can thank ‘those residents of Flevoland who came from the Noordoostpolder, that the feast of St. Martin is now also celebrated in Flevoland... so that a tradition has already come into being, which will never disappear.’ On the other hand, the newspaper also spoke of the need to observe the feast, implicitly suggesting there is a need to cultivate such traditions.16 In the 1970s the St. Martin tradition changed, and was used primarily to collect money for good causes. In Lelystad, for instance, it was the ‘Action Committee Flevoland for Active Development Cooperation’ that promoted the idea that ‘in place of the usual massive quantities of candy, children should collect a (symbolic) sum of money in the form of five and ten-cent coins’, to be turned in for the Third World. The Committee emphasised that ‘in this case, it is not the income from the action that is important, but so much more the idea that children learn to be

16 ‘Jeugd van Flevoland viert vanaf eerste jaar het Sint Maartenfeest. Oude volksgebruiken in nieuw gewonnen gebied’, in: De Flevolander, November 10, 1964. Cutting archive, Meertens Institute, Amsterdam.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

75

aware that a “a guest at the table” is better than collecting candy for themselves’.17 The call from the Action Committee fell on responsive ears in many schools. This ‘idealistic’ content for the St. Martin feast fit wonderfully with the idealistic and progressive ‘60s and ‘70s, in which the Netherlands professed to be a model of social consciousness. The connection with a ‘land of origin’ in the meantime was being felt less as Flevoland developed its own identity. The creation of a Flevoland identity came clearly to the fore when in 1987 a new edition was published of a famous survey under the editorship of P.J. Meertens in which the ‘character’ of the population of the different Dutch provinces was discussed in detail. The original survey of 1938 of course could not yet have discussed Flevoland. Only a chapter on the Zuiderzee fishermen was then included (Van WijheSmeding 1938). In the new edition of this weighty tome the newly reclaimed province Flevoland had however to be given its place. The contribution was written by Pieter Terpstra, the same person who in 1945, as a young journalist, had taken the initiative in starting the news and advertising paper De Noordoostpolder. Terpstra wrote that he found it difficult to say anything about the peculiar character of the residents of Flevoland, because ‘with regard to this region, one can hardly speak of “history” yet, let alone be able to determine anything about the character of its people’ (Terpstra 1987: 14). Yet he did make an attempt, in which he characterised Flevoland as a reflection of the Dutch population. After all, Flevolanders had come from all over the Netherlands, and thus Flevoland should be just as mixed as the Netherlands itself. ‘One finds a bit of the Dutch national character there, but the polder did not take on a character of its own’ (Terpstra 1987: 236). Or did it? According to Terpstra, what all Flevolanders have in common ‘is the daring to break with their old, familiar surroundings, to seek new opportunities in the wide open spaces’ (Terpstra 1987: 237). In the experience of the Flevolanders, and in the experience of other Dutchmen and women, Flevoland was the land of the pioneers (Kuiper 1982), who had built something new from the ground up – like the ‘reconstruction’ of the Netherlands in it’s battle with the sea. Here something great had happened, which drew even international attention; Flevoland represented ‘a bit of national pride’ (Terpstra 1987: 236). This is also the feeling expressed in the creation of the Nieuw Land Heritage Centre in Lelystad, opened in 2005, and which was also central in the visit by Queen Beatrix, on September 27, 2005, marking twenty-five years of her reign. Beatrix expressed then that superlatives were inadequate to describe how much admiration she had for the work that has been accomplished in the newest province of the Netherlands, which, in the early 1950s, when she visited it as a princess, was still more or less an island in the IJsselmeer with a couple of wooden sheds.18

17 ‘Gast aan tafel. Stuivers in plaats van snoep’, newspaper cutting from 1972 in the cutting archive of the Meertens Institute. 18 www.nos.nl/nosjournaal/25jaarbeatrix/provinciebezoeken/flevoland.

76

Reframing Dutch Culture

The Lesson of the Noordoostpolder In this chapter I have sought to show how ‘public folklore’ functioned in the development of a new sense of solidarity in the reclaimed Noordoostpolder in the first decades after the Second World War. The Noordoostpolder was once conceived as a test plot for what the new Netherlands could become. From this chapter it emerges that the Noordoostpolder was also a test plot for what was later to be termed public folklore, a cultural politics in which the government and applied ethnologists contributed to a process of shaping a community, in this case around the feast of St. Martin. Various actors played a role in this: the migrants themselves, who initially came together in their own cultural associations in which the folklore of their land of origin could be cultivated; the newspapers and schools, which sought to guide the process in the proper paths by providing information, making suggestions, or deliberate steering. Last but not least, there were the governmental authorities (local and national), churches and other social institutions, which armed with data from the scientists drew up their own plans, in which the government explored the boundaries between spontaneity and direction from above. It also emerged from this chapter that ethnologists were involved in shaping the policy, but that their attitude was generally hesitant and restrained. Even the interesting question, which was in fact asked by the social demographers, of what the influence of the modernisation process would be on ‘traditional’ folklore, was left out of consideration. The folklorists of Meertens’s generation restricted themselves chiefly to documentation, and, at that, to documentation of that ‘traditional’ folklore that was threatened with disappearing, in such places as the former Zuiderzee island of Urk and the old Zuiderzee town of Elburg. The authorities responsible for developing the society in the Noordoostpolder chose a more pragmatic approach in which they chiefly sought to take advantage of initiatives from the new residents themselves. For instance, the popularity of ringrijden and the St. Martin’s Eve rounds were seized upon and given a place in the cultural development process as a means for strengthening social cohesion. They did not go much beyond endorsing what arose from the population. The government too was careful. The report of the committee in Marknesse observed that ‘the imposition of such customs from above’ was senseless and that these customs ‘must arise from the population spontaneously.’ As we have seen in the newspaper reports from De Noordoostpolder, great importance was attached to a ‘spontaneously’ celebrated ‘authentic’ feast of St. Martin. Folklore was supposed to be ‘authentic’, otherwise it wasn’t ‘real’ folklore. It is also striking that the initiative for the most part lay with private individuals. It was, after all, the migrants themselves who set up their own cultural associations. The local and regional authorities only responded to the developments, but did try to guide them in the proper channels as much as possible. The central concern of the government was to cultivate social coherence and a collective polder identity. When they saw that folklore could provide a means of accomplishing this, they gratefully seized upon it.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

77

Still more striking than the role of the government however is that of the local newspaper, the privately owned news and advertising paper De Noordoostpolder. The role of the newspaper went far beyond the provision of information. The newspaper acted as an interpreter of the folklore; in the process they reached back to old (and out of date) scientific theories about the Germanic origins of the folklore. Further, in a certain sense the newspaper acted as the tutor for the new society, and offered guidelines on how the celebrations should take place. Drawing connections through to the present, we can ask if much has changed in the policies of the Dutch government with respect to ‘public folklore’ in the intervening years. With regard to the question of spontaneity, with in the background the large question of ‘authenticity’, ethnologists in the Netherlands are still rather careful and restrained, and most experts in the field of folk culture and ethnology do not place much faith in control from the top down. In a recent report on Immaterieel cultureel erfgoed in Nederland (Immaterial Cultural Heritage in the Netherlands), compiled at the request of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, this is even spoken of as ‘a peculiarly Dutch approach’ (Muskens 2005: 23, 32). What of course has changed since Meertens’s generation is that the dynamic of popular culture has become much more the starting point for ethnological research. It is no longer ‘traditional’ or ‘disappearing’ culture that is central, but the dynamics of cultural identity, change and integration (Bennis et al. 2002). In an ethnically fragmented society, social cohesion is once again become a central policy objective. This is particularly true for the management of religious and ethnic diversity. If in the Noordoostpolder the issue was the differences between Protestants and Catholics, today it is a question of managing a society comprised of diverse religious and ethnic groups, all of which have, or seek, a different degree of integration. There is a widespread feeling that the social problem of youth unemployment and criminality is caused by insufficient socio-cultural coherence and integration. Possibly the newest province in the Netherlands can once again take the lead in finding a solution. In any case, that is the opinion of the burgomaster of Almere, by far the largest city in Flevoland. In an interview in a weekly news magazine she called Almere ‘the test plot for the future, multicultural Netherlands’ (Van Deijl 2006). It is the same concept of the experimental plot that had already taken root before the Second World War, during the plans for the inpoldering of the Zuiderzee. In terms of ethnicity Almere is just as heterogeneous, and just as little integrated, as the other large cities of the Netherlands. Following a scientific investigation by sociologists and anthropologists from the University of Amsterdam, in 2001 the community began an ‘action programme for social cohesion’, intended to promote social coherence in Almere.19 Governments are increasingly calling in the aid of scientists, and want their recommendations for policy to be as concrete as possible. Scientists can not always satisfy this demand. For instance, the researchers Kees Schuyt and Léon Deben reported that the community was ‘slightly disappointed’ 19 See the website of the city of Almere http://www.almere.nl/smartsite.dws?id=13430, consulted on February 17, 2006.

78

Reframing Dutch Culture

because it was not possible to give their research a sufficient ‘political translation’. It is obvious that the contribution of public folklorists would lie primarily in strengthening what is termed the ‘identity dimension of social cohesion’ (Deben & Schuyt 2000: 72). At the moment, public folklorists are playing a significant role in the media. In her recent book History and Memory in American Magazines, the American media researcher Carolyn Kitch focuses on the important role that the media play as an intermediary in the construction of social ideas about the meaning of the past (Kitch 2005: 4–5). According to Kitch, their role is not so much that of a conduit with a one way flow, as in conducting a dialogue with their audience of readers. It is striking that in this dialogue public folklorists are allocated an important role as ‘experts on tradition’. In newspapers and on television programmes Dutch ethnologists are regularly asked to interpret current developments in today’s society and explain their meaning. In this way they contribute to ‘a social narrative’ about the past, and through that to the construction of a socially shared cultural identity. Something similar also applies to the government financed heritage institutions such as the Nieuw Land Heritage Centre in Lelystad. This Centre sees its task as ‘telling the story of the greatest polder in the world’. Telling substantiated stories about immaterial heritage (whether shared or not): is that not the most important task of public folklore? References Adriaenssens, Ivo (ed.) (2002), Alledaags is niet gewoon. Reflecties over volkscultuur en samenleven. Brussel: Koning Boudewijn Stichting. Baron, Robert and Nicholas Spitzer (eds) (1992), Public Folklore. Washington/ London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Bendix, Regina and Herman Roodenburg (eds) (2000), Managing Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History and Anthropology. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Bennis, Hans et al. (eds.) (2002), Een buurt in beweging. Talen en culturen in het Utrechtse Lombok en Transvaal. Amsterdam: Aksant. Bronner, Simon (1996), Popularizing Pennsylvania: Henry W. Schoemaker and the Progressive Uses of Folklore and History. University Park: Penn State University Press. Daan, Jo (1950), Wieringer land en leven in de taal. Alphen aan den Rijn: Samsom. De Bruin, G. (1995), Parochie in het nieuwe land. Vijftig jaar geschiedenis van de parochie St. Michaël te Emmeloord. Emmeloord: St. Michaël-parochie. De Munck, Bert (2005), Microtechnologieën van volkscultuur. Europese etnologie in Vlaanderen tussen sector en discipline. Volkskunde; driemaandelijks tijdschrift voor de studie van de volkscultuur, 106, 341–370. De Pater, B. (2000), Vergane glorie, nieuw elan. Inpoldering en beelden van de Zuiderzee. Historisch Geografisch Tijdschrift, 18, 37–48. Deben, Léon & Kees Schuyt (2000), Sociale cohesie in Almere. Sociale samenhang in een jonge stad. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

79

Dekker, Ton, John Helsloot and Carla Wijers (eds) (2000), Roots and Rituals: The Construction of Ethnic Identities. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Dekker, Ton (2002), De Nederlandse volkskunde. De verwetenschappelijking van een emotionele belangstelling. Amsterdam: Aksant. Dow, James R. and Hannjost Lixfeld (eds) (1994), The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Feintuch, Burt (ed.) (1988), The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Flokstra, Tjerd F. (2000), Samenleven in het nieuwe land. Een schets van de sociale, culturele en geestelijke ontwikkelingen in de Noordoostpolder 1942–1970. Kampen: IJsselacademie. Gerndt, Helga (ed.) (1987), Volkskunde und Nationalsozialismus. Referate und Diskussionen einer Tagung. München: Münchener Vereinigung für Vokskunde. Groenman, Sjoerd (1953), Kolonisatie op nieuw land. Assen: Van Gorcum. Heinemeijer W.F. (ed.) (1986), 50 jaar actief achter de Afsluitdijk. Jubileumbundel ter gelegenheid van het vijftigjarig bestaan van de Stichting voor het Bevolkingsonderzoek in de drooggelegde Zuiderzeepolders 1936-1986. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers. Helsloot, John (2001), An Element of Christian Liturgy? The Feast of St. Martin in The Netherlands in the 20th Century, in Paul Post et al. (eds), Christian Feast and Festival. The Dynamics of Western Liturgy and Culture, 493–518. Leuven: Peeters. Henkes, Barbara (2005), Uit liefde voor het volk. Volkskundigen op zoek naar de Nederlandse identiteit 1918-1945. Amsterdam: Athenaeum – Polak & Van Gennep. Hoekstra, H.W. (1998), Pieter Terpstra koos de plaatselijke drukker. Uit de geschiedenis van de Noordoostpolder. De Vriendenkring. Cultuurhistorisch tijdschrift voor Flevoland, 38, 23–28. Hoekstra, H.W. (2000), Doordrukken. Het verhaal van een familiebedrijf – 118 jaar Hoekstra. Emmeloord: F.D. Hoekstra bv. Johler, Reinhard (2000), Ethnological Aspects of ‘Rooting’ Europe in a ‘DeRitualised’ European Union, in Regina Bendix and Herman Roodenburg (eds), Managing Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History and Anthropolog. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 171–184. Jonker, Eduard (1988), De sociologische verleiding. Sociologie, sociaal-democratie en de welvaartsstaat. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff / Forsten. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2000), Folklorists in Public: Reflections on Cultural Brokerage in the United States and Germany. Journal of Folklore Research, 37, 1–21. Kitch, Carolyn (2005), Pages from the Past: History & Memory in American Magazines. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Köstlin, Konrad (1999), On the Brink of the Next Century: The Necessary Invention of the Present. Journal of Folklore Research, 36, 289–298.

80

Reframing Dutch Culture

Kruizinga, Jacobus H. (1953), Levende folklore in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Assen: De Torenlaan. Kuiper, J.L. (1982), Flevoland, land van pioniers. Dronten: Voster. Lowenthal, David (1996), Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: The Free Press. Luykx, Paul (2000), Erger dan de Reformatie? Katholieken in de jaren vijftig, in: Paul Luykx, Andere katholieken. Opstellen over Nederlandse katholieken in de twintigste eeuw. Nijmegen: SUN, 186–210. Meertens, P.J. and L. Kaiser (1942), Het eiland Urk. Alphen aan den Rijn: Samsom. Meertens, P.J. (1952-1953), De ontwikkeling van de taal in de drooggelegde en droogkomende Zuiderzeepolders. Het Gemenebest 13, 357–378. Meertens, P.J. (1958), Enkele aantekeningen over volksgebruiken in Elburg. Elburg afgesloten van open water. Onderzoekingen in verband met de betekenis der Zuiderzeeinpoldering voor de gemeente Elburg. Amsterdam: Stichting voor het Bevolkingsonderzoek in de Drooggelegde Zuiderzeepolders. Moser, Hans (1962), Vom Folklorismus in unserer Zeit. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 58, 177–209. Moser, Hans, (1964), Der Folklorismus als Forschungsproblem der Volkskunde. Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde, 55, 9–57. Muskens, George (2005), Immaterieel cultureel erfgoed in Nederland. Rapportage op basis van interviews met 33 deskundigen, in opdracht van het ministerie van OCW, directie Cultureel Erfgoed. Lepelstraat: DOCA Bureaus. De Noordoostpolder [NOP]: 1945–2006. Pots, Roel (2000), Cultuur, koningen en democraten. Overheid en cultuur in Nederland. Nijmegen: SUN. Roodenburg, Herman (2000), Ideologie en volkscultuur: het internationale debat, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 66–109. Te Velde, Henk (1992), Gemeenschapszin en plichtsbesef. Liberalisme en nationalisme in Nederland 1870–1918. Den Haag: SDU. Terpstra, Pieter (1984), Verloren land. Een herinneringswerk aan Schokland. Kampen: IJsselacademie. Terpstra, Pieter (1987), De Nederlandse volkskarakters. Bewerking van het gelijknamige, onder redactie van P.J. Meertens en Anne de Vries in 1938 bij Uitgeversmaatschappij J.H. Kok te Kampen verschenen boek. Kampen: J.H. Kok. Van Deijl, F. (2006), Annemarie Jorritsma: ‘Zonder Almere was het Naardermeer allang drooggelegd’. HP De Tijd 3 februari, 16–19. Van der Laarse, Rob (ed.) (2005), Bezeten van vroeger. Erfgoed, identiteit en musealisering. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Van der Molen, Sytze Jan (1961), Levend Volksleven. Een eigentijdse volkskunde van Nederland. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Public Folklore and the Construction of a Regional Identity

81

Van der Ven, Dirk-Jan (1930), Heemschut, volkskunst en de drooglegging der Zuiderzee. Amsterdam: F. van Rossum. Van der Ven, Dirk-Jan (1932), De stervende folklore der Zuiderzee, in J.C. Ramaer (ed.), De Zuiderzee: een herinneringswerk, 77-140. Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema. Van der Zeijden, Albert (2000), De voorgeschiedenis van het Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. De ondersteuning van de volkscultuurbeoefening in Nederland 1949-1992. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. Van der Zeijden, Albert (2004), Volkscultuur van en voor een breed publiek. Enkele theoretische premissen en conceptuele uitgangspunten. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. Van de Ven, Martin Ch. (1969), Taal in Noordoostpolder. Een sociolinguïstisch onderzoek. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger. Van Dissel, A.M.C. (1991), 59 jaar eigengereide doeners in Flevoland, Noordoostpolder en Wieringermeer. Rijksdienst voor de IJsselmeerpolders 1930– 1989. Lelystad: Walburg Pers. Van Ginkel, Rob (2000), Volkscultuur als valkuil: over antropologie, volkskunde en cultuurpolitiek. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Van Wijhe-Smeding, Alie (1938), De Zuiderzeevissers, in P.J. Meertens and Anne de Vries (eds), De Nederlandse volkskarakters. Kampen: J.H. Kok. Van Woensel, J.T.W.H. (1996), Kerkopbouw en kerkbouw in de IJsselmeerpolders. Lelystad: Stichting Uitgeverij de Twaalfde Provincie. Verslag (1953) Verslag van het congres over de culturele aspecten van de inpoldering der Zuiderzee, gehouden op 26 september 1953 te Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Stichting voor het Bevolkingsonderzoek in de Drooggelegde Zuiderzeepolders. Wolffram, Dirk J. (1995), Zeeuwse pachters in de Noordoostpolder. Selectie en bijdrage aan de sociale opbouw 1945–1962. Lelystad: Stichting Uitgeverij de Twaalfde Provincie.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition: The Turkish-Dutch and the Imaginary Geography of East and West Hilje van der Horst

In 1926, three years after Kemal Atatürk declared the Republic of Turkey (with himself as president), a boat named Karadeniz left Turkey. This exposition ship was equipped to travel along the European harbours, including Amsterdam, in order to show Turkey’s modernity to the European elite and to advocate its products, such as tobacco, cotton and carpets. Women were taken along, and they danced with the Western guests. Their unveiled, Western-attired bodies were a prime way of demonstrating Turkey’s place within modernity. Interestingly, the ship was also filled with material objects from the Ottoman past and archaic material culture. In contemporary Turkish-Dutch families, women are not usually perceived as the embodiment of modernity. In fact, their bodies are more likely to be regarded as carriers of traditional and religious values. Nevertheless, these families also tend to place modernity and tradition side by side. For the older generation of former migrants it is in fact tradition that is considered embodied, and the female body plays an important role in this embodiment. On the other hand, the houses of these former immigrants appeal to modernity. Their children, who have increased their cultural capital in the Dutch context but who are also less certain about their Turkish identities, tend to manifest tradition in their domestic interiors. Many Turkish-Dutch originally came from villages in central Anatolia. In the Netherlands, most of them live in urban environments. Their migration thus involved not only moving from Turkey to the Netherlands, but also from a rural to an urban environment.1 The living style and furnishings in rural Turkey, which are characterised by multi-purpose rooms and flexible furniture, have often been described to me as ‘traditional’, by both those who grew up in Turkey and those who grew up in the Netherlands. Houses in the Netherlands, which are furnished with couches, glass cabinets and tables, are often described as ‘modern’. This shows that the distinction between modern and traditional, which social scientists have been

1 Turkish immigrants to the Netherlands are much more often rural in origin than are other Turks, such as those who migrated to Germany (Akgündüz, 1993).

84

Reframing Dutch Culture

trying to deconstruct for quite some time, has remained very real in the experience of my Turkish-Dutch informants. Even though current scholars generally agree that the diversities in the world and the complexities of social and economic transformations cannot be satisfyingly understood in terms of an opposition between modernity and tradition, these terms remain important in lay discourse. Wariness of such binaries should not prevent the consideration of their effects in everyday understandings of the world. For example, Ozyegin (2002) describes how the interactions between urban tenants in Turkey and their housekeepers and doorkeepers of rural origin are invested with notions of tradition and modernity, which her informants understand in oppositional terms. These terms are similarly important for my Turkish-Dutch informants, whom I will discuss in this chapter. I limit my analysis to those elements that are helpful in understanding modernity and tradition as signifiers in everyday experiences, in relation to material objects. I am thus primarily concerned with modernity and tradition as meaning and as experience; I am less concerned with academic usages of the term and with schools of theory and definition. I will analyse how Turkish-Dutch appropriate understandings of modernity and tradition in their own lives, through both discourse and dwelling practices. The first part of the chapter sets the theoretical background. The first section discusses the connotations of ownership and location of modernity and tradition in the imaginative geography of East and West. In the second section, I review the concept of appropriation in light of these problematic ideas of ownership. Appropriation can help to overcome the implication of ownership. The first part of the chapter thus addresses the objections to locating modernity and authenticity as opposites in a bipolar world and the subsequent suggestion that appropriation goes from East to West for modernity and from West to East (or present to past) for tradition. This bipolar world is nevertheless relevant to the imaginations of Turkish immigrants and their descendants. The second part of the chapter focuses on their everyday usages and conceptions of the term and material appropriations. The third section begins by setting the research context, and the fourth section considers the changes in bodily practices that follow migration. It also investigates the performance of modernity and tradition in these bodily movements and postures. The fifth and sixth sections then scrutinise the appropriation of modernity and tradition in light of the fieldwork. Material dwelling practices and discourse on modernity and tradition are both shown to provide insight in the praxis of this appropriation. The Location of Modernity and Tradition In lay usage, tradition and modernity are not neatly divided. Both tradition and modernity are part of networks of terms and connotations. Tradition is intimately related to rurality, culture and authenticity, but also to conservatism and backwardness. Modernity, on the other hand, rubs shoulders with fashion, progress and urbanity, in

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

85

addition to loss and shallowness. While academics are obliged to define their terms in translucent ways, this should not alienate us from the fuzzy and contradicting realities of the everyday lives we wish to grasp. Objects are important mediators in everyday experiences and in the appropriation of modernity and tradition. The distinction between handmade, artisan objects and mass-produced industrial objects is a material embodiment of the constructed opposition between tradition and modernity, but they are not opposites. The meaning of artistry is a product of the fact that there is also an ‘other’ in the form of mass production. Even if the physical reasons for artisan production cease to exist, strong commercial motivations would remain to preserve time-consuming, relatively expensive production styles. The added value of artisan products, as compared to mass–produced products, derives from their appeal to notions of tradition. Paradoxically, the added value of tradition is a product of the modern capitalist economy. Although these points may be opposed in discourse, modernity and tradition are part of the same system in other dimensions, including the economic sphere. Throughout its history, modernity has been linked to an imaginary geography in which the prerogative to define modernity was preserved for the West. Along with the idea of modernity, therefore, came connotations of spatial ownership. Against the background of the ‘other’ of modernity, the pre-modern or the traditional, spatial ownership was defined as a concept that would always suppose a spatial and temporal location rather than universal applicability. In the European perspective, the other of modernity was both historically in the past and spatially at a distance, usually to be found in the direction of East and south rather than West and north.2 This bipolar Eurocentric geographical imagination is thus characteristic of the modern perspective (see also Said 1979; De Boer 2004). Although its advent is located earlier in history, modernity is intrinsically related to the industrial revolution, which changed material life and consumer culture immensely, such that mass consumer culture has become the material form of modernity (see also Miller 1987).3 This change from modernity as a set of ideas to a material ordering of society has made modernity descriptive of a geographical area, which was instrumental in the geographical imagery of the term. As Kumar says, ‘In our times, modern times, there is only one way to survive: become industrial. For the world as a whole, it became increasingly obvious that to be a modern society was to be an industrial society. To modernise was to industrialise – that is to become like the West’ (1995: 83). These spatial and temporal imaginations were obviously far from hermetic. The bygone was assumed to have survived here and there, allowing the modern subject 2 East, West, Middle East and similar terms often assume a Eurocentric starting position. 3 McKendrick (1983) argues that a change in consumer culture preceded the industrial revolution. Although the industrial revolution did change consumer culture, it furthered a prior change.

86

Reframing Dutch Culture

a gaze into the past and into a distant world that was actually close by. The history of the ethnological discipline is replete with examples of endeavours to find relics of the past in the everyday present, just as anthropology has often been an effort to seek the bygone of here in the present of far away (Roodenburg 2003; MacDonald 2002). Even though such styles of thinking have now been abandoned, they continue to colour the histories of these disciplines. Sociology, which has historically been more preoccupied with modernity than with tradition, has also been forced to open up its definitions of modernity and allow for the existence of multiple modernities. A number of problems are inherent in this bipolar geographical imagination. First, because it defines modernity as a set of localised characteristics rather than in the abstract, the concept of modernity becomes descriptive, consisting solely of what the ‘Western’ world is or was. It ceases to be analytical and creates a barrier that the non-Western world can never truly permeate. In addition, the modernity that is to be found in the non-Western world can be seen only in terms of the adoption of these Western properties, and modernity in countries in the supposed peripheries of modernity would always be considered exogenous, or even as ‘inauthentic’ additions. The genealogy of modernity is therefore localised, both historically and spatially. The concept must always remain relatively abstract, lest the argumentation of what constitutes modernity devolve into a circular line of reasoning. Second, the bipolar geographical imagination does not acknowledge everyday experiences of modernity and tradition. As various ethnographies have shown, the elements of modernity (e.g., globalised consumption) do not enter solely into localities. They are appropriated and localised, and they become part of what is called a creolised or hybrid environment (Bhabha 1994). For example, Miller prepared an extensive ethnography of everyday experiences with modernity in Trinidad, a country in which the rise in welfare generated a rather sudden inflow of mass-produced consumption goods, which are often associated with modernity (Miller 1997). This need not imply that modernity is a new experience in countries that are on the supposed peripheries of modernity. For example, Zürcher (1993) and other historians of the Ottoman Empire and its successor state Turkey have shown that Turkey’s quest for modernity is not of recent inception. Although Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, did define modernisation as his principal goal for Turkey, earlier sultans and ruling elites had cast a yearning eye towards Europe’s modernity for much longer. For a long time, modernity and Western-ness were intrinsic elements of Turkish history, just as the history of Islam or the Ottoman Empire were part of the histories of Europe for centuries (see also Navaro-Yashin 2002). Secularism and modernity have also been associated with each other, importantly because of Weber’s predicted disenchantment of the world. As has become clear however, religion and modernity continue to exist side by side, and there is no correlation between the level of modernity and the level of religiosity in a society, even if it is possible to speak of such levels. This applies to the relationship between modernity and Islam as well. Certain interpretations of Islam, however, do go hand in hand with the rhetoric of anti-modernity; to say that modernity is in opposition

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

87

to this religion would be fallacious (for example, see Saktanber 2002). It does no justice to the mixed experiences of modernity and Islam in specific geographical settings, which are located in the ‘West’ as well as in the ‘East’. The geographical imagination of modernity and tradition has immense implications for immigrants who relocated from areas that were not primarily associated with modernity to countries such as the Netherlands, which lie within the supposed cradle of modernity. The polar imagery suggests that Turkish immigrants moved from tradition into modernity, from continuity into change and from authenticity into the shallowness of mass consumption. This line of thought has also affected the integration discourse that has inspired so much policy and public debate in the Netherlands. In this model, the two cultural ‘cores’ are placed along a linear line. Immigrant populations are assumed to move from the beginning of the line (i.e., Turkish traditional culture) to the other end (i.e., Dutch modern culture). Alternative modernities are difficult to consider in this model. Integration can be equated only with modernisation in this view, and modernisation can be only of Dutch (or Western) inception. This imagination affects not only the ways in which the residents of the host country perceive the new inhabitants; it also affects how immigrants look upon themselves, as demonstrated later in this chapter. The mistaken assumptions that this line of thought produces can be illustrated by the example of television, a popular contemporary pastime that is an important everyday mediator of modernity throughout the world. Many of the families in my research prefer Turkish to Dutch television. Turkish soaps and sitcoms provide pertinent insights into modern life, which is defined as utterly middle class, in a nice decor of stylish furniture, rarely overtly Islamic and with an often humorous depiction of gender roles (for example, see Aksoy and Robins 2000). A periphery of modernity is also constructed on Turkish television, as television crews venture into the countryside to portray the ‘traditional rural lifestyle’, in addition to making these urban and secular soaps and sitcoms. The modern urban personae, however, are always those who are in the position to make these representations of tradition. It follows that many Turkish-Dutch, particularly those in the first generation, are confronted on a daily basis with the modern worlds that are constructed on Turkish television and the hierarchies that are suggested between modernity and tradition. The frequently voiced assumption that watching Turkish television will keep people more traditional or conservative (with the latter term used as an opposite of modernity) is thus unwarranted. Turkish television is actually an important mediator of modernity (for similar arguments, see Milikowski 1999; Dibbits 2000). Appropriating Own and Other The suggestion of the spatial ownership of such complex concepts as modernity and tradition is intrinsically linked to the concept of ‘appropriation’. In its development as an academic term, it became an alternative for other terms (e.g., integration and acculturation) that are used to describe the exchange of elements in cultural repertoires

88

Reframing Dutch Culture

(see Frijhoff 1997, 1998, 2003). It has also been used, however, to give a more empowered account of consumers (see De Certeau 1984). The terms acculturation and integration assign too little agency to the new users of cultural elements. Such new users had traditionally been portrayed as adopting these elements without criticism rather than adapting them in their own everyday experiences. This term, which previously carried a negative connotation of theft (see Frijhoff for a genealogy of the term, 1997), has thus been reinvented to have connotations that are more positive, and it has been proposed as a new interpretation of cultural exchange. Appropriation, however, does not necessarily imply the transformation of ‘other’ – regardless of reference to other cultural repertoires or to alienated production – into ‘own’. Roger Chartier, one of the first propagators of the term (after De Certeau), argues that all cultural praxis is appropriation, as individuals take elements from the cultural repertoires that are available to them and appropriate them in their own lives, altering them in the process (Frijhoff 1997). In this meaning, the term appropriation can help to overcome the implications of ownership that are described in the previous section. As previously noted, the notion of appropriation has also been used to bring agency back into the analysis of consumption. Consumption has often been criticised because of the suggested passivity of the consumer. Miller makes a strong case against perceiving consumption as a passive process, suggesting that we should view consumption as appropriation in the positive sense, as described above. He draws inspiration for his approach from the work of Hegel, notably the idea of objectification. According to Hegel, the subject cannot be placed outside of the process of its own becoming. This means that the subject is a dynamic process rather than an a priori given. Subjects produce forms, which are actually externalisations. Material culture is one of those forms. Such forms may appear to have an independent existence, taking on a life of their own. In the end, however, these forms always return to the subject through the process of appropriation, thus adding to the dynamics of the subject. Miller follows the same line of reasoning for modern consumer goods. These goods are often perceived negatively, as part of a growing abstraction over which people have no control. This Marxist line of thinking defines consumer goods and the process by which they are produced and consumed as alienating (Marx 1867). Miller, however, states that we should instead focus more on the way in which these commodities are re-appropriated by consumption and transformed into inalienable culture. Miller’s approach is thus also a critique of the pessimistic view that ‘authentic’ culture is losing ground to inauthentic commodities. He argues that commodities are made into culture through appropriation and that they are no less authentic than are things that exist as non-commodities. In this argument, Miller aligns with Appadurai (1986) and other scholars in saying that commodities and non-commodities are neither inherently authentic nor inauthentic. Commodities and non-commodities cannot be divided into separate domains (Kopytoff 1986). For example, handmade non-commodities change under the influence of commodities, and they are actually instrumental in their appropriation.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

89

The trousseau (çeyiz) that many Turkish women assemble is a case in point. These trousseaus show many innovations that can be understood in such terms. Doilies are now made for glass cabinets; tablecloths are included, and borders for bed frames (instead of flexible mattresses) are now considered important elements of çeyizler. The idea of appropriation helps to transcend the idea of own and other. All of the elements of cultural repertoires can actually be seen as externalisations (in Hegel’s terms) that must be re-appropriated in order to become own again. This applies not only to the entrance of ‘modern’ entities into allegedly non-modern environments, it applies to all objects, even in their ‘indigenous’ environments. Although the term appropriation is intimately related to practice theory, it tends to be used in a way that diverges from the central attraction of practice theory. This attraction (as found in the work of Giddens, Bourdieu, Lyotard and Taylor) lies exactly in the fact that practice theory is neither individualist nor holist (Reckwitz 2002). According to this line of reasoning, consumers should be considered as neither ‘sovereign choosers’ nor ‘dupes’ (Warde 2005: 146). In reaction to accounts that portray consumers in the latter mode, the pendulum has apparently swung too far in the direction of the former. For example, Miller holds a rather optimistic view of the consumer as free agent. Anything that individuals do to things is perceived as free and positive, whereas the meaning that is produced in the capitalist production process is perceived as negative. Neither producers nor consumers, however, are free to appropriate objects and invest them with their own meanings. Their agency takes place within contexts that are already saturated with meaning (see also Sewell 1999: 48 on the meaningful context of agency), and they deal with objects that already have persistent connotations within society. The current tendency to focus on and herald creativity within the study of culture should not obscure the areas of social and cultural life in which creativity plays a less important role. The powers of creativity should also not be overestimated (Löfgren 2000). Methods This chapter is based on research that was conducted in the houses of Turkish immigrants and their descendants in the Netherlands and in Turkey. The research in the Netherlands consisted of fifty in-depth interviews, forty-five of which took place in the houses of the informants. When discussing the diversity of these informants, I do not use the terms ‘first-generation’ and ‘second-generation’ to refer to groups. Although these qualifications may be appropriate with regard to individuals, they mystify reality when used to denote groups. Children of Turkish immigrants were often born in Turkey, and many grew up there, at least for part of their childhood, while their fathers worked in Europe. In addition, many parents leave some of their children in Turkey, either to care for grandparents or to attend school.4 Finally (and most importantly), about three of every four marriages appear to involve a partner 4 Some parents who still cherished the objective of return wanted their children to grow up in Turkey so that they would not have to readjust upon their return.

90

Reframing Dutch Culture

from Turkey (Hooghiemstra 2003). The resulting households are mixed, and the categorisation of their children in terms of generations is becoming increasingly difficult. The emphasis on generations is the heritage of integration theories. The current focus on trans-nationalism, which focuses on the receiving country as well as on the relationship between the countries of origin and the various destinations of the immigrants, demonstrates that reality is immensely more complex. A majority (25) of the in-home interviews involved people who had been born and raised in Turkey. This group, however, was further subdivided into former guest workers, family reunification and family formation.5 The other twenty informants included people who were born in the Netherlands and those who had been born in Turkey but who grew up in the Netherlands. About half of my informants in the Netherlands could be classified as working class, and the other half were middle class. A large majority were of Turkish background, while others were of Kurdish background. The majority belonged to Sunni Islam, although not all were practicing Muslims.6 The informants also included smaller numbers of Alevis (9) and Christians (5), in addition to one communist. In addition to the research in the Netherlands, fieldwork was undertaken in central Turkey during the summer of 2005, in cities and villages from which many Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands come. Although I conducted my research primarily in the province of Karaman, part of the research took place in the provinces of Aksaray, Kayseri and Ankara. During these two months, I visited forty-six houses that either belonged to Turkish-Dutch immigrants and return migrants or were being used by them. These houses were used for vacations (24), as permanent houses by return migrants (12) or during half the year by retirees (5). An additional five informants were using their parents’ houses (for which they had also helped to raise the money) during vacation. The demographic characteristics of the informants in Turkey differed from those of the informants in the Netherlands.7 Almost all were of Sunni and Turkish background. Some qualified as middle class with regard to their economic situation. In terms of cultural capital (as described by Bourdieu), however, the number of people with higher levels of cultural capital was markedly smaller among the informants in Turkey than it was among the informants in the Netherlands. The focus on houses and their interiors has profound consequences for research and analysis. In Turkey as well as in the Netherlands, the research involved making photographs of the living rooms, other rooms (where possible) and significant objects 5 This refers to people who came to the Netherlands after marrying someone of TurkishDutch origin. 6 For a quantitative analysis of religious adherence among Turkish and Moroccan Dutch people, see SCP (2004). This study reports that, in 2002, 35% of the Turkish-Dutch population went to Mosque on a regular basis. 7 For practical reasons the research in Turkey concentrated on a few central Anatolian cities and villages near these cities, where many Turkish-Dutch immigrants originated. This resulted in a more homogeneous selection of informants with regard to ethnicity, religion and class background.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

91

in the houses of informants. Photographs are not direct observations. They were taken by me as a researcher, and they thus constitute a first selection of material; they also provide a two-dimensional insight that differs strikingly from the bodily experience of visiting the houses. The combination of verbal interviews with these observations, mediated by photographs, constitutes a combination of very different sources of information, as is common in ethnographic research. The conflicting messages that I received through my various senses caused me to leave several interviews in a somewhat confused state. This confusion, however, should be seen as an advantage rather than as a disadvantage for researching material culture. The use of different sources (e.g., verbal and material or visual) reveals the contradictions of human beings and their lives. These contradictions may never surface in research that is based solely on verbal data. Bodily Practices of Modernity and Tradition Many of the Turkish immigrants had grown up in Turkey with bodily practices that differed sharply from those that were common in their current everyday experiences in the Netherlands. Also those who visit Turkey regularly or own property there, often engage in different bodily practices in Turkey and in the Netherlands. I focus here on the practices of dwelling. Rooms in Turkey served multiple purposes, and they were used both for sitting and sleeping. Objects in the rooms (e.g., mattresses and pillows) provided the flexibility that was necessary to accommodate these different functions. In the Netherlands, however, Turkish-Dutch usually have fixed and separate bedrooms and living rooms. Past and present, modernity and tradition are not neatly divided, either in practices or in the discourse about them. When people spoke about the ‘ways of the past’, they could well have been referring to present-day living practices, even for them. Notions of modernity and tradition were prominent in the bodily practices that involved interaction with these various material environments. Such bodily practices are often considered to reside in a pre-reflexive realm (for example, see Bourdieu 1977; Connerton 1989; Roodenburg 2004). Because my informants were familiar with various ‘sets’ of practices, they tended to be more conscious of them. These practices were negotiated into performances of tradition and modernity. Sitting was the first bodily activity that was very different in the Netherlands for Turkish-Dutch who grew up in the Turkish countryside. Instead of chairs or sofas, rooms that were used for sitting had straw-filled pillows that stand against the wall. Pillows with softer fillings were placed on the floor. People sat on the softer pillows and leaned against the straw pillows. The pillows were sometimes elevated about twenty centimetres from the floor, and sometimes even forty-five centimetres. While creating a more couch-like setting, this arrangement provides less flexibility and is less functional in small rooms. Nonetheless, many houses in Turkey were, and are still furnished in this way. The houses of those with more money, however, usually contain purchased couches, armchairs and tables. In houses in which space allowed,

92

Reframing Dutch Culture

I often encountered two sitting rooms, one with high furniture (e.g., couches) and the other with low furniture (e.g., pillows). The Turkish houses of Turkish-Dutch also reflect this pattern. Informants often suggested that they had become accustomed to sitting in chairs; the practice was also a matter of status, related to notions of modernity that they shared with other affluent people. Sitting leads into another activity, eating, which also involves sitting. Because all of my informants in the Netherlands had described eating on the floor as if it were a thing of the past, I was quite surprised at my first dinner in the home of a family in central Anatolia when, in the company of return migrants, dinner was served on the floor, and everybody came down from their chairs. When I asked my host about this practice, he replied that he had wanted to show me the ‘Turkish ways’, and that this was the reason that he had served dinner on the floor. He insisted that he did not eat on the floor regularly, and he appeared to be aware of the negative, nonmodern connotations of that practice. After this evening, I discovered that eating on the floor was actually quite common. Most of the dinners I had in houses belonging to Turkish-Dutch during my fieldwork in Turkey were served on the floor. A cloth (sofra) would be placed on the floor to protect the carpets, but people could also use them to cover their laps and keep them clean. A large, round metal tray or a round table would be placed on top of this cloth to provide a surface, upon which the food would be placed. Sometimes, we would each have separate plates and sometimes only forks to take the things that we desired. Even if there were plates, we would still often eat

Figure 5.1

Eating in the house of a return migrant in Central Turkey, 2005

Photo H. van der Horst.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

93

salad out of the communal bowl. There were no serving spoons to transfer food to individual plates. The practice of serving separate plates may have represented attempts by hosts to demonstrate their modernity, hygiene, hospitality or ability to adjust their ways to those with which they believed we would be familiar. The women appeared particularly eager to adopt such practices. Their husbands would sometimes protest, wondering aloud why the women were making such a fuss about it; the men would also sometimes express objection to this (in their eyes) unnatural display of modernity. The practice also proved impractical. For example, the platforms on which food was served did not provide enough space for all the individual plates. One host made a point of referring to all of the rules that accompany the practice of eating on the floor, while asserting that it did not reflect any lack of sophistication or civilisation. For example, we learned that there are prescribed polite ways of sitting at a sofra. Pointing the foot soles towards the food or other people present was considered impolite, and this general rule guided similar norms. Trying not to insult my hosts, I would always sit in the ways I was taught. In the first weeks, however, I had mistakenly adopted a cross-legged posture, which I later learned to be appropriate only for men. Some of my informants would see my struggle with bodily postures that I had not quite mastered and pressed me to stretch my legs, which was also a way of suggesting that we were equals and that there was no need for us to be formal among ourselves. Sleeping was another activity that was quite different in the past, and it still was in many of the houses that I visited in Turkey. Many of these houses would have piles of self-made woollen (yün yataks) mattresses. These mattresses could be placed on the floor at night and restacked into a pile in the morning. Many, however, no longer use these yün yataks. Returnees and vacationers are particularly likely to have adopted the style of sleeping in beds, as they had become accustomed to the ones that they had in the Netherlands. Others slept on sleeping couches or on nonwoollen mattresses that had been bought in stores, as they were lighter and easier to move. In the Netherlands, the bedroom is usually considered a private sphere. In central Anatolia, rooms are often open and not decorated for personal use, especially those for the children and unmarried adult daughters. In the morning, rooms are transformed into spaces that can be used for sitting; such a room does not lend itself to becoming a personal space. Some of the rooms, however, are indeed more private. I even encountered many rooms that were locked, underscoring the fact that they belonged to specific family members (usually the mother and father, or adult sons and their brides), rather than being counted among the traditional multi-purpose rooms. There was a generational difference in this regard. For example, in younger families, a preference for individual bedrooms would take precedence over the need for sitting rooms for guests. Among older couples, the opposite could be observed. Older people would often sacrifice an individual bedroom in order to provide a separate guest sitting room.

94

Reframing Dutch Culture

Even before migration, these bodily practices had been invested with notions of tradition and modernity. The Turkish rural style was not held in particularly high esteem. In the past, relatively affluent people (e.g., civil servants) bought ‘modern’, Western-style furniture. Many of their present-day relatives in Turkey have also done away with the traditional style and have acquired couches, tables and glass cabinets. One man, who had spent his childhood in Turkey but his adolescence in the Netherlands, says: The real city folk had a table, a dining table. You had those children, memurçocugu, children of civil servants, and there you saw that really clearly that they did have a dining table. In Turkey, that was a higher class. If you were a civil servant you had a good life, a steady income.

This informant’s family was originally from a village, but had moved to a small nearby city. For this reason, they did not consider themselves ‘real’ city folk; this was reflected in the fact that they had decorated their house in the low, flexible, multipurpose style of the village. Even though a table did eventually come into their house (partially because tables had become more common in their social environment and partially because of the remittances of the father, who worked in the Netherlands), dinner continued to be served on the floor. The table testified to their modernity and urban status, but the old practices remained. As illustrated in the example above, interactions of people with objects cannot be understood merely as reactions to whatever objects are available. Such material practices are part of a bodily memory (what Bourdieu called hexis). As Connerton (1989: 72) claims, this memory is re-enacted in the present through such habitual bodily practices. When individuals are intimately familiar with different sets of bodily practices, however, these bodily memories enter into a reflexive realm and become a domain of conscious performance. Although this may be particularly prominent among immigrants, it is also the reality for Turks who have not migrated, as these different practices also co-exist in Turkey. Appropriating Modernity The first immigrant workers, predominantly men, settled in boarding houses, in which they often shared rooms with fellow guest workers. The possibilities for decorating these rooms were limited. In addition, they devoted little energy to decorating, as the stay was deemed temporary. Although eating was done at tables, one former boarder told me that, once a week, a sofra was set up on the floor. He and his housemates would make a festive event of eating ‘traditionally’. This style of eating was thus transformed from a normal practice to something exceptional, a nostalgic performance of tradition. Their experiences in the Western world indicated a break from their accustomed bodily experiences.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

95

After a while, as the stay in the Netherlands grew longer and the political climate in Turkey grew more instable,8 wives and children were brought to the Netherlands. The Turkish workers moved out of the boarding houses and established households in the neighbourhoods of Dutch cities. Many families continued to consider their stay in the Netherlands temporary, even after family reunification. Their houses in the Netherlands were furnished inexpensively, often with second-hand objects. The handmade cushions and mattresses stayed in Turkey. Although people would have preferred to have new furniture, the use of the second-hand furniture was not problematic because, as previously observed, this Western-style furniture was deemed more modern and luxurious than the old cushions in Turkey had been. The Turks who migrated to the Netherlands did not reproduce their vernacular furnishing styles in the Netherlands. Instead, they chose styles and bodily practices that represented modernity and success to them. The houses in Turkey were not abandoned, however, as a return to Turkey remained a possibility. These trans-national migrants needed furniture in Turkey as well. Even though modernity was desired as an aesthetic style, and even though it suggested achievement, the material goals of migration may also be considered within a traditional framework, at least to some extent. The acquisition of land or houses in the original place of residence was often an underlying goal for many immigrants. The trip abroad was instrumental for achieving goals that were often quite localised and that would improve life, as the immigrants knew it. For many guest workers, however, migration also held the promise of being able to become part of a modern consumer culture. This applied to the brides and grooms of TurkishDutch as well. Several women who had come to the Netherlands as brides recalled that their husbands had told them not to pack much, as everything could be bought in the Netherlands. They therefore brought little, apart from some clothes. After a while (the length differed for each family), families began to regard their stays in the Netherlands as more or less permanent. This realisation was accompanied by a desire to invest in the house in the Netherlands (see also Van der Horst, 2007). The second-hand, old or cheap furniture was abandoned, and new furniture was acquired. Modernity was again an important value in selecting this furniture. For example, furnishing could reflect a family’s attention to fashion (see also Van der Horst 2006a). This was reflected in the fact that the owners of such interiors often described them to me as modern. They also defined this aesthetic in contrast to what they perceived as traditional rural Turkish decoration. Older houses that I observed in Turkey, which had not seen much investment over the last decades, were decorated with colourful ensembles of textiles in various designs, reflecting a different sense of what fits together than what is currently found fashionable in either Turkey or the Netherlands. Current decorating fashion consists of a small selection of carefully combined colours and a scarcity of patterns. A similar pattern is reflected in clothing. While Turkish women of rural or working-class backgrounds often combine clothes of various patterns and colours, women who follow urban 8

Notably the civil unrest that lead up to the military coup in 1980.

96

Reframing Dutch Culture

fashion and claim modernity tend to choose fewer colours and do not often combine different patterns. In both the Netherlands and Turkey, I observed many houses that were decorated with only a few colours, often white or cream with one contrast colour such as yellow or blue; patterned fabrics, if present, would certainly not touch each other. This colour and pattern harmony is intensified by the fact that many families buy sets of furniture. All of the components within one of these sets are of a similar style. The seating set is often decisive in determining the colour for the accessories.

Figure 5.2

Turkish Dutch interior with white and blue colour harmony

Photo Eefke Verheij.

This style is a contrast to the Turkish rural style, proclaiming to be both modern and urban. It nonetheless attracts clear disapproval as well. Many second-generation Turkish-Dutch perceive this harmony style (see also Van der Horst, 2006a) as particularly Turkish, and they therefore tend to find it non-modern. Their sense of modernity is defined in opposition to the style of their parents. A similar critique on the harmony style in Turkey is offered by Ayata (2002), who describes how those with more cultural capital look down on this style, as they perceive it to show very little creativity. The cultural middle class distinguishes itself by stressing the individuality of taste, within the limitations of fashion and socially determined good taste (see also Douglas 1996). The cultural middle class and elites do not seek such high levels of colour harmony, as they prefer to distinguish themselves through

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

97

careful bricolage and unusual combinations9 (see also Löfgren 2000; Mulkens 1999; and Pallowski 1991). The alternative conception of modernity by the descendants of guest workers can be illustrated by a conversation that I had with a young Turkish girl concerning the trousseaus that many young Turkish girls used to, and still do, prepare (see Van der Horst 2006b). Although the girl’s mother was present during this conversation, she does not figure into this particular quotation. The daughter wanted to ‘do everything modern’, which, in her understanding, was in opposition to everything Turkish. Hulya:10

Author: Hulya Author: Hulya: Author: Hulya:

In the past, she used to start, ‘Buy that; maybe you will use it in the future’. I do not want such things in my house. That is, for example, the bridal chest; you still have it. Like pans and cutlery end everything. We just do not want that. My mother wants, ‘Buy it, buy it, then you will have it ready’. We just don’t want that. But you and your sister, or... My sister and I want everything modern. Really, like a totally different style from the Turkish style. So these doilies you would never... No, totally not. I now do interior design as an education so I have totally changed my choice. But isn’t there something that you do still like, or do you want everything totally different? If I consider it modern, I would. A bridal chest, like you have old..., I would want to use that as table, but for the rest, totally nothing. Just that as the only thing, but besides... I find this just really typically Turkish, I wanted to say. Because if I go to friends’ houses, I see just exactly the same. Then I do not like it anymore. Then I ask my mother, ‘Shall we change it?’

Interestingly, this girl sees the old wooden bridal chest, when used as a coffee table, as something modern or fashionable. The lace doilies that the mother buys in shops, the glass cabinet and the set of furniture, however, are not modern, even though they are new. Old wooden chests are a frequent item of the colonial style that has been fashionable in the Netherlands and other countries for quite some time now. The reference to this fashionable style is possibly the reason that the girl can consider the antique chest modern. In addition, such chests are not common items in the houses of Turkish families in the Netherlands, as many trousseaus in the Netherlands are stored in plastic bags, cupboards or boxes. Because lace doilies abound, however, she does not associate them with the Turkish houses that were decorated by her parents’ generation, as most of her friends still live at home. Both generations reject 9 The symmetry that was advocated in the Netherlands by interior designer Jan des Bouvrie is avoided by the cultural middle and upper classes. 10 All of the names of informants are pseudonyms.

98

Reframing Dutch Culture

the styles of their parents. For the second generation, however, the style of their grandparents is gaining positive associations with authenticity and ‘specialness’, which fits a modern emphasis on individual identity. The contradiction between the two generations’ constructions of modernity and culture becomes clear in the question of whether there are things in Turkish culture that they wish to keep. This contradiction reveals a particularly dynamic meaning. Mother: Hulya: Author: Hulya: Mother: Hulya:

I love my own culture. Some things I love. Being modern is one thing; living with your own culture is something else. Yes, she finds it important. Even if you become modern, you do not just lose it. That is your own culture. You just keep that. Do you feel like, if it becomes more modern, it becomes less Turkish? Yes, it becomes less and less. My father thinks totally different about it, because he was already here at the age of seventeen. He thinks like a Dutch person. For example, most men do not drink wine with dinner, my father does.

The contradiction in this excerpt is striking. On the one hand, modernity is an aesthetic style that can be combined with culture. On the other hand, culture is shifting towards a style of living that tends to push away Turkish culture. An important point in the interview excerpt above is that the Netherlands is considered the location of modernity. Among other informants, modernity does not have such a straightforward location in the ‘West’ (as opposed to the ‘East’) or in the Netherlands (as opposed to Turkey) as it does for this girl and her sister. There is an eminent sense of pride in Turkey that is sometimes affronted in the Netherlands. For example, during the deliberations concerning whether Turkey could negotiate with the European Union about membership, some were hurt that the Dutch public opinion that was voiced in various media (and in everyday encounters), so easily disqualified Turkey as a non-modern nation.11 Even though I said nothing to dispute them, they sometimes projected this ‘public opinion’ onto me and tried to convince me of the modernity of Turkey. In these cases, informants tended to stress Turkey’s larger and more secular cities, such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The informants suggested that the Dutch are poorly informed, as they only know people from the rural areas of Turkey – and this group has supposedly grown even more conservative (or non-modern) in the Netherlands. I do not intend to test this common belief (i.e., to determine the relative modernity of either group). Nonetheless, the way in which this line of reasoning helps to relocate modernity to Turkey is interesting. 11 The combination of Turkey and Morocco and their respective nationals into a single category is also a cause of annoyance, as many Turkish people consider Turkey much more modern than Morocco, which they regard as part of a backward Arab world, a world from which Atatürk rescued them.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

99

A conversation that developed with the couple Mehmet and Annemarie, who were, at the time, living together and engaged to be married, illustrates this position on the complicated intersections and collisions of Turkishness and modernity in relation to consumption. Rosemarie is a Dutch girl and Ahmet is a descendant of Turkish immigrants. Annemarie has not become a Muslim. The house they bought several years ago in a suburb of Amsterdam is decorated in a middle-class style, with several design objects. The house has a hardwood floor, a sansevieria plant (which was popular in the 1970s and which has now experienced a comeback as retro) and a famous designer lamp (consisting of four very slim metal legs with a cube of thin white paper on top). There is also a metal designer wine rack, a metal designer magazine rack, purple couches and a rustic wooden table. In other words, the room is decorated according to middle-class trends in Dutch fashion. Ahmet:

Rosemarie: Ahmet:

Author: Ahmet:

Rosemarie:

Author: Ahmet: Author: Mehmet: Rosemarie: Ahmet:

Author: Ahmet:

What is Turkish? In the east of Amsterdam, you have those bright couches. That is a particular image that you have of a Turkish furniture shop. That is not really our taste. It is a bit clinical, not really cosy or anything; it is practical but... What you see nowadays is that Turkish people are also abandoning that style more and more. That they are also getting more into design. You see that also with small restaurants. That they go for more trendy things, like tapas and that kind of things from the Turkish dishes The mezzes... Not like the old-fashioned Turkish restaurants with a water pipe and carpet on the wall. It all gets a bit trendy, in order to get young people to go along. You also see that with furniture. That it is more directed at that. That they say like it is Turkish, but not out of date, not oldfashioned. We did have those very nice Pashabahçe glasses, didn’t we? Like those tea glasses but then with blown glass, like those hearts are in it. But just really modern. So, on the one hand they are Turkish tea glasses, but on the other hand, they are actually truly modern. But what kind of store, can you name a store where that kind of things... You mean modern things. Yes That is not a store that I would easily now... Not in the Netherlands. Not in the Netherlands, no, but in Turkey you see stores in which you think, ‘Gee, if this store were in the Netherlands, it would not qualify as a Turkish store’. No, that is of course... Yes, what is a Turkish store? In the Netherlands, that is still really focussed on the first generations.

100

Reframing Dutch Culture

Ahmet defines things with a Turkish connotation as non-modern. He does stress, however, that stores in Turkey sometimes enter a non-localised space of modern material culture. Rosemarie, on the other hand, looks for objects that connote both Turkey and modernity. She is sad that Ahmed does so little with his Turkish background, as she expresses in other moments during the interview. As in several other interviews, Pasabahçe shops emerge as a point of pride in this interview. This glassware and porcelain store, which has many locations in Turkey, sells objects of modern design alongside replicas of objects that figured in the Ottoman palaces. It also sells the most common of Turkish objects, such as tulip-shaped tea glasses and the coasters with red or blue dots that can be found in bars, cafés and restaurants throughout Turkey. Its merchandise runs the gamut from trendy and expensive to everyday and cheap. As such, Pasabahçe becomes a unique mediator of the wealth of Turkish history and its ability to compete in the modern world and among middle-class Turkish-Dutch. Appropriating Tradition In the previous section, modernity was placed against a supposed past of tradition. In this section, tradition is placed against a constructed present of modernity. Both modernity and tradition undergo the process of appropriation that is the subject of this section. Although discrimination against immigrants and their descendants receives considerable attention in the current world of identity and difference, being Turkish can also be an asset. To do so, Turkishness must be profiled in a particular way, usually by stressing a connection with tradition in the sense of authenticity. By removing associations between Turkishness and ‘backwardness’ or ‘problems’ and replacing them with connotations of authenticity or uniqueness, this characteristic can be transformed into a positive quality. Modernity as a process of shifting identities may thus trigger a search for tradition. This dynamic was particularly evident in my conversations with informants Mehmet and Elif, an economically and socially successful couple. Elif arrived in Amsterdam at the age of 18. Mehmet was born in Turkey, and he spent his childhood there as well. In statistical terms, therefore, they are both first-generation immigrants. This description may be appropriate for Elif, particularly in light of the fact that she considers her Dutch language skills insufficient. Ahmed, however, who went through the Dutch higher-educational system, appears to be and feel completely at home in the Netherlands and in Amsterdam; he could therefore be described more appropriately as second–generation. Elif, Mehmet and their two children are planning to move to IJburg, a newly developed neighbourhood on the border of Amsterdam. The spacious house that they have bought there will accommodate their family comfortably, and it has a small garden bordering a canal and an automobilefree street. They will leave behind a small apartment in the centre of Amsterdam, which has no garden and a lot of traffic.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

101

Tangible references to Turkey abound in their current house, and they envision this for their future house in IJburg, They want to have a modern interior, but with a generous amount of Turkish objects. With this in mind, they have hired a befriended interior architect in Turkey to make the design for them. In addition, all of their furniture will be manufactured in Turkey and shipped to the Netherlands. Both the ‘modern’ and the ‘Turkish’ elements in their house will thus be produced in Turkey. Although Elif and Mehmet aspire to combine modernity with Turkishness in their home, their plan seems trapped in a scheme of binary juxtaposition. Because of this juxtaposition, the Turkish objects are defined in contrast to the modern objects, and they come to stand for tradition, history and the vernacular. The modern objects, in their turn, come to be defined as non-Turkish. This dichotomy is also reflected in their strategy of buying only export furniture. They assume objects that are desired by people in Europe to be of better quality than are those that are produced for the Turkish market. In addition, the inspiration for the modern furniture was not sought in Turkey; it was found in an interior-decoration mall, Villa Arena, in Amsterdam. Turkish objects are evaluated according to both their aesthetic appeal and their appeal to authenticity. Mehmet tells about an old wooden object that would be inserted into a space that had been cut out of a wall and used as shelf space. On a visit to his aunt, he asked her whether he could have this object after her death. The aunt has since passed away, and they now plan to collect the object, which he describes as follows: Very old. It should be one hundred years old, according to my father. I found that so beautiful, as a reminder of her and of the Anatolian life, our village.

Even though this couple buys objects with Turkish connotations in shops to display in their current home or in their newly bought house, this object is exceptional, in that it is a link between Mehmet and his history. It connects him to his family heritage, to the village where his parents were born and to the ‘Anatolian rural life’, which was never really his, but which nonetheless contributes to his own distinction. As a reflection of the special background of this object and the story that it should tell about its owners, it will receive a prominent place in the hallway. Mehmet expects that it will be the first thing that people see upon entering their house. Through its contrast to industrial objects, the handmade object has gained a connotation of authenticity. Benjamin (1985) argues that the possibilities of mechanical reproduction have robbed works of art of their aura. I would argue however, that these industrial innovations have actually caused the aura of authenticity to become even more prominent, as it gains meaning through the contrast with massproduced objects. Whereas the modern objects are somehow placeless, the Turkish objects are thoroughly localised. They also localise their owners in both time and space. The imaginary geography of East and West is reproduced through the juxtaposition of ‘placeless’ modern objects against ‘placed’ Turkish vernacular objects. By suggesting place for the traditional, the modern obviously also receives an implicit place. As

102

Reframing Dutch Culture

discussed by gender scholars, the party that does not have to be named explicitly assumes dominance over the named other. As shown by Dyer (1997), Bhabha (1994) and others, this applies not only to gender and sexual binaries, but for those that are associated with race and ethnicity as well. Conclusion Miller defines the condition of modernity as inherently contradictory (1987). These contradictions should not be resolved with the goal of arriving at an understanding of modernity; it should constitute this understanding. This is especially true for the relation of modernity with tradition. Rather than being the opposite of modernity, tradition is an intrinsic element of it, particularly through the aesthetic vehicle of authenticity. In everyday life, however, tradition and modernity are often defined (either implicitly or explicitly) as an oppositional binary. Although some have suggested that it is losing ground to modernity, tradition is still thought to be located in Turkey. Modernity is believed to be the domain of the Netherlands and other Western countries. Although there is some resistance to this geographical imagination, my informants apparently had difficulty imagining alternative modernities in discourse. These alternative modernities are more easily realised in material practices. Modernity and tradition cannot be understood apart from each other. Authenticity is fundamentally related to the time perspective that accompanies modernity (see also Bendix 1997). Although modernity is often related to progress and oriented toward the future, it also creates a particular past through its influence on the ways in which people construct the past. This past is essentially nostalgic, as it is a history that is considered lost. The use of vernacular objects is also an appropriation of modernity, as it involves the supposition of being beyond this nostalgic past. The past is tradition, whereas people live in modernity. The juxtaposition of vernacular and modern objects serves the same purpose. The progressiveness of modern time always explores new things that are not yet considered ‘own’. Similarly, the indigenous or vernacular is sought in the past or in parts of the world that are considered to be still living this past and that have not been affected as strongly by the juggernaut of modernity. The melancholy sense of loss that is characteristic of the modern condition has a profound effect on the aesthetics of descendants of immigrants. They experience a loss of the authentic, as they tend to locate authenticity in Turkey, and because they are truly part of the modern world and mass consumer culture. Modernity and authenticity become intertwined in their decorating practices. Even though they patronise Ikea more frequently than their parents do, they combine their fashionable furniture with objects from Turkey. Such objects are souvenirs of an idealised and exotic place, similar to the souvenirs from around the world that native Dutch young people use to accessorise their Ikea interiors. These old objects, however, are part of a contemporary, fashionable design style, which can thus be perceived as modern.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

103

The quest for authenticity is also visible among non-migrants in Turkey. Similar displays of the Ottoman and the Anatolian vernacular can be found in cafés and restaurants there. Although such establishments sometimes cater to tourists, they are also quite likely to cater to the younger members of the local middle class. Rather than constituting an immigrant aesthetic, I would suggest that the children of immigrants but also the urban middle class in Turkey experience a loss with regard to what they perceive as ‘their authentic background’. Through their use of vernacular Turkish objects, Turkish-Dutch construct Turkey as the country of fantasy and authenticity; in contrast, they construct the Netherlands as its opposite, defining it as a place of bad weather, mass consumer culture and work, with hardly anything special or unique enough to display. Turkish youngsters tend to contrast urbanity with rural life and the present against the past. The up-to-date interior with Turkish elements fits well within a certain nonspecifically Turkish-Dutch middle-class environment. It allows for the conspicuous display of Turkish background, but in a way that resembles the style of the middle classes in many countries. This is accomplished through a search for authenticity, which is a prominent value in upper and middle class tastes throughout the world. Authenticity is one of the lines along which a hierarchy is constructed. By defining the objects in their interiors as authentic, the descendants of Turkish immigrants place their tastes in a higher position in the status hierarchy. They sometimes even suggest that they are more ‘authentic’ people because they are connected to ‘real’ culture, whereas Western people are simply part of a global consumer culture. In light of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘distinction’, it seems difficult for ethnic tastes to become accepted as ‘status providers’. This can be achieved, however, through the construction of an aura of authenticity. References Akgündüz, A. (1993), Labour Migration from Turkey to Western Europe (1960– 1974). An Analytical Review, Capital and Class, 50(1), 153–194. Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ayata, Sencer (2002), The New Middle Class and the Joys of Suburbia, in Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber (eds), Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey. London/New York: I.B. Taurus, 25–42. Bendix, Regina (1997), In Search of Authenticity. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Benjamin, Walter (1985), Het kunstwerk in het tijdperk van zijn technische reproduceerbaarheid en andere essays. Nijmegen: Sun. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977 [orig. 1972]), Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984 [1979]), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.

104

Reframing Dutch Culture

Campbell, Colin (1987), The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Connerton, Paul (1989), How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Boer, Inge (2004), After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. De Certeau, Michel (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Wijs-Mulkens, Elleke (1999), Wonen op stand, lifestyles en landschappen van de culturele en economische elite. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Dibbits, Hester (2000), In Turkije gaat het tegenwoordig net zo, de culturele repertoires van een Turks gezin in een multi-etnische wijk. Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 27(3), 314–344. Dibbits, Hester (2005). Nieuw maar vertrouwd: Migranteninterieurs, sociale klasse en etniciteit. Sociologie, 1(2), 143–159. Douglas, Mary (1996), Thought Styles. Critical Essays on Good Taste. London: Sage Publications. Dyer, Richard (1997), White: Essays on Race and Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Frijhoff, Willem (1997), Toeëigening, van bezitsdrang naar betekenisgeving. Trajecta, 6(2), 99–118. Frijhoff, Willem (1998), Foucault Reformed by De Certeau. Historical Strategies of Discipline and Everyday Tactics of Appropriation, Arcadia 33, 93–108. Frijhoff, Willem (2003), Toe-eigening als vorm van culturele dynamiek. Volkskunde, 104(1), 3–17. Gans, Herbert J. (1979), Symbolic Ethnicity, the Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2(1), 1–20. Gans, Herbert J. (1994), Symbolic Ethnicity and Symbolic Religiosity: Towards a Comparison of Ethnic and Religious Acculturation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17(4), 577–592. Hooghiemstra, Erna (2003), Trouwen over de grens. Achtergronden van partnerkeuze van Turken en Marokkanen in Nederland. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. MacCannell, Dean (1976), The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacDonald, Sharon (2002), On ‘Old Things’: the Fetishization of Past Everyday Life, in Nigel Rapport (ed.), British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain. Oxford, New York: Berg. Marx, Karl (2000 [orig.1867]), The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret, in Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt (eds), The Consumer Society Reader. New York: The New Press. McKendrick, John Brewer and John Harold Plumb (1982), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England. London: Europa Publishers.

Appropriating Modernity and Tradition

105

Milikowski, Marisca (1999), Stoorzender of katalysator. Turkse satelliet tv in Nederland. Migrantenstudies, 3, 170–189. Kumar, Krishan (1995), From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Kopytoff, Igor (1986), The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 64–91. Miller, Daniel (1994), Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach. Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg. Miller, Daniel (1987), Modernity and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2002), Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton/ New York: Princeton University Press. Ozyegin, Gül (2002), The Doorkeeper, the Maid and the Tenant: Troubling Encounters in the Turkish Urban Landscape, in Deniz Kandiyoti amd Ayse Saktanber (eds), Fragments of Culture: the Everyday of Modern Turkey. London/New York: I.B. Taurus. Pallowski, Katrin (1991), Socialer Fortschritt, aber Geschmackskatastrophe? Interpretationsmuster für Arbeiterwohnungen in der BRD, in Wolfgang Kaschuba, Gottfried Korff and Bernd Jürgen Warneken (eds), Arbeiterkultur seit 1945 – Ende oder veränderung? Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde. Roodenburg, Herman (2003), Introduction, in Jan de Jong et al. (eds), Het exotische verbeeld, 1550–1950. Boeren en verre volken in de Nederlandse kunst. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch jaarboek 2002, 53. Roodenburg, Herman (2004), Pierre Bourdieu: Issues of Embodiment and Authenticity. Etnofoor, 17(1–2), 215–226. Saktanber, Ayse (2002), Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey. London: IB Taurus. Said, Edward W. (1978), Orientalism. Pantheon: New York. SCP (2004), Moslims in Nederland. Diversiteit en verandering in religieuze betrokkenheid: Turken en Marokkanen in Nederland 1998–2002. Den Haag: Sociaal Cultureel Planbureau (SCP). Sewell, William H. JR. (1999), The Concept(s) of Culture, in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stewart, Susan (1993), On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Urry, John (1990), The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Van der Horst, Hilje (2006a), Modes van thuis, verandering in Turks Nederlandse woningen. Migrantenstudies, 22 (2), 39–56. Van der Horst, Hilje (2006b) ‘Turkish’ Lace in a Variety of Contexts: Mobilizing Modernity and Authenticity in the Ethnic Field. Ethnologia Europaea, 36(1),

106

Reframing Dutch Culture

32–44. Van der Horst, Hilje (forthcoming 2007) Living Amsterdam, Tangible Homes behind Amsterdam’s Façades, in Jan Rath (ed.), Ethnic Amsterdam. Warde, Alan (2005), Consumption and theories of practice. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), 131-153. Zürcher, Erik J. (1995), Een geschiedenis van het moderne Turkije. Nijmegen: Sun.

PART II PERFORMANCE

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society Peter Jan Margry

A Decapitation It happened a year after the assassination on Monday, 6 May 2002. In their haste to materialise more permanently the spontaneous but temporary memorials set up for the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and to establish worthy commemorative monuments, some people lost literally all sense of proportion. Harry Mens, an affluent real estate agent and television host, who had embraced the ideas of Fortuyn and as a special tribute had sponsored a life-size sculpture of Fortuyn performing his characteristic salute, had the bronze statue positioned upright in an open lorry en route to Fortuyn’s Rotterdam residence. He aimed to use the statue to create a semi-public commemorative site in the yard in front of his residence. Unfortunately, a crossover along the way was too low. In the collision, the statue was decapitated, as if by an executioner’s axe. Ordinarily, the media would have capitalised on the irony or might ridicule such a metaphorical event. In this case, however, the outcome was regarded as disconcerting and embarrassing, and the press voluntarily exercised self-restraint. Virtually no newspaper published a photograph of the outcome, out of respect, as well as for fear that agitated Fortuyn supporters might manifest the same resentment that they had toward politicians and authorities a year before.1 The absence of responses reflects the sensitivity and controversy that surrounded Fortuyn and his political movement. The widespread idea that the violent death of the ‘right-wing extremist’ newcomer Fortuyn was attributable in part to a smear campaign waged by the political establishment and the media made the response to his death particularly vehement. Anger and resentment were epitomised in various improvised mourning and protest memorials devised as national ‘whipping posts’ in several major cities throughout the country. In addition to ‘Fortuynist zealots’ or sympathisers with his political movement, the driving forces comprised a far broader segment of Dutch society. During the days following the murder, hundreds of thousands made their way to these makeshift commemorative sites. 1 On 11 April 2003 the Algemeen Dagblad was among the very few papers that ran the photograph. The event was covered on television.

110

Reframing Dutch Culture

In this contribution I will focus on the actions and practices related to the temporary and subsequently permanent commemorative monuments set up for Fortuyn in the Netherlands and Italy. The thousands of letters and notes deposited at these sites articulate a range of visual, written and performative messages that together help interpret and explain the Fortuyn phenomenon and his political movement. The narratives in these messages shed light on the nature and force of the widespread resentment toward politicians and authorities that suddenly manifested in Dutch society during the weeks that followed 6 May 2002. I have focused not on the material monuments but on their active effect or performative nature. Based on a substantive analysis of these documents and the media coverage at the time, I relate the significance of the memorials to the performance of those who positioned and created these in the public arena. In addition, I explore in what measure the performative effect has influenced public opinion in the Netherlands about Fortuyn and with respect to several subsequent changes in politics and society. To this end, I will review various types of Fortuyn memorials and will discuss theoretical constructs relevant for interpreting the research. In the ‘Arenas of Resentment’ section, I analyse in depth the significance and content of the memorials and texts as a foundation for my concluding observations. Commemorative Monuments The ideological foundations of the memorials and monuments dedicated to Pim Fortuyn were laid during his lifetime, as becomes clear in retrospect. Virtually out of the blue, Fortuyn, a former sociology professor, was at the forefront of national Dutch politics from 20 August 2001. In editorial columns he wrote over the years for Elsevier, a Dutch news magazine, he had identified the problems that in his eyes had been averted, denied or seemingly resolved via the current Dutch polder policy system of harmony (Fortuyn 2002b). These issues mainly concerned safety problems, healthcare, education, asylum seekers, immigration, integration, Islam and globalisation (Wansink 2004: 62–92). Even back then, his ideas drew a covert ‘community’ of followers. Fortuyn’s harsh condemnation of the policy prevailing at the time and the unorthodox solutions he proposed led to his first massive political victory in the Rotterdam municipal elections on 6 March 2002. Within two months, his political clout acquired national proportions. Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), the national political party he established on 14 March 2002, did so well in the polls that he was tipped as the next prime minister. The media had a field day with his charismatic personality and his unabashed criticism of the political system (which he labelled as ‘archaic and obsolete’). As a consequence, simmering and overt popular resentment of the old political-administrative culture was encouraged or reinforced. Fortuyn’s ideas found fertile ground among both white, underprivileged groups in urban areas and the upper crust of the nouveau riche, such as entrepreneurs

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

111

unaffiliated with the cultural and political middle ground.2 Generally, his supporters were native Dutch people who had either become disenchanted with politics and politicians over the previous decades, or had neither trusted politicians nor been interested in either to begin with. At the elections on 15 May 2002 over 1.6 million Dutch men and women, nearly 20% of the electorate, voted for the LPF and its murdered leader. Many Fortuyn sympathisers expressed their political perceptions of him in the memorials. On 9 May, a woman, Ins, wrote: ‘you helped me regain interest in politics.’ L., a young woman, stated: ‘I never voted, hated politics, but you changed all that.’3 Fortuyn’s special target was the incumbent Dutch Cabinet. This social-liberal coalition known as the ‘purple’ Kok Cabinet, which had been in power since 1994, had, according to Fortuyn, continuously contrived ‘back-door compromises’ and engaged in consensus politics (Fortuyn 2002b). He argued that the modus operandi consisted of cooptation, political correctness and a complete inability to self-evaluate and was very remote from daily reality. Whereas until recently the ‘polder’ policy had been celebrated as a promising export product, Fortuyn convinced part of the Dutch population that the political system and the policy of the Cabinet were dated and insufficiently democratic. Fortuynism was presented as a politically eclectic alternative (Pels 2003). In the words of the party: ‘selecting the best administrative tools from all political systems for that point in time and never committing to a single system’ (Oosthoek 2005: 223). From the moment the critic Fortuyn embarked on his political career, he was stereotyped by politics and the media as a populist, fascist or racist and as a Dutch Le Pen, a Dutch Haider or even Hitler, with a view toward isolating him and subsequently neutralising him as a political force (Oosthoek 2005: 112–114). Even before he was killed, this strategy on the part of politics and the media was consistently labelled as ‘demonising’ the politician Fortuyn, thereby – as some have suggested – virtually instigating his murder. After 6 May, the media capitalised on this presumed scenario.4 According to Fortuyn’s followers, politics and press joined forces to protect the establishment and to incite society against a ‘normal politician’ who had intended to stand for election. Two years later, on 23 May 2004, the chairman of the Dutch parliament stated at the inauguration of the Pim Fortuyn Hall in the parliament: ‘Never before has 2 A sociological analysis of the group appeared in Warna Oosterbaan, ‘Het onbehagen kan weer ondergronds’, in: NRC Handelsblad Magazine, 2 February 2002; Boomkens 2006: 232-234; Van Roosmalen 2003 sketches the tenor of his supporters. 3 All sections quoted in this chapter from texts of the improvised Fortuyn monuments are from the Pim Fortuyn Collection of the Meertens Institute, donated to the institute by the Fortuyn family. The acquisition of this material has in fact realised an historic Fortuyn monument that serves as a repository for and catalogues and discloses to the public the cultural legacy from this period, see http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/meertensnet/wdb.php?sel=138759 4 Conspiracy theories abounded about Fortuyn’s death. Cinematographer and Fortuyn admirer Theo van Gogh produced a film about the Fortuyn assassination, based on such a theory. Shortly after completing the film 06/05, Van Gogh himself was murdered in 2004.

112

Reframing Dutch Culture

the Netherlands been so shocked by the worst that can happen to a parliamentary democracy: murderous violence [that] silences free speech.’5 Worse still, as the first political assassination in the Netherlands in centuries, the incident appears to have mobilised a far larger share of the population than his direct political support might have suggested. Regardless of political sympathies, virtually all of Dutch society was shocked by the very occurrence of such violence in the Netherlands. In a memorial posting, Cees D. from Haarlem described 6 May as: ‘the day that Dutch democracy lost its innocence.’6 In a survey, many respondents believed that the cherished idea of an open, free and peaceful Dutch society had been eliminated in one fell swoop. The growing social disorientation within the Netherlands and the reversal in ideas about politics and society after 2002 arose less from the murder itself than from the responses that the murder instigated. From this perspective, the week following Fortuyn’s murder may be stereotyped as a social-political revolt, which can be characterised with words like commotion and pamphleteering; such elements have surfaced previously in Dutch political history.7 Never before in modern history, however, have members of Dutch society expressed such massive-public as well as personal criticism of the political and administrative elite and of the performance of society overall. Over the course of those days, the population invented a new ‘democratic’ instrument consisting of a series of politically-oriented, improvisedtemporary memorials. I have divided these Fortuyn memorials into three main categories: (1) temporaryimprovised memorials, (2) registration memorials and (3) (semi-)permanent, institutionalised monuments. I will describe these categories. 1. By the evening following the murder, there were various makeshift monuments, which were elaborated in the week following the murder. The five most important ones were located (i) in front of Fortuyn’s residence in Rotterdam; (ii) in front of the Rotterdam city hall, the site that symbolised Fortuyn’s first major electoral and political victory; (iii) at the foot of the statue of the ‘Father of the Nation’, freedom fighter Willem de Zwijger (William the Silent; 1533–1584), symbolically located directly opposite the entrance to the Parliament in The Hague; (iv) at the national monument commemorating the war victims on the Dam in Amsterdam and, finally, at the actual locus delicti, (v) the Mediapark parking lot in Hilversum. These locations were far from random but were selected on historical, political and 5 See http://www.tweedekamer.nl/over_de_tweede_kamer/voorzitter/Indexpagina_ archief_werkboek.jsp#0 6 One of the first people to use this metaphor – and trendsetting the use of it – was author Harry Mulisch in an interview with Die Welt on 8 May 2002; in the German press this statement became one of the most frequent headings above commentaries about what was occurring and had taken place in the Netherlands. 7 This is not a reference to the outbursts of violence on the evening of 6 May, which to most resembled a revolt but was more akin to a riot, cf. De Vries and Van der Lubben (2005: 22–31); nor were the events a revolt ‘of Fortuyn’, as these authors argue, but of a population.

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

113

emotional grounds and may be described as landscapes of political memory, loaded with connotations reinforcing the performative quality of the memorials (Edkins 2003: 215–217; Mitchell 2003). Each memorial remained in place for about a week, until they were removed by the various municipal cleaning services. Documents and objects were retrieved from them and presented to Fortuyn’s family. As of Fortuyn’s funeral on 10 May at Driehuis-Westerveld, his grave became the central site for depositing documents and objects, especially until Fortuyn’s remains were definitively interred near his holiday home in Italy on 20 July 2002. Since that point, a phantom grave has remained at Driehuis-Westerveld, which has continued to draw far more visitors than Fortuyn’s final resting place in Italy. In addition to the usual condolence cards with signatures or bouquets of flowers with a card, these places served as bulletin boards, where various messages, letters and notes were placed or hung describing what had happened, what the author believed was amiss in the Netherlands, and what should change. The thousands of such expressions – aside from the bouquets of flowers, images and various objects placed there – consist mainly of texts. I have divided these documents into four main categories of expressions: sorrow, grief and dismay; affection and love; sanctity; protest and resentment (Margry 2003; 114–125). 2. Various persons, organisations and institutions almost immediately opened semipermanent registers of condolences and expressions of grief in response to the murder. Some were web-based, while others were not. Although this practice is customary only upon the death of high-ranking individuals or members of the royal house, most communities provided public condolence registers for their residents. Opening such registers for the first time for an individual citizen nationwide indicates the historic significance immediately associated with the events, as confirmed by the massive numbers of people signing these registers. This impression was reinforced when the paper registers were transformed into a platform for everybody to share his or her personal views. The public exceeded the boundaries dictated here: instead of simply signing inside the pre-printed rectangle, people wrote half or even full pages about the course of events.8 The digital registers were similar but were often still more detailed, as people were free to write their entry from home. Since these registers generally addressed Fortuyn as an individual, the political commentaries tended to be brief. The anonymous nature of the Internet was conducive to curses and racist or fascistic remarks in some cases. Web masters removed most of such postings.9

8 Most paper registers have been preserved, whereas many of the on-line registers disappeared from the Internet after a while. The Meertens Institute has archived the paper registers and the most important on-line registrations; see http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/ meertensnet/file/edwinb/20050421/Coll_Fortuyn_invent.pdf 9 Most web registers are no longer on-line. The offensive and provocative e-mails have often been deleted from the postings printed out and presented to Fortuyn’s family.

114

Figure 6.1

Reframing Dutch Culture

Political messages applied to the statue of William the Silent († 1584) on Plein square, 8 May 2002

Photo: Peter Jan Margry.

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

115

3. Four days after the murder, the first more formal memorial materialised at Fortuyn’s temporary grave in Driehuis-Westerveld. Because a grave monument was lacking, another memorial consisting of flowers, letters and objects was placed there in anticipation of a permanent monument. This is the start of the period that Etkind refers to as ‘the hardening of memory’ and is intended to counterbalance processes of denial and refutation. One day after the murder, Nancy from Rotterdam left the following message at Fortuyn’s residence, considering the unstable memory of surrounding society: ‘Give us a statue of Pim, for us to keep the power that he gave us alive….!! A bronze statue, radiating his power and his courage to say what he believed will continue to inspire us…!!!’

The semi-permanent and permanent monuments arose in the period from about two months to three years following Fortuyn’s death. During that time his family and several ‘fortuynist’ groups and organisations worked to devise more permanent material and immaterial symbolic, ritual and political expressions of Pim Fortuyn and his ideas. Their work includes first of all the commemoration and grave monuments in the Netherlands (Driehuis-Westerveld) and Italy (Provesano) and the traditional statues erected for him in Rotterdam.10 Next, his social and political constituents attempted to realise a primarily immaterial memorial for society as a whole. The independent Pim Fortuyn Foundation was established and – regardless of Fortuyn’s actual political views – dedicated to innovating society and public administration and promoting freedom of expression.11 In addition, two of Fortuyn’s brothers tried to sustain the central idea within the theories of their murdered brother – administrative innovation and freedom of expression – through an ideological day of commemoration as well. Together with Fortuyn’s political party the LPF, the family decided to designate 6 May as the new national day of commemoration as of 2003. This transformed the idea from an optional initiative into a socially and politically controversial proposal, as the proposed date immediately followed the national date for commemorating the dead and the national liberation day on May 4 and 5, respectively. The intention was for 6 May to become the new liberation day, a national day of democracy and against violence according to the motto: ‘Let us uphold freedom of speech.’12 This was to be a Day of the People. Since the holidays on 4 and 5 May serve similar purposes, this proposal was in fact an attempt to repeat moral reckoning with the ‘old’ Netherlands, as Fortuyn had intended to settle the 10 The grave in Driehuis-Westerveld was in use for over two months, until Fortuyn’s remains were definitively transferred to his Italian grave on 19 July 2002. The former grave in the Netherlands subsequently became a commemorative monument. 11 http://www.pimfortuynfoundation.nl 12 Based on the Latin maxim invoked by Pim Fortuyn Loquendi Libertatem Custodiamus, cf. the website www.pim6mei.nl

116

Reframing Dutch Culture

score with the incumbent political system. Underlining the symbolic connotation, a new commemorative flag was introduced: the national Dutch flag, with a portrait of Fortuyn added in the centre. Following naturally from this instrumentalised use of nationalist motifs and symbols is the name attributed to a new tulip species by the firm Tomorrow’s Tulips in 2003. Named after Fortuyn, this white tulip refers unambiguously to a form of native Dutchness, an integral element in Fortuyn’s political programme. This political-nationalist background also underlies the refusal by the Keukenhof to feature Fortuyn’s statue with these white tulip bulbs, since this renowned Dutch flower park in Lisse regarded such a suggestive combination as a dangerous violation of its neutrality.13 This memorial, as well as the group of wax models (together with his two dogs) at Madame Tussaud’s, the founding of Radio Pim Fortuyn and the organisation of annual commemorative marches are but a few of the many initiatives launched as permanent memorials for Fortuyn. These plans also derived from the idea that a substantial share of society had spoken out in support of fortuynism via the temporary memorials in May 2002. Fortuyn’s direct followers presumed an imagined community many times larger than it actually was months later. Since then, this ‘hardening of the memory’ has been driven primarily by a few small memory communities with their own interpretations of Fortuyn’s ideas; these interpretations had progressively deviated from the broadly supported narratives of the temporary monuments in May 2002. This competitive pluralisation of the Fortuyn in-crowd impeded broad popular support for the new commemorative initiatives. Memory, Narrative and Performance Almost immediately after the politician Fortuyn was murdered, a massive commemorative drive had materialised at sites regarded as important in the context of Fortuyn’s political activities and his person and also considered suitable as a public stage. The massive-collective manifestation of grief following the murder would at first appear to relate to established repertoires of public rituals and improvised memorials after accidents, ‘senseless violence’, assaults, natural disasters and the like. Since about the mid 1980s, these cultural practices have become more commonplace in the West. Well-known examples include the temporary memorials for Olof Palme in 1986, for Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 and following 9/11 in New York in 2001 (Scharfe 1989; Walter 1999; Nelson and Olin 2003; Durbin 2003; Santino 2006). Such massive expressions of mourning and emotion have become characteristic manifestations of a changing, public and personal approach to traumatic death, mourning and sorrow that reflects more general changes within Western societies, such as secularisation, individualisation, globalisation and their

13 Hans van der Beek, ‘Pim Fortuyn-tulp staat garant voor snelle groei’, in Het Parool, 7 May 2003.

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

117

effects on individuals (Castells 1998: 310–334; Eckardt 2003; Boomkens 2006: 235–251). On the surface, the memorial sites dedicated to Fortuyn appeared to follow directly from these changes. After all, they offered everybody an opportunity to partake in the power of such memorials through a ‘performance of self’. This has been defined as a performance influenced by surroundings and public alike that serves to pass one’s own views on to others (Goffman 1959: 17). From that perspective, such memorials are conducive to individual exhibitions of emotive, social or political identity in public space. The memorials established for Fortuyn arose spontaneously at first. The abundance of texts and messages rapidly revealed different narratives. Because these narratives were featured in the media with increasing emphasis, the construction and elaboration of the monument gradually lost its spontaneous quality. They are therefore more accurately described as ‘improvised’ and ‘temporary’. The memorials constructed were above all ‘initiatives of memory’ that the concerned individuals used to try to disseminate in order to preserve substantive meanings associated with the monument. With respect to traditional religious beliefs, Durkheim has argued that this style of memorialising ‘serve[s] to sustain the vitality of beliefs, to keep them from effaced memory and, in sum, to revivify the most essential elements of the collective consciousness’ (Durkheim 1965: 420). Transposing this view to the Fortuyn case, several social-political convictions and existential experiences needed to be explicitly recorded and disseminated on the part of the population. The temporary memorials were deployed to reconfirm these beliefs about anchoring Dutch government and society. This idea led an anonymous individual to assert: ‘Pim, we believe that your ideas should prevail (politically)!!’ while the B. family from Gouda anticipated a broad movement: ‘The people will continue to support your ideas.’ The temporary and improvised memorial sites for Fortuyn arose without any government involvement. In addition to being based on mourning and sorrow, they were constructed from social and political narratives. This was the first memorial tribute to the political ideals championed by Fortuyn and his broad group of constituents. They materialised in their own, explicit manner and exemplify what the sociologist Alexander Etkind has termed ‘soft memory’, a socially active narrative that may be articulated via memorials and monuments (Etkind 2004). The historian Gillis supports this dynamic position and regards memorials as ideologically controversial memories and identities which, as social representations of reality, are continuously subject to change (Gillis 1994: 3–5). Nelson and Olin, however, argue that such monuments are not really about memory, and that their rhetoric and the impact of their rhetoric are socially defining (Nelson and Olin 2003: 1–7). The Fortuyn case will reveal that the two elements, memory and performance alike, applied to the memorials. In their material form, and based especially on the related meanings, improvised memorials have an intrinsic performative impact or agency (Santino 2006b). Not only is this impact highly dynamic, because monuments are appropriated by different persons or groups based on distinctive argumentations, but over time the official

118

Reframing Dutch Culture

connotations or appreciations prove subject to change as well. In this context, Patten Henry signalled, based on the tens of thousands of monuments aux morts from World War I, ‘monumental accusations’ targeting the politics responsible and levied by the dead and their survivors. These official war monuments in her view also represented an implicit ‘personal narrative’ intended to call attention to ‘the true stories’ of this ‘dirty war’ (Patten Henry 1996: 9). More recently, the temporary memorial established at the Atocha Station in Madrid following the train attacks on 11 March 2004 was transformed from a monument of mourning into a political statement within a few days. This transformation occurred specially after it had become clear that the Aznar administration, faced with the imminent elections, had deliberately distorted the truth about the attacks, giving rise to a political narrative about the disaster (Sánchez-Carretero 2006: 338). Neither temporary nor permanent monuments have meanings that are etched in stone: societies change continuously, and collective memory is unstable. The same holds true when temporary memorials precede permanent monuments, as the Fortuyn case will demonstrate. The creators of the temporary Fortuyn memorials have become active producers of meaning and symbolism thanks to the input of a substantive, narrative dimension. In analysing oral and textual performances, two interrelated events need to be distinguished in the narratives: ‘the event that is narrated in the work and the event of narration itself’ (Bakhtin 1981: 255). The texts are therefore not to be regarded as autonomous elements but are an active, integrated ingredient in the production of meaning. This is all the more true, since the mourning was hardly restrained, nor did the participants explicitly observe silence: emotions were often heated (cf. De Hart 2005). The texts, images and symbols and attributes contributed were evocative and instigated compelling conversations and heated debates between the visitors. Because additions changed the situation and effect – or enactment – of the memorials, this process continuously generated new conversations and discussions on site. This effect was especially pronounced, because the authors, in placing a message, could be held accountable immediately. These interactions helped integrate the monument with its surroundings. The performative nature of this memorial landscape brought about a style of communication, in which both the act of expression and the performer mattered, and which proved difficult for the visitors to circumvent. New meanings were generated in the process. Gradually, it became clear that the performing memorial sites conditioned the way the public came to terms with this traumatic event. Bauman argues that narratives generally have a ‘constitutive role of discourse in social and political life’ (Bauman 1986: 5). In stating that the ‘structures of signification in narrative (…) give coherence to events in our understanding’, he opens the door to analysing these ‘structures of signification’ in the Fortuyn documents as well. When Bauman goes on to argue that ‘narratives are the sign, the events their external referents’, he is advocating a performance-centred analysis that ties in with other performance approaches (Bauman 1986: 114). Cultural categories underlying actions and the ways that form and substance have been added to the

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

119

memorials are established, are based on such an integrative vision of text, language and culture, considered in the ethnographic context of the Fortuyn memorials. In determining the significance of the memorials, in addition to considering the performative nature of the individuals concerned, the importance of the involvement and active role of modern media such as television and Internet needs to be assessed in the creation and perception of the monuments (Vasterman 2004; Kleinnijenhuis 2003; Wansink 2004: 220–230).14 Extensive media exposure of the events gave rise to ongoing interference between the media and the people who created the memorials. The huge numbers of active visitors turned the locations into effective hearths of criticism. Both the persons and the media are the central mediators in what I have termed ‘performative memorials’ to reflect the broad performative power of the memorials, realised both by the actual memorial sites and by the individuals and mediators involved. Erika Fischer-Lichte introduced the ‘culture as performance’ concept. She argues that culture should definitely not be perceived as text alone but needs to be understood also – or especially – as performance. According to this line of reasoning, culture becomes a dynamic, expressive process that helps people define who they are as individuals and as collectivities. Everyday life and especially symbolic events and rituals, such as those concerning Fortuyn, figure as sites of enactment of the human cultural drama. Fischer-Lichte’s concept is based on recent theatrical productions but also applies to rituals and political manifestations and the like. Four elements come into play: mediality (as well as the physical co-presence of actors and spectators); ephemeral materiality; semioticity; aestheticity (the performance as an event and not as work). Her concept fosters insight into the functions and meanings of the monuments dedicated to Fortuyn. In the context of this contribution, however, to digress from her principles of strict co-presence of ‘actors’ and ‘public’ at the same location, I perceive no absolute delineation of performative effects on-site (FischerLichte 2005: 22–23). In this case of active involvement and interaction with the public, such a co-presence is abundantly clear, but there was more. The extensive media exposure of the construction and effect of the memorials realised an added performative effect of the monument enactment as a whole. This was visualised by the media outside the physically circumscribed area and is perfectly compatible with the view that performance is ‘everywhere linked to the interdependence of power and knowledge’ (Schechner 2002: 114). The mediator role of the memorial sites appears to have been decisive in the interaction between messengers, public and media for the dynamics and the process of memorialising and subsequent political revolt. Finally, conceptualisations of the temporary memorials merit a brief review. Years ago, Jack Santino proposed the term ‘spontaneous shrines’ (Santino 1992, 14 The important role of the media was also highlighted retrospectively by the main political operators at the time: Piet de Rooy and Henk te Velde (2005), Met Kok, over veranderend Nederland. Amsterdam Wereldbibliotheek, 90; Paul Rosenmöller (2003), Een mooie hondenbaan, Amsterdam: Balans, 247–248, 255–259.

120

Reframing Dutch Culture

2006). The concept has since become widely accepted. Stengs has criticised the term ‘spontaneous’ within this concept, arguing that spontaneity was rarely the case (Stengs 2004: 38). Although some degree of spontaneity and immediacy is discernible with the initial Fortuyn memorialisation, I do not regard ‘the spontaneous’ as a permanent fixture there either. Within the Fortuyn context, and also more broadly, I regard the term ‘shrine’ according to Santino’s concept as even more problematic. The term is all too suggestive of a compatible, favourably-disposed idea of adoration at a religious, holy site. This is not the case in general. I therefore prefer to opt for adjectives that are temporary and improvised together with the terms memorial or memorial site. Arenas of Resentment As stated, collective emotions surrounding Pim Fortuyn appeared compatible with the public rituals and ephemeral memorials that often materialise as massive mourning after the death of a celebrity. This proved only partially true with respect to Fortuyn. In addition to being repositories for flowers, cards, drawings, toys, stuffed animals, Pim paraphernalia, garments etc., the memorials served as vehicles for disclosing political criticism, resentment and hatred. The prevailing discontent generated a wave of protest and criticism, which, especially because of the media focus on them, drowned out aspects of mourning and grief. The issue was not only anger at the murderer or the presumed failure of the government to protect Fortuyn, but especially the opportunity to criticise politicians and government about immigration and integration, lack of safety and bureaucracy. About one third of all notes and documents deposited were explicit protest messages. To convey messages more emphatically and enhance their readability, they were made materially distinctive. First, they were visually explicit. To this end, they appeared in large, visible type in a clear layout that was usually done on a computer. These clear public statements were easy for visitors to read from a distance. They were also explicit and often contained crude formulations addressing political parties, politicians and social injustices. This characterisation does not suggest that the other messages cannot be interpreted as such. The many, often pathetic declarations of love and attributions referring to Messianic, holy or divine qualities of Fortuyn are also indirect reproaches to a deficient government (Margry 2003: 116-122). In addition, many texts and objects expressed a form of ‘popular nationalism’, which – government views of it aside – focussed on an idealised image from the period prior to globalised, multicultural society. The day after the murder, the memorials became less spontaneous. Extensive media coverage made the public aware of the existence and function of the memorial sites. As a result, people drafted their letters and messages increasingly from their home, and the content progressively became an interactive produce of the new discourse that arose about Fortuyn. To make the critical message the focus of public attention and to keep it from disappearing in the mass of flowers and letters, some

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

121

people placed several – identical or distinctive – copies of their texts in different places of the monument or presented them at several monuments. Because paper exposed to the elements does not last indefinitely, the messages were often sealed in plastic. Applying reinforcements, such as framing or positioning them on cardboard, made the texts easier to read amid the mass of papers, flowers and objects. As such, they became more visible to the media in their quest for compelling shots for the news sections. Note that the authors sometimes stood near their messages. This way, they deanonymised the message and were able to advance their personal point of view more explicitly or more elaborately in the ensuing discussions with other bystanders. Those placing letters were thus also able to latch onto any interest on the part of the media and thus disseminate their view far more broadly. Other people present, who might or might not have placed a document there as well, often lingered around the site and would share their opinion whether asked or not or would engage others in a discussion. To this end, texts were retrieved, read, transmitted and discussed. Often the written messages were confirmed, reinforced or elaborated, although positions were also challenged, modified or qualified. Through this approach and because of its vehemently critical and highly emotional tenor, the sites manifested as active arenas of resentment, where opinions were expressed in writing as well as orally. All this made for a mediagenic setting that received live television coverage and extended the substantive discussions way beyond the physical sites. This process and the mobilising power of the media further reinforced the suggestion of broad social discontent. The memorials were medleys of thousands of letters, cards, notes, posters, drawings and photographs conveying public sentiment and emotions such as mourning, grief, affection, friendship, love and holiness. The most powerful in both text and external manifestation were the expressions of protest, criticism, rage and resentment. These outbursts of criticism targeted presumed injustices in politics, administration and society, especially the smear campaign that politicians and the media had allegedly waged against Fortuyn. Protest messages in the form of letters to Fortuyn, messages to the Dutch government and unaddressed leaflets were deposited by the thousands. The tone was already set on the evening of the murder, when Fortuyn’s followers gathered on the Plein square across from the Dutch parliament and aggressively called for the heads of the politicians responsible, as if in a kangaroo court; on the one hand for being representatives of the ‘wrong policy’ that the Dutch politicians had in their view pursued in recent years, and on the other hand because of their smear campaign and demonisation of Fortuyn and their use of the ‘right-wing extremist’ and ‘racist’ labels. This presumed ‘demonisation’ is a recurring theme in the protest messages. Accusations were expressed both directly and indirectly: ‘who are your true murderers????’ read a rhetorical question. As if on a political billboard, another anonymous scribe responded promptly by listing cause and consequence:

122

Reframing Dutch Culture

Kok Melkert Rosenmöller De Graaf have set the stage the cowardly murder of our hero! Words such as ‘hatemongering’, ‘discord’ and ‘bad for society’ have incited the perpetrator to murder! Settle the score with these people on 15 May….. The author means that the terms used by these four leftist political leaders to describe Fortuyn’s actions and their ultimate consequences should be expressed in the elections on 15 May 2002. Others were more direct: ‘Please vote for Pim on 15 May, or his death will have been in vain.’ On 9 May a Rotterdam tram driver using the onomatopoetic pseudonym Tingeling wrote a poem with the following lines: ‘From the left we hear the shots; all of the Netherlands is doomed; a land replete with idiots.’ Both the ‘leftist’ and the ‘fascist’ press were under fire. One pamphleteer asserted: ‘The media bastards have instigated a sentiment that cost Pim Fortuyn his life’, while another, referring to the 16th-century father of the nation, wrote: ‘Alas, the

Figure 6.2

A sea of flowers, objects and documents in front of Fortuyn’s residence, May 2002

Photo Collection Fortuyn.

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

123

2nd Prince of the Netherlands has been murdered: thank you, television media and political leaders.’ Others wanted to restore the power to the people and wrote: ‘Have more ordinary people debate each other in the media; the true experts are among the masses.’ The politicians were presumed ignorant: ‘How come you understood the people and the people you, while the media and the politicians in office remained without a clue?’, someone wrote. At the public mourning or commemoration sites, but also in municipal condolence registers or on the anonymous Internet, critics lashed out against the exclusion of Fortuyn, who was believed to have been barred from entering the established, secluded political bulwark because of his innovative ideas. Politicians had indeed done their best to avoid direct debate with outsider Fortuyn. This was not the first time in recent Dutch parliamentary history, however, that incumbent politicians and the media had exercised almost paradigmatic political correctness and had tried to neutralise a political movement termed as ultra right-wing and undesirable through a cordon sanitaire.15 Fortuyn’s political positions were controversial and certainly not widely shared among the population. Nonetheless, his death and the ensuing social response changed general perceptions of Fortuyn as an individual and his ideas. The events led to a collective about-face that continues to baffle the key political operators concerned years afterwards.16 The consternation at his death and the widespread reproaches expressed via the memorial sites caused a general change of attitude. This occurred first during the tumultuous days following the murder, but also long afterwards in the ‘political’ memory. The ‘exaggerated’ and ‘demonising’ treatment of Fortuyn by politicians and the media alike seemed to inspire regrets and even the appearance of shame or guilt. This sentiment persisted for a while. Six days after the murder, an anonymous letter to one of the memorials read: ‘Odd that I am now placing flowers for the man I always called a “prick”. What a pity that I believed the crude media depictions of you. Strange, because I should really know better. What a pity that I am listening to your interviews only now and am discovering that I think you’re really smashing.’

15 In the 1980s the Centrum Democraten, under the aegis of Hans Janmaat, were de facto excluded from parliament. This helped instigate an assault on Janmaat by leftist radicals in 1986. In addition to providing a basis for comparison, Fortuyn’s murder gave rise to a new, negative evaluation of the way Janmaat had been treated at the time, see Joop van Holsteyn and Cas Mudde (eds) (1998), Extreem-rechts in Nederland. The Hague: SDU, 47–60; cf. the evaluating article by Ellis Ellenbroek, Frénk van der Linden & Leon Verdonschot, ‘Was de leider van de Centrumpartij een ziener?’ in the 2004 Christmas issue of Nieuwe Revu. 16 Incumbent Prime Minister Kok stated in an in-depth interview three years after the incident, that ‘the Netherlands was seized by irrationality overnight,’ see De Rooy and Te Velde 2005: 90.

124

Reframing Dutch Culture

The above text is characteristic of coming to terms with the many changes in views during those days. Again, the media and the criticism directed against the media were important forces for these changes. Many letter writers believed that their views had been manipulated. L., a young woman, admitted that she had accepted her teacher’s opinion far too easily that Fortuyn would not be a good leader for the country and expressed public remorse for not having been more discerning: ‘This really did influence me, Pim, I’m sorry.’ This and other texts placed at the memorials reflect the reversal that occurred within personal and public narratives alike.17 Whereas the improvised memorials were primarily centrepieces of protest and resentment, the sites temporarily fostered also cohesion, expressed in part in the emphatically shared shame and a collective sense of guilt. The note from Peter and Petra read: ‘Over the past few days we Dutch people have shown the feelings that we can express. We stand together.’ Known as ‘sober’, the Dutch had never in modern history exhibited a comparable collective emotionality. Research conducted four years after the event has revealed how intensely society experienced that week. During the days following the murder Dutch people felt a stronger common bond than they had in years.18 Increasingly, the memorials reflected the narrative of the national idea, the unity of Dutch society and the possibility that it might disintegrate. These were symbolised, for example, by a great many Dutch flags, often featuring texts with political connotations, and widespread use of the ‘national’ colour orange, many texts referring to Dutch history and culture, as well as to the threats (i.e. immigrants or Islam) and the new saviour of the nation (cf. Fortuyn 2001).19 Given that patriotism and nationalism were considered politically incorrect in the Netherlands, one person wondered: ‘When did loving one’s country become a cardinal sin????’ The quest for solidarity arose in part from fear of deprivation or the decline of solidarity or alienation from society. A woman named Bianca wrote: ‘One thing is certain, the Netherlands is no longer the Netherlands!!!’ She felt estranged and excluded in her own country.20 An anonymous contributor was more elaborate: ‘The Dutch democracy will never be the same. Gone is innocence, gone is the way things were.’ The S. family from Puttershoek was more dramatic: ‘This has left us without hope of salvation; we no longer have a future.’

17 Fortuyns then webpage – http://www.kro.nl/helden/held.php?heldid=11&held=fortuy n,%20pim – isn’t on line anymore. 18 Over 15% reported that this had been the most important incident of solidarity in recent years; part of the ‘Nationale trots’ [national pride] study conducted among 656 respondents by De Vos & Jansen Marktonderzoek in 2005 and commissioned by Reader’s Digest publishing company. Cf. also the report from the Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau De Sociale staat van Nederland (2003), which identified immense popular concern about the murder of Fortuyn. 19 This book was first published in 1997, with a more reserved title: Tegen de islamisering van onze cultuur. Nederlandse identiteit als fundament [Against Islamisation of our culture. Dutch identity as a cornerstone]. Utrecht: Bruna. 20 An analysis of inclusion and exclusion rituals appears in this collection in the contribution by Irene Stengs.

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

125

The heaviest blow to Fortuyn’s supporters may have been the loss of Fortuyn as a political representative and mouthpiece of the sentiment and views of socially and culturally vulnerable urban population groups, who did not feel that the ruling politicians properly supported their interests. For years, ‘populist’ issues concerning immigration, integration, crime, schools with high immigrant enrolments and neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations had been low on the political agenda. Fortuyn thus became a potential representative of about one fifth of society, often Dutch people who had voted for social-democratic parties in the past but had become disenchanted with these parties and their politics. Many statements on the memorials stipulated that Fortuyn had revived the interest of their author in administration and politics and in solving the serious social problems for the first time in years. Fortuyn had, in a manner of speaking, convinced the Netherlands ‘to wake up and smell the coffee.’ But because ‘his voice had been silenced,’ the newly mobilised electorate was now left orphaned and forlorn. The members wrote phrases such as: ‘We have been silenced,’ ‘Democracy has been murdered’ or ‘No freedom of expression.’ The most common text, which appeared in several versions, was the role attributed to the speaker: ‘You said what we thought.’ This brief statement provides one of the clues for explaining the collective and public emotionality that captured much of the Dutch population at the time. It refers to the transposition of the individual social responsibility of his followers to Fortuyn as a person – ‘You said what we thought’ – and to his function as a personal extension of them. His significance as a spokesperson has made his death especially drastic and compelling. Those who had identified closely with Fortuyn felt as if they had suffered an amputation. Previously, because of their social position, voting practices or minimal social involvement or low social status, they had felt politically ignored and virtually without representation. All at once, they had lost their political voice, shepherd and leader: ‘With your charisma and personality, you were a mouthpiece for many people,’ wrote a Nijmegen resident on 10 May. A woman named Gineke said: ‘What will become of the Netherlands without you? All of the Netherlands is in tears.’ Three men from Scheveningen looked ahead and called for a new spokesperson: ‘We hope that your ideas about a changing society will live on.’ The rage and helplessness resulting from the political loss were loud and clear and largely distinct from the sorrow. Messages written from this perspective tended to be without a heading and to address ‘Pim’ and, implicitly, the ‘people and nation.’ The temporary commemoration sites were thus instrumentalised as national public whipping posts, as part of a charivari against government and public authorities. They followed an extended tradition of ‘post-it’ monuments, which people have used to ridicule and criticise incumbent rulers, as exemplified by Pasquino, one of the ‘talking’ statues of Rome.21

21 Fernando Silenzi and Renato Silenzi (1968), Pasquino. Quattro secoli di satira romana. Florence: Vallecchi Editore.

126

Reframing Dutch Culture

The symbolic effects of the political resentment later erupted within the parliament. Pressure from Fortuyn’s political movement to have him as a person and his movement acknowledged symbolically as a purifying, democratic force was highly effective in the beginning. For the first time in history, a politician who had never served in parliament had a room named after him, as well as a bust produced of his likeness. The achievement should be credited not only to the LPF lobby. In retrospect, the Dutch government did this as a conciliatory overture toward his followers and as symbolic compensation for the way that political leaders had treated Fortuyn during the previous months. This political memorial also marked a formal political conclusion and paved the way for broad acceptance of his ideas. At both the left and the right extremes of the political spectrum, politicians started to acknowledge Fortuyn’s issues publicly and to play electorates against each other. The massive inroads that resentment of the national political system had made among the population are also borne out by the ongoing fragmentation among the government and losses of votes among the conventional parties. In addition to the LPF, many local parties gained ground during those years on issues such as the ones that Fortuyn had raised. Fortuyn had been the first to place the problems with multicultural society as a new central issue on the political agenda. The debate that ensued brought the role of Islam in the Netherlands into the spotlight as well. Fortuyn had labelled this religion as ‘backward’ because of the cultural and political practices associated with it. From that point onward, in conjunction with the increased prominence of Al Qaeda in the world arena, many regarded the expanding influence of Islam as a ‘problem’ for Dutch ‘Christian’ society. The election results on 15 May 2002 thus clearly reflected the social and political disorientation: massive numbers voted for an assassinated political leader, who, in keeping with Dutch electoral law, still figured at the top of his party’s electoral list. In 2004 a similar subject of confusion received even greater emphasis, when the polemic cinematographer Theo van Gogh was murdered by a radical Islamist in Amsterdam. A large temporary memorial site was established at the murder scene and also became an arena of resentment. Many of the letters placed there addressed the role and significance of Islam and Islamism in Dutch society. Although the idea of the Fortuyn Day on 6 May subsided after the low turnout at the 2003 commemoration, Fortuyn was materially immortalised that same year, when the Stichting Beeld van Pim built a rather large commemorative monument in the centre of Rotterdam.22 The visual artist used the cracked marble from the pedestal and the twisted obelisk positioned on the pedestal to symbolise how Fortuyn transcended the established structures and the subsequent social turnaround he achieved. The obelisk bears Fortuyn’s bronze bust ‘in debate’ to represent his active proclamation of free speech.23 The foundation sold small replicas to disseminate Pim’s legacy among individuals and to preserve it for future generations. This monument was 22 Jaap Roepius is the foundation chairman. The initiator of the statue is Rinus van de Heerik; the sculptor is Corry Ammerlaan-van Niekerk. 23 www.beeldvanpim.nl/replica.html

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

127

realised thanks in part to the preponderance of Fortuyn’s party on the Rotterdam city council. Afterwards, the large Dutch socialist party (PvdA) reported the following about the placement of the statue through former State Secretary and Alderman Hans Kombrink: ‘I see no objective cause. These gestures are appropriate for people who have demonstrated their merits. He had no such opportunity’ (Oosthoek 2005: 231). The PvdA politician intended to belittle Fortuyn’s achievements, without becoming personally involved. This statue, however, is also the embodiment of atonement efforts among other politicians. Whether or not Fortuyn had achievements on record: after breaking apart the polder policy and because of the strength of Fortuyn’s local party Leefbaar Rotterdam, the old parties could no longer overlook a hardening of the memory of Pim Fortuyn. The efforts by the estate agent Mens to place the aforementioned statue of Fortuyn performing his salute in The Hague met with perpetual objections from the community, as Fortuyn was not regarded as having any special significance for that city. At first, neighbourhood residents of Rotterdam successfully resisted placement of this statue on the square in front of his residence for fear that it would attract pilgrimages by right-wing extremists (Oosthoek 2005: 208). Eventually, the statue was placed in the front yard. Each year on the anniversary of the murder, both this last statue and the large bust on the square along the Korte Hoogstraat in Rotterdam draw a silent march of commemoration and reflection organised by various small groups of Fortuyn supporters. It is the end of a kind of pilgrimage across the Netherlands that also passes by the murder site in Hilversum and the grave monument at Driehuis (Columbijn 2006). The large statue is the annual gathering point for loyal Fortuyn supporters. Rather than a silent commemoration, people perform music and deliver speeches. The texts and objects placed at the sculpture comprise only a few individual expressions from the remaining diehard Fortuyn supporters. This represents an effort, in keeping with the memorials from 2002, to revive old narratives as an ultimate political resort to save their cause.24 In the years after 2002, when a general Fortuyn fatigue set in, and other politicians embraced his ideas, this commemoration was reduced virtually to a small in-crowd affair of fewer than 200 souls. Especially since 2004, the remaining Fortuyn groups are no longer even civil to one another and publicly challenge each other’s competence and legitimacy. The absence of a receptive audience and lack of media coverage minimised the significance of the ‘only true monument’. Not only classical statues were introduced in public space. The property baron Chris Thunessen in The Hague, a Fortuyn adherent who had always provided the 24 ‘In mijn hart leeft hij voort’, in NRC-Handelsblad, 6 May, 2003; Gretha Pama, ‘Lieve Pim, we moeten verder zonder jou’, in: NRC-Handelsblad, 7 May, 2003. Field studies I conducted on the anniversaries of Fortuyn’s birthday and the date of his death in 2004 and 2005 revealed how much his following had already diminished by 2003. It continued to dwindle in subsequent years. By 19 February 2005, only about 20 people rode the coach that travelled the memorial trail; on 6 May, 2005, the number was less than forty. The turnout was somewhat higher at the stops along the route. The number was highest in Rotterdam, where 175 people joined the march, with another 50 waiting at the monument.

128

Figure 6.3

Reframing Dutch Culture

A copy of a statue that had been decapitated in 2003

Fortuyn’s followers visit it on his birthday, 19 February 2005. Photo: Peter Jan Margry.

party with ample financial support, purchased Fortuyn’s residence in 2002. He subsequently had the interior ‘immortalised’, exactly as it was when Fortuyn still lived there.25 His main purpose was to preserve Fortuyn’s ideas for the future. As access to the house was restricted to those believed to concur with Fortuyn’s political objectives, the house served as a monumental political platform. A similar process occurred in Italy, where Fortuyn owned a cottage in the village of Provesano, and where he was ultimately buried. One of Fortuyn’s friends purchased this house in the hope of preserving it in its original state. To highlight the commemorative nature of this house, he had a sculpture of Fortuyn’s head affixed to the exterior wall. Near the residence is the cemetery where Fortuyn lies buried. Both memorials, however, in part because they are so far away from the Netherlands, attract only occasional 25 A virtual tour of the house became available online in May 2006: http://www. palazzodipietro.nl

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

129

visits from Dutch people vacationing in Italy. As a result, they have had virtually no opportunity to exert a performative influence. The transnational dimensions of the cult surrounding his person did not end here. International concern about the murder and the emotional responses labelled as unDutch extended international interest in the Dutch politician to Italy, due in part to Fortuyn’s ties with that country. This attention outlived the temporal quality of the daily news, because ‘fortuynist’ themes were current in Italy, as they were elsewhere in Europe. Political contacts with the LPF quickly followed the report by the Italian media about Fortuyn. Franco Grillini, a member of parliament and chairman of the largest Italian association of homosexuals, attended to emphasise and convey Fortuyn’s significance as an outspoken homosexual political leader and a champion of personal freedom. Elio de Anna, president of the Pordenone province and a member of Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia, attended Fortuyn’s funeral primarily to tell the media that Fortuyn deeply admired Berlusconi and had therefore contacted his party.26 At the same time, contacts were established between members of the LPF and the Italian Islamophobic party Lega Nord, led by Umberto Bossi, a member of Prime Minister Berlusconi’s Cabinet at the time. This also gave rise to an Italian translation of the book Fortuyn had written against the Islamisation of European culture.27 Although the members of the Lega Nord greatly admired Fortuyn, the party progressively came to embrace the outspoken critical views of Islam expressed by the emerging Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. All local, national and international efforts to enshrine Fortuyn and his Fortuynists in ‘hard memory’ have failed. This manner of memorialising Fortuyn appears to have been relatively insignificant. The strong influence that Fortuyn exerted temporarily on politics and society was almost entirely attributable to popular support for his ideas. The climax was the commemoration and representation of these ideas via the improvised memorial sites. The dynamic power of the ‘soft memory’ and the performative impact of the sites enabled him to leave a deep post mortem imprint on Dutch politics and administration. Despite this significance and the many initiatives to establish permanent memorials, in the four years that have elapsed since then, the fortuynist movement has disintegrated.28 The appropriation of several highlights from his political programme by the larger political parties at the centre-left and right may be the most important factor for not preserving the momentum of fortuynism since 26 Bas Mesters, ‘Sober slotakkoord tussen kerk, kroeg en Rocca Jacoba’, in NRCHandelsblad, 22 July, 2002. 27 Pim Fortuyn (2005), Contro l’islamizzazione della nostra cultura. Pordenone: Associazione Culturale ‘Carlo Cattaneo’, in conjunction with the Pim Fortuyn Foundation in Provesano. Ewout Kieckens, ‘Fortuyn wordt door Lega Nord niet vergeten’, in: Reformatorisch Dagblad, 18 May, 2005. 28 First, there was the reversal of the electoral victories that the LPF had achieved during the parliamentary elections on 15 May 2002, by participating in the new coalition of the first Balkenende administration, together with the Christian Democrats (CDA) and the liberals (VVD); within three months, the government fell, and the LPF disappeared from the government and became divided and decimated (dwindling from 26 to 8 seats).

130

Reframing Dutch Culture

the death of its leader.29 This was ultimately reflected in the elections for parliament of November 2006 when the LPF was completely wiped out. The new policy and conduct of the Dutch government had become so imbued with Fortuyn’s points of view that the ‘familiar’ image of the open and tolerant Netherlands, such as in the case of aliens’ policy and social security, are no longer recognised abroad (Carle 2006). Conclusion While the temporary-improvised memorial sites dedicated to Fortuyn as monuments of mourning on the surface appear perfectly compatible with a broader phenomenon of temporary memorials, I have tried in this contribution to explain that especially the Fortuyn memorials were instrumentalised to articulate broad social discontent. They therefore had a hybrid quality: as monuments of mourning but especially as hearths of resentment and protest. The relatively large number of memorial sites established at politically strategic locations, the broad participation in the memorials and the abundant and harsh criticism set the tone during the days after the murder. These days therefore qualify as a non-violent uprising against the political policy and system, which, over the course of a week, was articulated in an individual and public performative manner. The protest and resentment have in the first place become powerfully public expressions through the medley of texts and objects that composed the memorials. Analysing these memorials from a performance perspective and regarding the apparently static enactment of the improvised memorials as a performative event in public space, makes clear that the memorials could have generated a far greater effect across a broader range. The interaction of the compilers of the messages with the memorials, with the public and a massive media disclosure enhanced the semiotic nature of these memorials. This helped them evolve into ‘democratic’ instruments, which, as arenas of political resentment, defied and eroded the established power structures. Their impact was manifested a week later during the parliamentary elections, when massive numbers voted for a dead party leader. As opinionated narratives, the protest messages were expressions from the ‘orphaned’ citizens aiming to broadcast and record the memory of or, more correctly, the political perspectives of Fortuyn. One woman wrote: ‘you are the saviour of the Netherlands, because you rebelled.’ Not only did he rebel, but the performative impact of his death mobilised an additional 1.6 million citizens to protest. The establishment and performative impact of these memorials demonstrated that support for the protest was far broader within Dutch society than Fortuyn’s direct following might have suggested. The memorials came to resemble informal but broadly-based petitions, which, thanks in part to intense media exposure, ultimately exerted an influence on politicians and government policy that was impossible to 29 See e.g. an initial mention in ‘Fortuynism without Fortuyn,’ in: The Economist, 28 November 2002.

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

131

ignore. The anger targeted government and administration but was based on both deeply rooted and newly mobilised discontent with a personal perception that the Dutch administrative entities lacked the structure and power to deal with problems concerning immigration, integration, safety etc. Both the temporary-improvised and the permanent monuments served mainly to continue embodying the political weight of Fortuyn’s movement as a cohesive element, with the underlying hope of eliminating existential problems or threats in the lives of his followers or, in other words, to continue supporting a fortuynist policy. In this respect the temporary memorials – Etkind’s dynamic-performative ‘soft memory’ – ultimately proved far more important and influential than did the permanent monuments. The mediating role of the memorial sites in the interaction between messengers, public and media has been decisive for the dynamics and course of the political revolt realised by the performative memorials. The ‘hard’ monuments established since 2002 to commemorate the politician Pim Fortuyn, however, represent a diversity of social, cultural and political discourses and conflicts that have materialised in Dutch politics and society since then. The competitive diversity within which these commemorations and memorials were introduced heralded the beginning of the end of the fortuynism that effectively drove itself out of the political order in 2006, five years after it appeared. In the meantime, its role has been appropriated by the ‘traditional’ political system. References Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bauman, Richard (1986), Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Boomkens, René (2006), De nieuwe wanorde. Globalisering en het einde van de maakbare samenleving. Amsterdam: Van Gennep. Carle, Robert (2006), Demise of Dutch Multiculturalism. Society, March/April: 68–74. Castells, Manuel (1998), End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Colombijn, Freek (2007), The Search for an Extinct Volcano in the Dutch Polder: Pilgrimage to Memorials Sites of Pim Fortuyn. Anthropos 102(1), 71–90. De Hart, Joep (2005), Voorbeelden en nabeelden. Historische vergelijkingen naar aanleiding van de dood van Fortuyn en Hazes. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. De Rooy, Piet, and Henk te Velde (2005), Met Kok. Over veranderend Nederland. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek. De Vries, Jouke and Sebastiaan van der Lubben (2005), Een ononderbroken evenwicht in de Nederlandse politiek. Paars II en de revolte van Fortuyn. Amsterdam: Van Gennep. Durbin, Jeffrey L. (2003), Expressions of Mass Grief and Mourning. The Material Culture of Makeshift Memorials. Material Culture 35(1), 22–47.

132

Reframing Dutch Culture

Durkheim, Émile (1965), On the Elementory Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press. Eckardt, Frank (2003), Pim Fortuyn und die Niederlande. Populismus als Reaktion auf die Globalisierung. Marburg: Tectum Verlag. Edkins, Jenny (2003), Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etkind, Alexander (2004), Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany. Grey Room 16, 36–59. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2005), Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London: Routledge. Fortuyn, Pim (2001), De islamisering van onze cultuur. Nederlandse identiteit als fundament. Uithoorn/Rotterdam: Karakter/Speakers Academy. Fortuyn, Pim (2002a), De puinhopen van acht jaar paars. Uithoorn/Rotterdam: Karakter/Speakers Academy. Fortuyn, Pim (2002b), A hell of a job. De verzamelde columns. Rotterdam: Speakers Academy. Gillis, John R. (ed) (1994), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goffman, Erving (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City NY: Doubleday. Kleinnijenhuis, Jan et al. (2003), De puinhopen van het nieuws. De rol van de media bij de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen van 2002. Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer. Margry, Peter Jan (2003), The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in The Netherlands? Etnofoor 16(2), 102–127. Michalski, Segiusz (1998), Public monuments: Art in political bondage 1870–1997. London: Reaktion Books. Mitchell, Katharyne (2003), Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory. Urban Geography 24, 442–459. Nelson, Robert S. and Margaret Olin (eds) (2003), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago: Chicago UP. Nora, Pierre (1998), The Era of Commemoration, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past, vol. 3. Symbols. New York: Columbia University Press, 609–637. Oosthoek, Albert (2005), Pim Fortuyn en Rotterdam. Rotterdam: Ad. Donker. Patten Henry, Marilène (1996), Monumental Accusations. The monuments aux morts as Expressions of Popular Resentment. New York: Peter Lang. Pels, Dick (2003), De geest van Pim. Het gedachtegoed van een politieke dandy. Amsterdam: Anthos. Prost, Antoine (1997), Monuments to the Dead, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of memory: Rethinking the French past. Vol. 2: Traditions. New York: Columbia University Press. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina (2006), Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections after the March 11th Attacks in Madrid, in Santino (2006a),

Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society

133

Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, 333–347. Santino, Jack (1992), ‘Not an important failure’: Spontaneous Shrines and rites of death and politics in Northern Ireland, in M. McCaughan (ed.), Displayed in mortal light. Antrim: Arts Council. Santino, Jack (ed.) (2006a), Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Santino, Jack (2006b), Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, in Santino (2006a: 5–15). Scharfe, Martin (1989), Totengedenken. Zur Historizität von Brauch-traditionen. Das Beispiel Olof Palme 1986. Ethnologia Scandinavica 19, 142–153. Schechner, Richard (2002), Performance Studies: An Introduction London: Routledge. Stengs, Irene (2004), Ephemeral Memorials against ‘Senseless Violence’: Materialisations of Public Outcry. Etnofoor 16(2), 26–40. Van Roosmalen, Marcel (2003), De Pimmels. De apostelen van Pim Fortuyn. Soesterberg: Aspekt. Vasterman, Peter L.M. (2004), Mediahype. Amsterdam: Aksant. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, and Barry Schwartz (1991), The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past. The American Journal of Sociology 97(2), 376–420. Walter, Tony (ed.) (1999), The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg. Wansink, Hans (2004), De erfenis van Fortuyn. De Nederlandse democratie na de opstand van de kiezers. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

Crop Circle Tales: Narrative Testimonies from the Dutch Frontier Science Movement Theo Meder

Narrativity and Spirituality Although some prefer to believe otherwise, crop circles are a quite recent phenomenon. It all started in the south of England – mainly in the rural Hampshire and Wiltshire areas – in the late 1970s; simple circles appeared in the crops. People started to speculate about the possibility that these circles were an imprint that was left behind by a flying saucer that had landed. In time, the forms evolved from plain circles to intricate pictograms and, currently, even matrix print-like figures.1 Although these fantastic formations could no longer be explained by landing UFOs, the belief in a possible extraterrestrial explanation persists. Perhaps these crop circles were messages from outer space. Crop circles have been found in the Netherlands since the late 1980s. It began with simple circles and gradually evolved into pictograms. There was a peak in 1996, with no less than one hundred crop circles. In 1994, thirty formations were reported, and in 1997, forty-three crop circles were found. Since 1998, the number of Dutch formations has decreased; it now fluctuates between ten and twenty a year.2 According to sceptics, all crop circles are made by human hoaxers with relatively simple tools, just like the two British trickster artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed in 1991. For more than a decade, they had created crop circles with ropes and planks. Although their confession came as a shock to believers, they soon recovered as they began to realise that too many crop circles had appeared in England and elsewhere in the Western world to have been the work of a couple of elderly artists alone.3 Considerable numbers of crop circles have also been reported from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Germany. Believers

1 See Haselhoff 1998: 20–51; Pringle 1999: 125–134; Andrews and Spignesi 2003: 206–231; Klijnstra 2000: 61–106. 2 For an overview, see the website of the Dutch Crop Circle Archive: www.dcca.nl. 3 De Blécourt 1995a: 189 and 1995b: 8; Dégh 2001: 320–321; Schnabel 1994: 260–277.

136

Reframing Dutch Culture

like to point out that circle formations are not found only in fields of wheat or rye; they have appeared in carrots, potatoes, oilseed rape, grass, trees, snow and ice as well. While sceptics are convinced that Doug and Dave have many copycats, enough room is left for the believers to assume that the formation of many crop circles remains a mystery. In the meantime, many books and articles have been published about crop circles around the world. The vast majority of these books, however, are written from either a believer’s or a sceptic’s perspective. Hardly any publication on crop circles has been written from an ethnological point of view. The only book on crop circles that could more or less qualify as an ethnographic work is Round in Circles by Jim Schnabel (1994). This study stops after Doug and Dave’s confession in 1991, however, as Schnabel assumes that the belief in crop circles would die of natural causes – but it has not. In 2001, I decided to focus my folk-narrative research on the roles that stories play within ‘New Religious Movements’ in the Netherlands. Many New Religious Movements can currently be identified in the Netherlands, from the neo-pagan Wicca movement to the Raelian UFO cult, from Feng Shui and aura reading to shamanism and Kabala. I narrowed my focus to the new-age subject of crop circles and related phenomena. I joined the Dutch Centre for Crop Circle Studies (DCCCS), in order to participate and observe. My main objective was to explore whether and how stories are used to strengthen certain convictions and beliefs, and to see how narratives influence people’s behaviour, their worldviews and their interpretations of reality in everyday life. My research essentially concentrated on the interaction between narrativity and spirituality. What impact do stories have on belief, and how does belief generate new stories? Rather than considering the crop circle tales as either true or untrue, I chose to investigate them as exempla – narrative testimonies of a spiritual truth (for the resulting monograph see Meder 2006). My primary focus was on people who believe that most crop circles are not made by humans, but rather that they are the result of supernatural or extraterrestrial interference. During my research, I decided to refer to them as ‘croppies’ and ‘cereologists’, as they themselves dislike to be portrayed as believers. Croppies are people who frequently visit crop circles, as a sort of new-age tourism, while cereologists visit the formations in order to conduct research with tape measures, dowsing rods and such. From an outsider’s point of view (the etic perspective), sceptics and regular scientists consider crop circle stories and research as pseudoscience. From an insider’s perspective (the emic point of view), the tales and studies of croppies and cereologists are part of what they themselves refer to as ‘frontier science’; they investigate phenomena that ordinary scientists tend to ignore. Dutch Cereologists and the Balls-of-Light Theory How do crop circles, which are presumably ‘not made by humans’, come into being, according to the croppies and cereologists? Their current answer is that they are

Crop Circle Tales

Figure 7.1

137

Croppies in a formation in Valkenburg in 2004

Photo: Robert Boerman.

made by balls of light. The Dutch cereologist Eltjo Haselhoff and former chair of the DCCCS, who has a PhD in physics, made the balls-of-light theory accepted within the international frontier science community. An article on the subject of the balls of light was accepted in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Physiologia Plantarum, and Haselhoff explains his theory once more in his book The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles (Haselhoff 2001a and 2001b: 78–81). The balls of light are about the size of a tennis ball or a football, and eyewitnesses have reported seeing them hovering over fields. The balls of light use the Earth’s energy lines, or ‘ley lines’, to imprint a pattern in a crop. Electromagnetism emitted by the balls of light cause microwave radiation and heat, which actually flatten the crop and cause the nodes on the stalks of the grain to enlarge or explode. Tests with the germination of seeds from inside and outside the crop circle show significant deviations in growth, and they seem to support the balls-of-light theory. Because the balls of light seem to be able to imprint mathematical patterns in fields, some kind of intelligence must be involved; either the balls are intelligent beings themselves, or they are probes that are guided by intelligent beings. A growing number of witnesses, photos and videos may back up the theory – but sceptics have all kinds of other explanations for sightings of balls of light, including hallucinations, ball lightning, ignited swamp gas, fireflies, lens flares, deliberate photo or film manipulations or simply hoaxers using flashlights.4 Nonetheless, the sighting of light phenomena is well known in folklore and folktales

4 For the balls of light, see the 2001 documentary by B. Janssen and J. Ossebaard entitled Contact with the unknown intelligence behind the crop circles. Even within the group of cereologists, there is scepticism (for example, see Haselhoff 2001b: 85–88 on light orb photography. See also Nickel, 2002).

138

Reframing Dutch Culture

(cf. Moravec 2003). In the past, beings of light have received such names as fairy (light), ball of light, pixie, will-o’-the-wisp and jack-o’-lantern. After establishing that balls of light are involved in making crop circles, croppies and cereologists go their separate ways. Some offer ecological explanations for crop circles, assuming that they are a sign from Mother Earth. Others prefer to attribute some form of divine origin to crop circles. Many croppies and cereologists are convinced that crop circles are a supernatural phenomenon: perhaps earthly beings of a yet unknown kind or dimension are responsible for the enigmatic formations. For example, cereologist Rudi Klijnstra believes that crop circles are made by spirits of nature that the Indians know as ‘devas’ (Klijnstra 2000: 46–48). Cereologist Bert Janssen, on the other hand, thinks that crop circles are made by humans on a spiritual level. According to Janssen, crop circles emerge from the quantum field through mental power, and they are assumed to have a hypnotic effect on spectators (Janssen 2004). Another group of croppies and cereologists assumes that crop circles are an extraterrestrial phenomenon, in which case the balls of light are probably guided by remote control. Whereas sceptics attribute no meaning to crop circles other than as pieces of landscape art, croppies and cereologists are convinced that more is involved; they interpret the formations as warnings, signs or messages. The Wondrous Case of the Dutch Scorpio Crop Circle On 16 August 2001, I visited a formation in Stadskanaal (Groningen), which, according to the cereologists, was a ‘real’ crop circle (in their terminology, ‘real’ means ‘not made by humans’). The circle was discovered and photographed on 1 August by dentist Hans Hesselink, who happened to be passing by in an Ultra Light Aircraft. Photos and a first report were published on the Dutch Crop Circle Archive website of cereologist Robert Boerman’s PTAH Foundation.5 Because of the shape – a head and body with a large bent tail – the formation was soon called the Scorpio. In a newspaper interview, dentist Hesselink admitted his conviction that the Scorpio was the ‘signature of a higher intelligent being or group’ (Toering 2001a). According to Hesselink, campers had seen strange lights in the sky on the night that another crop circle had appeared in the same area. In their report, Boerman and Jan Willem Bobbink (Boerman’s nephew and also a cereologist) reported finding wheat stems with blown nodes and nettles with burnt leaves. Using a dowsing rod, Bobbink found about twenty ley lines crossing the Scorpio circles. Several days later, Boerman and Bobbink returned with Haselhoff for further investigation and sampling. Boerman took some regular photos and pole shots of the Scorpio with its eight-circle tail. After changing his position, Boerman – to his utter

5

See http://www.dcca.nl/2001/stadskanaal2/nl78.htm.

Crop Circle Tales

139

amazement – noticed that there were suddenly nine tail circles. Within a matter of minutes, while the experts were in the field, an extra circle had formed. The three cereologists went to the new circle and noticed that it was still warm. Haselhoff wanted to take a picture, but the battery of his digital camera had suddenly become empty. Boerman and Haselhoff then experienced a distinct pain in their limbs. Using his dowsing rod, Bobbink sensed that the ninth circle was not yet finished. The researchers ran away in terror. It took them half an hour to regain their courage and return. When journalist Roel Toering arrived, the battery of his digital camera failed as well (Toering 2001b). Once he had returned home, Haselhoff found that all of his photo files were corrupted, except for one photo that he had made outside the crop circle. A few days later, cereologist Ina Kliffen visited the crop circle.6 She encountered three circles in the grass in the vicinity of the Scorpio. Using her pendulum, she measured unusual energy values. All of these extraordinary events were published on Boerman’s website and in Frontier Magazine (Boerman 2001b), a Dutch magazine for mysteries of (frontier) science; they also found their way to the news media inside and outside the Netherlands. Benjamin Creme, a Scottish medium and prophet of world teacher Maitreya, stated that the Scorpio was made by a spaceship from Mars (Creme 2001). When I visited 52-year-old farmer Jan Hendrik Adams, I identified myself as a researcher, and asked, ‘What kind of people are coming to this crop circle?’ ‘People like you’, he answered.7 This was the second season that crop circles had appeared in this farmer’s fields. Adams told me that he believed that the crop circles were made by humans, although he could not explain how the ninth tail circle had come into being. He witnessed the researchers flee in panic when he was coming towards them from an adjacent field. According to the farmer, Bobbink’s sketch of the ley lines was nonsense: if earth energy had created the circles, why had no ley lines been drawn that could have predicted the coming of the ninth tail circle? Nonetheless, the farmer would not rule out the possibility that crop circles had been made by electromagnetic forces. He mentioned another peculiar fact, asking why so many formations like the Scorpio had appeared on the 53rd degree of latitude. ‘They are all exactly on a straight line’, he said. When I walked to the crop circle, I met 26-year-old Roland Koning, who worked at a local radio station. He had come to visit the Scorpio circle out of curiosity. As I was recording an interview with him inside the circle, he said that he believed that the circles had been made by humans. He would not be surprised if the cereologists had made the ninth circle themselves, just as ‘a publicity stunt’. When we visited the ninth circle, we noticed that there was a hole in the centre, about a finger deep (some time later, Robert Boerman stated that the hole had not been there when they discovered the circle). When Roland and I walked back to our cars, we came across 6 See http://www.dcca.nl/2001/stadskanaal3/nl81.htm. 7 Fieldwork Stadskanaal, August 16th, 2001 (report archives Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam).

140

Reframing Dutch Culture

the three grass circles. ‘How difficult can it be to make another one?’ Roland asked and trampled around through the grass. A few seconds later, there were four circles in the grass. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary that day in the Scorpio formation. The only thing that surprised me was the poor quality of my tape recording inside the crop circle, due to a disturbing rustle. Could this be electromagnetic noise? A technician assured me that it was the sound of the wind and the waving of the wheat. Later in August, a local artist, Chris Westen, made the news when he decided to buy the wheat from the Scorpio to bake ‘crop-circle buns’.8 The artist found a miller to make flour, and baker Geert Bos from Stadskanaal would make and sell the buns around Christmas time. The profit would be spent on a charitable cause: meals for the poor. Westen considers crop circles to be a rural form of art, not a supernatural or extraterrestrial phenomenon. Nonetheless, cereologists tried to warn the general public; because of radiation, wheat from crop circles may have biological abnormalities. The buns may taste bad or, in the worst case, be radioactive. ‘That’s why I’ll let my mother-in-law have the first bite’, replied Westen, jokingly. The farmer told me, ‘I didn’t harvest the crop circle, just the wheat around it. It’s impossible to harvest flattened wheat with a combine. By the way, I grow wheat for pig feed, not for buns!’9 For a while, the plan appeared to have been a cheap publicity stunt; no buns were sold during Christmas, or Easter for that matter. Eventually, however, five thousand buns were baked and sold on Queens Day, April 30, 2002. They looked, smelled and tasted like ordinary whole-wheat buns. ‘There is no wheat in it from within the circle, only from the outside’, baker Geert Bos told me. ‘I had to add fifty percent of my own flour to make it work’, he added.10 Reception and Acceptance of Exemplary Tales As soon as one enters the Dutch crop circle community, one is bound to hear the Scorpio story, along with other wondrous tales. Nonetheless, the Scorpio tale stands out in the Dutch repertoire; in a way, it is the equivalent of the British Julia Set story. On the morning of 7 July 1996, a farmer inspected his field of grain near the famous megalithic Stonehenge monument and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Neither did a pilot who flew over Stonehenge at half past five in the afternoon. When he returned thirty minutes later, however, the pilot was amazed to find a huge crop formation of many small and large circles imprinted in the field near Stonehenge. The magnificent formation caused a true traffic jam on the A303 between Stonehenge and the crop circle. Nobody had seen people in the field that day, nor had they noticed any unusual phenomena; the crop circle had simply appeared all of a sudden. The 8 See Toering 2001c; Oosterhaven 2001; Vergeer 2001, as well as http://www.dcca. nl/art/brood.htm and http://www.dcca.nl/art/brood2.htm. 9 Telephone conversation with the farmer on April 8, 2002. 10 Telephone conversation with the baker on April 23, 2002.

Crop Circle Tales

141

crop formation soon came to be known as the Julia Set, after the mathematical fractal that it represents. This story is well known among serious croppies and cereologists around the world.11 The story is usually told to initiate non-croppies and persuade sceptics. Rather than a contemporary legend, a story like the Julia Set narrative seems to be a tale of wonder that seeks to prove a paranormal or spiritual point. The Julia Set story is told to show that crop circles can emerge mysteriously within a short time, in broad daylight, without any human involvement. A similar phenomenon happened with the Scorpio formation, with the appearance of an extra tail circle in the daytime. I argue that the function of these crop circle tales resembles that of the traditional exemplum. As do the Catholic exempla about saints, angels and devils, these tales are intended to illustrate, support and propagate a spiritual or theological truth.12 The story of the Scorpio crop circle was published on the Dutch Crop Circle Archive (DCCA) website of Robert Boerman; (local) newspapers paid attention to it, and the case was presented at the Frontier Symposium in 2001.13 Once the interest in crop circles has been aroused, an individual is exposed to stories from all sides and sources upon entering the crop-circle community. This arguably involves the polyreception of tales, not only through oral transmission, but in print and in audio-visual media as well. Moreover, there is a perpetual repetition; the same types of stories are repeated over and over again. Individuals obviously appropriate those stories that are most consistent with their own worldviews. The available sources include books, magazines, websites, newsgroups, discussion forums, videos, DVDs, radio and television programmes, symposiums, informal meetings, lectures, workshops and gatherings at crop-circle sites. A considerable variety of commercial items relating to crop circles is apparently available as well, including a crop-circle board game, a crop-circle computer game, crop-circle T-shirts, crop-circle postcards, crop-circle calendars and crop-circle yearbooks. There is even crop-circle music, composed by the late Stephen J. Smith. The movie Signs appeared in 2002, followed by the low budget imitation, Warnings, in 2003. Signs received little appreciation from either croppies or sceptics (Jolms 2002, Tuijl 2002), and Warnings was ignored by both. Another feature of the ways in which stories can arouse or strengthen beliefs relates to their incontestability. The manner in which croppies or cereologists recount

11 See Haselhoff 1998: 49; Haselhoff 2001b: 6–8; Ossebaard 2000: 43; Pringle 1999: 12; Andrews and Spignesi 2003: 87–90; the testimony of Busty Taylor in the documentary movie Crop Circles: Quest for Truth by William Gazecki (2002), as well as oral transmissions that I taped during fieldwork: Eltjo Haselhoff in Amstelveen, September 19th, 2001, Bert Janssen at the Elf Fantasy Fair in Haarzuilens, April 26th, 2003. The story can be found in numerous places on the Internet, using a Google search for ‘Julia Set Stonehenge’. 12 See Daxelmüller 1984, cf. Dégh 1977. For the traditional genre, see Tubach 1969 and Van Oostrom 1985. 13 Frontier Symposium, 10 November 2001, Utrecht. Cereologist Robert Boerman told me the story once more in an interview, 12 February 2003, Oeken (tape recording archives Meertens Instituut).

142

Reframing Dutch Culture

the stories of the Julia Set and the Scorpio as exempla makes them irrefutable.14 One cannot argue with a good story. Moreover, if the narrator is a sympathetic or charismatic person, one is not inclined to argue with him either. At the time that they are narrated, many stories can no longer be verified; if listeners are tempted to believe anyway, why should they seek verification? Other tales are personal-experience stories and are thus very hard (and quite rude) to contradict. Upon entering the realm of croppies and cereologists, individuals absorb one amazing story after another. If the stories that the cereologists tell about crop circles are true (and they themselves are convinced they are), something extraordinary should be going on. The subsequent steps are the embrace and accumulation of stories. As soon as someone is willing to accept stories like the Julia Set and the Scorpio tale, there is room for more. The more consistent the stories are with the worldview of the listener, the easier it is for them to be accepted as credible (cf. Hoos 2004: 103). Stories that come from kindred spirits are easily absorbed. All of the stories are quite appealing, sensational and exciting; they give believers the feeling of belonging to a few initiated chosen ones within a world of ignorance, of being on the track of exclusive knowledge and on the brink of astonishing discoveries. As with every conviction, full faith does not come instantly; the process requires time and much contemplation, listening, reading and discussion. A new perception of the world comes in stages; stories are accepted and integrated into a worldview one step at a time. According to Aupers, people develop ‘esoteric careers’, in which incoming alternative knowledge slowly changes their ways of looking at the world (Aupers 2004: 44, 51). The boiled-frog analogy is applicable here.15 If a frog is thrown into boiling water, it will attempt to escape the cooking pan. On the other hand, if the frog is placed into a cooking pan with cold water and the water is heated slowly, the frog will not resist. Likewise the accumulation of stories may expand into the domain of UFOs, government cover-ups and crop circles as messages from outer space. This combination of narrative building blocks is reminiscent of the theory of memetics, in which the meme is a unit of cultural information (Brodie 1996). Metaphorically speaking, stories or memes spread and mutate like ‘mind viruses’, determining the views, thoughts and opinions of individuals and groups. Croppies and cereologists arguably share a specific set of memes, which are generally not very contagious among people whose minds are closed to new-age ideology or frontier science.

14 On the Circlemakers website, hoaxer Rod Dickinson claims to know that three hoaxers made the Julia Set during the night, but that it was simply not immediately discovered the next day (http://www.circlemakers.org/la.html). Haselhoff 1998: 44–50 provides information on small holes in the circles and a preliminary path underneath the downed crop, which could indicate that the Julia Set was made by humans. 15 I borrowed this analogy from the documentary by H. Reay (2001) called Aliens have landed (Real World Pictures: 2000).

Crop Circle Tales

143

From Narratives Towards a Belief System The narrative repertoires that croppies and cereologists build up do not remain static; aside from the fact that the stories accumulate, the content of the repertoires and the spiritual conceptions is dynamic. The narrative and conceptual repertoires evolve or mutate for individuals as well as groups. As the crop-circle phenomenon changes, so does the repertoire of tales. New stories generate new points of view, whereas new spiritual developments bring about new tales. As the balls-of-light theory became more accepted, more of these balls of light were observed, photographed and videotaped, and more of the stories started circulating. Another example is the fact that crop circles began as abstract symbols. The first simple circles were perceived as landing marks of flying saucers. These circles were followed by pictograms, which could no longer be interpreted as landing spots, but were instead considered to be alien messages. As crop circles transformed into mandalas, the tales became more esoteric; for example, some stories attributed healing capacity to these patterns. Figurative crop circles, depicting human (fantasy) objects, messages and symbols, have always been distrusted by believers and non-believers alike. Nonetheless, the appearance of alien faces in British crops in 2001 and 200216 caused a division among the believers; some considered the faces to be hoaxes while others took them seriously. For cereologist Robert Boerman, the acceptation of human symbols took a turn in 2002. Near the Dutch village of Stadskanaal, he encountered a crop circle with elongated and blown nodes, which convinced him of the authenticity of the formation. The only problem was that the crop circle contained the human love symbol of a heart and arrow.17 Boerman eventually accepted the appearance of human symbolism in crop circles; for sceptics, the design would have been a reason to doubt the validity of the blown-nodes theory.18 Boerman’s views on how crop circles come into being evolved as well. Although he originally thought that they were made by hoaxers and aliens (Boerman 2001a), he now concedes that the powers of nature and the psychic powers of the human mind can cause them as well.19 In many cases, the accumulation of stories results in the construction of a cosmology. Crop circle stories are never isolated within the convictions and conceptions of believers. Although the way in which these stories fit in may differ from one person to another, they are always part of a conglomerate of ideas that constitute a comprehensive view of the world, and even of the entire cosmos. One prominent concept in the new-age worldview is that there is no such thing as 16 See http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/cgi-bin/CCdb2?d=uk2001dn and http://www. cropcircleresearch.com/cgi-bin/CCdb2?d=uk2002dl. 17 See http://www.dcca.nl/2002/stadskanaal/stad1-nl.htm. 18 Actually, farmer Sjors van Ekelen told me that elongated and blown nodes are a natural phenomenon that always occurs after grain has been downed (interview Hoeven, Brabant, July 22nd, 2003; tape recording archive Meertens Institute). Biologists use the terms gravitropism and phototropism to refer to the attempts of plants to rise again. 19 Personal statement December 1st, 2004.

144

Reframing Dutch Culture

coincidence; because all things in life are connected, it is possible to make all kinds of connections through association and intuition. For example, this principle makes it possible to believe that crop circles can be decoded through occult numerology, while simultaneously believing in reincarnation and in aliens as the creators of humankind.20 An awkward ambivalence towards science can be distinguished within the frontier-science movement. Dutch groups, including the DCCCS and the Frontier Sciences Foundation, propagate a kind of science that leaves more room for intuitive, speculative and paranormal reasoning; in most cases, they involve energies, vibrations and dimensions that have not been acknowledged by regular science. Useful elements of regular science are embraced (e.g., elements of astronomy and quantum physics).21 The elements of common science that are contrary to the worldview of frontier science are rejected as stupid mistakes made by blind and biased scientists, or even as forms of deliberate disinformation. Two opposite rhetorical formulas concerning regular science are often voiced within the frontier-science community: ‘This has been proven scientifically!’ and ‘The learned scientists have gotten it all wrong again’. The crop-circle world is not free from conspiracy thinking. The debunking of crop circle stories by sceptics is considered part of a global conspiracy to cover up the truth. According to many croppies and cereologists, we are living in a world in which powerful organisations, companies, governments, scientists and politicians are not to be trusted. Not only do they deliberately cover up information or spread disinformation concerning the crop-circle enigma, they manipulate people on a global scale. The United States has a particularly bad reputation; the Apollo moon landing was a studio production,22 American television shows contain subliminal messages,23 airplanes emit chemtrails in order to sedate or poison us,24 and the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were an American action, intended to prepare us for the New World Order and global control.25 This will not stop until we all have microchips in our heads in the name of security.26 The frontier 20 Boerman 2001a; interview Robert Boerman, Oeken, February 12th, 2003. 21 With regard to quantum theory, see McTaggart 2005 and the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? by M. Vincente, B. Chasse and W. Arntz (2004). 22 See Custers 1999; Perey 2001; Collier 2002; Felius 2003. Also refer to a radio interview with cereologist Herman Hegge for Madiwodo, VPRO, 747 AM, Friday, October 3rd, 2003. Furthermore, see the documentary What Happened on the Moon? An Investigation into Apollo (2000), the mockumentary by W. Karel, entitled Dark Side of the Moon (2002) and the sceptic documentary De waarheid achter de maanlandingen by V. Quinn (2004). 23 Toby 2004–2005; Albert Toby at the Frontier Symposium 2004, Amsterdam, November 13th, 2004 (tape recording archive Meertens Instituut). 24 Michiel Koperdraad, DCCCS meeting, Epe, April 11th, 2004; Keating and Vredeveldt 2003; cf. Nanninga 2004: 45, who states that chemtrails (i.e., chemical trails) are simply airplane contrails (i.e., condensation trails). 25 Albert Toby at the Frontier Symposium 2004, Amsterdam, November 13th, 2004. 26 Interview Robert Boerman, Oeken, February 12th, 2003 and see M. Heijman 2002 and 2003.

Crop Circle Tales

145

scientists have no problem; the rest of the world, which consists of those who are ignorant of the truth, does have a problem (cf. Aupers 2004: 52–55). For cereologists, 2004 was an unusual year in crop-circle research. More than ever before, traces of human involvement were found: holes in the ground at construction points, abandoned bamboo sticks and ropes, and car wheels in crop circles. In England, one cereologist even stumbled upon a group of hoaxers in the middle of the night. From the sceptic’s perspective, such evidence is nothing out of the ordinary; it is simply the result of careless hoaxers. Janet Ossebaard and Bert Janssen, however, believe it to be a conspiracy; it provides evidence of a secret debunking campaign. The crop circles are real, but the British army and the secret service have been assigned to create confusion by swiftly adding traces of human activity. These efforts represent a final offensive to spread false information, just before the crop-circle phenomenon, and the entities behind it, reveal the truth.27 In the Netherlands, Robert Boerman counted only eleven crop circles in 2004.28 There were actually twelve, but one crop circle bearing the logo of soccer club Feyenoord was evaluated as such an obvious hoax that even Boerman omitted it from his Dutch Crop Circle Archive.29 According to Boerman, six of the twelve Dutch crop circles were probably hoaxes; accounting for fifty percent of all crop circles for that year. The rate of fake crop circles had never been so high. In 2004, blown nodes were found in a crop circle in Valkenburg (Limburg), and the shape of the crop circle matched the course of the ley lines perfectly.30 Holes were found in the formation, but Boerman did not (want to) notice them. To him, the crop circle was real; when confronted with the holes later on, Boerman assumed that the farmer had added the holes later to make the formation look like a hoax.31 A similar incident occurred with a crop circle in Simonshaven (South Holland) in 2002. According to Boerman, the formation was real; he therefore did not mention the holes that were found in construction points. He assumed that the holes had been made afterwards with a soil-core sampler, possibly by the Dutch secret service. In this instance, the holes had not been added to make the formation appear to be a hoax; they provided evidence that secret-service agents were secretly researching the phenomenon as well.32

27 Ossebaard 2004; lecture by Bert Janssen on the Frontier Symposium 2004, Amsterdam, November 13th, 2004 (tape recording archive Meertens Instituut). 28 See http://www.dcca.nl/2004/2004-nl.htm. 29 See http://www.sporthumor.nl/SHframes4.html?url=/SHframes3.html%3Furl%3D/ graancirkel.html, http://scifi.punt.nl/?gr=119019, http://www.rijnmond.nl/ ?pid=4&item=22456 and http://www.rijnmond.nl/nieuwsfoto/archives/archive-072004.html. 30 See http://www.dcca.nl/2004/valkenburg/valkenburg-nl.htm. 31 The holes were discovered by sceptic Henry de Hoon (Heerlen), who confronted Boerman with them. 32 Fieldwork Simonshaven, June 26th, 2002; email June 28th, July 13th and 14th, 2002; interview Robert Boerman, Oeken, February 12th, 2003 (tape recording archive Meertens Instituut).

146

Figure 7.2

Reframing Dutch Culture

Jan Willem Bobbink with dowsing rod

Photo: Theo Meder.

At this point, I would like to introduce the well-known acronym WYBIWYS: What You Believe Is What You See. If we believe that the Americans intend to poison us, contrails turn into chemtrails. If we sincerely believe that crop circles are a paranormal or extraterrestrial phenomenon, all attempts to debunk the stories must be conspiracies. If we are willing to believe that the Julia Set appeared in broad daylight, then an extra tail circle in the Scorpio can appear out of the blue as well. Individual’s convictions determine their perceptions and interpretations of reality. To sceptics, a crop circle is simply a bunch of horizontal wheat, or perhaps a nice piece of landscape art or rural graffiti. Croppies or cereologists can feel the energy and ley lines, however, and their dowsing rods will react to them. In the hands of a sceptic, a dowsing rod will remain motionless. In a sense, this involves the power of mind over matter.

Crop Circle Tales

147

Believers often employ rhetorics that are reminiscent of those employed by converted Christians. Believers have undergone a kind of conversion that conditions faith, thought, behaviour and perception of reality. Bert Janssen is a good example. Janssen began as an absolute sceptic and converted to the new-age confession (Janssen 2004: 51). In a chapter entitled ‘Some personal reflections’, he states that the hypnotic power of the crop circles changed his life and made him a better person. He writes, ‘The most significant change took place in my appreciation of materialistic items, like cars, houses, in short: possessions. I can do with a lot less now than I could ten years ago. [...] I have become much more intuitive. I feel things and I pay attention to this feeling’ (Janssen 2004: 102). Janssen testifies that, if other people were to embrace the crop-circle phenomenon, the world would soon be a better place: ‘I think the phenomenon is helping humanity to make the right choices and decisions. [...] The phenomenon [...] helps us to appreciate the shapes, helps us to change, helps us to develop qualities we do not have yet. [...] We will progress further in our evolution. [...] If everybody were to go through these changes then the world would look very different. I even dare to say that it might look better’ (Janssen 2004: 103–104). Ostension In the same way that narrative mental scenarios can colour an individual’s perception of the world (WYBIWYS), stories that are recorded in the brain can determine actions and behaviour in reality. Anthropological folktale researchers Linda Dégh and Bill Ellis introduced and elaborated the concept of ostension or ostensive action. Dégh states that ‘we have to accept that fact can become narrative and narrative can become fact’ (Dégh 1995: 261). Ostension is the occurrence of events and behaviour in daily life in the way they occur in legends. This refers to real-life action that is guided by pre-existing narrative; in the words of Ellis, it involves ‘dramatic extension into real life’ (Ellis 2001: 41). Ostension is neither narration nor a theatrical act. It involves the more or less conscious acting-out of narrative scenarios. In short, the concept of ostension involves the ‘legends we live’.33 Normally, events lead to stories; Ellis, however, takes a provocative stand by stating, ‘Events provoke stories; but it is far more likely that stories provoke events’ (Ellis 2001: 164). From the ostension perspective, the stories that individuals have in their heads determine their actions. If a person steps into a crop circle, the tales in his mind determine the extent to which he will be bored or excited. It is easy to imagine the sheer thrill that a croppie experiences when standing in an energetic message in a crop. The stories in his head make him visit, feel and examine the formation. For the croppie or the cereologist, a crop circle can be a temporary temple.34 The decision of artist Chris Westen to bake crop-circle buns was an act of ostension as well; the 33 Subtitle of Ellis 2001. 34 See the website of cereologists Steve Alexander and Karen Douglas: http://www. temporarytemples.co.uk.

148

Reframing Dutch Culture

existing stories guided his action. The artist would never have come up with such an idea if the crop had simply been flattened by a storm. Ostension involves other dimensions as well. Every year, British artist and hoaxer John Lundberg manufactures crop circles, because he wants to stimulate belief in the legend. In a Dutch documentary, he exclaimed, ‘If people don’t believe that the circles are [...] genuine, then it is not functioning properly. Then there is no point doing it. And so... If the day comes that people don’t believe, then I will not be making circles anymore’.35 Lundberg is thus clearly acting out the existing crop circle tales. To him, making crop circles is ostensive action – it says so on his own website www.ostension.org. Three subcategories can be distinguished within the concept of ostension (Ellis 2001: 162–163; Dégh 1995: 250–253). First, pseudo-ostension is the deliberate re-enactment of a folktale as a hoax or practical joke. In 1997, Dutchman Remko Delfgaauw and his friends decided to create a magnificent crop circle in order to fool the cereologists. The pranksters waited for them to declare the circle real, after which they revealed that the formation was a hoax (Delfgaauw 1999). Since this incident, Dutch cereologists have become extra cautious when commenting on the authenticity of a crop circle in public. Second, proto-ostension involves the translation of a narrative into a story of personal experience. Through a process of appropriation (Frijhoff 1997), a folktale can turn into a personal narrative, or memorate. A Dutch boy by the name of Robbert van den Broeke claims to have paranormal abilities. He has witnessed balls of light making crop circles on several occasions. Once, he was even hit by a ball of light, after which he regained consciousness in a fresh crop circle. Nowadays, he says that he can feel crop circles coming. In 2004, the balls of light turned into entities, very much like the Grey aliens, and he was able to photograph them in his own home.36 Sceptical farmers in the neighbourhood consider these memorates to be lies or fantasies.37 Quasi-ostension is a third category. Pre-existing narratives can lead to false readings of normal facts. When I visit crop circles, I sometimes encounter accidental crop-circle tourists who inform me that there are more crop circles in the vicinity. 35 Interview broadcast by Netwerk, Nederland 1, July 1st, 2002, NCRV. 36 See Haselhoff 2001b: 21–22; the documentary Contact (2001) by Janssen andOssebaard; ‘Hoevenaar ziet “schijf’’’ 1999; Smits 1999; Brandsma 2002; Wonderen Bestaan 2003; ‘Graancirkel met pauselijke boodschap’ 2005; ‘Medium Hoeven “zet buitenaards wezen op foto’’’ 2004; Coast to Coast AM 2004; RTL Boulevard 2004; also see websites: http://www.dcca.nl/art/alien-nl.htm, http://www.ufoplaza.nl/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1724, http://frontpage.fok.nl/nieuws/45940, http://www.ufoplaza.nl/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1993. Robbert van den Broeke’s photographing aliens somehow resembles the fraudulent photos Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright took in 1917 and 1920 of the Cottingley fairies; see Smith 1997. 37 Fieldwork Hoeven, July 22nd, 2003; farmers Adriaan van der Riet and Sjors van Ekelen, speaking on behalf of their fellow farmers as well.

Crop Circle Tales

149

When I go and have a look, it turns out that they had simply seen grain that had been flattened by a storm or an overdose of fertiliser.38 Infected by the crop-circle virus, some people begin to consider all downed crops to be circle formations. Quasi-ostension is thus a mistaken interpretation of ordinary events according to the narratives that are in our heads. From a sceptical point of view, every interpretation of crop circles as supernatural or extraterrestrial is a mistake and therefore quasiostension. Adventure and Spirituality Two aspects of crop-circle practice have yet to be mentioned: the adventurous and the spiritual. First, crop-circle research and crop-circle hunting can be very exciting. In recounting his trip with Nancy Polet to Wilshire (UK), Dutch cereologist Roeland Beljon compared the crop-circle hunt to the action scenes from the movie Twister. Croppies and cereologists gather in crop-circle café The Silent Circle (in the past, the most popular pub was The Barge Inn); as soon as news of a new crop circle comes in, they drive off in their cars to find it.39 On other occasions, Dutch frontier-science researchers have drawn parallels between their quest for the grail and the exploits of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. Crop-circle hunting certainly involves the excitement of adventure, discovery and exploration. Bert Janssen characterises his work as a ‘journey’ (Jansen 2004: 104). Even Dutch hoaxer Remko Delfgaauw has confessed that making a complex crop circle in the middle of the night is a sensational and mind-blowing experience (Delfgaauw 1999: 14). This relates to the concept of homo ludens; making and finding crop circles is also a sort of game. The hoaxers and the believers have been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now (Hoos 2004: 115), and the fierce discussion between sceptics and cereologists has yet to be silenced. With regard to the aspect of spirituality, several parallels can be drawn between modern crop-circle spirituality and traditional religious movements, both of which expect ‘messages from above’ (cf. Partridge 2003). New-age researchers and authors can be considered priests, and reading their literature or hearing their lectures can be compared to reading the Holy Scripture or listening to the Good Word. Occasionally, the members of the DCCCS mockingly refer to Eltjo Haselhoff as ‘Imam Haselhoff’. A sceptic journalist attending a lecture once referred to Bert Janssen as a ‘TV evangelist’ (Van Veelen 2002: 20). The annual Frontier Symposiums are increasingly resembling new-age church services (with esoteric music and scents and charismatic speakers), in which believers of equal conviction come together and become part of a vast believing body.40 More than once, I have heard speakers at such symposiums say, ‘I am beginning to sound like a preacher’. Like traditional religions, the new38 Fieldwork Lelystad, August 2, 2001 and fieldwork Uppel, July 30th, 2003. 39 DCCCS meeting at Epe, April 11, 2004. 40 Fieldwork at Frontier Symposiums, Utrecht, November 10, 2001; Amsterdam, November 3, 2002; Amsterdam, November 9, 2003; Amsterdam, November 13, 2004 (tape recording archives Meertens Instituut).

150

Reframing Dutch Culture

age cult involves tales about the creation of humans (by aliens), and some of their prophets have visions about the return of these god-like aliens, the end of time in 2012 or the dawning of a new peaceful era. In this respect, crop circles are considered as signs of the time (De Blécourt 1995a and 1995b). Tales about crop circles can be compared to traditional religious exempla; they bear witness to the truth. A visit to a crop circle can be compared to a pilgrimage to a holy place, and meditation and incantation within the circle are like prayer and song. Those who seek physical recovery or mental relief, those who look for balls of light and those who seek contact with higher beings from other dimensions or worlds are actually looking for miracles and wondrous apparitions. We must acknowledge that many crop circle tales are firmly rooted in the ‘Heavenly Messengers’ tradition, which creates ‘its own institutionalised system of belief, ritual, philosophy and mythology’ (Dégh 2001: 213). In the past, humans looked to the heavens to catch a glimpse of God or his angels and saints; they now look up to see UFOs, balls of light or entities from another dimension or world. In both cases, they are expecting spiritual welfare (cf. Dégh 1977) or, as Partridge puts it, ‘We are in need of salvation from space’ (Partridge 2003: 19). The men and women who are prepared for the changing times are the chosen ones. Tradition and Modernity As the spiritual components that have been mentioned above indicate, the seemingly modern crop-circle movement bears aspects of traditional religious thought as well. They share a desire to give meaning to life and a longing for spiritual anchorage and (re-)enchantment of the world. Another traditional aspect of crop-circle lore consists of the balls of light, which have been sighted and mentioned in folktales for many centuries. Nonetheless, no clear connection was made in the past between light phenomena and crop circles. There are no reports from folklorists concerning the formation of crop circles in the nineteenth or the first half of the twentieth century. Crop circles are thus probably a quite modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, cereologists are trying to provide crop circles with a respectable past through the invention of tradition (see Andreas Müller in Hoos 2004: 126). Historical accounts and folktales about rings caused by dancing fairies, witches or devil-worshippers have been interpreted as ancient crop circles. In most cases, these ‘fairy rings’ were caused naturally by fungi. Most of the Dutch folktales on this subject can be easily explained by natural causes. An English and a German tale keep returning, however, as they are assumed to represent substantial testimonies for the existence of historical crop circles. The English story concerns the Mowing Devil and dates back to a pamphlet from 1678.41 In the story, a poor mower demands a wage that a farmer considers too high. The farmer then exclaims that he would 41 See among others Schnabel 1994: 127–134; Haselhoff 1998: 21; Pringle 1999: xii; Ossebaard 2000: 11; Klijnstra 2000: 14–15; Haselhoff 2001b: 3–4, Boerman 2001a: 17.

Crop Circle Tales

151

rather let the devil harvest his field of oats. The next morning, the farmer discovers that the devil has cut down the oats in a circle, and he is too afraid to pick up the harvest. Rather than a historical account, this story should be regarded as a traditional folktale about the devil, internationally known as ATU 820, The Devil as Substitute for Day Laborer at Mowing.42 The fact that the crop was cut down in a circle is an indication of a diabolical trick. There is no proof of a historical crop circle, largely because the crop had been cut down and not flattened (Schnabel 1994: 131–132). The German story is a fairy tale, published in 1948 and entitled Die zwölf Schwäne (The Twelve Swans).43 The tale begins as, one morning, a farmer finds a ring of flattened grain on his land. The grain looked as if it had been flattened very gently by delicate feet. His two eldest sons keep watch at night, but to no avail; they must flee for a thunderstorm. On the third night, the youngest son, Hans, manages to endure the thunderstorm, after which he sees twelve swans land in the field of grain. After removing their swan costumes, they turn into swan princesses and start dancing in a circle, thus flattening the crop. Several adventures follow and, in the end, Hans marries one of the princesses. The crop-circle motif plays no further role in the rest of the fairy tale. Although the circle in this tale provides the best semblance of the modern crop formation, we should bear in mind that the fairy tale is a product of imagination and fantasy par excellence, in which suspension of disbelief is often required. Even this supposed crop circle was most probably inspired by the traditional folk belief that natural (fairy) rings in the field were made by dancing witches or fairies and, in this case, by swan princesses. The crop circles that have actually been found since the late 1970s have generated stories in abundance. Should these modern crop circle tales be called (contemporary) legends? The stories are certainly contemporary; they circulate as foaf-tales (foaf = friend of a friend)44 and as memes (mind viruses), and they share some features with both traditional and modern legends. As soon as ethnologists begin to consider narratives about crop circles or UFOs as ‘legends’, however, the stories become automatically categorised as false stories or as superstition. For a specific group of narrators, the stories are part of an elaborate belief system – it could even be seen as a modern faith – which is more than can be said of the average ‘Mexican Pet’ or ‘Runaway Grandmother’ story. Most contemporary legends are based on latent fear, whereas most crop circle tales contain a more optimistic and positive message. Few contemporary legends have supernatural or extraterrestrial plots, at least if we consider the collections made by Jan Harold Brunvand, Ethel Portnoy and Peter Burger.45 Rather than focussing on the question of whether crop circle tales are true,

42 See Uther 2004 and De Blécourt 1995b: 12. 43 See Wisser 1948: 150–160. Furthermore see Uther 2004, ATU 400, The Man on a Quest for his Lost Wife; Dekker, Van der Kooi and Meder 1997: 225–229, De Blécourt 1995a: 195–196 and 1995b: 12. 44 Burger 1993: 10; Burger 1995: 18; Burger 2004: 19. 45 See Brunvand 1981, 1984, 1986, 1989 and 1993; Portnoy 1992a and 1992b; Burger 1993 and 1995.

152

Reframing Dutch Culture

I consider their function, referring to them as exempla or testimonies, just as we do with the majority of Christian tales. Identities and Divisions Who are the people that tell the crop circle stories? Judging from the members of the Dutch Centre for Crop Circle Studies, the people visiting the Frontier Symposia and other people I encountered in the Dutch crop-circle community, I estimate that more men than women are involved; they are more likely to be above than below the age of forty, and a majority have received higher education. Some lost their Christian faith during their adolescence; others were raised as agnostics or atheists, and a small minority grew up in theosophical or anthroposophical environments. Most have an interest in the paranormal and the extraterrestrial, in new-age ideas and neo-paganism. Many subscribe to Frontier Magazine, which deals with such (predominantly ‘masculine’) subjects as crop circles, UFOs, conspiracies, Atlantis, crypto-zoology, free energy, quantum physics and pyramids. By far, most Dutch croppies and cereologists are white and were born in the Netherlands. I occasionally encountered some Surinamese or Indonesian individuals at the Frontier Symposia. As far as I can tell, I never encountered Christian or Muslim croppies or cereologists. Somehow, these religions do not agree with new-age concepts. The most prominent division in the Dutch crop-circle world is between the DCCCS and ION (Integraal Onderzoek Natuurfenomenen [Integral Research on Natural Phenomena]). I did not realise that I had automatically excluded myself from ION by joining the DCCCS. The contending groups avoid contact with each other and refuse to exchange information. No links to the other group can be found on the websites of either one group. It is said that the division was founded on personal conflicts, but there appear to be fundamental ideological differences as well. In a way, this division resembles the schism between the Protestants and the Catholics. From an etic perspective, the members of DCCCS are more akin to rationalists; they behave like scientists, use tape measures, make calculations and use infrared equipment if necessary. As a whole, the group appears to have a slight preference for the extraterrestrial explanation. The members of ION do not measure; they feel. They seem to prefer the supernatural explanation, and they try to contact the entities through meditation, telepathy or channelling. The ION group is more ecological and mystical. Perhaps one of the most significant global divisions is that crop circles, and the stories that accompany them, are primarily found in modern and secularised Western society (including Japan), in which people are beginning to be receptive to new-age thoughts. For example, there is no such thing as an ‘Islamic crop-circle phenomenon’. Muslims do not find crop circles, and crop circles do not seem to appear in Islamic countries.46 All kinds of explanations could be put forward for 46 Although some Western cereologists claim that circle formations have been found in desert sand, I have never seen photographic evidence of this.

Crop Circle Tales

153

this phenomenon, one being that crop-circle lore involves an important cultural and religious component. Conclusion In addition to homo ludens and homo religiosus, humans can be largely characterised as homo narrans, as storytellers. Like traditional exempla, the narrative testimonies that I encountered in the Dutch crop-circle and frontier-science communities had a distinct function of conviction and conversion. Once inside the community, an individual is exposed to stories that come from all sides and sources (polyreception) and are hard to contradict (incontestability). As soon as an individual is willing to accept the stories as true, there is room for more narrative repertoire (embrace and accumulation). This expanded narrative repertoire can eventually lead to the development of an elaborate belief system (building a cosmology). The tales are internalised in small steps and, over time, the repertoire proves to be flexible (dynamics of repertoire). Because of the opposition, and even hostility, of sceptics, towards the experiences of the new-age groups, the attitudes that these groups hold with regard to regular science is ambivalent, and their worldviews often contain a belief in conspiracies. Whereas events provoke stories, the narrative repertoires that exist in people’s minds determine their behaviour and (even more strongly) their perceptions of reality (ostension, WYBIWYS). These processes may eventually lead to conversion and the embracing of an elaborate belief system, which can provide new meanings to life, spiritual anchorage, re-enchantment of the world, fresh challenges and adventures. Although these processes have been occurring in the Netherlands for about twenty-five years now, they are not unique to Dutch culture. Instead, they are part of an international spiritual development, which is particularly prominent in the Western world. The centre for these developments – particularly with regard to crop circles – can be found in the South of England. The Dutch croppies and cereologists (and possibly even the hoaxers) have actually followed the example of their British neighbours at a relatively early stage, during a period in which secularisation and individualisation were intensifying in Dutch society. The phenomenon has now gradually begun to spread towards the southern and eastern parts of Europe. The English crop circles are still the most impressive pieces of art. Dutch crop circles are generally much less spectacular. This may be one reason why crop-circle tourism in the Netherlands has never developed in the way that it did in England. Moreover, because the crop circles of Wiltshire are clearly connected with such prehistoric sites as Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill, they are also connected with Celtic culture and neo-pagan religion (cf. Blain & Wallis 2004). In the Netherlands, these physical connections are lacking. For example, there is no tendency for Dutch crop circles to appear in the vicinity of the megalithic tombs or dolmens that are known as hunebedden. This does not imply that Dutch croppies and cereologists are not

154

Reframing Dutch Culture

interested in neo-paganism or Celtic culture; they must simply visit England in order to experience the full connection between ancient spirituality and landscape. References Andrews, Colin and Stephen J. Spignesi (2003), Crop Circles. Signs of Contact. Franklin Lakes: The Career Press, Inc. Aupers, Stef (2004), In de ban van moderniteit. De sacralisering van het zelf en computertechnologie. Amsterdam: Aksant. Blain, Jenny and Robert J. Wallis (2004), Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights. Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past. Journal of Material Culture 9(3), 237–261. Boerman, Robert (2001a), Graancirkels, Goden en hun geheimen. De geschiedenis van de Mensheid, beschreven in het Graan. Enkhuizen: Frontier Publishing. Boerman, Robert (2001b), ‘Nederlandse graancirkels van 2001. Frontier Magazine 7(6), 5–8. Brodie, Richard (1996), Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle: Integral Press. Brunvand, Jan Harold (1981), The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company. Brunvand, Jan Harold (1984), The Choking Doberman and other ‘New’ Urban Legends. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. Brunvand, Jan Harold (1986), The Mexican Pet: More ‘New’ Urban Legends and Some Old Favorites. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. Brunvand, Jan Harold (1989), Curses! Broiled Again! The Hottest Urban Legends going. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company. Brunvand, Jan Harold (1993), The Baby Train & other Lusty Urban Legends. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company. Burger, Peter (1993), De wraak van de kangoeroe. Sagen uit het moderne leven. Fourth edition, Amsterdam: Prometheus. Burger, Peter (1995), De gebraden baby. Sagen en geruchten uit het moderne leven. Amsterdam, Prometheus. Burger, Peter (2004), Mediahypes, moderne sagen en andere mediakwalen. Ter inleiding, in Peter Burger and Willem Koetsenruijter, Mediahypes en moderne sagen. Sterke verhalen in het nieuws, 9–23: Leiden, SNL. Collier, Phylis and James (2002), Het Van Allen gordel-enigma. Frontier Magazine 8(3), 8–9. Creme, Benjamin (2001), Ontstaan graancirkel waargenomen. Share Nederland (October 8th), 10. Custers, Dave (1999), Welles, nietes... de Apollo maanvluchten. Frontier Magazine 5(2), 23–25. Daxelmüller, Christoph (1984), Exemplum, in K. Ranke (ed), Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Part 4, 627–649.

Crop Circle Tales

155

De Blécourt, Willem (1995a), Cirkels in de tijd. Over hedendaagse voortekenen in het gewas. Groniek 127, 189–200. De Blécourt, Willem (1995b), Tekenen des tijds. De Nederlandse graancirkels en hun betekenissen. Skepter 8(1), 8–14. Dégh, Linda (1977), UFO’s and how folklorists should look at them. Fabula 18, 242–248. Dégh, Linda (1995), Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Dégh, Linda (2001), Legend and belief: Dialectics of a folklore genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dekker, Ton, Jurjen van der Kooi and Theo Meder (1997), Van Aladdin tot Zwaan kleef aan. Lexicon van sprookjes: ontstaan, ontwikkeling, variaties. Nijmegen: SUN. Delfgaauw, Remko (1999), Uit je dak in het graan. De sensatie van het graancirkels maken. Skepter 12(4), 12–14. Ellis, Bill (2001), Aliens, Ghosts and Cults: Legends We Live. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Felius, Jeannella (2003), Controverse omtrent maanlandingen versterkt. Frontier Magazine 9(1), 3–5. Frijhoff, Willem (1997), Toeëigening: van bezitsdrang naar betekenisgeving. Trajecta 6(2), 99–118. Haselhoff, Eltjo H. (1998), Het raadsel van de graancirkels. Feiten, analysen, hypothesen. Deventer: Uitgeverij Ankh-Hermes bv. Haselhoff, Eltjo H. (2001a), Opinions and comments on Levengood W.C., Talbott N.P. (1999) Dispersion of energies in worldwide crop formations. Physiol. Plant. 105: 615–624, Physiologia Plantarum 111(1), 123–125. Haselhoff, Eltjo H. (2001b), The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles: Scientific Research & Urban Legends. Berkeley: Frog Ltd. Heijman, Marcel (2002), De opmars van Big Brother. Frontier Magazine 8(1), 30–33. Heijman, Marcel (2003), Identificatieplicht, het paard van Troje. Frontier Magazine 9(1), 37–40. Hoos, Harald (2004), Zu den Hintergründen des Kornkreisphänomens und der Kornkreisforschung. Zeitschrift für Anomalistik 4, 102–144. Janssen, Bert (2004), The Hypnotic Power of Crop Circles. Enkhuizen: Frontier Publishing & Adventures Unlimited Press. Jolms, Eric (2002), Film Signs had ook Faith kunnen heten. Frontier Magazine 8(5), 36–37. Keating, Dylan and Marc Vredeveldt (2003), Chemtrails: een nieuwe bedreiging? Frontier Magazine 9(6) 36–39. Klijnstra, Rudi (2000), In de Ban van de cirkel. Graancirkels in de Lage Landen. Hedel: Indigo. McTaggart, Lynne (2005), Het Veld. De zoektocht naar de geheime kracht van het universum. Third edition, Deventer: Ankh-Hermes.

156

Reframing Dutch Culture

Meder, Theo (2006), In graancirkelkringen. Een etnologisch onderzoek naar verhalen uit de grenswetenschap. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Moravec, Mark (2003), Strange Illuminations: “Min Min Lights” – Australian “Ghost Light” Stories. Fabula 44(1/2), 2–24. Nanninga, Rob (2004), “We worden besproeid!”. Skepter 17(3), 45. Nickel, Joe (2002), Circular Reasoning: The ‘Mystery’ of Crop Circles and Their ‘Orbs’ of Light. Skeptical Inquirer (September/October). Ossebaard, Janet (2000), Graancirkels. Een wereldwijd mysterie. Hedel: Libero. Ossebaard, Janet (2004), Tegenkrachten, Frontier Magazine 10(5) 6–9. Partridge, Christopher (2003), Understanding UFO religions and abduction spiritualities, in Christopher Partridge (ed.), UFO Religions. London: Routledge, 3–42. Perey, David (2001), Moongate – update. Frontier Magazine 7(5), 14. Portnoy, Ethel (1992a), Broodje Aap. De folklore van de post-industriële samenleving. Amsterdam: De Harmonie. Portnoy, Ethel (1992b), Broodje Aap Met. Een verdere bijdrage tot de folklore van de post-industriële samenleving. Amsterdam: De Harmonie. Pringle, Lucy (1999), Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times. London: Thorsons. Schnabel, Jim (1994), Round in Circles: Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of Cropwatchers. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Smith, Paul (1997), The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’, in P. Narváez (ed.): The Good People. New Fairylore Essays. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 371–405. Toby, Albert (2004–2005), Verborgen boodschappen op TV. Frontier Magazine 10(6) 42–48 and 11(1), 46–51. Tubach, Frederic C. (1969), Index exemplorum: A handbook of medieval religious tales. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Akademia Scientiarum Fennica. Tuijl, Mark (2002), Signs. Aliens in het maïsveld. Skepter 15(3) 22–23. Uther, Hans-Jörg (2004), Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Van Oostrom, Frits P. (1985), Voorbeeldig vertellen. Middelnederlandse exempelen. Amsterdam: Querido. Veelen, Arjen van (2002), ‘Eeuwige cirkels. Heilige meetkunde in het graan’, Skepter 15(4) 20–23. Wisser, Ernst (1948), Dummhannes – deutsche Volksmärchen für Kind und Haus. Kreiling: Erich Wewel. Other Sources Brandsma, Rinze (2002), Graancirkels moeten uit taboesfeer. Noordhollands Dagblad (22 June).

Crop Circle Tales

157

Coast to Coast AM (2004), May 14th. Radio interview by Linda Moulton Howe with Peter and Robbert van den Broeke on photographing aliens. Gazecki, William (2002), Crop Circles. Quest for Truth (OpenEdge Media). Videoproduction. ‘Graancirkel met pauselijke boodschap’ (2005), Omroep Brabant, Thursday, April 7th. Television interview with Robbert van den Broeke. Hoevenaar ziet ‘schijf’ (1999). Brabants Dagblad (9 June). Janssen, Bert and Janet Ossebaard (2001), Contact with the unknown intelligence behind the crop circles. Gieten: Bert Janssen Productions. Video-production. Karel, William (2003), Dark Side of the Moon. Mockumentary from 2002; original French title: Operation Lune. Broadcasted by the VPRO on February 12th, 2003. Madiwodo (2003), VPRO, 747 AM, Friday, October 3rd, 11.00 – 12.00 A.M. Radio interview with Herman Hegge. ‘Medium Hoeven ‘zet buitenaards wezen op foto’’ (2004), in: www.omroepbrabant. nl, Friday, May 7th. Netwerk (2002), Nederland 1, July 1st, NCRV. Television interview on crop circles with Robert Boerman, Bert Janssen and John Lundberg. Oosterhaven, Robert Jan (2001), Kunstenaar bakt graancirkelbrood. Metro (27 August). Quinn, V. (2004), De waarheid achter de maanlandingen (Truemoon Prod. Zig Zag: 2004). Documentary, broadcasted by RTL5 on July 16th. Reay, H. (2001), Aliens have landed I & II (Real World Pictures, 2000). Documentary broadcasted by Discovery Channel on November 11th, 2001. RTL Boulevard (2004), RTL4, September 3rd. Television interview with Robbert van den Broeke on photographing aliens. Smits, Paulus (1999), Graancirkel ‘valt’ dit jaar vroeg in Hoeven. Dagblad De Limburger (9 June). Toering, Roel (2001a), Nog meer graancirkels in gemeente Stadskanaal. Nieuwsblad van het Noorden (1 August). Toering, Roel (2001b), Graancirkels, klaar terwijl u wacht. Westerwolde Nieuws (8 August). Toering, Roel (2001c), Kunstenaar koopt graancirkel Stadskanaal. Nieuwsblad van het Noorden and Westerwolde Nieuws (24 August). Vergeer, Angelo (2001), ‘Misschien krijg je wel voelsprieten’. Kunstenaar maakt brood van graancirkels. De Telegraaf (29 August) Vincente, Mark, Betsy Chasse and William Arntz (2004), What the Bleep Do We Know!? (Lord of the Wind Film, LLC: 2004). Movie. What Happened on the Moon? An Investigation into Apollo (2000) Aulis Publishers. Documentary. Wonderen Bestaan (2003), KRO, August 24th. Television interview with Robbert van den Broeke.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’: Negotiating Ethnic Inclusion and Exclusion1 Irene Stengs

Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, high profile killings or the deaths of public figures – these dramatic events appear to evoke similar public responses in many places in the world. Many will therefore recognise a scene of people placing candles, flowers, portraits and other mementos in a public place as a mourning ritual. The shared repertoire suggests shared intentions and meanings. Yet, behind the objects and practices involved lies a world of messages, morals and politics that is deeply embedded in the local society. Ethnological research into public mourning ritual is therefore by implication a study of the relationship between contemporary cultural and political processes in a particular society. This contribution investigates the relationship between public commemorative ritual, narrative, and place. The empirical focus will be on public ritual in commemoration of victims killed through so-called zinloos geweld (‘senseless violence’). In the Netherlands, ‘senseless violence’ evolved during the 1990s into a highly specific concept and societal concern. As we will see, however, the concept does not describe a specific form of violence, but rather should be seen as a moral category condemning a range of violent behaviour (cf. Stengs 2003; Vasterman 2004).2 A sudden concern with a fairly specific category of evil is not unique to contemporary Dutch society. In the United States, for example, a comparable concept accompanied by a comparable social concern is ‘random violence’ a category covering an even wider variety of ‘unpredictable threats’ (cf. Best 1999: 2).3 Another example may be 1 My gratitude goes to Jeroen Beets, Ron Eyerman and Lizzy van Leeuwen for their useful comments. I would like to thank Jeroen Beets and Richard Blake for editing the text. 2 The response to the so-called ‘MP3-murder’ in Brussels (April 2006) shows that the expression zinloos geweld has become the common term to label excessive social violence in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium as well. 3 In the United States the expression ‘senseless violence’ is used in the specific context of protests against ‘senseless gun violence’; that is, protests against the enormous death toll of the nation’s wide-spread gun ownership (approximately 30,000 a year, see http://www. silentmarch.org). In Germany the rarely used expression sinnlose Gewalt refers to cases of violent death, terrorism or vandalism. In Indonesia the idea of ‘senseless violence’ is associated

160

Reframing Dutch Culture

found in the fear of satanist child abuse which haunted Great-Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s (cf. La Fontaine 1998). For the Netherlands, the public outbursts of grief and anger surrounding ‘senseless violence’ have been approached from the perspectives in particular of trauma and coping (Post et al. 2003), moral panics (Beunders 2002), and media and media hypes (Vasterman 2004). Based on ethnographic research, this study offers an additional perspective by exploring the specific roles of narrative and ritual in the construction of ‘senseless violence’ as a societal issue. This perspective, however, requires the acknowledgement that the concrete narratives and rituals take place within the media-shaped landscape of modern society, without which they ‘would not make the sense, or have the resonance that they do’ (Couldry 2003: 13). In fact, the entire subject of this study owes its very existence and form to modern media, and is only accessible as an object of research through these media. In this chapter, I demonstrate how, in the process of the framing of a sequence of victims as ‘victims of senseless violence’, the various narratives elaborate other, underlying, issues. As we will see, the rituals performed may be partly interpreted as a ritual confirmation of such framing. From another perspective, the apparent unity displayed during the rituals will prove to be questionable. In the ritual process social boundaries are set and negotiated (cf. Cohen 1985; Hughes-Freeland and Crain 1998). In other words, the rituals are vehicles for processes of inclusion and exclusion. In the polarised Dutch society of today, the main divisions tend to follow ethnic lines. In some of the cases presented in this study, ‘senseless violence’ and the related rituals have been used by those on one or both sides of the line either to exclude others or to claim their inclusion within Dutch society. My point of departure will be a case that is of interest because of several interrelated issues. Firstly, there was serious controversy over whether or not the casualty could properly be labelled a ‘victim of senseless violence’, and over what, if any, ritual was appropriate. Secondly, unlike in earlier cases, the victim had a DutchMoroccan background, and the controversy therefore inescapably had an ethnic dimension. Finally, the fatal incident had not occurred ‘just anywhere’, but not far from the place where movie director Theo van Gogh had been brutally murdered by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim fanatic two months earlier. Because of this coincidence, the relationship between these two cases allows for a better understanding of the significance of ‘place’ in the politics of ritual. Blaming the Victim? On the early evening of Monday, 17 January 2005, a young man snatched a handbag from a woman who had stopped her car at a pedestrian crossing in Amsterdam. He then fled on a scooter with a companion. The woman responded by pursuing the scooter, driving in reverse. In doing so she hit the scooter, and the collision left the bag with ineffective violence, for example a robber who cuts off a woman’s hand without taking her bracelet (see Van Leeuwen 2005: 208–209).

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

161

snatcher dead. His companion fled the scene. The Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool opened the next day with the headline ‘Woman runs over and kills bag snatcher in [Amsterdam] East.’ The newspaper described how in the course of that evening, while the police fenced off the scene for investigation, a ‘vicious atmosphere’ began to develop. ‘Angry youths began to shout, and banged on the fence.’ Although the police spoke of a ‘tragic accident’, friends and family members of the victim spoke of ‘murder.’ The decisive element in the controversy following the incident was the Moroccan background of the thief/victim, a nineteen-year-old named Ali el Bejjati. Among circles of (young) Dutch-Moroccans, El Bejjati’s death gave rise to fierce resentment, strengthening their feelings of being victim to discrimination, rejection, and criminalisation; in brief, of being treated as second-class citizens. In their opinion, El Bejjati’s death proved that ‘Moroccans could now be murdered for something as minor as stealing a handbag.’ This interpretation was in direct opposition to that of El Bejjati’s death as mainly the unintended (but tragic) outcome of his own actions. Among many non-Moroccan Dutch, El Bejjati – soon known popularly as ‘the bag snatcher’ – evoked sentiments related to ‘increasing street violence’, ‘Moroccan criminality’, and ‘the advancing danger of Islam and terrorism’: perceived social wrongs all related to ‘the general failure of Dutch immigration politics.’4 El Bejjati died a ‘violent death’: his life ended brutally and abruptly. The bereaved, however, condemned his death as murder, a crime, an immoral act. It is precisely this framework of morality that helps us to understand the political and public responses to El Bejjati’s death. Over the last decade, Dutch society has evinced a far stronger non-acceptance of ‘violent death’, particularly when it is due to the immoral behaviour of others.5 New ritualised practices articulate this shift in degree of acceptance: ephemeral memorials, public wakes, and ‘silent marches’ (stille tochten). The violent deaths most likely to evoke such responses are mainly murder and manslaughter, in particular when labelled as ‘cases of senseless violence’. The ‘senseless violence’ label presumes that the victim was innocent, and often implies a tinge of moral heroism. Although the heroic dimension was definitely absent in El Bejjati’s case, opinions diverged on his status as a victim: some parties immediately 4 One more aspect should be mentioned to situate the case properly within the integration debate. The driver was of Surinamese background. This fact, however, played hardly any role in the escalation that ensued. How the case would have evolved if the driver had been a Dutch autochthon will remain a matter of speculation. 5 My interpretation is inspired by Philippe Ariès’ idea of ‘acceptable death’. According to Ariès, in modern, Western society death can only be ‘acceptable’, if at all, when every effort has been made to prevent it, generally in a medical context. Ariès contrasts the acceptable death to the unacceptable death, ‘the embarrasingly, graceless dying’ which may lead to extreme, emotional outbursts (1976: 88–89). Clearly, a death caused by murder or a traffic accident is not unacceptable merely because it is unexpected and, in particular when it concerns the death of young people, ‘undeserved’ – as has been suggested elsewhere to explain the recent proliferation of roadside memorials in the Netherlands (cf. Post 1995: 44) – but such death is the more shocking because of the moral aspects involved: recklessness, drunkenness, lack of respect for others, social indifference (Stengs 2004).

162

Reframing Dutch Culture

labelled his death as ‘an accident’, others as ‘murder’ or ‘senseless violence’. The controversy around the public rituals that followed El Bejjati’s death reflects this division. This chapter explores the political and moral aspects of such ritual responses in the context of the general Dutch concern over ‘senseless violence.’ Mourning Ritual or Protest? The day after El Bejjati’s death – Tuesday, 18 January 2005 – family, friends, and others who felt concerned brought flowers, candles and letters to the tree where he had died, turning the site into a small memorial. That evening, friends and bereaved gathered at the spot to pray for the deceased, under the guidance of an imam. The next morning, the flowers and letters had been removed by unknown persons, who had left a ‘racist’ drawing on the spot.6 New flowers were brought and this time the city authorities fenced off the site. Ladybird stickers on the cellophane flower wrappings placed the memorial in the context of ‘senseless violence’. The ladybird is the well-known symbol of the National Foundation against Senseless Violence (StichtingTegenZinloosGeweld), established in 1997 (see further below). A sketch of a hand, an orange ‘respect’ ribbon around the wrist, with the text ‘stop violence’ expressed a more ‘neutral’ position. El Bejjati’s Moroccan background was manifested through messages in Arabic and items like a framed Koran calligraphy, or a drawing of a mosque, and, perhaps, through the absence of any portrait of the deceased.7 On Wednesday evening, the second day after the incident, a hundred people attended a second commemorative gathering organised by a local youth organisation. During the gathering a silent march was announced to take place on the Friday afternoon. Eventually, a march was held on Friday afternoon, but I speak deliberately of ‘a march’ because the parties involved disagreed on the exact nature and label of the ritual. The NRC Handelsblad of January 20th, a major national newspaper, quotes the alderman for welfare of the district-council Amsterdam Oost/Watergraafsmeer, apparently shocked upon hearing that a silent march was planned for the following Friday: ‘that should be stopped.’ The organisers had planned to depart from Amsterdam Central Station, and march through the city centre to the place where El Bejjati had died. On Thursday afternoon the Amsterdam mayor, Job Cohen, met with the district council, representatives of minority-group organisations and relatives of El Bejjati. At this meeting, Cohen said that he would not give permission for a silent march, but would permit a ‘march of mourning’, instead. It was agreed that this march would depart from the memorial to proceed to the local mosque (the Alkabir mosque), where the Friday afternoon service was already planned to be held in commemoration of El Bejjati. The Mayor made the following statement: 6 The content of the drawing has not been made public. 7 Portraits of the deceased have been part of virtually every ephemeral memorial I have seen so far. Cuddly toys, another customary element of such memorials, were equally absent (except for one small elephant).

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

Figure 8.1

163

The memorial for Ali el Bejjati

The Arabic text reads: We belong to God and we will all return to him, January 2005. Photo: Irene Stengs. I told El Bejjati’s sister that everybody should acknowledge the facts. One of these facts is the criminal past of her brother. The main thing is that this would not have happened if he had not attempted to steal the woman’s handbag. No representatives of the city administration or the city council will participate in this commemorative march. As was the district council, I was against a demonstrative silent march. But I cannot oppose a march of mourning. (…) I can imagine that one would want to mourn if he had been a friend or relative. I would only have forbidden that march [of mourning] for one reason, namely when public security would be endangered. Well, such is not the case. (NRC Handelsblad, 21 January 2005, italics added).

That Friday, announcements at the memorial site read:

164

Reframing Dutch Culture In consultation with the district council it has been decided to begin the silent march of 21-1-5 where it all happened. We will then walk in silence to the ALKABIR mosque. We will start at 2 PM. So do not gather at Central Station. (italics added)

Apparently, the opinions were divided on whether the planned march would be a silent march or a march of mourning. The following description of the actual march – based on my field notes of the event – demonstrates that opinions on the nature of the march also differed among the participants. About 500 people have gathered at the memorial for the march, in the narrow street. The majority are young – teenagers – and of Moroccan-ethnic background. The apparent dress code is dark blue, grey or black ‘gangsta’ coats for the boys; most girls, also darkly clad, wear headscarves. This combination of age, ethnicity and style gives the occasion a flavour of its own; it gives me a sensation of meeting ‘the other within’. The few nonMoroccan Dutch participants seem, for the greater part, to work for the press. They are regarded with distrust and anger; the atmosphere is tense. I do not want to be taken for a reporter, so I am not taking pictures. This does not make much difference, however. As we are about to depart, I approach a young boy carrying a Moroccan flag with the intention of asking what the flag means to him and why he has brought it. He does not want to speak to me and quickly turns his back. The explicit and self-aware presence of young Muslimas is striking. During the march they make themselves seen and heard. Many walk in rows, their arms tightly linked. About ten minutes into the march, the girls begin to chant slogans in Arabic, which I later learn to be the first verse of the Koran: ‘There is no greater God than Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ Six chanting girls in a row carry a large Moroccan flag above their heads. After a while, one of the organisers – I presume a man connected with the mosque – calls on the girls to maintain the silence; ‘we have agreed that this would be a silent march’. Still, a couple of times some chanting can be heard. Half an hour after departure we arrive at the mosque, where some go home and others stay to follow the service.

The organisers thus perceived the event as a silent march, although it had not actually been silent. The newspaper headlines followed the Mayor in speaking of a ‘march of mourning’, although the term ‘silent march’ did appear in some articles. On the Friday evening television news, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende expressed his approval of the Mayor’s decision not to allow a silent march. This involvement of those at the highest level of national politics is illustrative of the import of the eventual label given to the march. Why were the bereaved, or the organisers, so eager to hold a silent march? Why were the authorities equally eager to prevent this from happening? What does it mean when the Mayor explicitly says that no official representatives will participate in a possible march of mourning? To answer these questions we need to understand the implicit messages of a silent march, and the specific role of the ritual. Since, in Dutch society, the silent march acquired its meaning from its strong association with ‘death through senseless violence’, I will first explore the concept of ‘senseless violence’.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

Figure 8.2

165

A march of mourning or a silent march?

Photo: Irene Stengs.

‘Senseless Violence’ as a Social Issue In 1996, the expression ‘senseless violence’ entered Dutch parlance as a term referring to a specific category of public violence. Although the phrase ‘senseless violence’ already existed – for instance to designate excessive violence in war situations or in television programmes – the term acquired a new connotation: street violence in which innocent people are killed or seriously injured. In this usage, ‘senseless violence’ was perceived as a new societal problem (Vasterman 2004: 63–64).8 Vasterman analyses how media hypes both reflect and contribute to the process of 8 See Blok (1991; 2001) for an approach to violence as a cultural construct, as ‘meaningful action’, instead of being dismissed a priori as ‘senseless’ (2001:111). As Blok illustrates, violence (by others or in other cultures) may appear ‘senseless’ to outsiders who are unaware of the political and cultural context. The tendency to qualify (certain forms of) violence as ‘senseless’ or ‘irrational’ should thus be regarded neither as a typical Dutch attitude towards violence, nor as an attitude that is specifically related to our era (cf. Girard 1972). See also Best’s study on ‘random violence’ (1999), an analysis of a typical contemporary American attitude to violence.

166

Reframing Dutch Culture

constructing social problems. Once a certain ‘condition’ is defined as problematic, usually through the efforts of only a small number of people (‘interest groups’), a social movement concerned with this particular problem may evolve to make it a political issue. In this process the media play a significant role ‘as messengers and managers of the public arena’ (2004: 260; cf. Best 1999: 28–47). The Dutch public concern about ‘senseless violence’ drew its impetus through two cases of manslaughter: the death of Joes Kloppenburg (26) in August 1996 and the death of Meindert Tjoelker (30) in September 1997. Both men were kicked to death during an evening out when intervening to put a stop to violent behaviour by others. In the commemorative service held a few days after Joes Kloppenburg’s death, his mother used the expression ‘senseless violence’. The then mayor of Amsterdam and the media also spoke of an act of ‘senseless violence’ (Vasterman 2004: 101). In reaction to the death of Meindert Tjoelker in Leeuwarden, the district chief of police for the province of Friesland appealed in the local newspaper for one minute of silence ‘to make clear that Frisian society will not unthinkingly accept this increasing senseless violence’ (quoted in Vasterman 2004: 95, translation IS). Nine days after the death of Meindert Tjoelker, the National Foundation against Senseless Violence (Landelijke StichtingTegenZinloosGeweld) came into being. Five months later relatives and friends of Joes Kloppenburg set up the ‘Stop! Now! Foundation’ (Kappen Nou!).9 Since the killings of Joes Kloppenburg and Meindert Tjoelker quite a few cases of manslaughter have been labelled ‘senseless violence’, and some of these have dominated the media and public discussion for weeks.10 Random victims of indiscriminate shots fired in anger, a bicycle repairman stabbed by a customer in a hurry, a boy shot by a driver whose car was hit by a snowball, two toddlers killed after finding a hand grenade in a playground – all appear on a list of victims together with Joes Kloppenburg and Meindert Tjoelker and other victims of nightliferelated violence.11 The public attention surrounding such cases has resulted in a proliferation of organisations and initiatives involved in the discussion on ‘senseless violence’ from various perspectives and with various objectives.12 These initiatives have played a significant role in both the institutionalisation of the fight against ‘senseless violence’ and in the framing of certain cases of manslaughter as ‘senseless violence’.

9 The words ‘Kappen Nou!’ are thought to have been Joes’ last words. See http://www. kappennou.nl/intro.htm 10 For a detailed analysis of the interaction between media and public opinion, see Vasterman 2004. 11 See http://www.schooltv.nl/eigenwijzer/projecten/index.jsp?project=479557 12 See www.zinloosgeweld.nl.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

167

The Canon of Heroes: A Serial Narrative The death of Meindert Tjoelker sent an unprecedented wave of indignation through Dutch society. In comparison, the death of Joes Kloppenburg evoked scarcely any public response. Although both victims were conceptualised as victims of ‘senseless violence’, something had apparently changed. Why did the death of Tjoelker give the concept of ‘senseless violence’ its eventual emotional charge, while the death of Kloppenburg had little effect? In various studies attempts have been made to explain this sudden societal concern with ‘senseless violence.’ Beunders explains the emotional response to Tjoelker’s death by pointing to the ‘virus of collective mourning’ that was in the air at the time he died. His death happened two weeks after Princess Diana’s, and the emotions were still fresh in the people’s minds, as were the public ritual responses (2002: 172–173). The Belgian White Marches (related to the ‘Dutroux murders’) of October 1996 are also mentioned as a possible example (ibid; Boutellier 2002: 83; Vasterman 2004: 120–121). These foreign cases of collective outcry and mourning may very well have influenced the scale, content, and form of the protests and sentiments evoked by the death of Meindert Tjoelker. Vasterman argues that the Tjoelker case was not a media hype on its own, but rather the starting point of a hype surrounding ‘senseless violence’ that lasted several years.13 According to Vasterman the hype ended in 2000, Daniel van Cotthem14 being the last victim of public violence to evoke a large public response under the banner of ‘senseless violence.’ Since then the topic has gradually disappeared from the news. On this point I am inclined to disagree with Vasterman. His media perspective on ‘quantity of media attention’ – irrespective of its significance – reduces the concern with ‘senseless violence’ to a singular and temporary phenomenon, in compliance with the general perception that present-day society is governed by the media and by emotions: we rush from hype to hype. In my view, a media hype may play an important role in the social construction of a problem, but the fading of the hype does not imply a fading of the construct itself. A focus on the role of narrative and ritual can clarify the unabated vigour of the concept, and can show how in the ritual process political and moral issues are crafted, negotiated, affirmed and denied. From this perspective, a ritual is an act and a statement at the same time (cf. Bell 1997: 162–164). As I will demonstrate, ‘senseless violence’ has remained a powerful notion, colouring public perception of violent deaths and the ritual responses to them. With the death of Meindert Tjoelker a strong narrative took shape, describing a brave moral hero who had died as a result of his intervention in the vandalism of others. The fact that Tjoelker was to be married on the Monday after that weekend added significantly to the dramatic content of the narrative, emphasising the sacrifice made.15 Except for the impending wedding, the narrative of Joes Kloppenburg’s death 13 For a similar line of argumentation, see also Stengs 2003: 37. 14 For no apparent reason, Daniel van Cotthem (17) received a heavy blow to his head in a railway station. He died two days later, on 9 January 2000. 15 The fact that Tjoelker was buried on his intended wedding day contributed significantly to his image as a victim (i.e. of senseless violence). Although I deliberately use the word

168

Reframing Dutch Culture

parallels Tjoelker’s in many respects. The hour and circumstances of Kloppenburg’s death as well as features of his personality (male, young, brave) narrate the same pattern of ‘the ordinary-man hero who intervened and paid with his life for good citizenship and moral courage.’ The Tjoelker narrative was strong enough to absorb that of Kloppenburg retrospectively, and to provide a perceptional framework for the interpretation of a variety of later cases of fatal street violence. To understand the continuities and discontinuities in the interpretations it might be helpful to distinguish the main elements of this framework: firstly, the aspect of a strong moral condemnation, mainly contained in the epithet ‘senseless’; secondly, a mythical dimension that allows the narrative to become an allegorical explanation of ‘what is wrong with our society’; finally, the main actors – the victim and the perpetrators. In 2004, the Dutch rappers Lange Frans and Baas B. scored a major hit with the single Zinloos (‘Senseless’). The rap consists of five verses in which the singers condemn the death of five young men who fell victim to acts of ‘senseless violence’: Daniel van Cotthem, Joes Kloppenburg, Meindert Tjoelker, René Steegmans and Kerwin Duinmeijer. Their song recounts in brief the narratives of the death of the victims, as they were covered at the time in the media. The verses alternate with a chorus: How many more to come How many more to go Who were these heroes We are doing this here in your names16 Such a ballad poses the question of who is included in the canon of heroes and who is not. The singers, not wanting to exclude anybody, attempt to deal with the problem in their final verse: The list is long, God Almighty with Kerwin Duinmeijer since August ‘83 and the trend right now is even colder, bleaker and the fear and the hate more familiar

‘image’, it is not my intention to deny the severity and sadness of Meindert Tjoelker’s death. I use the expression only to demonstrate the convincing power of narratives. The judicial inquiry that followed the confrontation between Meindert Tjoelker and his attackers showed that Meindert Tjoelker’s victimhood was much less one-dimensional than it had originally appeared in the narrative. After an evening of heavy drinking, Tjoelker had challenged the culprits until they attacked. 16 Translation IS; for the full text in Dutch see the singers’ website http://www.dmen. nl/page.php?pID=40.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

169

Apparently, since Kerwin Duinmeijer died in 1983, many have fallen victim to senseless violence, and society is even worse today than twenty years ago.17 Hence the singers’ rhetorical question: ‘how many more to come, how many more to go?’ However, by explicitly rendering the story of a few specific victims, the emphasis is put on them and not on those whose name is not mentioned and whose story is not told. Are some victims more heroic than others, or do other factors come in too? Below I will investigate why some victims are more captivating than others through the case of René Steegmans (22), beaten to death in the city centre of Venlo in 2002. Lange Frans and Baas B. highlight the heroic dimension of his death: Renée [sic] Steegmans did his daily shopping He could not know that they would kick him to death Told off two turds on a motorcycle And that would make him a victim himself The narrative follows the classic line of ‘an intervening hero fallen victim to senseless violence’. Steegmans had commented on the aggressive driving behaviour of two young men (eighteen and sixteen years old) on a scooter, who had just almost hit an elderly woman. Two other strands in the narrative of Steegmans’ death, however, are not so easily grasped in a single verse. Firstly, Steegmans was beaten to death in broad daylight in front of ten or more witnesses ‘who had not intervened’. In the emotional debate about this ‘fact’ the bystanders were publicly declared guilty, co-accountable for Steegmans’ death. Secondly, unlike in earlier cases, the main offender was of Moroccan background. The latter strand was painfully highlighted by an interview with the boy’s parents, that was broadcast on national television on the day of the silent march in commemoration of René Steegmans and as a protest against ‘senseless violence’.18 In the interview – conducted in their own language – the parents ‘defended’ their son by emphasising that he had always been a good, calm person, who never sought confrontation, although he was strong enough to ‘handle’ two men. The strongest resentment, however, was caused by their explanation of Steegmans’ death in terms of destiny and the will of Allah: in this respect, their son’s role had only been instrumental. The entire picture of the parents, unemployed, unable to speak Dutch after having lived in the country for decades, and their ‘unworldly’19 perception of the cause of Steegmans’ death, all added to the general feeling that the Dutch integration policy was bankrupt and that a stricter policy should be initiated. In Vasterman’s interpretation, the public upheaval around Steegmans’ death was no longer part of the ‘senseless violence’ hype as the case was drawn into the entirely 17 Kerwin Duinmeijer (15), who died in 1983 as a victim of brutal racism, is often labelled retrospectively as a ‘victim of senseless violence’. 18 The interview was broadcast on 25 October 2002, as part of the programme Netwerk. 19 The expression was used by the Venlo alderman of welfare in a reaction to the interview, which was also broadcast on television (Nova, October 29, 2002).

170

Reframing Dutch Culture

different context of the failing integration of immigrants into Dutch society (2004: 131). For the general public, however, René Steegmans has remained primarily a victim of ‘senseless violence’ as illustrated by his inclusion in the rap ‘Senseless’.20 Vasterman is correct in observing that the Steegmans case served to articulate ‘the failure of integration’, or, more precisely, certain perceptions of this failure. Contrary to Vasterman, however, I argue that the narrative of Steegmans’ death could only develop into an allegory of the ethnic tensions of the moment because of the unabated vigour of the label ‘senseless violence’ attached to it. To explain the power of this label I will first turn to the aspect of ritual, as it is through ritual that a victim of violence is made a ‘victim of senseless violence’. Ritual and Social Boundaries Two key rituals accompany each case of ‘senseless violence’: first, the placing of flowers, letters, and objects at the place of the victim’s death, which create an ephemeral memorial; and second, the silent march. In my view, the memorial can be interpreted as a material expression of the story of the victim’s death reformulated into a narrative of ‘another case of senseless violence’, while the silent march is the formal, public confirmation of this narrative, or of the victim’s new status of being a victim of ‘senseless violence’. I will illustrate this interpretation with an analysis of the ritual following the death of Anja Joos (43) in Amsterdam, on 6 October 2003, the first to be acknowledged as a victim of ‘senseless violence’ after René Steegmans. The case further shows how ‘senseless violence’ became connected with the immigration issue. We will see how this political context frames the meaning and impact of the ritual involved, and at the same time how the ritual as a social practice draws boundaries and articulates underlying issues of inclusion and exclusion. The process of framing Joos’ death as a case of ‘senseless violence’ is emblematic for the simultaneous making and mediation of such ‘reality’ through the interplay of media presence, media reporting and the presence and participation of ordinary people ‘on the spot’. The earliest news broadcasts reported Joos’ death with some factual information on the time, place and circumstances of her death. Soon, responses from the public became the main focus of media attention. Reporters could await the first people to arrive with flowers within a few hours after the incident. Now, the media were no longer mediating immediate reality, the unspoken assumption of ‘live’ broadcasting, but a reality already framed and ritualised (cf. Couldry 2003). In the days to follow, extended broadcasts or features were aired or published, composed of a blend of news and ‘on the spot’ interviews with people who had known Joos, the supermarket, or the employees. An increasingly shared narrative took shape, and the more it was recounted, the more the ‘incident’ became an ‘event’. For a period of two weeks people continued to bring flowers and attributes to express their sympathy

20 For example, see http://www.wortelepin.nl/evenementen/galaworteletruuj.htm.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

171

as well as their horror at the offence. The attributes placed at the memorial can be seen as a material highlighting of the key elements of the Anja Joos narrative, which I will reconstruct below. This reconstruction will also reveal how narratives about incidents like Joos’ death elaborate contemporary moral and political concerns. Intermezzo: The Anja Joos Memorial The Anja Joos memorial was located at the fringe of a small square, beside a lamppost, next to the chairs of the outdoor café where Anja Joos (43) was found by the police shortly before she died. On 14 October, eight days after the incident, the memorial consisted of a core of flowers, encircled by a composition of candles, written messages, and numerous attributes placed randomly amongst the flowers and the papers, including several photographs of Joos. Besides their function as commemorative objects, these photographs were evidence of a central element in the narrative: Joos’ physical weakness. Her condition was (partly) a consequence of her drug and alcohol addiction, implying that Joos was socially vulnerable as well. In fact, the narrative revolved largely around these themes. First, as a single woman in poor physical condition Joos was no match at all for six strong teenagers of seventeen, eighteen and nineteen years old. The photographs reconfirm that Joos, with her fragile appearance, had had no chance at all. Second, precisely because of her ‘junkie’ appearance she had been (falsely!) suspected of shoplifting. The first reports told that Joos was beaten to death by supermarket employees because she had stolen a can of beer and (possibly) also some food for her adopted stray dogs.21 Although there was a wide public and media consensus on the fact that the theft of a can of beer could never justify manslaughter, the dog food added a completely different perspective to the incident: Anja Joos might have been a drop-out, but she had been good to animals. Joos’ compassion for other living beings in trouble added a moral tinge of nobleness and self-sacrifice to the narrative. Her background also explains the prominent and continuous presence of street people at the memorial site. The vagabonds (all men) took care of the arrangement of the attributes, watered the flowers, kept candles and lanterns alight, and informed interested passers-by and journalists about the affair, and about their specific relationships with Joos. They also brought about a certain disorder. One behaved noisily, another made peculiar movements, or chalked images on the pavement; at times they argued about each other’s actions. Thus, the scene of the crime was not only marked by a memorial but also by the explicit presence of marginal people, who in general rarely function as a group. Furthermore, the memorial included attributes referring to the ‘reason’ behind Joos’ death: dog statuettes; (empty) beer cans and bottles; cans and boxes of dog food; pieces of dry dog food. A neighbourhood social-welfare institute contributed an eye-catching, blue, larger-than-life statue that had formerly been part of an ‘art

21 Spits, October 8, 2003.

172

Reframing Dutch Culture

of the homeless’ exhibition. Somebody had provided the statue with a ‘shoulder bag’, made from an empty Pedigree can. Messages like: ‘Senseless violence is so senseless’, or ‘Violence never makes sense’ put Joos’ death firmly in the context of ‘a victim of senseless violence’. The announcements left at the site to encourage people to participate in the silent march gave a straightforward message: ‘Anja Joos, † 6 October 03, silent march against senseless violence. The ephemeral memorial for Anja Joos can be understood as sustaining her social presence by the display of the narrative of who she had been. In this respect such memorials are comparable to displays on graves (see Hallam and Hockey 2001: 208– 209). The prevalence of the element of her violent death, however, superimposes a new identity over her personal identity: that of ‘victim of senseless violence’. In this respect, ephemeral memorials differ significantly from grave memorials. This difference, though, is not merely theoretical. As public performances, ephemeral memorials have an immediate effect in the world. Without the Joos memorial, for instance, the extraordinary presence and performance of the street people would have been impossible. The memorial made the square an arena where wider societal debates and moral issues were articulated. The Joos memorial was the material outcome of the woman’s appropriation by the general public, which rehabilitated her posthumously as a good member of ‘ordinary society’. This appropriation, however, was contested by the street people. Their presence and involvement expressed that, for them, Joos had been and still was ‘one of them’. By implication, if she were to be acknowledged as part of ordinary society, they should be as well. This struggle for appropriation of the ‘Joos narrative’ reveals one aspect of underlying processes of inclusion and exclusion. If the Anja Joos memorial was primarily a materialisation of those strands of the narrative that revolved around Joos’ personal and (new) social identity, what can be said about the strand or strands that refer to the offenders and their position in society? Just as ‘Anja Joos’ and the circumstances of her death acquired clearer outlines over the course of time, so did the role and profile of the offenders. They were perceived to have behaved in an extremely cowardly fashion: as a group they had beaten a sole, fragile woman to death. Out of prejudice, they had killed an innocent and moral person. And, last but not least, they were ‘Moroccans’.22 An additional dimension in this final strand is that Joos had reputedly shouted ‘Fucking Moroccans (kutmarokkanen: a politically charged term of abuse at the time), why are you always after me?’ at her persecutors.23 22 In fact, the main suspect was a Tunisian. Four of the five other suspects were of Moroccan background. 23 It is striking how the single word kutmarokkanen was able to draw the entire narrative into the sphere of increasing political tensions about the immigration issue. On the evening after the city council elections (6 March 2002), the then Amsterdam alderman for Education, Youth and Integration (Rob Oudkerk) used the expression in a tête-à-tête with the Mayor of Amsterdam (Job Cohen), without being aware that the conversation was being recorded by a television crew. The broadcast led to a serious row about the general stigmatisation of Dutch-Moroccans as non-integrated, violent and criminal. The Mayor’s reply had been ‘but

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

173

For an understanding of the position of the offenders in the ritual with relation to ‘senseless violence’ we must turn to the other key ritual, the silent march. My interpretation of the silent march is twofold. First, any silent march is the ritual confirmation of the victim’s status as a victim of ‘senseless violence’: with a silent march the narrative of the victim’s violent death is publicly, almost formally, acknowledged. Second, a silent march is a ritual in which ‘the community’ is constituted (or reconstituted) as a moral entity within the context of good and evil, as defined by ‘senseless violence’. As a public event, a silent march is a performance in which the participants present themselves to the outside world as ‘belonging to a community in which there is no place for evil’, and is, by implication, a ritual exclusion of proven evil ones from this community (cf. Bell 1997: 163). On the face of it, the excluded ones are the offenders. Although this is correct, it is possible to pursue this topic of inclusion and exclusion a little further by asking: who is and who is not (allowed to be) part of this moral community? What exactly is the place of the ritual within these processes? In his analysis of the meaning and constitution of communities, Anthony Cohen’s most significant argument is that the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is always relational: People have (a) something common with each other, which (b) distinguishes them in a significant way from members of other putative groups. ‘Community’ seems thus to imply simultaneously both similarity and difference. The word thus expresses a relational idea: the opposition of community to others or to other social entities (Cohen 1985: 12).

Hence, Cohen focuses on ‘the element which embodies this sense of discrimination, namely the boundary’ (ibid.). In my interpretation, the silent march can be seen as a symbolic and enacted demarcation between ‘us’ (the pure) and ‘them’ (the danger) (cf. Bell 1997: 162–163). This distinction is not absolute, however; it is negotiated and constituted prior to and during the performance itself. The main symbol of the ‘community’ in a silent march is the participation of the community’s highest formal representative, generally the local mayor, wearing the chain of office to confirm his ex-officio participation. In contrast, the aspect of exclusion from the community remains largely implicit in most silent marches. In the Anja Joos case, however, the negotiations about community boundaries came to the surface: the ethnic dimension meant that for some participants the boundary was between ‘us’ and ‘the Moroccans’, while others made an effort to limit the exclusion to the persons of the offenders, or even tried to include them too within the community.

they are our “fucking Moroccans’”, a reference to the famous WWII Amsterdam expression ‘Bloody Huns, keep your bloody paws off our bloody Jews’. The incident inspired the DutchMoroccan HipHop/R&B artist Raymzter to write the rap ‘Kutmarokkanen?!’ which became a hit overnight.

174

Reframing Dutch Culture

Intermezzo: The Anja Joos Silent March The silent march was organised by three (neighbourhood) drug addiction social welfare organisations and by the National Foundation against Senseless Violence mentioned above. The chair of the local district council, the pastor of the Amsterdam Drug Addicts Pastoral Care Foundation, the director of the Drug Users Interest Group MDHG and the Mayor of Amsterdam were to give speeches after the march. About a thousand people participated: among them a high number of people who had known Joos from the drugs scene or from the street (many with a dog and a bottle of beer), along with a significant number of Moroccan people, including representatives from several Moroccan organisations. During the march, a group of ‘Dutch’ young men began to shout ‘murderers’ and ‘fucking Moroccans’ (kutmarokkanen), but kept silent upon request. Racist remarks towards ‘Moroccans’, however, could be heard along the march.24 Differences in opinion concerning the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ came most strongly to the fore after the actual march, during the speeches. Some speeches evoked angry reactions, the drugs pastor’s in particular. He said: It is an illness of our time to perceive whole groups as a problem. People are labelled ‘drug users’ or ‘Moroccans’. By doing so, we place groups in opposition to each other. (…). Anja was one of us. But so also were those men who have been arrested, every single one of them is one of us. They are all people with names, worth mentioning, with their own stories.’25

Some members of the audience responded to his words by shouting such statements as: ‘I don’t think so’, ‘fuck off’, or ‘asshole’.26 A similar appeal by the director of the Drugs Users Interest Group elicited a similar response. But when he expressed his respect for the participating Dutch-Moroccans and Moroccan organisations, he received a wave of applause that ‘drowned out the booing’.27 The Mayor singularised the suspects as individuals without further comment, to include the Moroccans as a group in the Amsterdam community: It is a sad affair that brings us together after our silent march (…): the death of Anja Joos as a consequence of her violent maltreatment by a group of young men. Yes, the suspects are Moroccan Amsterdam people. I am therefore pleased by the declaration from eight Moroccan organisations that I have just read. They are also present tonight, and express their horror at the attack that was fatal to Anja Joos.28

24 Het Parool, October 16, 2003. 25 Quoted from Het Parool, October 16, 2003. 26 Quoted from Frits Abrahams, Eén van ons (‘One of us’), NRC Handelsblad, October 16, 2003. 27 Quoted from Het Parool, October 16, 2003. 28 Quoted from http://www.amsterdam.nl/gemeente/documenten/toespraken/cohen/ inhoud/toespraak_anja_joos.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

175

The idea of including the perpetrators into the moral community clearly went too far for many. The position of ‘the Moroccans’ as a group, however, was a subject of negotiation, with a large majority of the participants in favour of their inclusion. Illustrative of the need for this inclusion was their communal declaration and participation in the ritual. For the Moroccan organisations (and individuals), the significance of their fitting in with ‘Dutch’ ritual reached much further than this particular silent march. In the context of the accelerating societal debate on the ‘failure of integration’ a ‘Moroccan absence’ would rather have implied a confirmation of their exclusion from Dutch society. Places Full of Meaning On the day of Joos’ funeral – the day the memorial was dismantled – the site was marked with a tile bearing the ‘anti-senseless-violence’ symbol, the ladybird. The tile disappeared that very night. The theft inspired an artist to design a commemorative tile in honour of Anja Joos; this tile was eventually installed during a modest commemoration ceremony one year later, on the anniversary of Joos’ death. The narrative that, to speak with De Certeau, ‘haunted’ the place of mischief now had a material token (cf. 1984: 106). The practice of marking the place as a site with a narrative, however, was not sufficient to transform a neutral place on a city square into a specific space, with its own particular relation to the social world around it. The marking articulated only that this transformation had happened: for ‘those who know’, the narrative remains attached to the place regardless whether or not a mark is present. At this point it is important to remember that the Anja Joos narrative is more than a narrative about one concrete person’s sad fate. The concrete elements of the incident were absorbed into the moral and political field of meaning surrounding ‘senseless violence’, to evolve into a new allegory of ‘what is wrong with Dutch society’. It is this broader, exemplary dimension that gives such narratives a tinge of myth and transforms the places to which they are attached into what Augé calls ‘high places’, places with a history (1995: 82). The bond between narrative and place allows for a better understanding of the commotion around the ritual response to the violent death of ‘the bag snatcher’, with which this investigation started. El Bejjati died not far from the place where the provocative film maker and publicist Theo van Gogh had been murdered on 2 November 2004. The assassination took place in the context of Van Gogh’s habit of commenting bluntly on just about anything, including Islam, and of his production of Submission, a movie pamphlet about the relationship between the abuse of Muslim women and the Koran. Submission had been broadcast on national television two months earlier, and had evoked considerable anger among the Muslim community. The movie sparked a heated (media) debate, and it inspired a rap group to write a song that called for the death of the script’s author, MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh had also received death threats.

176

Reframing Dutch Culture

The murder shocked the nation. Van Gogh was slain in a brutal manner, ‘ritually slaughtered’, as it was called. In addition, the murderer had pinned a letter on Van Gogh’s chest, with a knife. The letter contained death threats against Ayaan Hirsi Ali and another MP, who was known for his outspoken negative opinions on Islam, integration and immigration. Opinions on the position of the Moroccan population in Dutch society polarised further, with a tendency to a shift, also in the light of international Muslim terrorism, towards being a religious rather than an ethnic issue. At the high point of the crisis, mosques or Islamic schools were set on fire in several provincial towns. On the spot where Van Gogh had died a large ephemeral memorial took shape. To provide a description and analysis of the Van Gogh memorial and other rituals related to his death in a way that would do justice to the case would require another article. I will limit myself here to the main aspect that is necessary for my argument: the manner in which Van Gogh’s death had imbued the area around the place of his death with meaning. We must therefore focus on the public interpretations of Van Gogh’s death, and on the ritualised practices in which these interpretations were made explicit and conveyed. The memorial itself was a ceremonial and material testimony to the seriousness with which the event was taken. The attributes visualised people’s emotions and perceptions, in a wide range of topics that cannot be dealt with here in detail. A vast category of images, objects and written messages referred to Van Gogh and his work, and closely related, to the recurring topic of ‘freedom of speech’.29 Another prevalent category obviously consisted of items and messages that in some way referred to the Muslim and/or Moroccan identity of the murderer, and to related issues including ‘integration into Dutch society’, a topic to which we will return below. Perhaps less obvious was the category of tokens that drew the murder into the context of ‘senseless violence’. Even though the murderer had committed his crime out of a political and religious conviction, ‘senseless violence’ was a prevailing topic. There were brief notes bearing such texts like ‘Senseless’ or, ‘Senseless! Who is next’ or ‘It is all senseless violence’. Another kind of reference to ‘senseless violence’ read, ‘Our society is stronger than the murderers of Meindert Tjoelker’. In addition, many ladybird stickers peeked out from the enormous heap of flowers. The National Foundation against Senseless Violence had hung posters on the lampposts at the memorial site. Several people had added the Foundation’s full-page obituary for Van Gogh to the memorial.30

29 This topic actually relates to another field of meaning attached to the Van Gogh murder: the right of freedom of speech was the central topic in the outcry surrounding the murder of the rising populist politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002; see the contribution Performative Memorials of Peter Jan Margry in this volume. 30 The obituary, which was also an appeal to maintain societal unity, appeared on 4 November 2005 in Metro, one of the two free public transit newspapers in the Netherlands. The obituary consisted primarily of a large ladybird.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

177

Other ‘senseless violence’ messages took a different direction by linking ‘senseless violence’ to ‘ethnic violence’, i.e. by presenting ‘senseless violence’ as a type of violence perpetrated in particular by Moroccans, as one specific ‘canon of victims’ illustrates: 31 André Hartman32 Eddy Wind33 René Steegmans Anja Joos Theo van Gogh Every one murdered by a Moroccan Who will be next? Dutch people, do something!!! The message was an explicit testimony of the perception that had earlier found expression around the deaths of René Steegmans and Anja Joos, namely that the division between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ parallels the ethnic distinction between ‘we’ (i.e. autochthonous Dutch and victims) and ‘them’ (i.e. Moroccans and perpetrators).34 The interpretations of Van Gogh’s death demonstrate the strong political and moral condemnative potential of ‘senseless violence’, a potential that the epithet ‘senseless’ has accumulated through the responses to the deaths of a long series of varied casualties. ‘Senseless’ has become a term to express one’s strongest possible moral condemnation. Rather than to simply place some particular incident or type of behaviour outside our moral or social order, ‘senseless’ is used to expel actual persons or groups from this order.35 In the serial narrative of ‘senseless violence’, the Van Gogh episode redefines those for whom there is no place in Dutch society, an exclusion that varies according to the various points of view. Just as the purport of a ‘senseless violence’ narrative is broader than that of the specific incident, so does the place of mischief extend beyond the precise spot where the incident happened. The opening article of the daily newspaper De Telegraaf on Tuesday, 18 January, about the death of El Bejjati, provides a good illustration. 31 Outside the direct context of the memorial, Theo van Gogh gained another place in the canon of victims of ‘senseless violence’: Lange Frans and Baas B. immediately added a verse about Van Gogh to their rap ‘Senseless’. 32 André Hartman was shot during a raid on his cigarette shop in 1993. 33 Eddy Wind, a bicycle repairman, was stabbed to death by an angry customer in 1998. 34 Van Gogh’s death was also placed within the context of ‘senseless violence’ by a ‘noise wake’, which was held in the evening on the day of his death. Approximately 25,000 people participated. The idea of a ‘noise wake’ had arisen in the context of the ‘usual’ silent march; Van Gogh had reputedly detested silent marches. 35 For example, I came across the expressions ‘senseless loss’, ‘senseless shoplifting’, and ‘senseless verbal violence’, all of which combinations illustrate the condemnatory power of the epithet.

178

Reframing Dutch Culture

Under the article’s headline the editors had placed the almost iconographic image of the police investigation in the hours immediately following Van Gogh’s death, with the body still there, hidden from view by a blue tent. Without words, the newspaper had drawn El Bejjati’s death directly into the field of meaning of the narrative still attached to the place. As the narrative of El Bejjati’s death evolved, the inclination to situate the incident within the specific meaning of ‘that place’ proved irresistible, for neighbourhood people, other (national) media, and also for the bereaved. More or less implicit verbal or visual references to the ‘whereabouts’ of the incident highlighted the meaning that was already attached to the location.36 Conclusion In the disagreements surrounding the ritual practices in commemoration of El Bejjati’s death, the deeper issue of the Van Gogh narrative – the position of immigrant groups within Dutch society – was again brought to the fore. This was virtually inevitable given the existing political charge of the location. Young DutchMoroccans seized upon the incident as an opportunity to renegotiate their implicit exclusion, using ritual as a tool. The messages included in the memorial and its immediate, unauthorised removal can be understood in this context. The same holds for the conflict about the name and nature of the march. By preventing a formally acknowledged silent march, which would have included his own presence, the Mayor attempted to keep the narrative of El Bejjati’s death outside of the ‘senseless violence’ myth that hovered above the place, and the associative narratives of victimhood and innocence. Which party was most successful in the controversy remains unclear. The march as it eventually took place was ambiguous enough to leave room for multiple interpretations, an ambiguity that is intrinsic to ritual. From the point of view of the authorities, the march, ‘reduced’ to a march of mourning, was a private happening devoid of any political dimension. For the participants, it remained a silent march and a protest against their exclusion. As a statement, the march allowed the participants to present the Dutch-Moroccan community as a self-aware group in Dutch society; as an act, the adoption of the ritual was proof of successful integration.

36 Van Gogh was killed in the Linnaeusstraat. Other examples of verbal indications of place referring to ‘Van Gogh’ were – with or without mentioning the actual street where El Bejjati had died – ‘near the Linnaeusstraat’ or ‘around the corner from the Linnaeusstraat’, ‘less than fifty meters from the place where Van Gogh was killed.’ For example, television reports on the El Bejjati case included shots of the Linnaeusstraat, or interviews conducted on the spot where Van Gogh had died, without explicitly mentioning either the Linnaeusstraat or Van Gogh.

Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’

179

References Augé, Marc (1995), Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (transl. John Howe). London, New York: Verso. Ariès, Philippe (1976), Western Attitudes Toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present (transl. Patricia M. Ranum). London: Marion Boyars. Bell, Catherine (1997), Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Best, Joel (1999), Random Violence. How We Talk About New Crimes and New Victims. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beunders, Henri (2002), Publieke tranen. De drijfveren van de emotiecultuur. Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact. Blok, Anton (1991), Zinloos en zinvol geweld. Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 18, 189–207. Blok, Anton (2001), Honour and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boutellier, Hans (2002), De veiligheidsutopie. Hedendaags onbehagen en verlangen rond misdaad en straf. Den Haag: Boom Juridische Uitgevers. Cohen, Anthony P. (1985), The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. Couldry, Nick (2003), Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. De Certeau, Michel (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life (transl. Steven Rendall). Berkeley: University of California Press. Girard, René (1972), Violence and the Sacred (transl. Patrick Gregory). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Hallam, Elizabeth and Jenny Hockey (2001), Death, Memory & Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Hughes-Freeland, Felicia and Mary M. Crain (1998), Introduction, in Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary M. Crain (eds), Recasting Ritual: Performance, Media, Identity. London: Routledge. La Fontaine, Jean S. (1998), Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Post, Paul (1995), Ritueel landschap: over liturgie-buiten. Processie, pausbezoek, danken voor de oogst, plotselinge dood. Tilburg: Liturgisch Instituut Tilburg. Post, Paul, Albertina Nugteren and Hessel Zondag (2003), Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual Repertoire. Leuven: Peeters. Stengs, Irene (2003), Ephemeral Memorials against ‘Senseless Violence’: Materialisations of Public outcry. Etnofoor 2003(2), 26-40. Stengs, Irene (2004), Roadside Mourning: Material Manifestations, Private Messages and Public Debate in the Netherlands. Paper presented at the EASA conference, 8–12 September 2004, Vienna. Van Leeuwen, Lizzy (2005 ), Lost in Mall. An Ethnography of Middle Class Jakarta in the 1990s. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam. Vasterman, Peter (2004), Mediahype. Amsterdam: Aksant.

This page intentionally left blank

PART III HERITAGE AND AUTHENTICITY

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 9

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work: The Changing Mission of the Fraters of Tilburg in Secularised Dutch Society Martin Ramstedt

The waning of traditional religious authority in the Netherlands – i.e. the authority of the different Protestant denominations and of the Catholic Church – has encouraged the emergence of both institutionalised and non-institutionalised alternative spiritualities, a process which began at the beginning of the 20th century and which has accelerated since the 1960s.1 This theoretical understanding has clear implications for the definition of ‘secularisation’ and contains an inherent critique of well-known – sometimes quasi-evolutionist – theories of ‘secularisation’. For instance, in his book God is Dead: Secularisation in the West, published in 2002,2 Steve Bruce underscored the secularisation paradigm put forth by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Peter Berger and others. He reiterated that cultural diversity undermines religious belief in egalitarian, individualistic and liberal democracies. My theoretical framework and empirical research challenge this statement by claiming that the thesis of secularisation has only been valid in the sense of a lesser influence of the institutional churches (‘unchurchisation’).3 Secularisation in the Netherlands has indeed been very much tied up with the ‘depillarisation’ and subsequent ‘unchurchisation’ of Dutch society. Between 1920 and 1960, the nation was split up into four ideological sectors, known as the Protestant, Roman Catholic, socialist and liberal ‘pillars’. The country was ‘pillarised’ in the sense that public life was completely institutionalised along ideological lines until the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Increasing prosperity, geographical and social mobility as well as media participation facilitated a massive reappraisal of traditional notions and values, resulting in a profound detraditionalisation of Dutch culture. 1 This chapter introduces a line of research which I have developed over the last four years at the Meertens Institute in connection with my post-doctoral project Detraditionalisation and the normalisation of alternative spiritualities in contemporary Dutch society. In fact, the title of the project presents my theoretical framework in a nutshell. 2 Oxford: Blackwell. 3 The term ‘unchurchisation’ has been used inter alia by Grace Davie, ‘Europe: The Exception?’ In Berger, Peter (ed.) (1999), The Desecularization of the World. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 68.

184

Reframing Dutch Culture

The concept of detraditionalisation implies the weakening of an established tradition as a normative system for its former constituency. As Paul Heelas points out, it does not necessarily entail the annihilation of the tradition in question. ‘Detraditionalisation’ merely points to the loss of its former hegemony and the concomitant emergence of rival life orientations. The ensuing pluralisation of life orientations continues until an ideology – old, rival or totally new – is successfully (re-)instituted as the new common standard (Heelas 1999: 1–11; Luckmann 1999; Cupitt 1998: 218). Psychology has perhaps provided such a standard, by instituting an increasing psychologisation of mainstream culture since the convergence of psychoanalysis and Fordism from 1914 onwards and that of human potentialism and neo-liberal management theory from the 1960s to the present (Rose 1998; Zaretsky 2004; Ramstedt forthcoming). The strong links between the human potentialist psychologists in the wake of Carl Ransom Rogers and Abraham Harold Maslow on the one hand, and various alternative spiritualities on the other, have rendered the originally counter-culturalist New Age movement compatible with dominant trends within the capitalist mainstream (Heelas 1999: 55; Ramstedt forthcoming). This compatibility was enhanced by the economic success of the ‘Confucianist countries’ – Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea – and the subsequent neo-liberal call for a value-driven ‘enterprise culture’ (Heelas and Morris 1992; Ramstedt 1999: 105–117). The end result of this convergence was an increasing ‘romantic spiritualism in business management’ (Salamon 2002), which has provided for a growing segment within the spiritual marketplace (Ramstedt 1999; Salamon 2000: 156). In a forthcoming article, Ineke Hogema of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, states that in 2004 350 Dutch institutions, including large management consultancies, management centres and one-person-practices, had included one or more spirituality-based courses for managers in their service packages under the labels ‘personal growth’, ‘awareness development’ or ’inner leadership’. In their latest book on The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (2005), Heelas and Woodhead propose the thesis that a spiritual revolution has taken place not only in business, but also in Christian congregations. By focusing on a recent enterprise of one such congregation, namely the establishment of ZIN, the Monastery for Spirituality at Work, by the Congregation of the Brothers of Our Lady, Mother of Mercy’ (abbreviated as ‘Brothers CMM’ or ‘Fraters of Tilburg’), I will endeavour to support their thesis that a spiritual revolution is indeed taking place within contemporary Christianity. The financial and social success of ZIN serves as an indication of increased public interest in an open, non-institutionalised and life-affirming form of Christian spirituality (Becker and Hart 2006: 61), as is also demonstrated by similar ventures.

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

185

ZIN is a representative case in point for various reasons. First of all, it numbers several Dutch government institutions (i.e. departments within different ministries, the police force, etc) among its clients. Secondly, major Dutch firms4 have solicited the services of ZIN in various ways. And thirdly, ZIN has provided a venue for major social debates on subjects like ‘corporate responsibility’, attended by representatives of the Dutch media, Christian trade unions and professionals from different economic sectors, or ‘dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism’, attended by religious intellectuals and leaders from the Netherlands and abroad. Through its network of partners and clients, permeating different layers of professional Dutch society, ZIN observes and influences the zeitgeist in contemporary Holland. ZIN is not a unique case, but one example of many new forms of spirituality practised or taught in former Dutch monasteries as retreat centres. My analysis of the transforming mission of the Fraters of Tilburg not only supports Heelas and Woodhead’s thesis of the ‘spiritual revolution’; it also has wider implications for the debate on The Desecularisation of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics,5 instigated by Peter Berger in 1999, in general, and Andre Droogers’ completed research programme [on Dutch society] Between Secularisation and Re-religionisation at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, in particular. Entering the Field On the outskirts of Vught, a small town in the Dutch province of North Brabant, close to the bishop’s seat in ’s-Hertogenbosch, a large and peaceful estate lies hidden behind a wall of tall, old trees. To the right of the unobtrusive estate entrance, a white sign announces in fine, crimson letters an unconventional ‘monastery for spirituality at work’ – ‘ZIN’, an ambiguous Dutch word that translates as both ‘meaning’ and ‘joy’. Until the late 1990s, the estate was dominated by the heavy brick structure of Huize Steenwijk, the former monastery of the local community of the Fraters of Tilburg, which was founded there in 1902. Refurbished with considerable glass, light wooden panels, reed grass, bamboo, steel, expensive design furniture and secular artwork, the building now offers a temporary refuge to professional groups and teams of volunteers seeking renewed motivation in their work through alternative ways of contemplation, meditation and reflection. In spite of the structural transformation, I soon learned that the altered design still resonated in fact with the original mission of the Fraters of Tilburg, who have always combined spirituality and work. Six Fraters are still living on the premises, albeit in a much smaller, new building next to ZIN. They are the members of the small ‘Eleousa Community’, whose quarters comprise a small chapel, a huge fruit and vegetable garden as well as a shelter for chicken, ducks and two cows. Behind the community housing lies the large cemetery 4 5

For privacy reasons, disclosure of the firms’ names was not permitted. Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999.

186

Figure 9.1

Reframing Dutch Culture

ZIN’s ‘cloister’ in Vught

Photo: Dieter Schütte.

of the Fraters. With its many uniform and monochrome graves, some dating back to the nineteenth century, it exudes an atmosphere of simplicity, introspection and transcendence, which adds to the special ambience of ZIN for visitors seeking peace and introspection. The congregation of the Fraters of Tilburg was founded in 1844 by Pastor, later Archbishop, Joannes Zwijsen (1794–1877) in the town of Tilburg, which lies some ten kilometres southwest of Vught. Deeply moved by the growing destitution in the increasingly industrialised Tilburg, Zwijsen established the congregation of the Fraters, whose mission was to provide for the education of neglected children. That same year, he also founded a Catholic orphanage for boys, where the Fraters started a highly successful printing and publishing enterprise in 1846 to provide work for the orphans and to publish educational material for the broader community of young Catholics. By setting up Catholic schools and initiating a number of training institutes for Catholic teachers in the following years, the Fraters made a significant contribution to the emancipation process of the Catholic constituency in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, once Protestant dominion and the prolonged

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

187

suppression of Catholic culture had come to an end (around 1800). Bound by their vows of poverty, obedience and religious chastity, the Fraters have led a religious life in society, largely outside the protective walls of their cloisters. Over the years, they have embraced modern professions in keeping with the overall mission of their congregation (Blommestijn and Huls 1998: 10–14). The religiosity of the Fraters also resonated with members of other modernising societies, and in 1886, the Fraters successfully began missionary work in the Netherlands Antilles. In 1902, they entered Surinam, and in 1923 the Netherlands Indies. After World War II, and parallel to the decolonisation of the ‘Third World’, they extended their mission to Zaire (1958), Kenya (1958), Namibia (1959), and Brazil (1960). Finally, they also made headway in California (1963). Today, their congregation numbers some four hundred Fraters worldwide. While overseas membership is growing fast, especially in Indonesia, Kenya and Brazil, the increasing secularisation of the Netherlands is now seriously threatening the continued existence of the Fraters in their country of origin.6 As I have mentioned above, detraditionalisation in the Netherlands has gone hand in hand with a radical ‘unchurchisation’ since the 1960s. By 2003, this process had gone so far that Dutch society is regarded as one of the most secularised in the Western world, with around 60 percent of the population not adhering to any Christian denomination (Becker and Vink 1994: 7, 30–32, 42, 69, 74; Becker and De Wit 2000: 13; Norris and Inglehart 2004: 9–10, 86, 88; Henkel and Knippenberg 2005: 10; Knippenberg 2005: 89–93; Becker and De Hart 2006: 7–38, 57). In 1995, the Fraters tried to rekindle interest in their congregation through the TV series Werken van Barmhartigheid (Works of Mercy) broadcast by KRO/RKK, the Roman Catholic TV networks. The series, designed to translate the concept of mercy into the post-modern age, was accompanied by a booklet of the same title, published by the congregation itself. The series attracted considerable attention in both the media and society at large. It became quite apparent that a large number of people regarded the contemplation of a modernised notion of mercy as a valuable endeavour. In September 1998, the congregation attempted to rejuvenate its Dutch membership by placing three advertisements in several Dutch dailies. However, only one man responded by entering the novitiate. Conceding defeat with regard to rejuvenating their membership ‘at home’, the Fraters were nevertheless highly successful at enhancing the social impact of their core mission – mercy and work – through two ventures: (1) the foundation of the broad, inter-confessional Movement of Mercy, which had expanded into various regional branches throughout the country by 2005, and (2) the transformation of Huize Steenwijk, aimed at addressing burning issues in contemporary Dutch society. With regard to the latter, they sought professional input from a corporate consultancy, with plans crystallising in the establishment of ZIN, a non-confessional organisation designed to run on a profit basis with no subsidies from either church or state. The Fraters were able to finance the necessary architectural transformation of the estate and 6

See www.cmm.org, accessed in January 2006.

188

Reframing Dutch Culture

the refurbishment of the building by selling their flourishing educational publishing house in Tilburg. By 2005, ZIN had emerged as a financial and social success, with important clients from the Dutch business world and Dutch government institutions like the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Public Works, as well as from various organisations in the educational and health care sectors. Making Sense of ZIN The Fraters’ decision to assign a new purpose to their monastery in Vught in fact reflected common practice among Christian institutions that were short of ‘clients’. As Dutch society became more secular, especially from the 1980s onwards, state subsidies were increasingly abolished (Zondag 1998: 16). Faced with a growing lack of financial support from believers, hundreds of churches and monasteries have either been demolished or sold to secular owners. However, some congregations and church institutions have tried to establish themselves as players in the emergent bezinningseconomie (spiritual economy) where ‘spiritual products’ are customised to meet the growing demand. In the early 1990s, the Missiological Institute in Heerlen was approached by the Nieuwegen Foundation, representing a number of Catholic congregations, in order to investigate the orientation and strategies of Christian centres established to provide up-to-date spiritual education for the lay public (De Jong and Steggerda 1998: 7– 8). This investigation was a follow-up to a previous research project on the future of Christian education, initiated in 1989 by the Ministry of Welfare, Public Health and Culture7 eager to support the professionalisation and financial independence of Christian educational institutions. The findings of this project had resulted in the recommendation that Christian education should address the existential themes and pressing needs of contemporary society, especially the widespread longing for meaning and motivation in life. But it would have to take into account the prevailing resistance to traditional forms of catechesis. Because Christian education centres could no longer count on subsidies from either state or church, they would have to adjust to the prevailing zeitgeist. One of the objectives of the Missiological Institute’s investigation was to monitor this adjustment (Zondag 1998: 17–24). Eleven centres were eventually screened. Most of them had originally been founded by a congregation, and were still partly dependent on their founders in terms of budget, personnel and housing. They had, however, all become quite independent where programming was concerned. Courses were invariably tailored for ‘progressive’ Christians with a critical inclination towards traditional forms of religiosity and a spirit of subjective experimentation. For this reason, the course material amalgamated – albeit to varying degrees – spiritual and instructional techniques from other religious traditions, such as Zen mediation, the vibrant alternative spirituality scene and Jungian strands of psychoanalysis as well as human 7 The Ministry has since been renamed the Ministry of Public Health, Welfare and Sports.

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

189

potentialism (Zondag 1998: 41–43; Steggerda 1998a: 53–66; Steggerda 1998b: 97; Berk 1998: 111–122). As to the appropriation of the Zen Buddhist tradition, Christa Anbeek, lecturer at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Utrecht University and student of the Indian Jesuit Zen teacher AMA Samy Roshi, has concluded that Zen in particular meshes with the growing thirst for existential meaning in Western societies because it emphasises the cultivation of ‘authentic’ being and experience amidst the concrete circumstances of daily life (Anbeek 2003: 117–153, 177–184). Furthermore, the lack of theology and ritual in Zen has led many Westerners to interpret it – falsely perhaps – as ‘religiously neutral’ and hence as suitable for appropriation by Christians in their pursuit of alternative forms of religiosity. The programming of the Christian centres that were investigated closely resembled the mix of spiritual methods offered by non-denominational ‘New Age’ centres specialising in alternative spirituality. The largely synonymous terms ‘New Age’8 and ‘alternative spirituality’ refer to highly eclectic, individual world views which all share a holistic outlook on life. This outlook is intrinsically linked to lifeaffirming values that are based on belief in the divinity of life and an all-pervading life force. Everyone can supposedly tap into the latter by means of spiritual practices selectively appropriated from different religious traditions or psychological schools, as well as art. Modified for individual purposes, these practices are applied to the development of the hidden potential of the divine self in order to realise the meaning of an individual’s own life on this planet. By frequently seeking knowledge about spiritual techniques with different gurus, teachers, coaches or friends, personal experience and interpretation remain the individual’s ultimate reference point from which to assess ‘authentic spirituality’ (see also Heelas 1996: 2, 19–35; Aupers 2004: 35–36). The salience of alternative spirituality in Dutch society has been substantiated by the results of different surveys, including those carried out by the Social and Cultural Planning Office, a research institute under the auspices of the Dutch Ministry of Public Health, Welfare and Sports (Becker and Vink 1994: 151–152, 178, 187; Becker, De Hart and Mens 1997). A further indicator is the Dutch book market, of which ‘New Age’ has formed a burgeoning segment since the 1980s (Aupers and Otterloo 2000: 71; Aupers 2004: 39–40). The emergence of increasing numbers of ‘New Age centres’ since the 1990s has also attested to the validity of alternative spirituality for an ever-growing number of Dutch people after the decline of traditional religiosity (Aupers and Otterloo 2000: 77). Since the 1980s, New Age groups and centres all around the world have increasingly provided spiritual management training services to organisations (Heelas 1996: 10, 62–66; Aupers 2004: 57–76), and since the 1990s, modern Christians and Christian institutions have followed suit. In the 1990s, Stephen Covey’s ‘seven habits of highly effective people’, a modernised version of traditional 8 For an analysis of the historical origins and the development of this dated term, please refer inter alia to Heelas 1996; Aupers and Otterloo 2000; or Hanegraaff 1996.

190

Reframing Dutch Culture

Protestant ethics, were being introduced as the latest management wisdom in many multinationals, including Unilever. In 1994, Laurie Beth, founder and president of The Jones Group, an advertising, marketing and business development firm with the mission ‘to recognise, promote, and inspire divine excellence’, presented Jesus as an exemplary executive leader (Beth 1994). Two years later, Norvene Vest’s Catholic ‘answer’ to the Protestant challenge appeared, proposing the Benedictine Rule as a guideline for integrating work with all aspects of life (Vest 1996). Some of the Christian centres in the Netherlands were then beginning to emulate these American advocates of Christian spirituality at work. A case in point is Wil Derkse, an oblate at the Benedictine abbey of St. Willibrord at Doetinchem,9 who recommends the Benedictine Rule as a guideline for human resource management in the Dutch corporate world (Derkse 2003: 9). Thus at a time when the Fraters of Tilburg were starting to reorganise their mission in Vught, the term ‘spiritual leadership’ was making increasing headway in the corporate world. In 1997, the Fraters eventually came into contact with Leendert Bikker, founder and director of the successful communication firm Bikker Communication Group as well as President of VNO NCW, an organisation representing ninety percent of all Dutch corporations. Together, they developed the concept of ZIN as a refuge for professional teams from both the profit and nonprofit sector who were seeking deeper meaning and motivation in their work. However, in contrast to the afore-mentioned Christian centres, ZIN would have to be completely independent of the Fraters’ congregation in terms of budget, personnel and programming. Only Wim Verschuren, former head of the CMM Brothers and now a member of the Eleousa Community, and each succeeding congregational head were to be permanent members of ZIN’s administrative board. Leendert Bikker had all the credentials of a successful entrepreneur. In early 1998, together with the Fraters, his team developed the catchy slogan Met ziel en zakelijkheid, (With soul and efficiency), which was to attract a wide range of clients to ZIN. In 1999, once his former team member Henk-Jan Hoefman had taken on the directorship of ZIN, Bikker withdrew from any further involvement. After selling his business to Euro RSCG Worldwide in New York, he was appointed CEO of the corporate communication network and moved to the US. However, in 2004 he started a new corporate communication firm in Rotterdam and resumed cooperation with ZIN. Having illuminated ZIN’s socio-cultural embeddedness, I will now fine-tune my inquiry into the meaning of ZIN. I will do so by following the lead of Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, put forward in their above-mentioned book on the spiritual revolution that is arguably taking place in the Western world. A key factor supporting their case is the apparent growth of subjective-life spirituality in connection with the general ‘subjective turn’ in contemporary society. The subjective turn implies a turn away from ‘life-as’, that is, ‘life lived as a dutiful wife, father, husband, strong 9 He is also professor of ‘Science, Society and Philosophy of Life’ at the Radboud University of Nijmegen.

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

191

leader, self-made man etc.’, to ‘subjective-life’, that is, ‘life lived in deep connection with the unique experiences of my self-in-relation’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 3). Distinguishing between ‘religion’ on the one hand and ‘spirituality’ on the other, Heelas and Woodhead argue that the former would sacralise ‘life-as’ modes of living, whereas the latter would in fact be bound up with subjective-life modes of existence (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 5). A further test case for their thesis of spiritual revolution was their investigation into whether subjective-life spirituality would become increasingly influential within Christianity (Heelas and Woodhead 2005:60). On the basis of their fieldwork in the English town of Kendal, they subsequently suggested four categories of Christian congregations embracing different degrees of subjective-life spirituality: 1. Congregations of difference, in which we find ‘a growing recognition of the importance of subjective-life, and a concern with its cultivation, but only insofar as it is contained and constrained by a strict theological and moral framework’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 61). 2. Congregations of experiential difference, in which ‘‘‘external”, “institutional”’ features of congregational life (…) are rejected in favour of relaxed and informal worship and lay participation (…). The message is that God is to be known not only by way of external conformity, but in deep inner experience and transformation of a holistic nature’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 63). 3. Congregations of humanity, in which worship ‘is very much focused on praise of God, and preaching tends to take a humanitarian (…) direction, with more emphasis being placed on duty and self-sacrifice than on freedom, self-realisation and the cultivation of unique subjective-life’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 64). 4. Congregations of experiential humanity, which – like the Unitarians and the Quakers – tend to have a ‘traditional tendency to stress the authority of the voice of God speaking in the heart of the individual’ and are hence ‘more likely to embrace a spirituality oriented around subjective-life than are other varieties of Christianity’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 65–66). Heelas and Woodhead finally concluded that, even though the holistic milieu of alternative spirituality is growing, it is the ‘relative success of congregations of experiential difference’ that ‘helps explain why the congregational domain has not declined more rapidly’, at least in the UK and the US (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 75). Taking Heelas and Woodhead’s considerations as my point of departure, I will now embark on a more detailed analysis of ZIN in order to correlate my findings with their conclusion. In my analysis, I will include yet another line of inquiry recently set out by Jeremy Carrette and Richard King in their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. They examined

192

Reframing Dutch Culture (…) the growing commercialisation of ‘religion’ in the form of the popular notion of ‘spirituality’, as it is found in education, health-care, counselling, business training, management theory and marketing. The analysis offered is but one example of the way in which the ‘market mentality’ is now infiltrating all aspects of human cultural expression in (so-called) ‘advanced’ capitalist societies (Carrette and King 2005: x).

Carrette and King furthermore wish ‘to challenge the individualist and corporatist monopoly of the term spirituality (…) for the promotion of the values of consumerism and corporate capitalism’ (Carrette and King 2005: 5). They thereby highlight what was silenced in ‘the colonisation of our collective cultural heritage by individualist and capitalist forms of spirituality’, namely ‘a concern with community, social justice and the extension of an ethical ideal of selfless love and compassion towards others’ (Carrette and King 2005: 17). I intend to follow their suggestion that the ‘emergence of new forms of engaged spirituality grounded in awareness of our mutual interdependence, the need for social justice and economically sustainable lifestyles, may yet prove our best hope for resisting the capitalist excesses of neo-liberalism and developing a sense of solidarity and global citizenship in an increasingly precarious world’ (Carrette and King 2005: 182). I will therefore focus on the question of whether ZIN’s success attests to either a capitalist takeover of religion or an attempt at resistance in the name of communality and compassion.10 Spirituality at Work The traditional religiosity of the Fraters of Tilburg has revolved around the notion and practice of mercy, crystallising in what are known as the ‘seven works of mercy’: (1) to give food to the hungry; (2) to quench the thirst of the thirsty; (3) to give shelter to strangers; (4) to provide the naked with clothes; (5) to attend to the sick; (6) to visit those held in prison; and (7) to bury the dead. The very workings of the spirit of mercy in human beings have been summed up in the congregation’s motto: ‘seeing – being moved – taking action’, that is, seeing something that moves us to take action for the well-being of others. Under the leadership of Henk-Jan Hoefman, ZIN’s new director, this vital core of the religious heritage of the Fraters – that is, the ‘spirituality of mercy’ – was translated into something that would resonate with people in the Dutch professional world. Although the congregation’s motto was retained, it was stripped of any explicit references to ‘religion’. Eventually, it became ‘finding one’s true calling in life and acting on it with spirit and expediency’. ZIN’s

10 My analysis is based on three years of participant observation in various ZIN programmes, more than twenty interviews with members of the CMM Brothers as well as ZIN personnel, freelancers and clients, and the insights I have derived from supervising a workgroup of MA students at the Culture, Organisation and Management Department of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam who were conducting comparative research on spirituality in the Dutch corporate world.

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

193

explicit and comparatively modest goal has been to contribute to the humanisation of work and to a more compassionate outlook on and behaviour in professional life. The very materiality of ZIN’s architectural design was to have an integral function by evoking just that kind of secular spirituality. Responsibility for renovating Huize Steenwijk was eventually given to the architects Annette Marx and Ady Steketee from Eindhoven. Their task was to design ZIN in accordance with the spiritual needs of its anticipated customers. Its architectural composition would take clients out of their daily aesthetic milieu into a space that would encourage them to contemplate their deeper motivations in life. In cooperation with external specialists in ecological landscape design, geomagnetic fields and feng shui, Marx and Steketee integrated modern art, ecological living and the heritage of the Fraters into their design. Every detail was designed to combine ergonomic function with graceful form. While the basic colour scheme at ZIN is white in combination with natural wood, suggesting contemplative simplicity, the many large windows and steel elements convey a sense of clarity and lightness. The office equipment projects a practicality and discreet elegance, whereas the furniture in the community room and guest quarters, intended for accommodation during longer programmes and weekend retreats, displays vivid, joyful colours. In this way, the importance of community is discreetly emphasised. To discourage distraction from the outside world, the guest quarters are not equipped with telephones, televisions or radios. The function of each room is indicated by plain crimson letters on the bare white wall next to the entrance, for example ‘auditorium’, ‘hall’ or ‘rest-room’. Even the numbers of the guest quarters are not printed in cold numerals but are spelled out in serene letters, for example ‘eleven’ or ‘fourteen’, in order to discourage instrumental thinking. Marx and Steketee’s work was well received not only by Hoefman and the CMM Brothers; it was also awarded the Welstandsprijs 2000, a provincial prize launched in 1995 and dedicated to outstanding architectural projects in North Brabant. The actual graphic design at ZIN was the domain of Isis Spuijbroek, a professional artist and designer who was initially associated with the Bikker Communication Group. Like the work of Marx and Steketee, her contribution was given public recognition in the form of a nomination for the Dutch House Design Award. Spuijbroek has continued her involvement at ZIN as head of the graphic design department, a responsibility she fulfils alongside her other professional work. Most rooms at ZIN are stripped of any explicitly religious symbols. Yet the secular artworks displayed throughout the building have been carefully selected to encourage both clients and staff to see the world from a different angle. Most artworks are rather disquieting, impelling the onlooker to reflect upon them. For example, Van Hennert’s black-and-white drawing entitled ‘You/ Me’ shows entangled human bodies bound to each other by two giant octopuses. And Helen Fink’s polychrome drawing ‘Only a dream’ depicts a human body with both female breasts and an erect penis. In developing the art programme at ZIN, Hoefman was able to draw on the experience of Frank Eerhart, Director of the Plint Foundation at the time of ZIN’s

194

Reframing Dutch Culture

inception. The Plint Foundation has been promoting the combination of poetry and art in the form of unique poetry posters and cards available in exclusive bookshops and department stores throughout the country. Some of the Plint posters – frequently inspired by the Japanese tradition of calligraphy and Haiku composition – were put up in the guest quarters at ZIN. However, most artworks have been given on loan by a Dutch sponsoring bank, the SNS Reaal Fonds. They comprise some fifty paintings by twenty-two Dutch artists. Then there are the artworks by artists specifically selected for a six-month period to work on their own projects in ZIN’s guest studio and to contribute to particular management training programmes. Other art forms too have come to form an integral part of daily life at ZIN. Every evening at 5:30, for instance, clients and staff can participate in a music meditation in the former chapel, which nowadays serves as a general space of silence. And during lunchtime, poetry is read aloud to employees and guests alike for their individual contemplation. Both staff and clients are encouraged to participate fully in the daily rhythm of ZIN, which is consciously maintained in order to emulate the traditional monastic routine. The day starts with Tai Chi and a Christian morning meditation before breakfast, taken at fixed hours in the former refectory. The same applies to lunch, when a minute of complete silence is observed by all. The day ends with the afore-mentioned music meditation, followed by dinner in the dining hall, prepared for those who either work late hours or who will be staying on for the night. The meals include vegetarian dishes, and all ingredients are organically produced. Alerting clients to further possibilities for engaging in spirituality at work, housekeeping is handled by a team largely made up of mentally handicapped men and women. There are sixteen in total, all of whom are associated with Cello, a provincial health care organisation with its own mission. Cello in fact espouses the view that mentally handicapped people should be treated, wherever possible, like ordinary members of society with a right to professional work specifically tailored to their abilities. At ZIN, they work under the guidance and care of Anne Boerboom. She related in an interview how some of ZIN’s clients, especially young managers, have occasionally felt challenged by the presence of the handicapped members of the housekeeping team. However, this challenge forms part of the training in mercy that is the aim of the whole concept of ZIN. Renting out facilities to well-established corporate consultancies, such as De Baak or KernKonsult, was initially an important and reliable source of income for ZIN. As I have said, apart from hosting external training modules, ZIN has also been a venue for conferences on topics relevant for society at large. The very materiality of the environment and the special services provided by the staff have thus been of crucial importance for the propagation of the kind of spirituality that is put to work there. Aside from the materiality of ZIN, Hoefman and his team have developed an instructional concept for management consultancy, training and coaching, which characterises the specific approach – or credo – of the ‘monastery’ to spirituality and work. It consists of the following points, highlighting ZIN’s dedication to advancing subjective-life spirituality:

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

• •

•

• •

•

• • •

• •

•

195

Recognising the uniqueness of the individual human being Paying attention to a person in his or her entirety, i.e. taking a holistic view by considering the person’s behaviour, abilities, persuasions, identity and spirituality Discriminating between slow and fast questions which demand different approaches in terms of problem solving: while fast questions refer to a certain behaviour, knowledge item or capability and demand quick solutions, it is the slow questions that are tied up with a person’s identity, persuasions and spirituality, thereby warranting a contemplative approach and a long-term perspective Finding a balance between action and contemplation Balancing several sets of opposites or paradoxes following from the overarching paradox of ‘spirit on the one hand and expediency on the other’, namely (1) ‘expansion of the firm and sense of community’, (2) ‘excellence and constraint’, (3) ‘instrumental professionalism and compassion’, (4) ‘career and calling’, and (5) ‘quick solutions and deeper questions’ (see also Schuijt and Hoefman 2004: 10, 14–17; Schuijt 2001: 9–10) Accepting tension, in the sense that balancing the afore-mentioned paradoxical drives should not lead to a reduction in their inherent tension because tension is valued as the source of creativity and inspiration Professional learning based on personal experience Encounter, in terms of learning in interaction with other people, in a group, team or community Compassion in the workplace (with its Buddhist connotations, the term ‘compassion’ is currently finding acceptance among wider sectors of Dutch society, in contrast to ‘mercy’, which has largely been rejected because of its conservative Christian flavour; this is why ZIN employs ‘compassion’ rather than ‘mercy’) Beyond the personal perspective, i.e. taking a professional viewpoint that transcends personal interest Learning through challenge, which entails exposing oneself fully to the situation at hand and paying attention to often inconvenient or alarming details Clients share the responsibility with regard to the outcome of a certain training programme.

All consultants at ZIN have included these points in their work. Furthermore, all have integrated meditation, working with metaphors and self-inquiry into their training programmes. These commonalities notwithstanding, each trainer has been granted considerable freedom to develop his or her own approach and tools according to the needs of a particular client. Each has brought a unique spiritual career to his or her work at ZIN. For instance, organisational psychologist Murielle Spanhoff, a consultant at ZIN since its inception, sees spirituality as identical to fundamental insights derived from authentic experience in concrete life situations. For her part,

196

Reframing Dutch Culture

Els Burger, an organisational psychologist and permanent staff member, draws inspiration from the books by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, Eckart Tolle, the contemporary German mystic, Wessel Ganzevoort, the Dutch spiritual management consultant, Johan Verspaete, his Belgian colleague, and others. With a background in progressive Roman Catholicism as well as working and teaching experience in the health care sector and social casework, Maria Kennis believes that ‘spirituality’ today means something like ‘being authentic in one’s work’, ‘to work from one’s own intrinsic potential’, and ‘to acknowledge one’s fallibility’ (Kennis 2004: 79–92). Apart from the permanent staff, freelance consultants working for ZIN have had backgrounds in Landmark Education, Sufism, Zen and New Age. Working with ideological tension has thus been part and parcel of Hoefman’s job description. His relation with the Fraters, in particular, has also given rise to a paradox. Whereas the Fraters wish to pass on their tradition, he is working for ZIN’s dynamic development and the growth of its own spiritual profile. A major point of contention between him and the Fraters had initially been the design of the room of silence (stilteruimte), the former chapel of Huize Steenwijk. The Fraters had been afraid that their heritage would be completely relinquished. While a satisfactory compromise was reached with regard to the design of the renovated chapel, another spiritual tradition has recently been integrated into ZIN. When De Tiltenberg – a Christian education centre in Vogelenzang founded by the lay order of the Women of Nazareth – had to close down for financial reasons in 2003, its thriving Zen group found a new refuge at ZIN. Eventually, Hoefman granted the Fraters their crucifix. At the same time, however, Dick Verstegen, the well-known Zen teacher, journalist and former chief editor of various Dutch newspapers as well as management consultant, was asked to chair the coordination and marketing team responsible for all spiritual programmes open to the wider public. He too brought an important network to ZIN both in terms of spiritual capital and potential clients. Not surprisingly, the open spiritual programmes have largely been based on either Christian or Buddhist sources of inspiration. With regard to the latter, these sources have mainly originated from the Zen tradition, which seemingly lends itself ‘to an effortless unification with inter-religious essentials such as compassion, solidarity and trust’.11 Conclusion The notions of spirituality negotiated at ZIN attest to the fact that the Fraters have indeed taken recourse to subjective-life spirituality in their effort to salvage the essence of their religiosity in contemporary Dutch society. The very existence of ZIN thus supports Heelas and Woodhead’s conjecture that the spiritual revolution has reached Christian institutions too. ZIN’s reinterpretation of the Fraters’ mission as a call for making professional work more humane and meaningful implies a life lived in profound connection with the unique experiences of oneself in relation

11 See ZIN brochure 2006/7.

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

197

to others. This way of life is predicated upon contemplating one’s innermost motivations and aspirations vis-à-vis the paradoxical parameters of the professional world. Everything at ZIN – the very materiality of the whole environment, the integration of mentally handicapped people into the staff, the different training programmes and retreats involving self-inquiry, meditation and contemplation – is geared to confronting people with perceptions of reality that interfere with their habitual routines and accepted wisdom. Through this interference, they are supposed to emotionally rediscover what is really important to them, not only in their work but in all areas of their life. It is this process that makes ZIN an organisation of ‘experiential difference’, where – according to Heelas and Woodhead’s definition – transcendence is approached not by way of external conformity to a religious way of life, but in deep inner experience and transformation of a holistic nature. As to whether ZIN testifies to a colonisation of the heritage of the Fraters – and Zen Buddhism for that matter – by individualist and capitalist forms of spirituality, a number of vital factors suggest an answer in the negative. First of all, individualism is not at all encouraged at ZIN. Starting with the architectural design of the building, there is almost no space where a person can really indulge in narcissistic pursuits. The artworks always direct attention to the other. Even the guest quarters are conceived in such a way that the inhabitant must feel part of a greater whole. For instance, there is opaque glass in the bathrooms that face the common hallway. While protecting the privacy of individual guests, it nevertheless exposes them to the gaze of anyone that happens to pass by. The mirrors in the bathrooms do not give a clear reflection, so that guests cannot see their faces properly – a vital obstacle to self-absorption. Moreover, clients cannot take their meals individually; they have to congregate with others in the refectory. The very mission of ZIN to make work more humane and meaningful expresses concern with the larger common good. The associated training calls upon every participant to work towards such a transcendent end from his or her own source of inspiration and motivation. As to the possible capitalist exploitation of religion at ZIN, we have to bear in mind that due to dwindling membership all churches in the Netherlands have been forced to enter the spiritual market to fight for their material existence. ZIN too was born out of this necessity. Nevertheless, it has resisted capitalist considerations as much as possible. Provided that ZIN can be self-sufficient, the Fraters also want it to cater for teams of volunteers and for low-wage employees from the health care and social work sectors. Special discounts have therefore been reserved for these groups. The surplus earned from the standard fees paid by corporations and other professional organisations is used to sponsor ZIN’s less privileged clients. The presence of the handicapped staff members and the ‘uneconomic’ attention to detail prevalent in all aspects of the ‘ZIN experience’ are further indications that capitalist interests are of lesser relevance here. The promulgation of an ecological way of living and the insistence on work as a calling also attest to the fact that spirituality at ZIN is indeed grounded in an awareness of mutual interdependence, the need for social justice and economically sustainable lifestyles.

198

Reframing Dutch Culture

I agree with Heelas and Woodhead that ZIN’s success at passing on the heritage of the CMM Brothers in a new guise is at least partly due to the fact that it is an organisation of experiential difference. However, equally important is a consideration put forward by Robert D. Putnam in his much-acclaimed book Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community: Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America (Putnam 2000: 66).

He also argued that mainstream American Protestant churches in particular have played (…) a vital role in bridging diverse groups within local communities, encouraging faceto-face contact, social linkages, and organisational networks that, in turn, are thought to generate interpersonal trust and collaboration in local communities on issues of common concern (Norris and Inglehart 2004: 227).

The social capital provided by the mainstream Protestant churches in the US has been particularly efficacious, precisely because their networks have been ‘bridging’ ones. They have cut across different social groups, thereby fostering conditions for collective action, both in terms of community building and economic production (Norris and Inglehart 2004: 181–182, 191–192, 227). The same holds true for ZIN, which is well connected with different constituencies of the broader Dutch society. Paradoxically, that is why its very existence – which to a certain extent is a neo-liberal response to the challenges of ‘enterprise culture’ – might attest to an ‘emergence of new forms of engaged spirituality grounded in awareness of our mutual interdependence, the need for social justice and economically sustainable lifestyles’ that are able and willing to resist, as was hoped by Carrette and King, the capitalist excesses of neo-liberalism and its attempt at taking over religion. An interesting indication of ZIN’s prospects – and therefore those of the Fraters’ transforming mission – in the Netherlands is a key insight that Norris and Inglehart have derived from the European Value Surveys (EVS) and World Values Surveys (WVS) compiled between 1981 and 2001. I am referring here to their proposed nexus between existential security and secularisation. Arguing that rising levels of existential security is conducive to secularisation, Norris and Inglehart defined secularisation as being rooted in a profound loss of faith in religious authorities and the social purpose of their regime, resulting in a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs (Norris and Inglehart 2004: 5, 7, 10, 13–14, 26, 217, 220 and 231). The current decrease in existential security in terms of employment and job opportunity throughout the Western world, including the Netherlands, might therefore reverse the secularisation process. I do not believe, however, that traditional religion will see a revival in Europe any time soon. A spiritual revolution as outlined by Heelas and Woodhead seems to be much more likely. ZIN’s success has in any case prompted the leadership of other congregations in the Netherlands to emulate the example of the Fraters of Tilburg. Another indication

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

199

of the impact of ZIN on Dutch society as a whole is perhaps the recent appointment of the 81-year-old Jesuit Paul de Blot as the first ‘Professor of Organisational Innovation and Spirituality’ at Nijenrode University, a renowned Dutch business school.12 References Anbeek, Christa W. (2003), Zin in zen. De aantrekkingskracht van zen in Nederland en België. Rotterdam: Ashoka. Aupers, Stef (2004), In de ban van moderniteit. De sacralisering van het zelf en computertechnologie. Amsterdam: Aksant. Aupers, Stef and Anneke van Otterloo (2000), New Age. Een godsdiensthistorische en sociologische benadering. Kampen: Kok. Becker, Johan W. and R. Vink (1994), Secularisatie in Nederland 1966–1991. De verandering van opvattingen en enkele gedragingen. Rijswijk: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Becker, Johan W., J.J.M. de Hart and J. Mens (1997), Secularisatie en alternatieve zingeving in Nederland. Rijswijk: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Becker, Johan W. and J.S.J. de Wit (2000), Secularisatie in de jaren negentig. Kerklidmaatschap, veranderingen in opvattingen en een prognose. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Becker, Jos and Joep de Hart (2006), Godsdienstige veranderingen in Nederland. Verschuivingen in de binding met de kerken en de christelijke traditie. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Berk, Tjeu van den (1998), Individualisme, bron van verontrustiging maar tevens weg naar authenticiteit, in De Jong and Steggerda 1998: 111–124. Blommestijn, Hein and Jos Huls (1998), Barmhartigheid – een levensroeping. Het hart van religieus leven bij Joannes Zwijsen. Nijmegen: Titus Brandsma Instituut and Valkhof Pers. Carrette, Jeremy and Richard King (2005), Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge. Covey, Stephen (1989), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. London: Simon & Schuster. De Jong, Aad and Moniek Steggerda (eds) (1998), Vorming in geloofscommunicatie:.Een onderzoek naar geloofscomunicatie in katholieke vormings- en bezinningscentra. Baarn: Gooi en Sticht. Derkse, Wil (2003), Een levensregel voor beginners. Benedictijnse spiritualiteit voor het dagelijkse leven. Tielt: Lannoo. Hanegraaff, Wouter (1996), New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Heelas, Paul (1996), The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the

12 De Telegraaf, Saturday, 18 March 2006, p. 23.

200

Reframing Dutch Culture

Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Heelas, Paul (1999), ‘Introduction: Detraditionalization and its Rivals’, in Paul Heelas, Scott Lash and Paul Morris (eds.), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, 1–20. Oxford: Blackwell. Heelas, Paul, and Paul Morris (1992), Enterprise culture: its values and value, in Paul Heelas and Paul Morris (eds), The Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate. London: Routledge. Heelas, Paul and Linda Woodhead (2005). The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Henkel, Reinhard and Hans Knippenberg (2005), Secularisation and the Rise of Religious Pluralism: Main Features of the Changing Religious Landscape of Europe, in Hans Knippenberg (ed.), The Changing Religious Landscape of Europe. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1–13. Hogema, Ineke, ‘The Game of Your Life? The Transformation Management of Oibibio Business’, in Karen Lisa Salamon, Karen Lisa and Martin Ramstedt (eds), The Spiritual Turn in Business: A Qualitative Critique (forthcoming). Jones, Laurie Beth (1994), Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership. New York: Hyperion. Kennis, Maria (2004), Tussen instrumenteel en medemenselijk handelen in de zorg, in Henk-Jan Hoefman and Lennette Schuijt (eds), Het menselijk gezicht van werk. De integratie van professionaliteit en spiritualiteit. Rotterdam: Asoka, 79–92. Knippenberg, Hans (2005), ‘The Netherlands: Selling Churches and Building Mosques’, in Hans Knippenberg (ed.), The Changing Religious Landscape of Europe. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 88–106. Luckmann, Thomas (1999), The Privatization of Religion and Morality, in Paul Heelas, Scott Lash and Paul Morris (eds), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 72–86. Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart (2004), Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Robert D. (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ramstedt, Martin (1999), ‘Weiche’ Faktoren im ‘harten’ Diskurs. Intuition und Emotion im modernen Management, in: Ursula Kreft et al. (eds), Kassensturz. Politische Hypotheken der Berliner Republik. Duisburg: Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung, 99–125. Ramstedt, Martin (forthcoming), New Age and Business, in James Lewis and Daniel Kemp (eds), New Age Handbook. Leiden: Brill. Rose, Nikolas (1998), Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salamon, Karen Lisa G. (2000): No borders in business: the managerial discourse of organisational holism, in Timothy Bewes and Jeremy Gilbert (eds), Cultural Capitalism – Politics after New Labour. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Salamon, Karen Lisa G. (2002), Prophets of a Cultural Capitalism: An Ethnography

Transforming Notions of Mercy at Work

201

of Romantic Spiritualism in Business Management. Folk. Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 44, 89–115. Schuijt, Lenette (2001), Met ziel en zakelijkheid: Paradoxen in leiderschap. Schiedam: Scriptum. Schuijt, Lennette and Henk-Jan Hoefman (2004), Het menselijk gezicht van werk, in Henk-Jan Hoefman and Lennette Schuijt (eds.), Het menselijk gezicht van werk. De integratie van professionaliteit en spiritualiteit. Rotterdam: Asoka, 9–18. Steggerda, Moniek (1998a), De deelnemers aan het onderzoek, in De Jong and Steggerda 1998: 51–66. Steggerda, Moniek (1998b), Hoe werken de cursussen? Evaluatie, effecten en verschillen, in De Jong and Steggerda 1998: 87–99. Verstegen, Dick (2000), Alleen maar nu. Eindhoven: Wegener Dagbladen. Verstegen, Dick (2005), Zenboeddhisme. Kampen: Kok. Vest, Norvene (1996), Friend of the Soul: A Benedictine Spirituality of Work. Cambridge, Boston: Cowley Publications. Zaretsky, Eli (2004), Secrets of the Soul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Zondag, Hessel (1998), Historische achtergronden van het vormings- en bezinningswerk, in De Jong and Steggerda 1998: 15–25. Zondag, Hessel (1998), ‘Opzet en uitvoering’, in De Jong and Steggerda 1998: 41–49.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 10

Vernacular Authenticity: Negotiating Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Netherlands John Helsloot

Mother’s Day is actually a nasty business of trade people. That one day, you see children buying their mothers flowers, while they call them names the rest of the year. As a child, I was quite different; I had no pocket money and yet, almost every week, I went out to pick a bouquet of wild flowers for my dear mother. Yes, I picked them myself, those little flowers. I do love my mother dearly.

In an interview for a women’s magazine in 1966, Dutch singer Gert Timmermans apparently knew how to pick his words as well. Timmermans was renowned in the 1960s for such sentimental songs as ‘I honour your grey hairs’ (Ik heb eerbied voor jouw grijze haren), which was particularly appealing to elderly women. Consciously and astutely, he presented himself as a sincere youngster, placing his self-denying and repeated efforts – in short his authenticity – in sharp contrast to the unauthentic behaviour of other children. To him, their so-called expressions of filial love were but a whim and a fraud, as could be expected of such comparatively affluent and easy-going children who knew nothing of the countryside. In their baseness and empty-headedness, these children eagerly let themselves be taken in by the lures of impersonal commerce. Ethnology and Authenticity To ethnologists, this mental operation has a familiar ring. It lies at the very heart of their discipline, as it was conceived in the late eighteenth century. Far removed from the superficial and internationally oriented culture of life in the cities, the simple utterances and manners of people in the countryside retained truthfulness, originality and authenticity, only to be unearthed by perceptive scholars. Current scholars are obviously well aware of the presuppositions that underlie this particular view of culture. Much historiographic work has shown that this mechanism has been derived from ways of coping with the onslaught of modern society. More specifically, by promoting visions of harmony and continuity in the face of social divisiveness and rapid change, it is also derived from strategies for resisting or at least canalising

204

Reframing Dutch Culture

its progress. Symbolic fences were necessary for preventing the loss of true self or maintaining stable identities. Particularly in the twentieth century, ethnologists have played a major part in this ideological project in the Western world, and the Netherlands is no exception. Lectures and writings about the nature of popular culture, traditions or folklore; exhibitions of material expressions and a variety of live performances and staged enactments have exposed the general public to the view that the allegedly timeless culture of rural society contained superior moral qualities. For their own good and that of the nation as a whole, people should relate to this authentic culture and participate in it. Although this intellectual offensive has now been well documented and analysed (e.g. Köstlin 1996; Bendix 1997; for the Netherlands: Van Ginkel 1999; De Jong 2000; Van der Zeijden 2000; Dekker 2002; Henkes 2005), the study of the popular reception of the categories that frame this ethnological vision of culture is still in its infancy (Eriksen 1994; Knecht and Niedermüller 2002; Götz 2004; Schippers 2005). Ethnologists became aware of the extent to which the European public had effectively appropriated their teachings when, particularly since the 1960s, it showed no hesitation to elaborate freely on them (the so-called ‘Rücklauf’-process; cf. Bendix 1997: 177–178). For example, to legitimise a local community festival, more than one of its organisers made up an attractive combination of ethnological and historical ingredients, arbitrarily taken from often dubious or undisclosed sources. Paradoxically, great care was often taken in these performances to ensure the perceived authenticity of folk costumes, folk dances and the like. At first, many academic ethnologists were dismayed when confronted with these would-be traditions, denouncing them as unjustified fabrications (‘fakelore’), which should be exposed as such. In the 1960s and 1970s, they began an often-painful process of self-reflection, questioning the basic premises and concepts of their discipline. Demonstrably, many so-called traditions were not unchanging expressions of a timeless and predominantly rural culture, but recent inventions. The concept of folklorism (cf. Bendix 1997: 176–187, Roodenburg 2000: 98–104) generated a more positive attitude. Focussing on the actual conditions and mechanisms underlying these new ‘traditional’ phenomena, this conception stimulated ethnologists to make sense of what they saw in the field in a less biased way. Only after an alternation of generations in ethnology and the general impact of a postmodern philosophy that denounced all hierarchy in value judgements, however, was it recognised that questioning the claimed authenticity of traditions prevented one to come to grips with cultural reality. In order to do justice to practitioners of would-be traditions, it was advisable to accept these festivals, performances and representations, not as distortions, but as expressions of equally authentic emotions, perceptions or interests (e.g. Smidchens 1999: 63–64, Rooijakkers 2000: 181–182, Van der Zeijden 2004: 13–18). As Anne Eriksen underlines, tradition is ‘not an essence from the past, but a discourse in the present: what is said to be tradition is tradition’. Quoting Richard Bauman, Eriksen argues that tradition is best understood

Vernacular Authenticity

205

as ‘an act of authentication’ within a wider communicative process (Eriksen 2005: 297–298). In this chapter, joining currently emerging research (Van de Port 2004), I argue that these notions of the authenticity (or unauthenticity) of traditions and rituals and the debates that evolve around them have not been confined to academia. There also is a ‘popular culture of authenticity’ (Taylor 1991: 61). Gert Timmermans was certainly not alone in playing with basic ethnological interpretative constructs. Goffman’s concept of frame is helpful for grasping these concepts because, as Turner (1982: 28) states ‘Celebratory behavior is “framed” behavior’. Frames provide actors with ‘relational styles, perceptions, values, sentiments, and social and symbolic types’ on specific occasions. They may be taken as mental tools that define ‘the situations in which we find ourselves’ and offer ‘a way of organizing our experiences’ (Manning 1992: 118). They also allow analysts to grasp ‘the ways in which actors negotiate and structure the meaning of experience’ (Crook and Taylor 1980: 244). Goffman discriminated between ‘cynical’ and ‘sincere performances’ and observed that, ‘As members of an audience, (...) it is natural for us to feel that the impression the performer seeks to give may be true or false, genuine or spurious, valid or phony’ (quoted in MacAloon 1984: 6). Similarly, Schmied (1996: 59) distinguishes a ‘pole of authenticity, a seemingly automatic inner reaction to a situation or object’ in the expression of emotions, as well as another pole, in which ‘social norms are followed without the emotions being present. This latter behaviour is often discredited as hypocrisy and cynicism’. Other researchers have also ascribed to actors ‘a finely tuned capacity for discriminating among frames’; in other words, they discriminate between ‘accurate’ and ‘fabricated’ frames. The latter generate ‘false ideas’ (Burns 1992: 278–279; Manning 1992: 126). Rituals that combine gift giving with notions of traditionality represent one area of cultural behaviour that particularly exemplifies the operation of these attitudes. In general, customs express ‘a narrative about an ideal world’, about ‘how we could and should behave towards each other: loving, thoughtful, kind’ (Frykman and Löfgren 1996: 15). Paradoxically, within this ideal world, ‘gift giving (...) is socially defined as non-normative (i.e. non-rule governed) behavior. Forms of gift giving which contradict that definition of the situation are likely to be seen as not quite right’. Valued instead are ‘spontaneous acts of people who have genuine feelings for each other’ (Cheal 1988: 85–86). The standard for evaluating these acts is their authenticity or the lack thereof. As Schmied’s notion of ‘pole’ indicates, however, it is not a simple matter of one or the other. The evaluating process is more complex because, as Collins (1988: 58) rightly comments, ‘It is not just that different people might have different definitions of the same situation, but that each participant can be in several complex layers of situational definition at the same time’ (see also Hochschild 1983: 76–86, 185–198). This raises the question of how actors recognise, deny or negotiate the authenticity of (gift-giving) traditions and, by extension, the authenticity of their own involvement in these traditions, as well as how they can remain true to their own selves in this context. This is probably best exposed by testing the notion of

206

Reframing Dutch Culture

authenticity. Confrontations with new or foreign situations may be prime occasions for eliciting such reflexivity (cf. MacAloon 1984: 11–13; Bendix 1997: 8). As a case in point, I analyse the introduction of and response to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (both of which originated in the United States) in the Netherlands. Notions of authenticity and unauthenticity play a key role in the perception and performance of these rituals. My main source of information is the discourse (e.g. comments, stories and advertisements) that appears annually around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, particularly in the 1940s through the 1970s (in later decades, a saturation point had apparently been reached), in a fairly representative sample of newspapers, women’s and youth magazines and trade journals.1 The limitations of these sources are obvious; they cannot possibly be said to reflect actual opinions and valuations of participants or bystanders (Hausen 1984: 484; LaRossa 1997: 177–179). They may nonetheless be assumed to offer an indication of the possible range of reactions; rather than conveying a uniform ideology, the sources display ‘disruptions and inconsistencies and spaces for negotiation’ (McRobbie 1994: 163). Conversely, they may have been influential in shaping these attitudes. Additional data were drawn from an ethnological questionnaire on the celebration of both Days, which was issued in 2003 by the department of ethnology at the Amsterdam Meertens Institute. In order to provide a general background, the first section of this chapter describes the various campaigns to promote Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Netherlands, and the second section deals with the types of responses – positive, negative or aimed at negotiating a middle ground – to these initiatives. On the factual basis that is presented in these sections, the main issue is revisited in the concluding section. Promoting Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Netherlands Word of the new holiday probably first reached the Netherlands through evangelical channels. As early as the late 1910s, the Dutch Salvation Army had begun to incorporate Mother’s Day into its yearly cycle of holidays. At special meetings of its local branches on a Sunday in June or September, officers testified to the privilege of having been brought up by a devout and good mother, no doubt echoing the views expressed in the Army’s journal Strijdkreet (War Cry) that mothers were ‘a revelation of God’, second only to Jesus. Honouring one’s mother was thus associated with spiritual benefits. For the same reason the Salvation Army has sent flowers and greeting cards to the inmates of the country’s prisons for decades. Some slight efforts were apparently also made to induce children, of salvationists and others, to 1 Newspapers consulted, amongst others: Algemeen Handelsblad, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, Het Parool, De Telegraaf, De Tijd, Trouw, de Volkskrant, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden. Women’s magazines: Beatrijs, Eva, De Haardvriend, Libelle, Margriet, Moeder, Mimosa, Prinses, Rosita, De Spiegel. Trade journals: De Bloemisterij, Floralia, Handelsblad voor den Tuinbouw, Vakblad voor de Bloemisterij.

Vernacular Authenticity

207

celebrate Mother’s Day at home by sending their mothers flowers or letters and by doing small domestic chores. This idea was thus obviously not completely unknown in 1923 and 1924, when a national-scale introduction of a Mother’s Day was proposed at the meetings of

Figure 10.1 ‘A flower for Mother and our heart for Mother’s God’ Poster for the florist industry’s Mother’s Day Campaign (1975).

208

Reframing Dutch Culture

the Royal Dutch Society for Horticulture and Botany (Koninklijke Nederlandse Maatschappij voor Tuinbouw en Plantkunde) – a professional organisation dedicated to promoting and safeguarding the interests of this sector of the economy. This initiative was prompted primarily by similar efforts that had been made by florists in Germany and Austria in the same years, and which were mediated through wellread international horticultural magazines (Hausen 1984: 478; Boesch 2001: 27, 37). The American origin of the Day, however, was duly acknowledged. ‘The idea is imported. America led the way’.2 In a circular letter issued by the Society in 1924, its local branches were invited to use the United States as a model. ‘Surely the Dutch Mother is as important as her American counterpart is, and no Dutch child would wish to be second to the American child in his affection and ardent love for his Mother’. As in Germany and the United States (Hausen 1984: 479; Schmidt 1995: 256–267), the Society presented itself from the outset as an organisation ‘honouring the idealistic side of the trade’. As the Society’s chair stated unreservedly, however, this coincided with keeping a keen eye on its commercial interests. Central to the florist industry’s concept of Mother’s Day was that all mothers were to be honoured simultaneously (i.e. nationally) on a fixed day. Although mothers obviously already had birthday celebrations, Mother’s Day addressed the ‘idea of the Mother’ in addition to individual mothers. Correspondingly, only an ‘ideal’ gift could be deemed appropriate. The Society expostulated that a floral tribute best met this condition. Consistent with the self-image of disinterestedness that it displayed, the Society pointed out that buying flowers at a market or in a florist’s shop, depending upon means, was only one option. It was equally valid to pick them in the fields (cf. Schmidt 1995: 265–267) – one of the origins of Gert Timmermans’ approach. Based on these premises, the Society launched a concerted campaign to win over the Dutch public for the new holiday, their first Mother’s Day, to be held on Wednesday, 20 May 1925. Het boek der moeders (The Mothers’ Book) was published to underline the truly national character of the Day. In this book, leading intellectuals and writers from various religious and ideological backgrounds contributed meditations ‘on an ideal possession, common to all’ – their mothers (Van Zuylen 1925: 7). There was a broadcast on Mother’s Day on the national radio. Local branches of the Society sent articles on Mother’s Day and advertisements to local newspapers and sought the cooperation of clergymen, priests, school teachers and voluntary societies in order to familiarise their flocks, pupils and members with ‘the elevated idea underlying a general tribute to Mother’. Teachers directed schoolchildren, who had been provided with small paper flags bearing the message ‘For Mother’, to the local flower market to buy plants for their mothers. To children in the late 1920s, someone recalled, all of these activities truly resembled the celebration of a national holiday (DijkemaJansen 1977: 8). In the years to come, the primary school was to be a major locus for propagating the Day. 2 Eigen Haard 51 (1925) 132. Mother’s Day could simultaneously be described as ‘an heirloom of Germany’ and ‘typically American’, De Bloemisterij 14–5–1936, Handelsblad voor den Tuinbouw 15–5–1936.

Vernacular Authenticity

209

From 1931 onwards, the Netherlands conformed to practices in the United States and some other European countries by establishing the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day (Van Gilst 1998: 35). Each year, the holiday was signalled by newspaper articles and advertisements; in the mid-1930s, the advertisements adopted a slogan that would be used for decades: Moederdag – Bloemendag (‘Mother’s Day – Flower Day’). In their May issues, magazines for women, families and youth provided various hints, inspired by the florists’ campaign, for how to celebrate the Day. In addition to the recurring radio broadcasts, Mother’s Day also became an item in television programmes in the late 1950s. Although the florists tried to claim a monopoly for their products on Mother’s Day, this did not remain uncontested. From the late 1920s, the Dutch Society of Confectioners (Nederlandsche Banketbakkers Vereeniging), styling themselves as “Mother’s friend” (de vriend van Moeder; Van Gilst 1998: 35), advanced the notion of a fancy cake as the most appropriate gift for Mother’s Day. They even remodelled the florists’ slogan to read Moederdag – Taartendag (‘Mother’s Day – Cake Day’). The material nature of cakes seems to have restrained confectioners from propagating the high-minded ideas concerning the moral significance of the Day that were advanced by the florists. A more spectacular element in their campaign, which emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, was the presentation of free Mother’s Day cakes to new mothers, women in hospitals, mayors’ wives and, up to the present day, the queen of the Netherlands, who is sometimes known as de moeder des lands (‘the mother of the country’). These presentations obviously attracted much-sought publicity for their product. As could be expected, other trades began to discover business opportunities as well, albeit not on an organised scale. Appealing simply to the joy that their items would bring to grateful mothers, an almost unlimited array of manufacturers and shopkeepers began to advertise Mother’s Day gifts, particularly of household goods (which were meant to ‘ease and alleviate her task’), cosmetics and undergarments. Since the 1950s, there has been a growing tendency to accentuate the femininity of mothers in addition to their motherhood on Mother’s Day. Such ‘stereotypical gifts’ as cakes, bouquets and anything domestic were to be abandoned in favour of ‘something really personal’, such as a piece of jewellery or a shawl. This way, the notion of ‘indulging’ mothers on their Day was given new shades of meaning (Jacobs 2003: 24). Even on the ideological front, the florists were unable to sustain exclusive ownership of the Day. Miss C.P. van Asperen van der Velde, the director of an institution for popular education, Ons Huis (Our Home), which was based in a working-class district in Amsterdam, immediately embraced the idea of a Mother’s Day. She had a less positive opinion, however, of the rather narrow focus on selling flowers that the Society for Horticulture maintained. On a visit to the United States in 1928, she saw Mother’s Day celebrated as ‘a perfectly ordinary family holiday, enjoyable and pleasant’. Thereafter, she decided to impart a more idealistic

210

Reframing Dutch Culture

foundation to the Day.3 From a general drive to promote ‘harmony in the family, brotherhood in humanity at large’, she focussed on raising women’s self–image as mothers. After all, they were fulfilling an ‘elevated, holy task’ in society (quoted in Sorée and Snepvangers 1992: 86–87). She established a Mother’s Day committee and propagated her views in lectures and radio talks (Van Asperen van der Velde 1946: 118–124). Some Roman Catholics became another major ideological force with which the florist industry would have to contend. In the Roman Catholic liturgy, the entire month of May was already dedicated to a mother – Mary, the divine mother. To avoid interference with socio-religious practice, many Roman Catholics had voiced ‘objections’ to the new holiday since its inception. The Society for Horticulture attempted to accommodate these reservations by setting Mother’s Day on other dates (e.g. Mother’s Day was observed on 7 July in 1926). Because the Society was unwilling to maintain this policy, however, Catholics initially appeared to adopt a general attitude of aloofness, which was understandable, as they had been subjected to some strong, negative opinions. In 1932, one Catholic women’s magazine quoted the German cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, to whom celebrating Mother’s Day represented ‘one further step in the direction of de-Christianisation, of paganism’.4 The awareness of the neutral, vaguely Protestant (or at any rate, decidedly non– Catholic) origin of the Day may have contributed to this view as well (cf. Van Es 1958: 12). The florist industry’s ‘national’ approach notwithstanding, this mattered in the heavily ‘pillarised’ (i.e. strongly divided internally along religious lines) Dutch society of the time.5 As the church hierarchy apparently offered no clear guidelines, other voices could be heard at the same time. In 1931, the Roman Catholic League for Large Families (R.K. Bond voor Groote Gezinnen) even ventured to take the initiative of celebrating Mother’s Day in the Netherlands (De Jager 2001: 198).6 By wilfully ignoring the previous efforts of other interest groups, the League clearly sought to establish the Day on a new platform that would be acceptable to Roman Catholics as well. With the exception of their recommendations to dedicate special masses to mothers, however, their proposal followed the established practice of presenting flowers and helping mothers with their housekeeping chores on that day. Local parish priests and other Catholic organisations made similar efforts to ‘Catholicise’ or ‘Christianise’ the Day. For example, as a boy, the future Dutch cardinal Adrianus Simonis played the piano in a Mother’s Day broadcast on Catholic radio in 1939. One underlying component of this approach, which gained momentum in the 1940s and 1950s (Van der Veer 2001: 9), was the growing awareness that Mother’s 3 Libelle 8–5–1965. 4 De Katholieke Vrouw 7–5–1932. 5 I found no examples of organised Protestant resistance to Mother’s Day. 6 The League’s incentive was most probably the commemoration that Pope Pius XI held that very year (1931) of the 1500th anniversary of the proclamation of Mary’s divine motherhood at the Council of Ephese.

Vernacular Authenticity

211

Day could ‘no longer be denied’, that it was admittedly a ‘happy thought’ and that it suited ‘us Catholics very well’;7 it should therefore be incorporated into Catholic devotional practise, both public and domestic. For decades, Catholic children had been familiar with decorating Mary’s statue with flowers during the month of May in their churches, schools and homes. In a gradual shift of emphasis, ‘Mary’s month’ became known as ‘mothers’ month’, and celebrating Mother’s Day represented its ‘apotheosis’.8 This combination of religious and secular practice was even more natural, as Catholic children were taught to imagine that they had ‘two mothers’, ‘Mary in heaven and mother at home’ (quoted in Van der Veer 2001: 10), both of whom were equally fond of receiving a surprise gift of flowers. When the Church began to lose its hold on the lives of individual Catholics in the 1960s, this specific Catholic rendering of Mother’s Day gradually lost its meaning and appeal. From then on, Catholics have generally participated in the Day without any further religiously inspired reservations or appropriations. Whereas Mother’s Day was heavily instrumentalised in Nazi Germany to further the regime’s ends and war effort (Weyrather 1993), there is no evidence that it received a similar ideological twist in the Netherlands during the years of German occupation.9 On the contrary, the florist industry adopted the strategy, as they stated prudently, of reminding the public of the Day ‘without giving offence to anybody’.10 Because goods other than flowers were in increasingly short supply as possible gifts, the war gave an unexpected boost to the Day. Excellent sales were reported and, as stated contentedly in 1942, ‘In a few years time, Mother’s Day has gained enormous popularity in this country’.11 When this exceptional condition lost ground after the war, florists were once again forced to fight for their territory. The American origins of Mother’s Day are now a matter of common knowledge. In the 1980s, however, it was (possibly unwittingly) sometimes misrepresented as a Nazi invention (e.g. ‘occasioned by the birthday of Hitler’s mother’) – by feminists who opposed the glorification of what they felt were outdated and repressive gender roles on Mother’s Day (Schlimmgen-Ehmke 1988: 147; De Jager 2001: 199).12 In 1973, women declining this ‘sop for a whole year’s work’ raised a makeshift statue for the ‘unknown mother of the family’ on Amsterdam’s central Dam square. To some degree, these protests left their mark. Since the war, however, Mother’s Day has largely been a self-perpetuating ritual and ideological machine (as was the case in Germany, Schlimmgen-Ehmke 1988: 151; Matter 1988: 155), which has continued to elicit both positive and negative responses. As Frykman and Löfgren 7 De Volkskrant 10–5–1947, De Engelbewaarder 1–5–1947, De Tijd 11–5–1946. 8 Taptoe 1–5–1954. 9 I found no editorials on Mother’s Day in the Dutch national-socialist party’s newspaper Volk en Vaderland for the years 1933–1944. 10 De Bloemisterij 1–5–1941. 11 De Bloemisterij 14–5–1942. Cf. De Bloemisterij 15–5–1941, 21–5–1942, 13–5–1943, 20–5–1943 (‘a great success’). 12 Leaflet issued by Vrouwen tegen sexisme & fascisme (Women against sexism & fascism), Amsterdam 1982. Meertens Institute Archives.

212

Reframing Dutch Culture

(1996:16) observe, ‘Just as much as they [customs] produce cultural conformity, they also stimulate protest and alternatives. They become their own critics, precisely because they make certain sides of a culture visible’. These responses, however, referred more to the gradual incorporation of the Day in the domain of ‘tradition’ than they did to external ideational forces. I address this discourse, along with the intricate processes of negotiation that it entailed, after the next section. Compared to the publicity and commotion surrounding the introduction of Mother’s Day, Father’s Day entered the Dutch scene more or less casually. Even though there is no explicit evidence of a connection, Father’s Day in the Netherlands probably emerged in the wake of renewed efforts to promote Father’s Day in America in the mid- and late 1930s (Schmidt 1995: 275, 279, 286; LaRossa 1997: 170). During this period, voices would occasionally appear in the Dutch press asking ‘Father’s Day, why not?’ or, more positively, ‘(...) if there is a Mother’s Day, there should be a Father’s Day as well!’ As in the United States, this plain logic, which was also repeated in women’s magazines in the 1950s, was particularly appealing to trades that felt they had missed their share in a gift-giving market that had been successfully created by other trades for the occasion of Mother’s Day. In 1936, the Dutch Union of Tobacconists’ Societies (Nederlandsche Bond van SigarenwinkeliersVereenigingen) took the initiative to promote Father’s Day in the Netherlands.13 Either independently or in mutual competition, the idea was also adopted by men’s outfitters in the late 1940s. Remarkably, each group proclaimed its own Father’s Day, the former fixing it on the second Sunday in October, the latter on the third Sunday of June; the result was the sudden appearance of two Father’s Days. Conforming to the American practice, the disagreement was settled around 1950 in favour of the June date. Understandably, the Roman Catholic Church voiced no objections, as they had finally accepted Mother’s Day around the same time. Also echoing the florist industry’s original slogan, tobacconists began to advertise with the slogan Vaderdag – Sigarendag (‘Father’s Day – Cigar Day’). In the 1950s and early 1960s, they copied the florists’ strategy of presenting cigars to mayors, the youngest or eldest father in town and to retirees in an effort to attract publicity for Father’s Day. The notion of honouring an ‘idea of the father’, as promoted in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s (Schmidt 1995: 289; LaRossa 1997: 189), was generally absent in promotional activities. The tobacconists simply conveyed the message that a Father’s Day gift of cigars would render ‘a content Father’, who would ‘increase a family’s happiness and conviviality’. Paralleling developments in Mother’s Day advertising, a specific focus emerged on fathers as males who longed for such gifts as after-shave. Florists tried to claim their share as well by advocating ‘real men’s plants, robust and full of character’ as gifts, and by propagating Father’s Day as ‘Plant Day’. In the 1970s and 1980s, a representation emerged of a father who, instead of being glad to receive the canonical and outdated trio of cigars, socks and ties (in Dutch, “the three S’s”: sigaren, sokken, 13 De Sigarenwinkelier 22–8–1936. I owe this source to L. Bracco Gartner, Tabaks Historisch Museum, Delft.

Vernacular Authenticity

213

stropdassen), was ‘ready for a change’, now preferring such items as gardening tools or fishing rods. For example, the notion of ‘indulging Father’ transformed from not disturbing his afternoon nap or his reading the newspaper (as was popular in the 1950s and 1960s), to allowing him to express himself freely in his hobbies and leisure activities on ‘his’ Day. This transformation corresponds to shifts in patterns of the self-image and gender roles of fathers in society as a whole. As was the case with Mother’s Day gifts, such gifts and offers were not generally welcomed, no matter how attractive they may have appeared from the outside. Negotiating the Authenticity of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Right from the start, those who promoted Mother’s Day in the Netherlands were well aware that ‘some sceptics’ might reject the idea (Van Zuylen 1925: 7). As mentioned before, some Roman Catholics initially opposed the Day. From the late 1930s, others were able to negotiate its wider acceptance by stressing outward congruities. The response by organised socialism followed a similar pattern. In 1925, Mother’s Day was considered a ‘worthy product of degenerated capitalist society’, ‘exploiting sentiments of motherly and filial love to benefit commercial profits’, and ‘set up exclusively to the advantage of mothers of a certain class’.14 In later years, these voices fell silent, and leftist newspapers followed mainstream opinion by largely endorsing both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. In both cases, references to wider ideological standards caused the new holiday to be weighed in the balance and found wanting for a short time. Another type of standard, however, was (and remains) more pertinent to the response on both Days in general. Although less articulate or elaborate, this standard was powerful, as it emanated directly from people’s understanding of their authentic selves, especially as mothers and fathers, and of the authenticity of calendar traditions. Although they do not form an explicit ideology, these reactions are not entirely unsystematic. They appear to revolve around a rather limited set of structural oppositions that claim, on the one hand, that these Days should be rejected because they were new, superfluous, inspired by twisted ideals, commercial, artificial, and imposed from above, or, on the other hand, that they should be welcomed for reasons that were based on the exact opposite. Interestingly, these opinions and sentiments could be firmly held, while proving themselves, often at the same time, equally open for discussion and negotiation. In the following section, I consider these arguments and the ambivalence surrounding them in some detail. New and Superfluous Holidays Whereas ‘anything was possible’ in the United States, the florist industry’s trade journal commented in the early 1950s that it was regrettably ‘an unpleasant trait of 14 De Proletarische Vrouw 14–5–1925, cf. 14–5–1930. I found no similar condemnations of Mother’s Day in later volumes of this weekly.

214

Reframing Dutch Culture

ours [the Dutch] that we are so sceptical’ with respect to attitudes about Mother’s Day. Somewhat later, this observation was confirmed as prominent figures denounced Father’s Day as a ‘silly thing’ or a ‘peculiar affair’. Such a Day was something ‘new’, and ‘it is in our national character always to be somewhat dismissive of anything new’. The novelty of Mother’s Day, however, was more open to debate. Hausen (1984: 474) maintains that, in Germany, Mother’s Day was not so much an invention of the 1920s as it was a practical summary of diffuse ideas already prevalent at the time. This also pertains to the Netherlands. The ‘idea of the mother’ to which the florists referred was certainly not wholly new or unknown (Dankbaar 1984; Bakker 1987). Motherhood or motherly love itself was not at issue; the debate centred on whether or how to celebrate it. For example, some argued that such an occasion already existed in the celebration of mothers’ birthdays. In the bourgeois culture of the late nineteenth-century, this occasion was gaining importance as a family ritual. Nonetheless, birthdays were certainly not celebrated in all classes of Dutch society prior to the Second World War. This did not prevent some of those taking issue with Mother’s Day from focussing on ‘mother’s birthday’ to make their point. This occasion was ‘good and nice and beautiful, because it was natural and a matter of course’, compared to ‘a massively celebrated family holiday with its ready-made gifts’.15 In addition, mothers were supposedly well satisfied with having only ‘one birthday party a year’. In reaction, others claimed that a mother’s many domestic duties, even on her birthday, prevented her from experiencing it ‘as a true holiday’. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, was not intended to honour ‘her person’ as much as it was intended to recognise her ‘as the central figure in the domestic circle’. Mothers would therefore ‘not suffer themselves to be misled that an annual Mother’s Day was superfluous’. On the contrary, ‘this holiday answers a real need and makes up for a deficiency’. To bring this home to those around her, a children’s story in the 1930s offered a role model for negotiating this view. After a ‘fierce internal struggle’, a girl who had initially considered the practice of giving gifts on Mother’s Day ‘nonsense’ – ‘that’s what birthdays are for’ – was finally convinced of the superiority of Mother’s Day, having felt bad about denying her mother a gift. Ideal Mothers and Fathers Above and beyond individual mothers, motherhood itself was to be symbolically celebrated on Mother’s Day. In the late 1930s, florists admitted that ‘we Dutchmen have difficulty appreciating symbolism’. They did, however, claim an exception for ‘the mother symbol to which we are still a bit susceptible, aren’t we?’ Florists and other Mother’s Day activists sought to promote and exploit the power of this symbolism. One of their tactics was to represent mothers as victims. Particularly in the 1950s, women’s magazines contained a steady lamentation that the domestic 15 De Proletarische Vrouw 14–5–1930, Het Parool 8–5–1954 (Mrs. A. RomeinVerschoor).

Vernacular Authenticity

215

work of mothers was ‘not fully appreciated’ (i.e. by their families). Mother’s Day was therefore a welcome occasion to set matters straight and ‘to thank her for a year’s work’, as several of the Meertens Institute’s informants wrote. When mothers began to take jobs outside the home in the 1960s, this lamentation re-emerged, claiming that mothers who remained at home were now being ‘discredited’ by other women. A shift in emphasis against this view began to emerge in the late 1960s, as Mother’s Day came to be presented as an occasion to pay homage to ‘mother, the employed woman’. More generally, there was a tendency (in perception more than in practice) for relations between spouses to become more equal (Moree 1994, Knijn 1994, Vossen and Nelissen 1997). Nonetheless, this did ‘not diminish the purpose of Mother’s Day, for it is a good thing for Father to know that he is a “nobody” when it comes to housekeeping and child care’. Fathers echoed sentiments springing from this same need for compensation in regard to Father’s Day. For children, Father’s Day was a good opportunity ‘to express their special love for their fathers’, ‘to be reminded of his presence’. For fathers, it offered the opportunity ‘to experience on one day how much they appreciate me [as a father]’. Not all mothers and fathers shared this opinion about the two Days. To treat motherhood as a ‘virtue’ instead of as a mere ‘privilege’ was ‘ridiculous, arrogant and foolish’, according to Annie Romein-Verschoor, a left-wing intellectual writing in the 1950s. Film director and writer Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004, went even further by claiming, in commenting on Father’s Day in his deliberately shocking manner, that ‘fathers are there to be spat in the face’. This view objects to the practice of extolling mothers or fathers merely for their biological roles in the procreation process. As historian Ileen Montijn wrote in 1997, ‘On Mother’s Day, the animal in the mother is honoured’. As early as the 1930s, mothers were being pressed to guard against the inclination (i.e. the ‘almost animal instinct’), which was epitomised on Mother’s Day, to be possessive of their children. In the 1960–1970s, both Days came to be seen as occasions on which, rather than being honoured, mothers or fathers were made to realise their own deficiencies in fulfilling their roles. One women’s magazine asked, ‘Are you really a good mother?’, and a father who was being spoiled by his family on Father’s Day wondered what he really amounted to as a father. These and similar feelings flowed together into a type of modesty and an admission that ‘it is somewhat overdone to praise ourselves’ on Mother’s Day. Instead of being saints or fairy-tale figures, mothers had become human beings. Such self-reflection still allowed the celebration of Mother’s Day, but now ‘with a wink’; it was no longer necessary for mothers to feel guilty about their shortcomings as a mother. In the 1980s, the argument came full circle with the claim that Mother’s Day could allow a woman ‘feel like a mother again’, even if she was ‘not really a good mother’. This less serious, even frivolous attitude towards the Day was characteristic of general Dutch attitudes towards calendar holidays in the late twentieth century (Helsloot 2005). Holidays became a matter of choice and, in a process of negotiation or of personal appropriation, freed of prescribed standards. As observed by Frykman and Löfgren (1996: 19) ‘customs in modern society do not command people to

216

Reframing Dutch Culture

behave in a particular way. Instead, we are offered a framework in which to do our own celebrating’. Commercial Holidays A story from 1950 tells of a mother who, upon receiving a gift, says, ‘You may pretend to act out of sudden inspiration, but the confectioners and florists have been making a lot of noise about Mother’s Day. This isn’t completely of your own doing’. This discounting of the authenticity of the Mother’s Day ritual by discrediting participants as having been influenced or manipulated by commercial interests, was pervasive, if not dominant, in discussions about the holiday. The rejection of Mother’s Day as an invention of the ‘sickening shopkeepers’ (misselijk makende middenstand) appealed to many. Even cardinal Simonis in later years regarded it as ‘a strange commercial cult’. Fathers who preferred to pass it over were ‘talked into feeling guilty about it’. Underlying Mother’s Day was a ‘false sentiment, infused by an urge to sell’. It did not spring ‘from within’ or ‘from the heart’, as some of our informants wrote. These feelings were even more intense with regard to Father’s Day, particularly in the 1950s. Informants denounced the holiday as ‘bosh’ (apekool), ‘rubbish’ (onzin) or ‘meant to trick people out of their money’ (geld-uit-de-zak-klopperij). Without denying their previously discussed commercial motives, florists took great pains to stress that a good turnover was merely ‘a welcome consequence’, not the ‘purpose’ of their endeavours. Faced with the ongoing criticism that they continued to commercialise Mother’s Day, florists eventually felt that it was time for a counteroffensive. Even though Ann Jarvis’ role in founding Mother’s Day in the United States is questionable (Schmidt 1995: 267–272; Jacobs 2003: 14–15), the florist industry referred to it in order to support their claim that denouncing the day as ‘an invention of the florist industry’ was to ‘fall short of the truth’. Shopkeepers were well advised to draw their customers’ attention to this ‘widespread misconception’. Newspapers and women’s magazines came to the florists’ rescue by also referring to Ann Jarvis’ ‘originally purely ideal’ motive behind Mother’s Day, as well as her ‘dogged’, ‘furious battle’ against those who would commercialise and thereby ‘denigrate’ the Day. In the 1970s, the florist industry even tried to turn its ostensibly auxiliary role to its own advantage. Whereas Mother’s Day was increasingly criticised for being ‘commercial’, flowers and plants were perceived to be beyond this criticism, as they were ‘green’ and natural. This realisation offered the industry renewed opportunities. People have apparently always been somewhat uncertain about the true role of the florist industry in Mother’s Day. The frequently asked question of whether the holiday originated from commercial or ideal motives was answered as follows in 1939: ‘let the question mark be left a question mark’. It was ‘(...) by all means disenchanting to presume the former, simply because the idea reached us from the country of Roosevelt, reputedly inclined to materialism’. This criticism, it was argued further, was merely a phase, which would gradually fade away in an ongoing process of acceptance or within the course of the life cycles of individual mothers:

Vernacular Authenticity

217

as they grow older, mothers would be less likely to mind having their feelings so ‘patently exploited by commerce’. Even Ann Jarvis’ fight against commerce was discredited. She lacked the ‘sense of humour’ to see the ‘innocence’ of advertising for her Day. This line of argumentation allowed the florist industry to go farther than playing down the commercialisation of Mother’s Day; it made the commercialism acceptable, essentially by responding to critics with, ‘So what?’ The involvement of businesspeople did not ‘detract’ from the idea; it was not ‘objectionable’, and it was of only ‘minor importance’. They were ‘welcome to their profits’, because ‘we are wise enough to understand and see through this’ and to ‘make our own choices’. ‘When one comes to think of it, any holiday may be labelled commercial’. The latter argument was also advanced in defence of Father’s Day. The fact that this Day had obviously been invented by commerce did not ‘disqualify’ the idea at all. Downgrading the meaning of gift giving, and by extension the function of commerce in general, was another means of negotiating the acceptability of the two Days. It was claimed that ‘being thought of’ by their loved ones was far more important to mothers than receiving gifts was. It was the mental act behind a present, and not its material value, that counted (Cheal 1988: 113). When Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende could slip away for just two hours to visit his mother on Mother’s Day 2002, she was still all too grateful: ‘The point is his gesture’. The same could also be expressed through letters or phone calls. Contrary to the practice in the United States, however, sending special Mother’s Day greeting cards never developed into a ritual in the Netherlands. The same line of reason underlies the general preference for giving a kleinigheidje (small gift) Taking this one step further, commerce could be bypassed altogether by propagating the notion that mothers prefer self-made gifts, as women’s magazines stressed to mothers and children alike for decades. This was one aspect of a wider educational effort since the 1930s to stimulate children’s creativity (Vos 1999: 121– 140). Gert Timmermans’ action, which was presented in the introduction, is consistent with this line of reasoning. The florist industry had already admitted that, ‘under special circumstances’, handpicked flowers could be ‘more eloquent’ than those bought in shops (cf. Schmidt 1995: 272). Connecting with these ideas of authenticity and self-expression, schoolteachers and magazines continuously urged children to make this gesture, thereby shaping their mothers’ attitude of thankfulness. This form of gift giving presented its own problems of authenticity. After she had grown up, a child learned from her mother that she had actually detested the particular flowers that she had received on Mother’s Day (Dijkema-Jansen 1977: 9). This mother had nonetheless acted in accordance with the advice in magazines regarding children’s self-made or self-procured gifts in general (cf. Schmied 1996: 60). ‘The wrong choice, but bought out of their [children’s] own pocket money, and mother is mollified and happy’. On listening to special Mother’s Day verses or songs she had heard being rehearsed a hundred times, a mother should pretend to be completely surprised. Similarly, when confronted with the morning ritual of a childmade breakfast that she found revolting, a mother ‘forced herself into a grateful

218

Reframing Dutch Culture

Figure 10.2 Poster for the Mother’s Day campaign (1975) of the florist industry laugh’.16 Many of our informants equally remembered their mothers and fathers, or themselves in these roles, reacting ‘pleased (as fitting)’, ‘as if glad’ or ‘affectedly enthusiastic’. Artificial and Enforced Sentiments Particularly during the first decades after the introduction of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, another type of charge emerged that was somewhat related to the charge of commercialism. Referring to Mother’s Day, a female Member of Parliament stated bluntly in 1925 that ‘such an artificial incitement of motherly love will not endure’. Contrasting this to the ‘always touching’ spontaneous expression of that sentiment, the high esteem in which she held her own mother ‘prevented her from airing such

16 ‘The tea looked unattractive, but I drank it courageously and thanked him [son] with a big hug. “Do you want some more?”, he asked’, Margriet 9–5–1975.

Vernacular Authenticity

219

feelings on demand’.17 Because the practice originated ‘from the outside’ or ‘from above’ (i.e. ‘on the authority of absolute strangers’), many others considered it ‘untruthful’; this caused ‘resentment’. The Dutch national character, which resists being told when and how to celebrate, could be invoked in this respect as well.18 Some felt that Mother’s Day was also wrongly conceived psychologically, as it was impossible to ‘generate a sudden feeling of appreciation, simply because one was compelled to do so on one particular day of the year’. Father’s Day was similarly rejected in 1948 because it was ‘fabricated’, ‘made up’ and did ‘not originate from tradition and even less from people’s inner needs’. The perception of the practice of ‘producing tokens of love following a given, external schedule’ as ‘a sorry business’ has a long history as well. These criticisms elicited responses from various sources, including Miss Van Asperen van der Velde, who claimed that the criticism was overdone, as the call to Mother’s Day was no more than ‘an inducement that one was free to follow – or not’. Nonetheless, in the effort to prepare the ground for this mood, it was regularly pointed out that ‘being caught in the daily grind’ and ‘in our times already so lacking in poetry and romance’, one would be foolish not to ‘seize upon’ this ‘unsought’ occasion. Through the Mother’s Day ritual, one could explicitly show emotions that were ‘not so easy to approach’ (e.g. ‘voicing love, gratitude and many never spoken words’). The creation of such a ‘pause’ was ‘much-needed’ and, ‘for practical reasons’, a fixed day was a good ‘solution’. The Burden of Tradition From the outset, the florist industry had reckoned with the possibility that not everybody would be readily convinced of the need for or value of the new holiday. To those children (supposedly only a few, and described as ‘degenerate’) who viewed their mothers’ character as less stellar than they were expected to believe, thinking otherwise of their mothers’ good character as expected of them, Mother’s Day was likely to become a ‘burdensome, compulsory day’ and therefore to generate unauthentic behaviour (komedie).19 This diagnosis proved largely prophetic. We cannot tell how many people in the Netherlands have participated in the celebration of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day over the years. That they have done so increasingly, however, is certain. Through the combined effects of the introduction of the Days in primary schools, the media coverage and commercial advertising, the new rituals became ever more widely known and gradually less novel, thereby slowly but steadily becoming ‘traditional’ (i.e. more or less inevitable), whether as something to negate or with which to comply. Our informants described this process according to their memories: ‘Unwittingly, it became “common” practice, so we 17 Eigen Haard 51 (1925) 290. 18 Nine out of ten women supposedly rejected Mother’s Day, preferring an ‘unsought moment’ over a fixed day ‘decreed’ by florists and confectioners, Beatrijs 9–5–1959. 19 Floralia 5–6–1925.

220

Reframing Dutch Culture

went along’. ‘One just participated because “everybody” did so’. ‘Later on, more people felt like it; I simply followed’. The imitation of others was even easier when people agreed to the notion that the Days offered a ‘good occasion’ or when they considered the Days ‘fun’, thus allowing them to describe their own participation as ‘spontaneous’. Others, however, voiced misgivings, as the counterweight to ‘thinking of’ mother or father on their Days was ‘forgetting’ them. From the mother’s point of view, this was likely to be perceived as resulting from a conscious and intentional act rather than from a slip of the mind. ‘Don’t they [children] appreciate mother’s work; do they think it’s nothing out of the ordinary?’ Not only were such children (regardless of age) ungrateful; they violated what had become a social norm. ‘Children ought to visit their parents on Mother’s Day; that’s only decent’, a character in a 1959 story stated. In the 1950s, disregarding the Days was already felt to create ‘a certain constraint’ in family life (Buter 1962: 112). A large proportion of our informants confirmed this from their personal histories. The realisation that their mothers would feel ‘slighted’, ‘wronged’, ‘displeased’, ‘hurt’, ‘disappointed’ or ‘miserable’ generated ‘bad feelings’, a sense of ‘guilt’ or of ‘failing’ their parents. Many therefore complied – ‘for the sake of peace and quiet’. This peace had to be, and actually was, negotiated, by allowing for the existence of a kind of internal dissonance, an uneasy struggle between the pulls of authentic and unauthentic behaviour. In the 1960s, a woman was quoted as saying, ‘To me, it’s all humbug (flauwe kul), that Mother’s Day, but mothers are so fond of it, so I just take part’. As an adult, a woman could agree (partially at the insistence of her husband) to send flowers to her mother-in-law, even while harbouring the thought, ‘Still, to me it’s nonsense (onzin)’. This attitude of ‘well, all right then’, of feeling ‘unable to escape’ such an obligatory ‘nonsense day’, must have been pervasive, particularly when young children were involved. It would be ‘disappointing’ to children to ‘thwart’ their efforts to celebrate such a Day. On the other hand, as recipients of tokens of affection, mothers could ‘feel somewhat moved and completely forget that a Mother’s Day is in some respects actually unsympathetic to her’. Alternatively, they could smile at the fact ‘ that it’s completely devoid of meaning’ and ‘forget that one has longed for a well-meant appraisal on one particular moment’. ‘We are taken in willy-nilly by Mother’s Day, and we actually consider it rather fun’. In a similar way, even though a father might say that his Day was ‘not that important’ or even ‘total nonsense’, he was known to hold a different opinion ‘in his heart of hearts’. In the second half of the twentieth century, these mental balancing acts, these negotiations through such devices as tactically ‘forgetting’ one’s authenticity, were an ongoing feature of the discourse and, according to the data from our informants, the actual practice surrounding both Days (cf. Schlimmgen-Ehmke 1988: 150).

Vernacular Authenticity

221

Conclusion The situation that is described in the previous section is perhaps best summarised as ‘sincere confusion’ (Cheal 1988: 42); in Goffman’s terms, it is a ‘frame dispute’, an argument about what frame is relevant for responding to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Actors appear to perceive both Days primarily as something external to them. This strangeness may be labelled in various ways, including superfluous, unnatural or commercial. Behind these epithets and in their reflexive responses, actors rely on some inner frame or standard that is connected to conceptions of their identity. This yardstick may be said to consist of a basic notion of authenticity, of a ‘romantic identification between ourselves and a culture, conceived as pure and natural’ (Roodenburg 2000: 82; Berking 1999: 143, 129–133). In various respects, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day threaten this vernacular authenticity, creating the need to seek ways to preserve and defend it. As we have also seen, however, in other respects, both Days seem to resonate with this inner standard, as when they are considered ‘rather fun’ or ‘a welcome occasion’. More often than not, responding to the Days entails a process of negotiation, a resolution of inner tensions by deliberately adopting an ambivalent stance (see also Schmidt 1995: 270). This does not preclude, however, acknowledging the existence of different framing possibilities. Roodenburg has described ethnology’s endeavour well into the twentieth century as one of ‘conferring certificates of authenticity’ (Roodenburg 2000: 71). Characteristically, the opinions of those to whom these certificates were attributed were largely left out of the considerations of ethnologists. This uneven power balance was disturbed particularly in the 1960s when, to the surprise of ethnologists, actors proved quite capable of engaging in acts of authentication or bestowing certificates of authenticity themselves. The pervasive process of social and cultural democratisation in Western societies was largely responsible for this development. Precisely how this convergence of academic and vernacular categories of authenticity came about, however, will be difficult to establish. In general, this testifies to an increasing popular appropriation of academic concepts. On the other hand, the sources generating the latter may have been more socio-culturally widespread than had previously been noticed and appreciated (cf. Doorman 2004: 40). My aim has been to underline the plausibility of this view by focusing on the operation of vernacular notions of authenticity in the perception of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Without falling back on antiquated notions of a presumed authentic popular culture, it opens the way to writing a history of ethnology from below, a vernacular ethnology. References Bakker, Nelleke (1987), De wetenschap der moeders. De vrouwenbeweging en het streven naar professionalisering van het ouderschap in Nederland aan het begin van de 20e eeuw, in J.J.H. Dekker et al. (eds), Pedagogisch werk in de samenleving. De ontwikkeling van professionele opvoeding in Nederland en België in de 19e en 20ste eeuw. Leuven-Amersfoort: Acco, 47–61.

222

Reframing Dutch Culture

Bendix, Regina (1997), In search of authenticity: The formation of folklore studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Berking, Helmuth (1999), Sociology of giving. London: Sage. Boesch, Alexander (2001), Das Muttertagsreden. Einführung in den Muttertag und das Muttertagsreden des politischen Katholizismus in Österreich, in Produkt Muttertag. Zur rituellen Inszenierung eines Festtages. Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde, 27–51. Burns, Tom (1992), Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. Buter, Adriaan (1962), Honderd jaar Enscheder volksleven. Neerlands Volksleven 12, 103–114. Collins, Randall (1988), Theoretical continuities in Goffman’s work, in Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds), Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 41–63. Crook, Stephen, and Laurie Taylor (1980), Goffman’s version of reality, in Jason Ditton (ed.), The View from Goffman, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 233–251. Dankbaar, Jenny (1984), ‘Professionalisering’ van moeders en pedagogen. Pedagogische oudervoorlichting in Nederland rond 1900. Comenius 4, 462–476. De Jager, Jef (2001), Rituelen. Nieuwe en oude gebruiken in Nederland. Utrecht: Het Spectrum. De Jong, Ad (2001), De dirigenten van de herinnering. Musealisering en nationalisering van de volkscultuur in Nederland, 1815–1940. Nijmegen: SUN. Dekker, Ton (2002), De Nederlandse volkskunde. De verwetenschappelijking van een emotionele belangstelling. Amsterdam: Aksant. Doorman, Maarten (2004), De Romantische orde. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Dijkema-Jansen, H. (1977), Voor moeder. Mededelingen van de oudheidkundige Kring ‘Rheden-Rozendaal’, 61, 7–9. Eriksen, Anne (1994), “Like before, just different”. Modern popular understandings of the concept of tradition. ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 50, 9–23. Eriksen, Anne (2005), Our Lady of Perpetual Help: invented tradition and devotional success. Journal of Folklore Research 42, 295–321. Frykman, Jonas and Orvar Löfgren (1996), Introduction. The study of Swedish customs and habits, in Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren (eds), Force of Habit. Exploring Everyday Culture. Lund: Lund University Press, 5–19. Gilst, A.P. van (1998), Moederdag, Traditie 4, 32–35. Ginkel, Rob van (1999), Op zoek naar eigenheid. Denkbeelden en discussies over cultuur en identiteit in Nederland. Den Haag: SDU. Götz, Ineke (2004), What is German – who should be allowed to become German? An ethnographic field study on the distribution of national semantics and symbols in everyday life, in Attila Paládi-Kovács (ed.), Times, Places, Passages: Ethnological Approaches in the New Millennium. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 16–26. Hausen, Karin (1984), Mütter, Söhne und der Markt der Symbole und Waren: Der deutsche Muttertag 1923–1933, in Hans Medick and David Sabean (eds), Emotionen und Interessen. Sozialantropologische und historische Beiträge zur

Vernacular Authenticity

223

Familienforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 473–523. Helsloot, John (2005), Das Schweigen durchbrechen. Der Triumphzug des Valentinstags in den Niederlanden – nach 50 Jahren. Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 50, 141–168. Henkes, Barbara (2005), Uit liefde voor het volk. Volkskundigen op zoek naar de Nederlandse identiteit 1918–1948. Amsterdam: Atheneum–Polak & Van Gennep. Hochschild, Arlie Russel (1983), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkely-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press. Jacobs, Marc (2003), Moederdagen. Rijpe vruchten van personencultus, lobbywerk en PPS. Mores 4, 12–25. Knecht, Michi and Peter Niedermüller (2002), The politics of cultural heritage. An urban approach. Ethnologia Europaea, 32, 89–104. Knijn, Trudie (1994), Social dilemmas in images of motherhood in the Netherlands. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 1, 183–205. Köstlin, Konrad (1996), Die Konstruktion des Eigenen, in Carlo van der Borgt et al. (eds), Constructie van het eigene. Culturele vormen van regionale identiteit in Nederland. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut, 31–43. LaRossa, Ralph (1997), The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History. Chicago-Londen: University of Chicago Press. MacAloon, John J. (1984), Introduction: cultural performances, culture theory, in John J. MacAloon (ed), Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Philadelpia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1–15. Manning, Philip (1992), Erving Goffman and Modern sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Matter, Beate-Cornelia (1988), Der “Deutsche Muttertag”. Versuch einer Auswertung des ADV-Materials, in Nils-Arvid Bringéus e.a. (ed.), Wandel der Volkskultur in Europa. Festschrift für Günter Wiegelmann zum 60. Geburtstag. Münster: Coppenrath, 151–163. McRobbie, Angela (1994), Postmodernism and Popular Culture. Londen: Routledge. Meder, Theo (2005), To believe or not to believe. cULTUUR 1(2), 42–59. Moree, Marjolein (1994), A quiet revolution: working mothers in the Netherlands 1950–1990. Netherlands’ Journal of Social Sciences 30, 25–42. Roodenburg, Herman (2000), Ideologie en volkscultuur: het internationale debat, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 66–109. Rooijakkers, Gerard (2000), Vieren en markeren. Feest en ritueel, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 173–230. Schippers, Thomas K. (2005), Woorden voor mensen van hier en ginder. Enkele kanttekeningen bij het gebruik van een etno-vocabulaire binnen en buiten de wetenschap. cULTUUR 1(2), 3–13.

224

Reframing Dutch Culture

Schlimmgen-Ehmke, Katharina (1988), ‘Bemerkungen zur Anpassungsfähigkeit des Muttertages seit 1923’, in Frauenalltag – Frauenforschung. Beiträge zur 2. Tagung der Kommission Frauenforschung in der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, Freiburg, 22.–25 Mai 1986. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 142–152. Smidchens, Guntis (1999), Folklorism revisited. Journal of Folklore Research, 36, 51–70. Schmied, Gerhard (1996), Schenken. Über eine Form sozialen Handelns. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Schmidt, Leigh Eric (1995), Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sorée, Mark and Marijke Snepvangers (1992), Ons Huis. 100 jaar buurtwerk in Amsterdam. Amsterdam: s.n. Taylor, Ch. (1991), The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press. Turner, Victor (1982), Introduction, in Victor Turner (ed.), Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Van Asperen van der Velde, C.P. (1946), Jordaan-herinneringen. Ons Huis in de Jordaan. Bussum: Van Dishoeck. Van de Port, Mattijs (2004), Registers of incontestability. The quest for authenticity in academia and beyond. Etnofoor 17, 7–22. Van der Zeijden, Albert (2000), De voorgeschiedenis van het Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. De ondersteuning van de volkscultuurbeoefening in Nederland 1949–1992. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. Van der Zeijden, Albert (2004), Volkscultuur van en voor een breed publiek. Enkele theoretische premissen en conceptuele uitgangspunten. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. Van Es, F. (1959), Moederdag en Vaderdag in Vlaams-België (een enquête). Oostvlaamsche Zanten 34, 7–29. Van Zuylen, J.J.L. (ed.) ( 1925), Het boek der moeders. Samengesteld ter gelegenheid van den Moedersdag op 20 Mei 1925. Amsterdam: Van Looy. Venbrux, Eric, and Theo Meder (2004), Authenticiy as an analytic concept in folkloristics, Etnofoor 17, 199–214. Vos, Jozef (1999), Democratisering van de schoonheid. Twee eeuwen scholing in de kunsten. Nijmegen: SUN. Vossen, Ad and Jan Nelissen (1997), Women between motherhood and employment. A historical overview from different perspectives, in Gerard Frinking and Tineke Willemsen (eds), Dilemmas of Modern Family Life. Amsterdam: Thesis, 16–45. Weyrather, Irmgard (1993), Muttertag und Mutterkreuz. Der Kult um die ‘deutsche Mutter’ im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

Chapter 11

Singing in Dutch Dialects: Language Choice in Music and the Dialect Renaissance Louis Peter Grijp

The noise of motorbikes starting up blends seamlessly with the aggressive triplets of drums and electric guitars. After a few stirring ooohs and aahs, lead singer Bennie Jolink launches into broad Achterhoeks dialect: ‘Oe-oe-oerend hard kwamen zie doar aan gescheurd/ oe-oe-oerend hard want zie had’n van de motorcross geheurd’ (At full speed they raced up on their bikes/ at full speed because they’d heard about the motocross). These are the opening lyrics to Jolink’s ballad about Bertus and Tinus, farmers’ sons who, on their way home from the motocross where they’d had ‘alderbastende gein’ (a great time), crashed to their deaths on their Norton and BSA bikes. Jolink wrote the song in 1977, when such crude country sounds had never before been heard in popular music. Oerend hard marked the breakthrough in the Netherlands that year for Jolink’s band Normaal (Normal), with the help, it should be said, of some pretty remarkable publicity. Shots for the video clip of Oerend hard were taken in spring of that year on location in Hummelo, the village in the Achterhoek (a predominantly agrarian region in the east of the Netherlands) where the band hails from. Some more shots then had to be taken at the NOS studio in Hilversum, home to the national broadcasting center. The band came fully prepared. They had brought a hay blower to spread straw and confetti around the studio. They had also consumed substantial quantities of beer, and that morning had visited a cattle market in the Achterhoek, a fact that was still evident in Hilversum from the smell. A dispute broke out with the assistant floor manager, who had to sweep up the mess that Normaal made. Angry, she called the musicians ‘peasants’, whereupon Jolink called her a knakentemeier – Amsterdam dialect for a whore who turns a trick for the meagre sum of a knaak (two and a half guilders, these days about one euro). This incident was followed by a photo session in the dressing room, where a mirror came to grief. When the band finally left the studio, they almost ran down a uniformed gatekeeper who had signalled them to stop. All in all, this was more than enough to make national headlines the

226

Reframing Dutch Culture

next day with reports of vandalism, assault and attempted manslaughter (Ruerink and Manschot 1990; Palm 2005).1 Thus at the start of their career Normaal cultivated a wild image based around the themes of countryside, alcohol, sex and violence. When their manager, Joost Carlier, was concerned that the shots of a live performance for their next hit, Alie, would be too tame, he distributed half litre bottles of beer and encouraged the audience to spray it about, thereby establishing a tradition. Since then, much of the beer at Normaal’s performances – the band is still performing – is not consumed by the audience but disappears into the ground. Other fixed elements at gigs include the scattering of straw over the audience, and live mascots. The most popular mascot is Hendrik Haverkamp, a human beanpole. A metalworker by day, he wanders about in a smock and clogs during the performance, carrying a bucket of manure. When the band plays, the audience abandons itself to what they call høken, a lively kind of leaping about in a throng, chests bare, pushing and pulling, and engaging in vloertje beuken – mass stamping on the wooden floor. In theory, this behaviour is confined to the male members of the audience, but from time to time bare breasts also make an appearance. Especially in the early days, girls regularly stripped on stage, but things have toned down somewhat over the years. These days the venues even have a høkfree zone for older members of the audience. This brief description serves to introduce one of the most successful Dutch dialect groups, as a prelude to a discussion of the phenomenon of dialect music. I will confine myself to the Netherlands, a country where dialects are dying out. Particularly in the urbanised Randstad area – the ring of cities that includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht – dialect is scarcely spoken any more.2 Although dialects still survive in the provinces outside the Randstad, the number of speakers is declining with each generation, albeit at a faster rate in some provinces than in others. At the same time, the blending together of local dialects is giving rise to ‘regiolects’. Such phenomena also apply to Frisian, which has the status of a minority language.3 Surprisingly, it is against this background that we observe in recent decades a remarkable rise in the number of singers and music groups using dialect. The website of folksong specialist Joop van den Bremen, which is dedicated entirely to this phenomenon, informs us that there are over one thousand singers and groups in the Netherlands who sing in dialect.4 From these many groups, I have selected Normaal as a case study. I wish to add a second, that of Ede Staal, a singer from Groningen who represents quite a different kind of dialect music. Both have had an immense impact, each in their own way.

1 The paragraphs on Normaal are borrowed from Grijp 2006. 2 I do not discuss urban dialects in this chapter because they have a different cultural significance than rural dialects. 3 All statements made about ‘dialects’ in this chapter also apply to Frisian, unless otherwise stated. 4 http://www.streektaalzang.nl (formerly: http://people.zeelandnet.nl/vdbremen/strk/ strktlnn.htm).

Singing in Dutch Dialects

227

Using these two case studies, I will discuss several models that could explain the rise of dialect music. These are the dialect renaissance, the musical construction of place, and language choice in music. Finally, I enquire whether a relationship exists between the extent to which a dialect is still spoken in a province and the popularity of music in dialect in that province. Case Study One: Normaal Normaal was not the first band to make pop music in the Achterhoek. Like everywhere else in the Western world, young people there in the 1960s had enthusiastically embraced Anglo-American music – first rock and roll, and later the Mersey beat. This brought many changes to youth culture. Light music had always been the domain of ‘respectable’ artists, but now anyone could make music. Bands sprang up like mushrooms as countless young people got their hands on an electric guitar or a drum set. In Doetinchem for instance (a city in the Achterhoek), they included Leonor Lead, Les Aimants, The Blue Stars, Bob Group 99, Buzzgroup Act, Ginhouse, The Golden Strings, Internos, The Jibs, Jungle Rhythms, The Summits, Walther and the Rattles, Les Clochards, The Jacks, Ad Fundum, Changed and Denver. The names of all these bands speak volumes: there is not a single Dutch or Achterhoeks name. Old photos show jackets, white shirts and ties making way in the course of the 1960s for T-shirts and denim, with hair becoming longer and longer. In Doetinchem in 1966 – if we confine ourselves to this city for a moment – Beatclub Shabby was established; there people could dance and listen to music. There were three local radio shops where young people could go to buy singles and LPs. They could learn about the latest music through national pop music magazines like Tuney Tunes, Hitweek and Muziekparade, and through programmes like Tijd voor Teenagers on the radio and Top of Flop on television (Doppen et al., 2001). It was in such an environment that Ben Jolink took his first musical steps in the early 1970s. He was still searching for what he wanted to do. As a student, he found the art academy in Hengelo most unappealing. In hip Amsterdam, a great future as a theatre set painter seemed to be beckoning him, but that turned out to be a great disappointment. As he would often say later in interviews, he may have looked pretty hip, but as soon as he opened his mouth, his Achterhoeks accent exposed him as a ‘peasant’ and people lost interest. The suffering inflicted by these incidents would have far-reaching artistic consequences. To vent his frustrations, Jolink began writing poems in Achterhoeks, which he regarded as his mother tongue. In the early days, Normaal’s repertoire still consisted primarily of songs in English, but Jolink saw the light in 1975 during a pop festival in Lochem. After a couple of up-tempo numbers in Achterhoeks, which the audience already found quite unusual, he sang the Drieterije Blues at full volume: ‘Ik zat laatst te driet’en op the plee’ (Achterhoeks for ‘recently I was having a crap on the loo’; original text ‘Oh, my baby left me’). Things really took off. The crowd’s positive response made Jolink decide to sing only in Achterhoeks from then on. Using their own language was also perfectly in

228

Reframing Dutch Culture

Figure 11.1 Normaal posing as rural types in the 1980s. Second left is lead singer Bennie Jolink. Photo: Nationaal Popinstituut.

keeping with the group’s wish to ‘normaal doen’ [act normally], a code of behaviour expressed in the group’s name.5 There are several dimensions to Normaal’s success. Firstly, the group is of immense significance for their own supporters; secondly, thanks to Normaal, the regional music culture of the Achterhoek has acquired visibility; and finally, the band has influenced popular music elsewhere in the Netherlands. Normaal’s supporters, or Anhangerschap, are made up of thousands of loyal fans, mainly farmers and others living in the countryside. For years, the Anhangerschapsbode6 kept them abreast – in dialect – of the band’s ups and downs. The term ‘boer’ (peasant) was elevated to an honorary epithet, and the group’s populist lyrics expressed not only the ideals but above all the frustrations of the farming community. Verses like De boer is troef (farmers are trumps) and Ik bin moar ’n eenvoudige boer’nlul (I’m just 5 The band was still singing mainly English-language covers when they came up with the name Normaal, after a lengthy search. Jolink later had this to say on the subject: ‘It was as if the name had been waiting for us. How often did we say to one another: Let’s just be normal?’ (Palm 2005: 111). The group first performed under the name Normaal in December 1974. 6 The name of this magazine contains a word play on the Graafschapsbode, a regional newspaper. The word Anhangerschap itself is a pun, since anhanger means not only ‘follower’ or ‘fan’, but also a ‘trailer’ – filled with straw or manure – pulled by a tractor.

Singing in Dutch Dialects

229

a simple peasant) struck a chord with many. Inhabitants of the Randstad, EU rulings, environmental regulations and speed cameras came under attack, while funfairs, the pub, motocross, beer and generous country wenches were glorified. Normaal made themselves popular with this target group not just with words, but with deeds. They played benefit concerts for De Graafschap, the Achterhoek football club and for farmers whose herds were struck down by foot-and-mouth disease. Another fitting gesture was collecting motorbikes for African missionaries. In addition, Normaal’s numerous frats’n (pranks), devised with their distinctive sense of humour at their regular pub in Hummelo, went down well with their supporters. Their fan base is not confined to the Achterhoek or to speakers of Low Saxon, the regional language varieties spoken in the eastern Netherlands and to which Achterhoeks belongs. Their ‘campaigns’, as Normaal called their tours, took them all over the Netherlands, at least to rural areas. Dialectal differences represented no great obstacle here. The audience could pick up the most important lyrics, perhaps not immediately during the performance but from LPs and CDs. What also came across was the all-important message – the fact that dialect was used instead of standard Dutch or English. The Achterhoeks spoken by Normaal therefore represents the ‘language of farmers’ in general. The contrast that Jolink and his kind liked to exploit is that of city versus country, of Randstad versus province. While they may have exaggerated this contrast, Normaal has undeniably strengthened feelings of self-respect among many a rural inhabitant. When the band performs, farmers celebrate ‘being farmers’. The group has created its own farming culture, with music in the lead role, music which is just as likely to be inspired by Chuck Berry and The Rolling Stones as by German oompah music. This glorification of the countryside has an additional significance in the Achterhoek, the band’s own region. Normaal has played an invaluable role in promoting the region internally. It has taught young people that they needn’t be ashamed of their situation, behaviour or pronunciation; quite the reverse in fact – they can be proud of being farmers and Achterhoekers. At the same time, Normaal has paved the way for all kinds of bands to sing in Achterhoek dialects – bands like the popular Boh Foi Toch (which means something like ‘Heavens, what a world’), based around accordion player Hans Keupers. The band’s line-up includes two former members of Normaal, drummer Jan Manschot and guitarist Ferdy Joly, who once co-wrote Oerend hard with Jolink. Boh Foi Toch employs a milder idiom that Normaal, one that owes more to folk music and appeals to a more traditional sense of community – that of agricultural equipment associations and citizens’ militia. The group believes in doing things on a small scale: their first CD was distributed by 52 mobile grocery shops. Besides Boh Foi Toch, there is still a handful of bands and singers who sing in Achterhoeks. Although most of these musicians cannot make a living from dialect music alone, a professional successor to Normaal – Jovink & de Voederbietels – has since appeared. The first part of the name is a contraction of the names of the band’s founders, Hendrik Jan Lovink and Gijs Jolink (the latter is the son of Normaal vocalist Bennie Jolink). ‘Voederbietels’ is a play on words, linking the name of The

230

Reframing Dutch Culture

Beatles, the symbol of international pop music, to voederbieten (mangelwurzels), a symbol of the countryside. Lovink and the young Jolink may emphasise their points of difference from Normaal – Jovink does not speak up for oppressed farmers, nor scatter beer and straw about – but the parallels are unmistakeable: singing in Achterhoeks, a leaning toward rock and roll and a love of motocross. The band even organises its own annual music and motocross festival, Zwarte Cross (Black Cross). Like Normaal, they have a well-organised fan club, De Voederbietels, with their own magazine, the Bietenblad, and successful merchandising, as well as an impressive string of CDs. It would be correct to say that Normaal has paved the way for a regional, Achterhoeks music culture. I should perhaps explain this in more detail. By using the Achterhoeks dialect, musicians stress the regional dimension of their music, the fact that they are rooted in the region. The fact that music is indeed viewed as part of the regional culture is evident in the fact that the Staring Instituut in Doetinchem, dedicated to preserving the traditional regional culture, has been home to the Poparchief Achterhoek Liemers since 2000. This is remarkable, given that in principle this archive documents all popular music made in the region – mainly in English, as the aforementioned list of Doetinchem bands suggests. Of the dozens of acts currently active or since disbanded, I will mention only Vandenberg, the Achterhoeks/Twents hard-rock group, with vocalist Bert Heerink, which achieved worldwide fame with Burning Heart in the early 1980s and toured internationally. But it is singing in dialect, with the emphasis accorded to regional roots by Normaal and their successors, which has given popular music in the Achterhoek its own unique character. Thanks to Normaal, the commonly perceived gap between ‘traditional’ and pop culture has been effortlessly bridged, at least in the Achterhoek. Normaal has been important not just for music in the Achterhoek, but for Dutch popular music as a whole. There is no doubt that Normaal has contributed to popin-je-moerstaal (singing in your mother tongue), and especially to adapting one’s mother tongue to the demands of Anglo-American rock music. This was no easy matter at first. There were no successors to Peter Koelewijn’s big rock-and-roll hit Kom van dat dak af (Get down off that roof) in 1960. The Dutch-language singer Boudewijn de Groot may have achieved success with literary songs, but his genre was more folk and chanson than rock. However, it was precisely through dialect, by being able to express his own emotions, that Jolink managed to create a convincing synthesis of American rock music and Achterhoeks, his mother tongue. The year 1977, when Oerend hard came out, has proven to be a turning point in Dutchlanguage pop music. That was the year in which the Flemish Raymond van het Groenewoud had a hit with his pop album Nooit meer drinken. The following year, Ernst Jansz set up Doe Maar, whose reggae and Dutch lyrics reached unprecedented heights in popular music in Dutch. One particular area of mother-tongue music in which Normaal has blazed a trail is what is known as dialectpop or boerenrock. Successful bands like De Kast from Friesland and Skik from Drenthe are musically indebted to Normaal. Although Rowwen Hèze, the successful band from North Limburg, employs a different

Singing in Dutch Dialects

231

idiom (Tex-Mex), the whole idea of a party band with strong regional roots is very reminiscent of Normaal. Like Normaal, De Kast (who incidentally sang mainly in Dutch but who became a national sensation with a handful of Frisian songs) and Skik, Rowwen Hèze’s success went far beyond the borders of the provinces. Their northern Limburg dialect is not actually all that incomprehensible to other Dutch people, nor is Skik’s Drenthe dialect. Moreover, Rowwen Hèze has adopted the shrewd practice of singing the chorus in standard Dutch, so that non-Limburgers can sing along too. Case Study Two: Ede Staal Dialect music is a phenomenon that goes much further than pop bands like Normaal, Rowwen Hèze and Skik, although these are the best known. Most dialect music is less a question of solid rock-and-party music by professional bands than of amateurs and semi-professionals who make nice music with nostalgic lyrics for a somewhat older audience from their own province. For them, Normaal with its wild performances was hardly a shining example. The most interesting representative of this quieter type of dialect music is Ede Staal from Groningen.7 In 1982 Staal, a keen gardener, had written the waltz Mien toentje (My garden), the theme tune to the weekly gardening programme on Radio Noord, which at that time served the whole of the northern Netherlands (the provinces of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe). The song is about Staal’s dwarf French beans that fail to come up, the sparrows eating his strawberries, the new potatoes that are doing poorly and the lettuce that has bolted. This blend of self-irony and love of gardening – the soil, the farm, the countryside – was a huge success, especially since it was sung in Gronings. Although being on the way down, this dialect was still inherently associated with the countryside and the province as a whole. The then 41-year-old Staal, an English teacher by profession, had been writing songs for his own amusement, often no more than fragments and usually in English, but also in French, Danish and East Frisian. At the request of others, he had translated one of his English songs into Gronings. The tape caught the ear of an employee at Radio Noord, an inveterate Groninger who immediately recognised Staal’s artistic potential and asked him to write a signature tune for the gardening show. Mien toentje made Staal the Groningen folk singer, although he avoided performing wherever possible. It was not until two years later that a record came out with four songs in dialect, followed a few months later by an LP that chalked up unprecedented sales for a regional product. Shortly afterwards, Staal underwent a major operation for lung cancer. In the last year of his life, he hosted a weekly radio show on Sunday mornings featuring stories in dialect in which he played the role of a Groningen farmer for whom modern life was moving just a little too fast – a tongue-in-cheek take on his own lifestyle. A 7 The paragraphs on Ede Staal are borrowed from Grijp 2001. Texts by Ede Staal are published in Staal (2004).

232

Reframing Dutch Culture

Figure 11.2 Ede Staal (left) during a recording session for Omroep Noord, ca. 1982 Photo: Fieke Spoel.

second LP concluded the short-lived career of this talented man whose fame would continue to grow after his death in 1986, reaching almost mythical proportions. That was certainly the case in Groningen, but Staal also attracted attention nationwide thanks to a documentary (1996) and the film De Poolse bruid (1998). Set in the Groningen countryside, the film lays bare the emotions of a taciturn farmer by means of Staal’s song ’t Hooge Laand [a region in Groningen], in which ‘clay becomes music’. The song can be regarded as a northern equivalent of Jacques Brel’s Mijn vlakke land.8 Staal himself also corresponded to the stereotype of the closed northerner. The only videotape that exists of his rare performances shows a shy, awkward man in a somewhat scruffy jacket singing his songs from a metal music stand. This lack of affectation undoubtedly contributed to his success. His songs zero in on a fundamental ‘Groningenness’, singing the praises of the landscape, the houses behind the dyke, the old days – all in the language of that area and of bygone days. Although Staal grew up speaking Dutch, and had picked up dialect from his surroundings, dialect was the critical factor in his breakthrough. His Groningen dialect may not have been flawless – it was a bit of a hotchpotch in fact as he had lived all over the province, picking up its various linguistic peculiarities – but it was still recognisable to every speaker of dialect. His lyrics also dealt with dialect and dialectal differences. In 8

Mijn vlakke land is a translation, sung by Brel himself, of Le plat pays.

Singing in Dutch Dialects

233

addition to these regional themes, he expressed general human sentiments like love and the transience of life. As I have already stated, there have been many singers like Ede Staal who have sung simple songs in dialect, but Staal’s literary talent has never been surpassed. His lyrics and interpretations impart an authenticity that raises him above his own province and dialect. Although Staal sung in Gronings, he embodies the quintessence of regionalism. He went to the heart of ‘the regional’, or rather, to the most characteristic part of someone, himself, who slowly sees his familiar rural environment yielding to the modern age. Dialect is a point of reference for the familiar, and is at the same time the medium in which such people can express their feelings. Non-Groningers too recognise this essence, which is why Staal’s songs have been translated into Frisian, Limburgish and Flemish by singers who themselves have nothing to do with Groningen or Gronings. The Renaissance of Dialect It was not in 1977 or 1982 that the vernacular was first discovered as an artistic medium. As early as the nineteenth-century, Frisian had been used in Friesland to shape regional sentiments. Poets like Eeltje Halbertsma (1797–1858) composed songs in Frisian, often to classical melodies by Mozart and Mendelssohn. And they too were part of a tradition, a fact of which they were perfectly aware. In the seventeenth century, people wrote and sang in Frisian, in particular Gysbert Japicx, a schoolmaster from Bolsward, who is regarded as the founding father of Frisian literature. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, priests, teachers and other intellectuals elsewhere in the Netherlands began to write songs in dialect, as well as regional novels and plays. It has always been the provincial elite who were the first to regard the life of ordinary people as something of value and who discovered and developed dialect as an artistic medium. Strangely enough, the ordinary country people who used dialect in everyday life actually sang mainly in Dutch. Dialect had almost no written tradition, or rather, this existed only among a small portion of the elite. Until the first half of the twentieth century, the song sheets or cheap song books sold by travelling musicians contained Dutch lyrics, and this is how they were sung by ordinary people (Grijp 1996, 92–93; Roodenburg 2000). All the same, people did sing in dialect throughout the twentieth century, albeit on a very limited scale and almost inaudibly for the Randstad audience in the west of the country. This latent tradition was reactivated in 1982, when Radio Noord played Mien toentje. Staal’s exceptional talent, combined with other factors, explains why his songs suddenly caught on. One factor was the growing regional consciousness in reaction to the advancing unification of Europe – in the Netherlands and beyond, the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) was seen as an ominous moment – and general globalisation. With national borders losing their importance, people began to look more to their own region. Moreover, they realised that the countryside was radically

234

Reframing Dutch Culture

changing: young people from the villages were moving to the big cities, schools and shops were closing and communities were disappearing. Dialects were also changing; increasingly, they merged to become regiolects as local differences became smaller. For many, however, dialect continued to embody individual identity, solidarity, security. Concern for disappearing dialects prompted the dialect renaissance, the Dutch equivalent of the German Dialektwelle (Besch et al. 1983: 1655–1657; Schobess 1987; Wiegandt 1990; Reimers 1992; Probst-Effah 1992; Noll 1993). This re-evaluation of dialect is expressed, inter alia, in literature, theatre and music. The status of dialects, which were usually only spoken, rose when people began writing, performing and singing in dialect. In recent decades, dialect can also be heard from the pulpit: both Protestant and Catholic services held in dialect can guarantee full churches. In addition, there are writing courses on offer that devote considerable attention to the spelling of dialect words. This emancipation of dialect has reached growing numbers of people in the past few decades. The most successful genre of the dialect renaissance is music because it uses contemporary forms of expression in addition to traditional dialect. By employing contemporary, international music styles, dialect music has the potential to reach a young audience, whereas the other forms often appeal more to older people. This blending of traditional, local elements with contemporary, international influences makes dialect music a good example of glocalisation, with dialect being the ideal means of definitively appropriating new international music styles. There is a marked preference for country styles that have gained international recognition, such as American country, Tex-Mex, Cajun, as well as European ‘oompah’. Dialect Music and the Musical Construction of Place In the preface to Ethnicity, identity and music. The musical construction of place (1995), Martin Stokes argues that music is an important tool for shaping ethnic identity and for constructing a ‘place’ in the sense of a geographical, cultural and/ or social co-ordinate. Music is therefore not so much a reflection or expression of underlying cultural and social patterns, as ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have assumed, but a means by which identities can be actively constructed and manipulated. Stoke’s idea has been fruitfully applied to ethnic groupings with identifiable folk-music traditions, like the Scottish, Irish, Catalans and Basques. It can perhaps also be applied to Dutch dialect music, although this does not properly equate with the examples of ethnic folk music just mentioned. Firstly, the relationship between people from Groningen, Limburg, Drenthe and Friesland vis-à-vis the national state in which they live is decidedly less tense than in the case of these other minorities. We do not readily speak of the Groningen, Limburg or Drenthe ‘people’. At most, some Frisians think in these terms; after all, they once fought to have Frisian recognised as an independent minority language. But secession from the Netherlands or the introduction of a Frisian passport is generally viewed as twaddle. Labelling people from Groningen, Limburg, Drenthe and Friesland as

Singing in Dutch Dialects

235

‘ethnic groups’ comes across as rather contrived; it is more appropriate to speak of regional groups. Another difference from Stokes’ ethnic folk music is that there is no typically Groningen, Limburg, Drenthe or Frisian style of music. For that matter, there is not even a typically Dutch style, in either classical, popular, or folk music. As I have said, Dutch dialect singers adapt international styles. It is dialect that lends regional music its individual character, together with the frequent use of subjects with a regional flavour. For this reason, and bearing in mind that the political and musical context differs from that of ethnic/regional music in other countries, we would expect music – in combination with dialect – to be an appropriate vehicle for articulating regional identity in the Netherlands. Language Choice in Music However, the question remains as to whether the articulation of regional identity is in fact what dialect music is striving for. Rather, it would appear that musicians want to express their personal identity with the help of dialect as a collective given. We see this if we ask them about their reasons for their ‘language choice in music’, as I have called it. Language choice refers to the choice a musician – a singer, producer or composer – makes of a certain language, prompted say by commercial or symbolic considerations. That choice can turn out differently for different genres (for a general theory of language choice in music, see Grijp 1995a; also Berger and Caroll 2000). The choice is often an unconscious one: a singer usually follows the dominant language of the repertoire to which he or she is attracted. For popular music, this has been English since at least the 1960s. In the Netherlands, no more than about ten percent of popular music is presented in Dutch, at least via the radio. Nevertheless, roughly half of Dutch popular artists who make the charts, including many singers active in mainstream music, sing in Dutch (Grijp 2003). Pop singers who sing in their own language, however, are making quite a conscious choice. In general, there is a well-considered switch from English to the singer’s own language. We see this in the explanations singers themselves give (Rutten 1995). Thé Lau, singer/guitarist from The Scene, expressed it as follows: ‘My English lyrics were always very contrived (...). In fact, everything was wrong with them, (...) I can express myself much better in Dutch.’ Or Bob Fosko from the Raggende Manne: ‘From the moment that I switched over to Dutch lyrics, I noticed that I was able to inject emotion into my music.’ Or Pascal from the rap group Osdorp Posse: ‘I found that I could express much more of myself in my own language: I could tell the story more from my own experience.’ And Huub van der Lubbe from De Dijk: ‘I could suddenly say what was on my mind and what my concerns were. I finally had the option of making it all more personal.’ For all these Dutch singers – and more such sentiments have been documented – it is true to say that although they have a good command of English, they themselves do not feel that this helps them to get to the heart of things when they write lyrics.

236

Reframing Dutch Culture

When a singer switches from English to Dutch, there are perceptible changes not only in the singer, but also in the audience. At least, that was Huub van der Lubbe’s experience: ‘There was an added extra, people could follow us all of a sudden.’ And vice versa. When Erik Mesie began singing in English, he noticed a difference in the audience: ‘The disadvantage of English lyrics was that they considerably increased my distance from the audience during performances. Because people can’t actually understand them. And I was used to being able to tell from the audience’s reactions what they thought of the lyrics. I really missed that.’ Dutch dialect singers, who – like their audience – all speak perfect Dutch, tend to place a slightly different emphasis when explaining their choice of language. The Brabant singer Gerard van Maasakkers began singing in English before switching to Dutch, which he found ‘too high-flown’ and so moved on to Brabants. ‘I could express my emotions much less powerfully in Dutch’, he explained. Later, when he felt that nostalgia was starting to gain the upper hand, he went back to Dutch, but with an accent ‘from here’. Since then, he switches between the two languages. Jan Ottink, from the Achterhoek, formulated it as follows: ‘You can’t get anything across in English because it’s not your language and because people only half understand it. At the same time, clichés are less of a problem, simply because this language has not yet been used very often for pop music. You have to create your own tradition.’ Jack Poels from the group Rowwen Hèze, who initially sang mainly in English, says: ‘People who know us say that our faces always lit up when we started singing in dialect. That made us stop and think.’ This tallies with Bennie Jolink’s discovery of dialect as the language for singing, as described above. It was the audience’s response that made him decide to sing in Achterhoeks – the language, says Jolink, in which he thinks. Ab Drijver, the singing journalist from Drenthe, has quite a different point of view: he sees it as a ‘justification’ of the fact that his father only spoke dialect and for that reason counted for little in society. In his view, his language choice contributed to the emancipation of dialect (Grijp 1995b). It is conspicuous that those who sing in Dutch or in dialect do not mention national or regional identity or pride about their own origins as determining their choice of language. At least, no-one cites this reason in so many words. The most decisive factor is their ability to express themselves as effectively as possible, together with the audience’s response. If there is a collective feeling among dialect pop singers, it is one of solidarity with the farming community or the rural population in general, rather than an awareness of their own district. Thus with his lyrics Bennie Jolink was able to transform the farming community’s sense of inferiority into a selfawareness that is celebrated during Normaal’s concerts, not only in the Achterhoek but throughout the country. The ‘other’ is solely the West, the Randstad, which brings modernisation and uniformity to the countryside. This is particularly true of the pop and rock sector. For luisterlied singers like Ede Staal (the luisterlied is the Dutch equivalent of the chanson), the choice of language has not been enquired into to any great extent. But here too, the lyrics seldom if ever bear traces of rivalry with or hostility towards other provinces; instead, they lament

Singing in Dutch Dialects

237

technological change, the restructuring of the landscape, tourism and the loss of village communities and dialect. Dialect music does play a role, however, in the conscious construction of identity by regional stations. In theory, each province in the Netherlands has its own regional station. For these stations, dialect music is an excellent means of highlighting a region’s profile, while at the same time offering entertainment that people with little or no understanding of dialect can also enjoy. Various regional stations have put out compilation CDs of dialect music. Although most of these stations broadcast in Dutch, they nevertheless devote several hours a week to regional issues in dialect (only on Omrop Fryslân (Radio Friesland) is Frisian predominantly spoken). These few hours usually feature dialect music, which is why many dialect singers have been ‘discovered’ by their regional station, as the example of Ede Staal demonstrates. Conversely, most dialect singers are of little interest to the national radio in Hilversum, while regional radio offers them their ideal audience. The Relationship between Speaking and Singing in Dialect In 2000 I drew up a map of dialect music in the Netherlands showing the numbers of groups and singers per province based on Van den Bremen’s website referred to above (Grijp 2001). The larger the circle on the map, the more dialect groups and singers are, or have been, active in the province in question.9 Most singing in dialect occurs in the provinces of Limburg and Friesland, with the least in Utrecht, North and South Holland and Flevoland. The latter comes as no surprise. Very little dialect is spoken in Utrecht and the two provinces of Holland – in fact, only in the north of North Holland and in a few fishing and market-gardening villages in South Holland. Moreover, the Hollands dialect most closely resembles standard Dutch, which is derived from it. Although the province of Utrecht does not historically belong to Holland, these days it is part of the Randstad. The province of Utrecht is also largely urbanised, and local dialects have virtually died out. Flevoland is quite a different matter. A thinly populated province made up of land that was impoldered in the twentieth century, it does not have its own dialect.10 To sum up, very little dialect is spoken in these four provinces, which would appear to explain the almost complete absence of music in dialect there.11 Can the popularity of dialect music generally be explained by the extent to which dialect is still spoken in a given province? A problem here is the scarcity of reliable numerical data on the speaking of dialects, in part because it is difficult to establish the extent to which different individuals speak dialect. Nevertheless, a 9 The list of groups and singers on the site is cumulative, with groups that no longer exist remaining on the site. In this way, the figures quantitatively express the total amount of dialect music in past decades. 10 See on Flevoland also the contribution of Albert van der Zeijden in this volume. 11 As I have said above, I do not consider urban dialects in this chapter. Amsterdam in particular is musically productive in this regard.

238

Reframing Dutch Culture

Figure 11.3 Survey map of dialect music in the Netherlands

sociolinguistic study from 1998 into children’s school performance in relation to their dialect background (Driessen and Withagen 1998) appears to me to be very useful. Although this is an attitudinal study (only the speakers themselves were asked if they believed they spoke dialect/Frisian), within that limitation nuanced figures were obtained for each province. For example, the study established the extent to which not only school children but also their parents had Dutch as their spoken language (see table A). This could vary enormously between the two groups. Parents often raise their children in Dutch because they think that speaking dialect at home has a negative impact on their children’s school performance.12 As a measure for dialect/Frisian speaking for each province, I began with the mean scores of the parents and children for Dutch. I then turned that score around – that is, I deducted it from 100%. The result is the percentage of the population that speaks dialect/ Frisian; this is shown in the right-hand column of table A. The ranking shows the provinces where the most dialect/Frisian is spoken – Limburg and Friesland (52.3% and 53.6% respectively) – at the top, and the provinces with the lowest number of dialect speakers – South Holland and Utrecht (between 1 and 2%) – at the bottom. We can compare these figures with the number of dialect singers/groups (or acts) observed at about the same time (table B). Limburg has more than twice as many such acts as Friesland (475 and 197 respectively), whereas dialect is spoken at about the same rate (53.6% and 52.3% respectively). Since Limburg has almost twice as 12 Incidentally, the study concluded that the effect of dialect speaking is probably nil.

239

Singing in Dutch Dialects

Table 11.1

Ranking of Dutch provinces according to the percentage of dialect speaking persons

TABLE A

Provinces Limburg Friesland Drenthe Groningen Zeeland Overijssel Gelderland North Brabant North Holland Utrecht South Holland

% children Dutchspeaking

% parents Dutchspeaking

Mean % Dutchspeaking

Mean % dialect speaking

53.4 53.3 80.6 87.9 85.1 92.2 97.0 95.7 96.7 99.6 99.0

39.4 42.2 44.4 58.1 69.1 64.3 77.5 81.3 95.9 96.5 98.0

46.4 47.8 62.5 73.0 77.1 78.3 87.3 88.5 96.3 98.1 98.5

53.6 52.3 37.5 27.0 22.9 21.8 12.8 11.5 3.7 1.9 1.5

many inhabitants as Friesland, it is more accurate to take into account the number of inhabitants per province. The right-hand column in table B shows the number of acts per 10,000 inhabitants – more than 4 in Limburg, 3 in Friesland, 2 in Groningen, 1.5 in Drenthe, etcetera. And indeed, this largely corrects Limburg’s huge musical predominance over Friesland (a ratio of almost 5:2), although a predominance still remains (more than 4:3). The ranking of the provinces in table B is determined by the number of acts per 10,000 inhabitants. If we place the two tables alongside one another, the province rankings are very similar, although there are small variations. North Brabant and Groningen have somewhat more dialect groups than we might expect on the basis of current dialect use: these provinces rank two places and one place higher respectively in table B than in A. All in all, singing in dialect appears to be reasonably in step with the degree to which dialect is spoken. This is not particularly surprising. On the other hand, we might also expect that it is precisely those provinces experiencing the greatest dialect loss that would produce the most dialect music. Concern for the rapidly disappearing dialect would then be translated into greater musical ‘rescue activity’. This is not the case, however. Working from table A, if we deduct the percentage of children who speak dialect from that of their parents, we see that the largest dialect loss occurred at the end of the twentieth century in the provinces of Drenthe and Overijssel (36.2%

240

Table 11.2

Reframing Dutch Culture

Ranking of Dutch provinces according to number of acts per 10,000 inhabitants

TABLE B

(TABLE A)

Provinces

Acts

Inhabitants

Acts per 10,000 inhabitants

Limburg Friesland Groningen Drenthe Zeeland North Brabant Overijssel Gelderland Utrecht North Holland South Holland

475 197 116 74 52 162 67 41 2 2 2

1,136,695 642,977 575,072 483,369 379,978 2,411,359 1,109,432 1,972,010 1,171,292 2,591,035 3,458,381

4.17 3.06 2.01 1.53 1.36 0.67 0.60 0.20 0.02 0.01 0.00

Provinces Limburg Friesland Drenthe Groningen Zeeland Overijssel Gelderland N. Brabant N. Holland Utrecht S. Holland

Mean % dialect speaking 53.6 52.3 37.5 27.0 22.9 21.8 12.8 11.5 3.7 1.9 1.5

and 27.9% respectively). However, these provinces do not have a higher than average number of dialect groups – on the contrary. It is conspicuous, also according to the corrected count, that considerably more dialect music is made in Limburg than in Friesland. Might the strong regional consciousness be a factor here? To my knowledge, no comparative research has been carried out into this question, but I would hesitate to call Limburgers more chauvinistic than Frisians. A more likely explanation is the role of dialect music within these regional cultures as a whole. Carnival is an extremely popular festival in Catholic Limburg, turning the province completely on its head once a year. Almost all songs played and sung at that time are in dialect. There is also a carnival song contest, with entries from across the province. Carnival, with its songs in dialect, makes a major contribution to the expression of the Limburg identity (Wijers 1995). Van den Bremen’s survey of dialect music does not include bands that only perform during carnival, but the influence of carnival on the day-to-day music culture in Limburg is obvious. Carnival is scarcely celebrated in predominantly Protestant Friesland. Consequently, that particular breeding ground for music in Frisian is absent, which could help to explain the quantitative difference between the provinces. On the other hand, music in Frisian is qualitatively more diverse. For example, operas, choral music and classical songs have been composed in Frisian (Algra et al. 1996),

Singing in Dutch Dialects

241

something which is not at all the case with Limburgish. As I have said, the Frisian elite has devoted itself to a ‘national’ culture since the nineteenth century, which can explain such elitist musical expressions in Frisian. In Limburg, the elite tended to dedicate itself to what we call ‘folk culture’. Evidently, classical music does not fit this concept, with only operettas being performed in Limburgish. But also within popular dialect music the range is broader in Friesland than in Limburg. For example, there is the folk/pop music of Twarres, a Frisian-language duo that topped the national charts in 2000 with their tender song Wêr bisto (Where are you?). In 2006 Nynke Laverman caused a sensation with fados sung in Frisian. Earlier, French chansons were sung in Frisian, for example, by Douwe Heeringa with songs by Jacques Brel (1989). Conclusion This chapter has shown something of the renaissance of dialect music in the Netherlands since the late 1970s. Rock singer Bennie Jolink from Normaal and ‘troubadour’ Ede Staal represent the main archetypes, although in terms of musical style the dialect music landscape is quite varied. A general explanation for this popularity is the rise of regional consciousness in response to globalisation processes and to the changing nature of the relationship between the nation state and Europe. A more specific explanation lies in the dialect renaissance: when a dialect threatens to disappear, people realise its value and seek to raise its status by writing, preaching and singing in dialect, forms of expression that were traditionally reserved for the standard language, the written language. The success of dialect music can also be explained through the contemporary, international music styles it employs. Thus we can interpret dialect music as a special form of glocalisation – an attempt to preserve the local culture, in this case, the local or regional language, by combining it with global music styles. These efforts have been facilitated by a democratisation of the technology required, with the rise of regional stations clearly contributing to the growth of dialect music. For radio stations, this music was a means of shaping the regional identity from which they derived much of their raison d’être. They offered artists an ideal platform. Remarkably, however, none of the singers to our knowledge has ever mentioned regional identity as the motivation behind his or her decision to sing in dialect. For the artists, it was primarily a desire for a personal style and an effective means of expressing themselves that prompted this decision, together with the positive response of the audience. For Ede Staal, this led to an awareness of being rooted in his own region, in his case the province of Groningen. By drawing his listeners’ attention through his lyrics to the beauty of the Groningen language, Staal tapped into a rather dormant ‘Groningen-feeling’ among many of them. Staal’s poetic ability to activate a nostalgic, regional consciousness was shown to possess a supraregional quality when it was successfully transposed to other regions – in other words, when his songs were translated into other dialects. Something similar

242

Reframing Dutch Culture

occurred with the considerably more aggressive Normaal: with his undeniable demagogic talent, vocalist Bennie Jolink expressed a deeply-rooted ‘farmer feeling’ that was understood far beyond the borders of the Achterhoek. He transformed the sense of inferiority felt by rural youth and older people into a collective pride about being farmers, which was celebrated exuberantly at Normaal’s concerts. Regional rivalry is barely – if ever – an issue for Staal, Jolink and other dialect singers. The contrast between countryside and city, the Randstad region if you like, does play a key role, however. Staal and Normaal have given the countryside a voice. The diversity within dialect music applies not only to the many genres used by the singers – rock, blues, country, Tex-Mex, schlager, chanson, luisterlied – but also to the differences between regional music cultures. Here I am of course referring to quantitative differences. For the first time, an attempt has been made here to establish the extent to which the presence of dialect music, expressed in numbers of singers and bands, is linked to the level of dialect speaking in a province. The conclusion to be drawn from the tables is that these figures run fairly parallel. In other words, the more frequently a dialect is spoken in a given province, the more it tends to be sung as well. We can also observe qualitative differences between the regions, for instance between the multifaceted Frisian-language musical culture, with its classical genres, and the dialect music of Limburg, which is nourished by carnival. What is still needed, however, is an in-depth comparison of regional dialect music cultures. References Algra, Hans P. et al. (1996) Muzyk yn Fryslân. Aspekten fan it Fryske muzyklibben juster en hjoed. Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy. Berger, Harris M. and Michael T. Carroll (2000) (eds), The Politics and Aesthetics of Language Choice and Dialect in Popular Music. Popular Music and Society 24(3), 1–133. Besch, Werner et al. (eds) (1983), Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen and algemeinen Dialektforschung. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter. Doppen, M. et al. (2001), Popmuziek in Doetinchem. Een greep uit de Doetinchemse pophistorie tussen 1950 en 2000. Doetinchem: Staring Instituut. Driessen, G. and V. Withagen (1998), Taalvariatie en onderwijsprestaties van autochtone basisschoolleerlingen. Taal en Tongval 50(2), 2–24. Grijp, Louis Peter (1995a), (ed.), Zingen in een kleine taal. De positie van het Nederlands in de muziek. Volkskundig Bulletin 21(2), 151–329. Grijp, Louis Peter (1995b), Is zingen in dialect Normaal? Muziek, taal en regionale identiteit. Volkskundig Bulletin 21(2), 304–327. Grijp, Louis Peter (1996), Van dialectlied tot boerenrock, in Carlo van der Borgt et al. (eds), Constructie van het eigene. Culturele vormen van regionale identiteit in Nederland. Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens Instituut, 91–108. Grijp, Louis Peter (2001), Dialectmuziek en regionale identiteit, in Louis Peter Grijp

Singing in Dutch Dialects

243

et al. (eds), Een Muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 806–812. Grijp, Louis Peter (2003), Eigenheimers en meezingers. De muzikale taalkeuze van Nederland, in Jan Stroop (ed.), Waar gaat het Nederlands naar toe? Panorama van een taal. Amsterdam: Bakker, 45–52. Grijp, Louis Peter (2006), Doe maar Normaal. De ontwikkeling van dialectmuziek in de Achterhoek, in D. Verhoeven et al. (eds), Gelderland 1900–2000. Zwolle: Waanders, 449–453. Noll, Günther (1993), Dialektliedpflege in Rheinland. Aktuelle Beispiele, in Günther Noll (ed.), Musikalische Volkskultur im Rheinland. Aktuelle Forschungsbeiträge. Bericht über die Jahrestagung 1991. Kassel: Merseburger, 91–149. Palm, Jos (2005), Oerend hard. Het onmogelijke høkersleven van Bennie Jolink. Amsterdam: Contact. Probst-Effah, Gisela (1992), Anmerkungen zur Dialekt-Renaissance der 70er Jahre, in Günther Noll and W. Schepping (eds), Musikalische Volkskultur in der Stadt der Gegenwart. Hannover: Metzler Schulbuch, 135–142. Reimers, Astrid (1992), En Message us dem Milljöh, in Günther Noll and W. Schepping (eds), Musikalische Volkskultur in der Stadt der Gegenwart. Hannover: Metzler Schulbuch, 157–170. Roodenburg, Herman (2000), Ideologie en volkscultuur: het internationale debat, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 66–109. Ruerink, D. and J. Manschot (1990), Wat is Normaal? Amsterdam: Loeb. Rutten, Paul (1995), Nederlandstalige popmuziek. Een synthese van eigen en mondiale cultuur. Volkskundig Bulletin 21(2), 277–303. Schobess, Rainer (1987), Plattdeutsch und Popmusik. Ein Abgesang. Leer: Schuster. Staal, Ede (2004), Deur de dook zai ik de moan, in S. Reker (ed.), Groninger liedteksten van Ede Staal. Assen: In Boekvorm. Stokes, Martin (ed.) (1994), Ethnicity, Identity and Music. The musical construction of place. Oxford: Berg. Wiegandt, Jochem (1990), Plattdeutsche Liederüberlieferung in der Stadt. Leer: Schuster. Wijers, Carla (1995), Prinsen en Clowns in het Limburgse narrenrijk. Het carnaval in Simpelveld en Roermond 1945–1992. Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens Instituut.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 12

Their Own Heritage: Women Wearing Traditional Costumes in the Village of Marken Herman Roodenburg

They cover their heads with little cotton caps, they don colourful bodices for all to see and they always wear an apron over their loose-fitting skirts. But don’t bother asking these women how they can still wear such an outfit despite living in a globalising and highly urbanised society like the Netherlands, for they might not have an answer. As one of them said: ‘It’s something habitual, as it is to those Turkish and Moroccan women, and they’re not even in their own country. So why shouldn’t I do so in my country?’ Over the last two decades, women of Turkish or Moroccan descent wearing headscarves, djellabas or other long garments have become a familiar sight on the streets of Amsterdam and other Dutch towns. But the Marken women, who are so proud of their folk attire, their klederdracht, have almost disappeared, even from the streets of Marken, a former island and fishing village twenty kilometres north of Amsterdam. At present there are perhaps only twenty or thirty of them left, and all are aged over sixty.1 And whereas the women of Turkish or Moroccan origin, despite their non-Western dress, are considered by both scholars and the public at large to epitomise Dutch society with all its social and cultural complexity, the women in Marken attire are usually denied such coevalness. As ‘relics’ of the past they are deemed ‘quaint’ or ‘picturesque’, a tourist attraction at best (cf. Fabian 1983; Roodenburg 2002). Particularly in the summer months, thousands of tourists crowd the streets of Marken, taking photographs of the old wooden houses, the small but lively harbour and, if they are lucky, some of the women in their dracht. Occasionally, 1 This contribution is based on interviews with four Marken women: Aaltje P. (b. 1928), Grietje van A.-Z. (1929), Geertje Z. (1940) and Trijntje V.-K. (1942). Aaltje and Grietje still wear the Marken costume (they go in dracht), while Geertje and Trijntje wear ‘civilian’ clothes (they go in burger). The women were interviewed in the summer of 2006 by Adriana Brunsting, a former curator at the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen. I wish to thank her for her excellent interviewing and for her critical remarks on two earlier versions of this chapter. I should also like to thank Irene Stengs for her helpful comments. Finally, I extend my gratitude to Aaltje, Grietje, Geertje and Trijntje themselves for their kindness and willingness to amply inform me about their clothing memories.

246

Reframing Dutch Culture

a Turkish or Moroccan family, with its own ‘traditionally’ clad women, may join the crowd. Ever since the nineteenth-century folklorists – often on the heels of open-air painters, travel writers and craniologists – discovered the culture of the ‘folk’, of their country’s peasants and fisher folk, they have sung its requiem, just like the social anthropologists sung the requiems of the distant cultures they had started to expose (Clifford 1986, 115). The Dutch folklorists followed suit. Construing the culture of peasants and fisher folk as a precious heritage, as the nation’s ‘untainted’ and ‘timehonoured’ core, its only hope for regeneration, they readily adopted the prevailing salvage paradigm. One had to rescue and preserve whatever there remained of this legacy before it was too late (Roodenburg 2000: 80; cf. Bendix 1998). Today, Dutch folklorists (or ethnologists, as they now like to call themselves) prefer a different point of view, if they look at peasants or fisher folk at all. They no longer believe that with the shrinking of the country’s agricultural and fishing populations a vital national essence will be lost; instead, they like to point out that, partly thanks to their predecessors’ rescue work, the cultural changes among the two populations have been numerous and complex. Generally, they view the folklorists’ active interference with the peasants’ and fishermen’s cultures (including the ‘preservation’ of ‘traditional’ customs and costumes, the spread of tourism and the founding of open-air museums) as a central feature of the heritage industry, defining heritage in the well-known phrasing of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as ‘a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past’. As she explained, heritage is not lost and found. It is not prior to its identification, evaluation, conservation and celebration. It produces something new, is ‘created through a process of exhibition (as knowledge, as performance, as museum display)’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 149–150). But what about the locals, the men and women whose customs and costumes should be ‘rescued’ and ‘preserved’? What about, for instance, the twenty-odd Marken women? How did they continue shaping their lives, confronted on the one hand with the unrelenting decline of the local fishery and on the other hand with past-oriented interference from the folklorists and the tourist industry? Obviously, the Dutch agricultural and fishing populations have decreased, especially since the mid twentieth century. By the end of that century, the number of men and women employed in the two economies had dropped to a mere three per cent of the total population, and the figure is still dropping. As a consequence, numerous country-dwellers sold their house to townsfolk who were envisioning a quiet and authentic country life, and moved to a city or to one of the modest housing estates that were springing up on the outskirts of their villages. Even in Marken many of the old wooden houses are now owned by urban newcomers. This is all part of larger processes of heritage-making. Starting in 1900, when a direct ferry service (the Marken Express) was established between Amsterdam and the island, tourists began to haunt the village. Their numbers increased when, in 1957, a dyke finally joined the island to the mainland. Gradually, the village changed into an inhabited open-air museum, like much of the nearby nature reserve of Waterland, just north of

Their Own Heritage

247

Amsterdam. Already in 1971 Marken acquired the status of protected villagescape. Today all cars and tourist buses are directed to a spacious car park at the entrance to the village. Interestingly, the Markeners did quite well. Many of the men, finding no employment in the local fishery, started commuting to the mainland, even before the dyke was finished. In 1947 already half of the men were working elsewhere; at the end of the 1950s their number had increased to some eighty per cent (Schutte and Weitkamp 1998: 252). As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, heritage is the transvaluation of the obsolete, the outmoded or the defunct. But while Marken around 1900 came close to being defunct, making it fit for such transvaluation, since the mid twentieth century, when the men started taking jobs on the mainland, it found its feet again. It makes the women who still wear the dracht all the more interesting. They never sported their costumes for the tourists. As the four interviewees pointed out, it was often because of the tourists, because of all the staring and all the pictures being taken, that the Marken women came to loath the costumes. As we will see, those who continued wearing the garments did so for themselves. It was more related to their families, to their mothers and grandmothers, and to their individual life-histories than to all the heritage industry and its cultural production. Though Marken did turn into an inhabited open-air museum, that tells only half the story.

Figure 12.1 Doing laundry outside on the island Marken, ca. 1950 Photo: A. Klein.

248

Reframing Dutch Culture

With a few recent exceptions (Arnolli et al. 2000; Dekker 2006; Brunsting and Van Zuthem 2007) Dutch traditional costumes have always been studied from a viewer’s point of view, with the focus on materials, shapes and colours and their symbolism. The wearer’s point of view has barely been touched upon, as though these clothes were never worn, had never wrapped or moulded a body. But as Joanne Entwistle reminds us (referring to, for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), dress is first and foremost a corporeal thing, a ‘situated bodily practice’ (Entwistle 2000). In other words, the dressed body, like the body at large, may be interpreted as a text or a sign, as the passive bearer of a range of gender, social and political meanings, but it may also be construed as an agent, as an active keeper of the past. In both perspectives the body is perceived as socially constituted. However, in the first it is generally studied in terms of its symbolism, of the attitudes towards it or of the discourses about it; in the second it is investigated in its capacity of being culturally shaped in its performances, in its actual practices and behaviour (Connerton 1989: 104). In adopting such a Bourdieuan or phenomenological stance we may successfully avoid some of the imbalances involved in the first perspective, in this typical beholder’s view with all its ocularcentrism and its taken-for-granted dualism of subjects and objects. As for instance Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (2000: 2) have argued, ‘We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mould and shape them both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their power as material memories.’ In other words, by focusing on Bourdieuan notions of habitus and hexis (Bourdieu 1977; cf. Roodenburg 2004), we may best understand what these women’s lives have been like: how these women in making, wearing and flaunting their costumes also made themselves, how they came into being through their attire. Making the Dresses Themselves To the women of Marken, wearing the costumes meant, first and foremost, work. Dress shops or tailors were unknown in the village. It was a matter of home dressmaking, of the ever-recurring practices of sewing, knitting, embroidering and mending. For much of the century, the women made their garments (and those of their husbands and children) themselves. From early childhood on, when they started helping their mothers, they had the memory of the techniques and the feel of the fabrics in their hands (cf. Connerton 1989). In the last ten years, dress historians have finally ‘discovered’ the unwaged and largely anonymous practices of home dressmaking. Up until the 1960s, such practices were of vital importance to millions of households in the United States and the United Kingdom (and, one suspects, in a host of other European countries). Moreover, as Cheryl Buckley and Barbara Burman have argued, the practices had a special resonance in individual memory and life stories (Burman 2002: 5; cf. Burman 1999). More so than clothing bought in the shops, home-made clothing marked out

Their Own Heritage

249

the different stages of a woman’s life, attaching feelings and memories to family and friends and to specific places and events (Buckley 1998: 158–160). It was all about ‘face’, about keeping up appearances. For a long time most American and English households could not afford the clothes on offer in the local dress shops or in the big urban warehouses. However, by selecting the right fabrics and following (or even deftly elaborating on) the prevailing fashions, many housewives managed to maintain the family’s face. Respectable clothing, in its visible commitment to notions of physical cleanliness and moral hygiene, could underpin employability and creditworthiness. Similarly, it ‘allowed entry into public and civic events, churchgoing and church-related events, outings, journeys and holidays’ (Burman 1999: 11). Much of this may have applied to the twentieth-century Netherlands, and at first sight it seems to hold for the Marken households as well. To the villagers, churchgoing was a weekly social event. On Sunday mornings they all attended church, whether they belonged to the Hervormde Kerk or to the equally Calvinist but more orthodox Gereformeerde Kerk. They dressed for chapel as richly as possible, the women donning a white bonnet of fine linen, a scarf of the same material adorned with lace and white embroidery, and a baaf or bauw, a gaily-coloured stomacher made of chintz and worn over a partly visible but no less brightly-coloured, embroidered bodice. Other favourite occasions to flaunt one’s garments were birthdays, betrothals, weddings and a variety of church-related or public events. Traditionally, Whitsuntide stood out. During this period, all the young unmarried women put on their antieke goed, the garments inherited from their mother or grandmother – that is, if they owned such heirlooms. Most prestigious among these heirlooms were the naambauwen, named after the birds, flowers or other motifs depicted in the chintzes and occasionally going back to the first decades of the nineteenth century. Though the bauwen have been characterised as vernacular to the core, they are a perfect example of early modern processes of globalisation. Favoured among the eighteenth-century bourgeois and originally fabricated in India on patterns designed in the Netherlands (like the equally favourite chine de commande), the chintzes were already solidly integrated in the Marken costumes of the 1850s (Hartkamp-Jonxis 1987; Breukink 2000; Bing and Braet von Ueberfeldt, plates XXIII and XXVI; cf. Miller 1987). All Marken families, rich and poor alike, were expected to dress themselves as richly and respectably as possible, especially on Sundays, and to combine the right garments for the occasion. Then, as our interviewees called it, one was keurig, a notion that has lost most of its former connotations of respectability and has generally narrowed down to lower middle class notions of neatness and tidiness. But it was this respectability, this keurigheid in its broader sense, which generations of Marken women, with all their sewing, embroidering and mending practices, have been striving for. It was also for this purpose that more and more Marken households came to be equipped, first with a hand-driven and later with an electric sewing machine, a household object that the heritage makers – painters, folklorists and the tourist industry alike – with their past-oriented interest in the garments chose to ignore.

250

Reframing Dutch Culture

Mothers and Daughters Yet, home dressmaking in Marken was also different from the practices as they have been described for twentieth-century England and America. First, it may well have enhanced the families’ creditworthiness, but in a fishing village such as Marken employability was until well in the twentieth century a family affair. For instance, right after primary school most of the boys would join their fathers and uncles at sea. Only when the economic prospects in the fish trade deteriorated did the boys go to secondary school and start looking for other jobs. Second, Marken dressmaking was not grafted onto fashion. Though the Marken dracht was always in flux and certainly was affected by its own little fashions, it never followed the trends in clothing as displayed in the dress shops and warehouses. None of the women was interested in buying voguish fabrics or in the fashion patterns included in women’s magazines. What they wanted were the specific Marken materials, such as the fine linen and lace needed for their caps and scarfs, the various qualities of wool for their skirts, stockings and smocks, and the colourful ribbons used for trimming and embellishing their garments. For a long time they could buy the lace and ribbons in one of the village shops. Most of the other materials could be had from the pedlars (often Jews) who arrived from the mainland with their wares. In addition, in making their dresses themselves the Marken women were maintaining more than the family’s face. Take, for instance, the summer months with their weekly promenades – their passeggiate – on Sunday afternoons, when the women, especially the young and unmarried, dressed even more richly than they did for church. To tourists witnessing this Marken ritual, it may have looked idyllic, but there was more to it than that. As Aaltje recalled: ‘You always went walking with the girls next door and then all the girls looked you up and down: what did you wear? And you quarrelled with your sisters: who would wear the most beautiful bauw?’ In other words, the costumes were not merely geared to the public. The promenades were also about sisters competing for the finest garments in the family, and they were about inheriting. According to Aaltje, it was an unwritten law that the eldest daughter (which Aaltje was not) inherited the most antieke, the most cherished, bauw. Exactly because the Marken women did not follow the fashions, they were free to flaunt both their self-made garments and their heirlooms. Many of the garments were such family heirlooms. Because they were passed down from mother to daughter, they inevitably needed mending or taking in or letting out. They were meant to be worn and flaunted and not to be safely stowed away, whatever present-day museum curators or collectors might think. In thus actively appropriating the heirlooms of their mothers or grandmothers, the women may be said to have made the garments part of their hexis, their bodily habitus, thus allowing themselves to be picked up by the garments, to have themselves moulded both physically and socially. Interestingly, although they embroidered their initials and thus literally inscribed themselves in all the garments they made, the women always left their mother’s or grandmother’s initials on the garments they inherited. Wearing the deceased’s initials was something to be proud of. It strengthened the generational

Their Own Heritage

251

ties and, as we have seen, it lent the eldest daughters a privileged position among her sisters. Focusing on incorporating practices we should not forget how they generally are tied in with inscribing practices; they usually work in tandem (Connerton 1989: 72–78; Taylor 2003: 18–27). As scholars (and many novelists) have told us, clothes have lives of their own. Though appropriated by the Marken women and thus closely interwoven with their individual life-histories, the Marken costumes followed their own trajectories, often spanning several life-histories and in the process repeatedly moving in and out of different conditions of identification and alienation. Included in a mother’s or grandmother’s legacy and thus redefined as gifts, they were removed from the sphere of use. At a later stage, the costumes, again brought into use by the legatee and now cherished as her antieke goed, may be donated to a museum, for instance the openair museum sof Arnhem or Enkhuizen (and thus be, in the words of Igor Kopytoff, ‘sacralised’), or they may be sold to collectors (and thus be ‘commoditised’; cf. Kopytoff 1990; Banim and Guy 2001; Miller 2005: 7). In both cases, the initials of mothers or grandmothers were first removed. If for much of the twentieth century the Marken women kept cherishing the naambauwen and their other precious heirlooms, they also held dear to what they made themselves. These garments embodied the work of their hands, reminding them of the daily practices of dressmaking, of how they used to sit together with their mothers and sisters, sewing, embroidering and knitting. As our interviewees recalled, one started early, from early childhood on. Even before going to school, their mothers taught them the basic techniques. Geertje told us how at the age of five she was already embroidering the roses on a bodice and how, to her mother’s amazement, she could do it even while strolling around. No wonder her mother left the embroidery to her. They were always together, as Geertje fondly recalled. If we are to believe Aaltje, no female teacher arriving from the mainland could compete with the girls’ clever fingers. Her own teacher had to learn the finer points of the art from one of the mothers. Not that Brightly Coloured If the past sedimented into the women’s dressed bodies through the processes of making and inheriting the garments, and by flaunting them on Sundays or other festive occasions such as feast days or weddings, it also manifested itself in a less celebratory way, for instance when a member of the family passed away. Looking at paintings of Marken and its inhabitants, most of which were made at the end of the nineteenth or in the first decades of the twentieth century, one might think that its streets and alleys were teeming with colour, that despite their Calvinist beliefs all Markeners – men, women and children alike – sported the most gaily-coloured dresses. However, that is not how the four interviewed women recalled their youth. As we know also from other sources, from Christmas to Palm Sunday all the women would

252

Reframing Dutch Culture

wear a dark-coloured, tight-fitting woollen smock – a buisje – to chapel. For more than three months, there was not much colour to be seen on Sundays, nor were the Markeners’ weekday dresses that colourful. In addition, when in mourning most of the Markener colours were subdued or, in later stages of the mourning period, only soberly applied. Men, women and even children in mourning garb were a common sight in Marken. As Grietje recalled, ‘There was always somebody dying’. Markeners took their mourning seriously. When the death was that of a close relative, they would dress for years in black and subdued colours. If a child passed away, the parents would wear mourning garb for ten years. They also observed lengthy mourning periods when a father or mother died. When Grietje’s father passed away in 1950, she was still a young woman of twenty-one. Yet she wore mourning attire for nine years, making it her day-to-day dress until 1959, when she turned thirty. It also happened, as Trijntje told us, that a woman who had lost her husband while she was young would wear mourning for the rest of her life. The Marken mourning rituals were sophisticated, geared to degrees of consanguinity but also to the age both of the deceased and of the bereaved. As a rule, people seem to have mourned for seven years: four years of deep mourning, when the bereaved would dress in black and other dark colours, followed by three years of half mourning, when colours (white, blue, green and, in the last phase, a raspberry red) were gradually and in that order integrated with the black. That is how the young Aaltje used to dress after her father’s early death, envying the other children in their gaily-coloured clothes. Even one’s freedom of movement was restricted. In the first year of mourning the family stayed indoors more than usual. Aaltje, for instance, refrained from joining the walks on Sunday afternoons and did not attend birthdays or other festive events. Similarly, if a relative fell seriously ill, one dressed more soberly. When going to church, no woman would don her antieke goed. Thus, many Marken women must have worn mourning for years, having few if any chances to flaunt their colourful stomachers, however loaded their drawers and cupboards may have been. Grietje was one of these women. For nine years she could not sport her most cherished piece of clothing, an antique and gaily-coloured naambauw. We were also told how a young woman in the village who was facing the prospect of yet another period of mourning decided to have done with the dracht once and for all: she took to wearing jeans and never for one moment regretted her step. The rules were less strict regarding wider kin and the very young and the very old. When a cousin, niece or nephew died, the mourning period was confined to two or three years. Similarly, families mourned a stillborn child, but went ‘in the light’ (in ‘t licht) again when the next baby was born. Nor did families mourn very long for a grandfather or grandmother who died at an advanced age. When she was seven or eight, Trijntje mourned the passing of her aged grandfather for just two years. That was in the early 1940s. In 1960, when her father-in-law passed away, she went into only half mourning and for no more than a year. When she stowed away her mourning dress, she abandoned the dracht altogether, though in her recollection it was not so much the burden of mourning as the spirit of the times that made her do so.

Their Own Heritage

253

Figure 12.2 Two Marker women in traditional mourning dress Photo: Henk van der Leeden; collection Zuiderzeemuseum Enkhuizen.

It is only at the occasional funeral that visitors to Marken may still spot a woman in deep mourning. But there is a good chance that after the ceremony she will change into half mourning and not wear that garb for very long. Indeed, Geertje’s parents have told her that they do not want a rouwige dood. They have had the good fortune to enjoy a long and happy life together, so their daughter should not lament for them too long. In addition, her father has said that if he dies first, his wife should not go into deep mourning. Of course, like all other Marken attire, mourning clothes were home-made or inherited, and taken in or let out. And like all Marken costumes, some of them were more beautiful or more respectable, being made from more expensive or more ‘antique’ materials than others. Like the other costumes (but presumably more cogently) they also embodied the past, moulding and shaping the selves of their wearers. Aware of that legacy, of its huge impact, Geertje’s parents like other parents before them decided to break with it, to leave their daughter room to choose her own ways of grieving.

254

Reframing Dutch Culture

Abandoning the Costumes – Or Not? What made this world practically disappear? How can we explain that while in the early 1950s almost everybody was in dracht (except for the mayor, the doctor, the ministers and other dignitaries and their families, all of whom were from the mainland), just fifty years later everybody (except for the twenty-odd women) is in burger (‘in civilian’) or, as Aaltje liked to call it, in ‘t vreemd (‘in foreign’)? Part of the answer may lie in the island being finally connected to the mainland in 1956. It certainly enlarged the Markeners’ world, as they could now travel by bus to Amsterdam and other nearby towns. At the same time, it brought the tourist buses with their staring passengers, causing Aaltje’s husband to discard his dracht once and for all. But many of the women continued to wear their costumes. For them, other reasons may have obtained; for example, already in the 1950s it proved increasingly difficult to find the proper fabrics and haberdashery. There was, for instance, a dearth of the dark blue sagathy needed for the men’s stockings. There was also a sudden surplus of pastoorskousen, the black sagathy stockings that a growing number of Catholic parish priests no longer wished to wear under their soutanes. Thus, during the 1950s the stockings of the Marken men changed from blue to black. In the same decade, the Marken women had to find alternatives to the no longer available ras, a fabric woven from fine wool from which the women’s skirts were made. There was also a dearth of the colourful ribbons used for trimming both the most beautiful and all the daily garments. Around 1980, Aaltje and some other women travelled to a small factory near the town of Breda, which is in the south of the Netherlands, to place an order and to make sure that the machines were properly geared to producing the ribbons’ typical pattern and combination of colours. They also visited the nearby national Textile Museum in Tilburg, which had the machines but not the know-how required for manufacturing the ribbons. Similarly, to find the finest lace for their linen caps and scarves, formerly to be had in shops in Marken or Amsterdam, some of the women went abroad, to shops in Brussels and Bruges or, like Aaltje, even to Honiton, a well-known centre of antique lace-making in Devon, England. They also bought lace while they were on holiday in Germany or Austria. Ironically, as more and more women abandoned the costumes for good, the supply of fabrics and haberdashery improved. They gave their garments away to the diehards, whether these were relatives or not, or they sold them cheaply. As Grietje recalled, you could suddenly buy the garments at church bazaars or at fairs in aid of the village band or the local football club. However, more than a shortage of materials it was probably the increased mobility of Markeners – who now went to school and found jobs outside the village, and who now, for the first time, had the opportunity and the money to go on holiday – that prompted them to discard the costumes. Marken was not an isolated community. For centuries it had traded with Amsterdam and other harbours around the Zuiderzee, which explains for instance the early and eager adoption of chintzes. But until the second half of the twentieth century, Markeners mostly stayed where they were and found employment in the village – and staying in the village meant wearing

Their Own Heritage

255

the dracht, just as moving to other parts of the Netherlands meant changing into burger. As Aaltje told us, in 1939 her future father-in-law found a job in Apeldoorn and moved there with his wife and children. First, though, they all went to Amsterdam to buy the necessary burgerdracht in the popular C&A department store. The boys were dressed in jackets, neckties and so on, but the parents were poorly informed and were acquainted only with the Marken dress codes, and so when they arrived in Apeldoorn, the boys were laughed at. No boy at their new school had ever worn such clothes. Typically, when one of the sons returned to Marken to get engaged to Aaltje, he changed back into the dracht and it was Aaltje who made his (and her own) engagement costume. It was probably schooling and the new luxury of going on holiday that more than anything else led Markeners to abandon their traditional attire. Until the 1950s, the majority of the children attended only primary school, after which the boys started work in the fishery and the girls took a position in a Marken household or, like Geertje, in an Amsterdam household – no reason to go in burger. But all this started to change when more and more children also attended secondary school. A law introduced in 1969 made education compulsory until the age of 15. The village children now had to travel to the mainland, to Amsterdam or nearby Monnickendam, where folk attire was rare. Gym classes, so our interviewees recalled, were another reason for abandoning the Marken dress. Things changed again when, starting in the 1960s, many Marken families, like other Dutch families, went on holiday, either in the Netherlands or abroad. It saved the women a lot of fuss to just leave the costumes at home, and that is what most of them did. They changed into burger and, pressed by their husbands, children or other women who had already abandoned the dracht, they would often change for good. Before setting off, they usually had their hair cut – saying goodbye to the long corkscrew curls that for generations had defined the girlish appearance of the women. When they returned, they soon discovered that, without hair, their caps were now too large for them. So, if they did not abandon the Marken dress altogether, they took to the smaller and also more elegant girls’ caps. There was no shortage of these, as most of the girls already went in burger, and it took less time to put them on or take them off. Not all women took this route, however. For example, Aaltje told us that she bought her very first blouse and skirt during the exceptionally hot summer of 1977, in preparation for a day-trip to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, she felt miserable when she got to the city, suspecting that everybody was watching her, that the men were undressing her with their eyes. She never dressed in burger again, even though she travelled a lot. Grietje also went her own way. Twice she flew to Indonesia to spend six weeks with a daughter who lived there. But she had no qualms about going in burger. She also travelled with her daughters to Crete and Mallorca, and went on a winter sports holiday to Austria, where she wore blouses, skirts, frocks and trousers, which she immediately stowed away upon her return. Of course, Indonesia and the

256

Reframing Dutch Culture

Mediterranean are far too hot to walk around in the heavy Marken costumes, but she also hated people bothering her and taking photographs. One day when she was looking for lace in Bruges or Brussels, dressed in her costume, she was cornered by some English tourists asking her questions about the old church or cloister they were standing near, ‘As if I’d been around in 1600!’ Interestingly, while Aaltje felt uncomfortable in burger, Grietje felt that she was being stared at when she was in dracht. Yet she was always glad to be back in Marken and to put her costume on again. As she phrased it: ‘Dan sta je weer in je kracht!’ (translated literally: ‘Then you stand again in your strength!’). We may probably take this in a double sense. Dressed in her Marken clothes she felt comfortable and self-confident again. But she may also have missed the firmness, the physical moulding, of her stiffened bodice. She recalled a similar experience after being hospitalised. When she put on her costume again, she felt much better, whereas in the hospital, wearing only pyjamas, she had felt that she could only loll in a chair. Geertje related a similar story. Though she has been in burger for thirty years now, she still remembers how she liked the bodices, how they supported her body. Indeed, when she suffered a hernia, her mother told her that she might have been spared the pain had she continued to wear a bodice. Bound up, then, with their clothing memories is a range of mostly pre-reflexive bodily memories, of habits sedimented into the body, often from childhood on, when the children, like those of the seventeenth-century elites, were dressed in children’s corsets. Conclusion If their grandmothers could see how Aaltje and Grietje are dressing now, they might not approve. They would denounce the skirts with their raised hemlines, and the replacement of the black woollen stockings by flesh-coloured stockings or tights. And what about the shoes, which are still black and neatly polished but are no longer the rather plump and flat-heeled shoes of the older generations? Generally, the Marken women who like Aaltje and Grietje kept wearing the costumes, now dress more comfortably and elegantly. Under their bodices they too wear modern shifts and knickers. Even the materials are not quite what they were. Some of the women started using lurex or other synthetics (e.g. wool combined with polyester) in their dresses. Even the diehards have and had their little fashions. As the four interviewees liked to recall, in the ‘old days’ people would not even dream of changing into burger. Because they were all in dracht, it was not they who stood out, but the others – the newcomers like the mayor, the doctor, the two ministers or the schoolteachers, and their families. It was they, these buitenmarkers, who dressed in ‘t vreemd. However, as we have seen, from the late 1950s on more and more women simply discarded their costumes, which created a dilemma for the others: should they follow this example or proudly continue the dracht? Of course, the more the Marken women changed into frocks, blouses, skirts and jeans, the easier it was to put the costumes away (and many of the factors mentioned

Their Own Heritage

257

above may have functioned more as the final push than as the actual reason). But all women, young and old, had to decide. They were forced to take a stance, often realising that discarding their costumes would mean discarding a whole way of life. Like for instance the habits, the garb, of nuns (Hüwelmeier 2004; Konrad 2005), the costumes were more than just a couple of pieces of clothing. They constituted a way of life, habitual behaviour embodied. Along with the objects, a self was discarded, a self that from childhood on had been culturally shaped through collectively making, wearing and flaunting the costumes. References Arnolli, Gieneke et al. (eds) (2000), Relaties. Mode en streekdracht. Amsterdam: Nederlandse Kostuumvereniging voor Mode en Streekdracht. Banim, Maura and Ali Guy (2001), Discontinued selves: why do women keep clothes they no longer wear?, in Ali Guy et al., Through the Wardrobe: Women’s Relationships with Their Clothes. Oxford and New York: Berg, 203–220. Bendix, Regina (1997), In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Bing, Valentin and Braet von Ueberfeldt (1978), Nederlandsche kleederdragten, naar de natuur geteekend. Zutphen: Terra (originally published 1850–1857). Breukink. Margaret (2000), ‘Sitshandel en aspecten van sits in mode en streekdracht’, in Arnolli (2000), 57–75. Brunsting, Adriana and Hanneke van Zuthem (2007), Het streekdrachtenboek. Zwolle: Waanders. Buckley, Cheryl (1998), On the Margins: theorizing the history and significance of making and designing clothes at home, Journal of Design History 11 (1998), 157–171. Burman, Barbara (ed.) (1999), The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (London: Berg). Clifford, James (1986), On Ethnographic Allegory, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 98–121. Connerton, Paul (1989), How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dekker, Jeanine (ed.) (2006), De Zeeuwse streekdrachten 1800–2000. Zwolle: Waanders. Entwistle, Jo-Anne (2000), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fabian, Johannes (1983), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Hartkamp-Jonxis, Ebeltje (ed.) (1987), Sits. Oost-West relaties in textiel. Zwolle: Waanders. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud (2004), Närrinnen Gottes. Lebenswelten von Ordensfrauen.

258

Reframing Dutch Culture

Münster: Waxmann. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass (2000), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, Barbara (1998), Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Konrad, Dagmar (2005), Ordentlich – passend – angemessen. Schönheit im Kloster, in Gabriele Mentges and Birgit Richard (eds.), Schönheit der Uniformität. Körper, Kleidung, Medien. Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Kopytoff, Igor (1986), The cultural biography of things, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Daniel (1987), Material Culture and Mass Consumption. London: Blackwell. Miller, Daniel (2005), Materiality: an introduction, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Roodenburg, Herman (2000), Volkscultuur en ideologie: het internationale debat’, in Ton Dekker, Gerard Rooijakkers and Herman Roodenburg (eds), Volkscultuur: Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 66–109. Roodenburg, Herman (2002) Making an Island in Time: Dutch Folklore Studies, Painting, Tourism, and Craniometry around 1900. Journal of Folklore Research 39, 173–200. Roodenburg, Herman (2004), Pierre Bourdieu: Issues of Embodiment and Authenticity. Etnofoor 17, 1–2. Schutte, Gerrit Jan and J.B. Weitkamp (1998), Marken. De geschiedenis van een eiland. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Taylor, Diana (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

PART IV HISTORIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 13

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg

From a purely scholarly point of view the history of Dutch ethnology construes as a fairly modest one. Though it can boast some interesting forerunners, its academic history starts as late as 1923, when the linguist and historian of religion Joseph Schrijnen (1869–1938) was appointed full professor in General Linguistics and Folklore Studies (volkskunde) at Nijmegen University. Important as the moment was, it did not herald a victorious march through the institutions. Until the 1990s the history of the discipline was one of a few scholars and numerous amateurs, of a limited interest in research and a heavy emphasis on documentation and popularisation. During much of the twentieth century Dutch academia was only mildly interested in the history and culture of its peasants and fisher folk. Outside its walls such interest was wide and lively, as is testified not only by the involvement of the amateurs but also by that of painters (the Hague School and its followers), of travel writers, open air museums and mass tourism (Stott 1998; De Jong 2001). It is this wider context of popularisation and artistic interest which makes the rather unassuming history of Dutch ethnology a fascinating one all the same. There are the early films, most of them made in the 1920s, by Dirk Jan van der Ven. And there is the novel (in seven volumes!) written by J.J. Voskuil, a former staff member at the Meertens Institute and devoted entirely to the thirty years of his involvement with the discipline (Voskuil 1996–2000). The book, a funny and witty roman à clef, published in the second half of the 1990s, was a huge success. Though as a scholar Voskuil always preferred a low profile, it suddenly lent ‘face’ both to the institute and its department of ethnology. It was also in the 1990s that the discipline’s history was seriously taken in hand. As research started to prosper and the discipline was thoroughly redefined along the terms originally developed by Hermann Bausinger and Hans Moser in the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch ethnologists, profiting from the reflexive turn in the humanities and social sciences, started studying the work of their predecessors (e.g. Frijhoff 1997; Van Ginkel 2000; Dekker 2002; Roodenburg 2000; Henkes and Roodenburg 2003; Henkes 2005). In carefully researching the functioning of their discipline before and during the German occupation they would even take the lead in Dutch academia. Though it was deemed important to clearly establish who among the contemporary ethnologists had sympathised or even collaborated with the Nazis, the gist of this

262

Reframing Dutch Culture

historiography was aimed at considering the theoretical flaws of the discipline. How was it possible that the Nazi ideologists could so easily incorporate the discipline’s central concepts in their propaganda campaigns? And were these weaknesses, this lack of critical mass, sufficiently reflected upon fifty years hence? What about the recently rediscovered and reformulated concepts of national identity, ethnicity, heritage or authenticity? Most of this historiography was inspired by Bausinger, Moser, Konrad Köstlin and other German ethnologists, though it was also informed by, for instance, James Clifford, George W. Stocking or the ethnologists Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Regina Bendix. Interestingly, in its focus on German ethnology it continued a longstanding tradition. From the early twentieth century on, Dutch ethnologists tended to regard German folklore studies as their scholarly frame of reference. This applied – although not to the same extent– to many of the Austrian, Swiss and Scandinavian ethnologists as well. Another striking feature was the contacts with colleagues in Belgium. By the end of the nineteenth century, ties strengthened with Flemish folklorists, who had been the first within the Dutch-speaking territories to launch a scholarly journal for the discipline. In 1888 they established the journal Volkskunde, which still prospers today. The small number of scholars dedicated to ethnology, the sustained emphasis on documentation and the traditional focus on Germany may explain why for a long time the discipline neglected its theoretical dimensions and its history. It saw itself almost as an offshoot of German folklore studies and ethnology. As stated, toward the end of the twentieth century, it underwent a thorough theoretical and methodological reassessment, adopting a broader orientation toward Europe and the world and developing a greater interest in ethnology in the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian countries and in France. In the process alliances were forged with the new cultural history and with social and cultural anthropology. One of the consequences was that the term ‘ethnology’, already adopted among the sister disciplines in France, Germany and Scandinavia, came to be regarded as a more appropriate designation for the discipline than the older one of volkskunde or folklore studies (Dekker, Roodenburg and Rooijakkers 2000: 7–8). Early Developments When did Dutch ethnology start? When do we meet with a first interest in the country’s peasants and fisher folk? Obviously, the discovery and publication of Tacitus’s Germania manuscript in 1458 fostered part of this interest. Tacitus’s Germania provided a fairly cohesive ethnographic account of a non-Romanised, Germanic era in Northwest Europe. It also extolled the valour of the Batavians, who lived in the area that later became the Netherlands. Tacitus’s description of these Batavians underlay what in later centuries was to be called the Batavian stam or tribe, the heart and roots of the Dutch natie, a term already in use in the seventeenth century. State formation in the Netherlands, in

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages

263

conjunction with the struggle for freedom from Spanish control and the religious disputes threatening to divide the population, heightened public interest in the new state’s origins and identity. The Dutch were believed to have emerged from an amalgamate of Germanic tribes, of which the Batavians were regarded as the most prominent. In the Batavians’ uprising against the Romans in 69 AD an analogy was found to the Dutch revolt against Spain. To a large part the country’s proto-national identity was grafted upon this Batavian myth (Schama 1987: 76–81). Both the myth and the Germanic tribes theme remained a fixed reference in Dutch ethnology until well into the twentieth century (Swinkels 2005). It agreed with the contemporary ethnologists’ interest in ethnic continuity, in which especially the country’s peasant and fisher folk were seen as the vectors of the nation’s ‘timeless’ and ‘authentic’ heart. The Eighteenth Century Disciplines writing their own history often tend to colonise a past to which other disciplines can lay justified claims as well. A case in point is the Leiden physician and university lecturer Joannes Le Francq van Berkheij (1729–1812). Was he the first Dutch ethnologist or the first Dutch anthropologist? The question is a highly anachronistic one, as the eighteenth century hardly distinguished between the two disciplines. Scholars used the notion of anthropology (or anthropologia, as we already encounter it in a Dutch 1768 adaptation of a French encyclopedia) in a broad sense. Considered as a branch of Buffon’s system of natural history, anthropologia or menschenleere did not yet systematically distinguish between physical and cultural anthropology or between volkskunde and volkenkunde. What makes Berkheij interesting is that he may have been the first scholar in Europe to use the term volkskunde. In his Natuurlijke Historie van Holland, heavily indebted to Buffon, he coined the terms volkskunde and volksbeschrijving as shorthands for the description of a country’s natural history. Both terms may be dated to 1776, when Berkheij published the third part of his voluminous study (Dekker 2002: 4– 6; Koolhaas-Grosfeld 2003). In contemporary Germany, the term Volkskunde was introduced in 1782, at the University of Göttingen, where at the time a completely new historiography was devised, a historiography not of states but of peoples or ‘nations’ (Vermeulen 1996: 13–14). Berkheij did not portray the Dutch as a whole. His careful ethnography, considering social and geographical differences in detail, addresses the contemporary province of Holland (covering the present provinces of North and South Holland). Following Buffon he discussed the ‘nature’ of the province’s inhabitants, situating their physical and mental make-up within the parameters of natural predisposition, customs and natural surroundings. Interestingly, Berkheij also stressed notions of ethnic continuity, arguing that the Hollanders still possessed many of the Batavians’ physical and mental characteristics, because over the ages they hardly interbred with other peoples. In emphasising such continuity (in his case clearly related to

264

Reframing Dutch Culture

the exasperated national consciousness characteristic of the Dutch Enlighthenment), Berkheij also anticipates the brothers Grimm and the Romantic Nationalists in general (Abrahams 1993; Koolhaas-Grosfeld 2003: 84–86), though his work does not attest to their much more ideological and aesthetic appreciation of folk culture. It does not hold any Herderian convictions that folk songs and folk poetry should be seen as the expression of a nation’s soul, as its ‘untainted’ and ‘timeless’ core. It is also free of the Romantic Nationalists’ salvage paradigm, the fear that this soul will get irretrievably lost. The Nineteenth Century Remarkably, neither Berkheij nor the brothers Grimm found much following in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. Generally, Dutch national consciousness remained grafted onto the seventeenth century, on the Dutch ‘Golden Age’. Prevailing was a largely state-oriented and assimilationist idiom of nationhood, not the ethnocultural and differentialist idiom so characteristic of nineteenth-century Germany and its Kleinstaaterei. Only at the end of the century would the Netherlands develop an ethnocultural idiom of its own (cf. Brubaker 1992; Roodenburg 2000: 72–78). Perhaps one may say that Berkheij’s legacy lived on in the work of another physician, Douwe Lubach (1815–1902), who published a study with the intriguing title, Grondtrekken eener ethnologie van Nederland (1861–1863) (Basic Features of a Dutch Ethnology). Arguing that physical anthropology and culturally informed ethnology are inextricably entwined, Lubach addressed the tribal distinctions and the physical and cultural attributes of the oldest inhabitants of the Netherlands. Far from empirically grounded, the book achieved little impact, though it stimulated the amateurs of ‘antiquities’ to go searching for the lacking archaeological materials. German inspiration was not completely absent. An interesting example is the lawyer and poet A.C.W. Staring (1767–1840) who, having studied in Göttingen from 1787 to 1789, developed an interest in local tales and customs and in German and Nordic mythology in general. A far more influential figure was the Frisian minister Joost Hidde Halbertsma (1789–1869), whose interest in the Romantic Nationalists and their ethnocultural convictions (he corresponded with Jacob Grimm) was closely related to his cherishing of the Frisian language and his fighting for the cultural and linguistic autonomy of the province of Friesland. In the 1840s a regional awareness arose among Friesland’s cultural elite. It started gathering local tales and describing local and regional customs. Though the movement started its own yearbook (De Vrije Fries) in 1839 and also established the first folklore museum in the Netherlands, the Kabinet van Friesche Oudheden, in 1853, its activities did not produce a scholarly debate on the nature of folk culture or on the merits of folklore studies in general. Such theoretical issues were raised elsewhere, for example in Germany and Great Britian. Inspired by the British reception of Romantic Nationalism, in particular by Andrew Lang’s ‘anthropological theory of folklore’, the later church historian Laurentius Knappert

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages

265

(1863–1943) wrote his dissertation on the uses of folklore studies for the history of religion (Knappert 1887; cf. Roodenburg 2000: 82–89). The author was well acquainted with the latest research in fairy tales and myth, but he could not rely on any data from the Netherlands, which may explain why his book, like Lubach’s before him, did not inspire others to take up the discipline. Eventually, inspiration came from Belgium, where the Flemish had entered upon a struggle against the French speaking elite to obtain recognition for their own language and culture. In its ethnocultural idiom, grounding the Flemish nation in its supposedly age-old language and folk culture, it resembled the Frisian movement or comparable movements in Scotland, Brittany or the Basque Provinces. Its journal Volkskunde, launched in 1888, addressed Dutch and Flemish scholars alike and soon Dutch folklorists started to publish their articles in Volkskunde. It would remain the only outspoken scholarly platform for the Netherlands and Flanders into the 1920s, and greatly enriched the discipline in the Netherlands. The Twentieth Century Despite Knappert’s interest in British folklore studies, Dutch ethnologists would follow their German colleagues. For example, Joseph Schrijnen’s work betrays the influence of Gustav Meyer (like Schrijnen both a linguist and folklore scholar), and of Albrecht Dieterich, whose geological imagery of folk culture as the Mutterboden der Kulturnation returns in Schrijnen’s no less static characterisation of culture as ‘to a large part rooted in the mother soil of folk culture’ (Schrijnen 1910: 5; idem 1913: 10; cf. Van der Zeijden 1995: 240–241). Schrijnen was the first ethnologist to write a handbook for the discipline, his Nederlandsche volkskunde (1915–1917). In keeping with contemporary views, he largely interpreted Dutch folk culture in terms of Germanic continuity. Along these lines, Schrijnen argued that the comprehensive Dutch tribe comprised three main tribes: Frisians in the Northwest, Saxons in the East and Franks in the South. He thereby followed Berkheij and recent research into Dutch farm architecture, in which the farms’ construction styles were attributed to the same ethnic typology (Gallée 1907–1908). In 1912 these and similar views materialised in the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum in Arnhem, modelled after the Swedish open air museum of Skansen, founded in 1891 (De Jong 2001). The museum was dedicated to the systematic collection and ethnic classification of the material manifestations of folk culture, of all the buildings and implements used by Dutch peasants and fishermen. Behind the initiative, as behind folklore studies in general, loomed the contemporary salvage paradigm, the ethnocultural conviction that folk culture, though harbouring the timeless and untainted core of the nation, was about to disappear and that scholars and the public at large should rescue whatever there remained to rescue. Remarkably, Schrijnen was not only interested in continuity. He also advocated a ‘synchronic’ focus on folk culture, even trying to adopt De Saussure’s structuralist

266

Reframing Dutch Culture

distinctions of parole and langue. In the Donum Natalicum, presented to Schrijnen at his sixtieth birthday, one of the contributions (‘Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens’) was written by Petr Bogatyrev and Roman Jakobson. In the early 1930s harsh criticism of a reprint of Schrijnen’s handbook demonstrated that the discipline was unfolding. The author was Jan de Vries (1890–1964), who as a full professor in General Linguistics and Old Germanic Studies at Leiden University was already enjoying an international reputation (Henkes 2005: 121–193). Soon to become the most prominent folklore scholar of the Netherlands, he advocated a more rigid approach to the discipline. De Vries criticised Schrijnen’s notion of the three tribes, blaming him for his poor knowledge of Old Germanic culture, for his far too Germanic interpretations and for his neglect of the geographic-historical methods developed by Albert Wesselski and Carl von Sydow. Though Schrijnen had come to advocate a synchronist approach to save the discipline from the arbitrary collecting of ‘antiquities’, De Vries condemned the unrevised reprint for being just that, a criticism hitting Schrijnen hard (Dekker 2002: 51–54). De Vries articulated his own ideas in a volume entitled Volk van Nederland (1937). Intended as the modern equivalent of Schrijnen’s handbook, it contains articles written by various authors on subjects ranging from the national soil conditions and national character to ritual, traditional costumes and folk art. In his introduction De Vries equated folk culture with the culture of peasants and fisher folk and criticised the notion of gesunkes Kulturgut, put forward by the German ethnologist Hans Naumann, arguing that folk culture was no more than a passive and out-ofdate imitation of the culture of the upper classes. Like Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer and Adolf Spamer in Germany, De Vries pointed to the processes of appropriation among the peasants and fisher folk. Folk culture was defined as dynamic; adopting many elements of elite culture. However, De Vries maintained the notion of a folk spirit, which he – again like Hoffmann-Krayer and Spamer – situated in the ways of appropriation. Though allowing for diachronic trends, cultural innovation and external influences, he did not discard the notion of ethnic continuity (Roodenburg 2000: 90–92; Dekker 2002: 134–142). If in the Interbellum the discipline was dominated by the two personalities of Schrijnen and De Vries, its popularisation was lorded over by the journalist Dirk Jan van der Ven (1891–1973). Though adopting Schrijnen’s (and Dieterich’s) understanding of folk culture as the ‘mother soil’ of all culture, he took a quite divergent stance as to its protection and conservation. Contrary to Schrijnen, he did not consider folk culture as a vanishing relic, as a ‘delicate flower’ best to be left alone. Offering a fascinating and still informative illustration of all the complexities involved in the practices of protection and conservation, of heritage as a mode of cultural production (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998), Van der Ven promoted, staged and invented folk culture wherever he could. It was his way of salvaging the national spirit (De Jong 2001; Henkes 2005: 33–119). He inundated the public with popularising and richly illustrated lectures, books and films, and he organised pageants, gatherings, folkdances and other forms of public folklore, actively encouraging re-enactment.

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages

267

One conspicuous example was his staging of the Vaderlandsch Historisch Volksfeest in 1919, a national manifestation of the country’s regional diversity, presenting the feasts, traditional costumes and folk dances from all the eleven provinces. No less remarkable are the films he made between 1921 and 1936, all devoted to the country’s local and regional folk costumes and not shunning reenactment. The films may be seen as an early and in its direction already quite professional example of visual ethnology. The music to some of these silent movies was written by the German-Dutch composer Julius Röntgen. In 1934, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences started a first institutionalisation of the discipline by establishing a national body for folklore studies: the so-called Volkskunde Commissie (Folklore Studies Commission). In keeping with the German example, this commission was institutionally affiliated with the Dialects Commission and the Commission on Names, established in 1930 and 1948, respectively. Schrijnen was appointed chairman, the Neerlandist Pieter Meertens (1899–1985), already holding the same position in the Dialects Commission, was appointed secretary. A tireless organiser, he would become its driving force, eventually uniting the three commissions in the institute named after him (Henkes 2005: 265–351). The three commissions circulated questionnaires to gather linguistic, onomastic and ethnological data. The Folklore Studies Commission was, in conjunction with its Flemish counterparts, dedicated primarily – following yet another German example – to compiling a Volkskunde-Atlas voor Nederland en Vlaams-België (Folklore Atlas for the Netherlands and Flanders). By using the geographic-cartographic approach developed by the German colleagues (who built on the studies of Wilhelm Pessler and the historical Kulturraumforschung of Hermann Aubin, Theodor Frings and Joseph Müller), the compilers aimed to find historical explanations for a range of folkloric manifestations both in Flanders and the Netherlands. After Schrijnen passed away in 1938, the ambitious De Vries was appointed as his successor. The start of the Second World War and the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 heralded a new but also controversial career prospect for De Vries. In their strategy to incorporate folklore studies and related disciplines such as archaeology within their own ideology, the Nazis welcomed Dutch folklore studies to buttress their thesis of a presumed Germanic tribal affiliation between both peoples (Eickhoff 2000; Eickhoff 2003). The long-time orientation on German folklore studies, the widespread admiration for German culture in general, and the absence of a solid institutional and conceptual framework serving as a buffer against Nazi cultural policy were all conducive to such a rapprochement (Henkes 2000). In 1943, attracted by the ample finances made available by the occupying forces De Vries put himself forward as a begunstigend lid (supporting member) of the Germanic SS and set himself the task of establishing a Rijksinstituut voor Nederlandsche Taal en Volkscultuur (State Institute for Dutch Langue and Folk Culture). As a consequence, when the war ended he was discharged from his chair in Leiden and all of his other positions (Dekker 2002: 239–256; Henkes 2005: 184–191). Not only did De Vries damage his own career and reputation, he also seriously tainted the image of folklore

268

Reframing Dutch Culture

studies for many years to come. It induced Meertens and Han Voskuil (b. 1926), Meertens’s most notable successor, to maintain a low disciplinary profile and to focus on documentation. Though practiced at the Amsterdam Volkskundebureau, the successor to the Volkskunde-Commissie, the discipline had little chance to enter academia again. During the post-war years, most of those envisioning a role for folklore studies in the social and economic reconstruction of the Netherlands were amateurs or scholars working outside the discipline. They pioneered popular journals such as Eigen Volk (Our People) and Neerlands Volksleven (Dutch Folklife) and found productive popularisers such as Klaas ter Laan (1871–1963) and Tjaard W. R. de Haan (1919–1983). Assisted by the Nederlands Volkskundig Genootschap (Dutch Folklore Society) and the Beraad voor het Nederlands Volksleven (Council of Dutch Folk Customs), they determined the folklore studies of the 1950s to a large degree (Van der Zeijden 2000). Meanwhile, scholars at the Volkskundebureau kept gathering material for the Flemish-Dutch atlas. Although this work strengthened ties with the colleagues in Flanders, the first edition was published only in 1959, due to differences of opinion regarding project execution and evaluation. It was also harshly criticised: as several critics pointed out, the material was inadequately processed and analysed, the themes addressed were inappropriate, and the maps resulting from this essentially ahistorical undertaking were too rudimentary. Until 1968 only four issues of the atlas were published (Dekker 2002: 275–330). By then, new scholarly insights, elaborated in Germany, were eagerly embraced at the Volkskundebureau in the Netherlands. Most important was the Tübinger school, led by Hermann Bausinger, and its critical reassessment of the core concepts of ‘people’, ‘tradition’ and ‘continuity’. Another influence was the Munich School of Hans Moser, in which the discipline’s long-standing ahistorical methods were replaced by careful archival research. The new insights came to the fore in a number of critical reviews written by Voskuil in the early 1970s (Dekker 2002: 335–336). Profiting from this reflexive turn initiated in Germany the discipline gradually sought to ally itself with the emerging new cultural history of Peter Burke and others, and it found an interesting ally in a group of cultural anthropologists working at the University of Amsterdam. Thanks to its colonial past the Netherlands possessed some important schools of cultural anthropology, but quite in keeping with this past most of the research conducted focussed on the non-Western world. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that a group of anthropologists headed by Jeremy Boissevain became interested in an anthropology of Europe, including the Netherlands. The new alliances materialised in the Volkskundig Bulletin, established in 1975, after both Meertens and Voskuil had withdrawn from the editorial board of Volkskunde, due to serious differences of opinion with the colleagues in Flanders concerning the future of the discipline. Boissevain and his younger colleagues Anton Blok and Jojada Verrips were all involved with the new journal, taking a seat in its editorial board. They were joined by the cultural historian Willem Frijhoff.

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages

269

The driving force behind these innovations was Voskuil, who in 1965 was appointed head of the Volkskunde Department at the Bureau. Inspired by Bausinger and Moser, Voskuil systematically gathered historical and serial data to elaborate the geographical approach, focussing preferably on material culture. Relatively little attention was paid to contemporary folk culture. Moreover, Voskuil rejected the study of folklorism and sided, like Schrijnen and Meertens, against such public folklore as practiced by Van der Ven. Recent Developments Anno 2007 Dutch ethnology has yet to become firmly established in academia. The tarnished reputation of the discipline as a result of the Second World War, its close ties to public folklore and amateur pursuits, as well as a healthy and perhaps typically Dutch suspicion of notions of national identity (see our Introduction), may all explain this situation. As a consequence, most folklore research has taken place within the subsequent surroundings of the Volkskunde Commissie, the Volkskundebureau and the Meertens Institute, which received its name after Meertens’ death in 1985. Besides the literature already mentioned, Voskuil’s roman à clef offers an engrossing and well-informed historiography of its own. In the 1990s folklore studies thrived in the Netherlands. At the Meertens Institute, the focus shifted increasingly to the present without, however, excluding historical approaches. Continuing the course embarked on in the 1970s and 1980s by the generation of Han Voskuil and Ton Dekker, it has now adopted many of the new perspectives and developments in the humanities and social sciences, inspiring the institute in 2000 to follow the example of many of its sister institutes abroad and to rename the discipline of folklore studies as (Dutch) Ethnology. As we saw, during the same period, this new course was accompanied and directly supported by new reflexive research into the history of the discipline. All these recent developments converged in two innovative research programmes (Bennis 1999; Bennis 2006), a new handbook in Dutch (Dekker, Roodenburg and Rooijakkers 2000), a new journal of ethnology in Dutch journal (cULTUUR) and the present English introduction. At present, three of the ethnologists working at the Meertens Institute are holding a special chair: Gerard Rooijakkers at the University of Amsterdam, Louis Peter Grijp at the University of Utrecht, and Herman Roodenburg at the Catholic University of Leuven. Another chair, focussing on the province of North-Brabant, is held by Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld at the University of Tilburg. Fortunately, public folklore and the discipline’s popularisation have been safely lodged at the second central operator in folklore studies, the Nederlands Centrum van Volkscultuur (Dutch Centre for Folk Culture) in Utrecht. This state-sponsored national centre, established in 1992, is dedicated to inform the public as widely as possible on Dutch folk culture as cultural heritage. Two outdoor museums serve this purpose as well: the Dutch Open Air Museum and the Zuiderzeemuseum, established in 1947. The Meertens Institute has strong ties with all three institutions. Dutch

270

Reframing Dutch Culture

ethnology will always represent a fruitful amalgam of research, documentation and popularisation, but is no longer the discipline of a few inspired but isolated scholars. References Abrahams, Roger (1993), Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics, Journal of American Folklore 106, 3–37. Bennis, Hans (1999), Het oog op de toekomst. Onderzoeksplan Meertens Instituut 2000–2005. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Bennis, Hans (2006), Dynamische Tradities. Onderzoeksplan Meertens Instituut 2006–2010. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Brubaker, Rogers (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. De Jong, Ad (2002), De dirigenten van de herinnering. Musealisering en nationalisering van de volkscultuur in Nederland, 1815–1940. Nijmegen: SUN. Dekker, Ton (2000), Ideologie en volkscultuur: een geschiedenis van de Nederlandse volkskunde, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlands etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 13–65. Dekker, Ton (2002), De Nederlandse volkskunde. De verwetenschappelijking van een emotionele belangstelling. Amsterdam: Aksant. Dekker, Ton, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds) (2000), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN. Eickhoff, Martin, Barbara Henkes and Frank van Vree (eds) (2000), Volkseigen. Ras, cultuur en wetenschap in Nederland 1900–1950. Zutphen: Walburg Pers [special issue of the Jaarboek van het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie 11]. Eickhoff, Martijn (2003), De oorsprong van het ‘eigene’. Nederlands vroegste verleden, archeologie en nationaal-socialisme. Amsterdam: Boom. Frijhoff, Willem Th.M. (1997), Volkskunde en cultuurwetenschap. De ups en downs van een dialoog. Amsterdam: KNAW. Gallée, J.H. (1907–1908), Het boerenhuis in Nederland en zijn bewoners. Zwolle. Henkes, Barbara (2000), Voor Volk en vaderland. over de omgang met wetenschap en politiek in de volkskunde. Jaarboek van het Nederlands Insituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie 11, 62–94. Henkes, Barbara (2005), Uit liefde voor het volk. Volksundigen op zoek naar de Nederlandse identiteit 1918–1948. Amsterdam: Atheneum – Polak & Van Gennep. Henkes, Barbara, and Herman Roodenburg (eds) (2003), Volkskunde, vaderlandsliefde en levensverhalen. Special issue of the Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 29(2), 129–244. Knappert, Laurentius (1887), De beteekenis van de wetenschap van het folklore voor de godsdienstgeschiedenis onderzocht en aan de Holda-mythen getoetst.

A History of Dutch Ethnology in 10½ Pages

271

Amsterdam: Centen. Koolhaas-Grosfeld, Eveline (2003), ‘Mensch, ken u zelven’. Antropologie als bron voor de volkskunde van Johannes Le Francq van Berkheij. De Achttiende Eeuw 35, 69–86. Lubach, Douwe (1861–1863), Grondtrekken eener Ethnologie van Nederland. Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman. Roodenburg, Herman (2000), Volkscultuur en ideologie: het internationale debat, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlands etnologie. Nijmegen: SUN, 66–109. Schama, Simon (1987), The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Knopf. Schrijnen, Jos (1910), Essays en studiën in vergelijkende godsdienstgeschiedenis, mythologie en folklore. Venlo: G. Mosmans. Schrijnen, Jos (1915–1917), Nederlandsche Volkskunde, 2 vols. Zutphen: Thieme. Swinkels, Louis (ed.) (2005), De Bataven. Verhalen van een verdwenen volk. Nijmegen: Museum het Valkhof. Van Alkemade, K., and P. van der Schelling (1732–1735), Nederlandse displegtigheden. Rotterdam: Ph. Losel. Van der Zeijden, Albert (2000), De voorgeschiedenis van het Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. De ondersteuning van de volkscultuurbeoefening in Nedelrand 1949–1992. Utrecht: NCV. Van Ginkel, Rob (2000), Volkscultuur als valkuil. Over antropologie, volkskunde en cultuurpolitiek. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Voskuil, J.J. (1996–2000), Het Bureau, 7 vols. Amsterdam: Van Oorschot.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 14

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology The titles mentioned here offer an introduction to the ethnological research carried out on the Netherlands and translated into a major international language (mostly English or German). A selection of titles of important studies published only in Dutch is given with a translation of the title; many of which do have an abstract in English. The titles not only refer to strict ethnological research but also to research carried out within related disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, cultural history or sociology. More up to date information may be retrieved from the the Meertens Institute’s ethnological library online catalogue: www.meertens.nl/bibliotheek Ethnological Handbooks and Studies A good overview on research in Dutch Ethnology and Folklore Studies during the last decades is given by Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds) (2000) in Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie. Nijmegen: Sun (Popular Culture. An Introduction to Dutch Ethnology). In 2001, Gerard Rooijakkers published a short and more popular introduction to folkloristics: Volkskunde. De rituelen van het dagelijks leven. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur (Folkloristics. The Rituals of Daily Life). A historical ethnology on the important region of Holland was written by Rob van Ginkel (2003), Hollandse tonelen. Een etnologische verkenning, in Th. de Nijs and E. Beukers (eds), Geschiedenis van Holland. vol. IIIb. Hilversum: Verloren, 620–694 (Dutch Scenes. An Ethnological Exploration). For a short overview on the country in general see: Peter Jan Margry (2004), The Netherlands, in William M. Clements (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife, vol. 3. New York: Greenwood Press, 233–248. Rob van Ginkel (1997), Notities over Nederlanders. Antropologische reflecties. Amsterdam: Boom (Notes on the Dutch: Anthropological Reflections). Historiographical Studies Two general historiographical overviews on the Dutch discipline volkskunde (ethnology) have been published: W.Th.M. Frijhoff (1997), Volkskunde en cultuurwetenschap: de ups en downs van een dialoog. Amsterdam: KNAW (Folkloristics and Cultural Science: the Ups and Downs of a Dialogue); and

274

Reframing Dutch Culture

Ton Dekker, ‘Ideologie en volkscultuur: een geschiedenis van de Nederlandse volkskunde’, in Ton Dekker, Herman Roodenburg and Gerard Rooijakkers (eds) (2000), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlands etnologie. Nijmegen: Sun, 13–65 (Ideology and Popular Culture: a History of Dutch Folklore). A similar historiography, looking at international but also national developments, is offered in Herman Roodenburg, Ideologie en volkscultuur: het internationale debat, in idem, 66–109 (Ideology and Popular Culture: the International Debate). A detailed historiography of 20th century Dutch ethnology and ethnologists is provided by Ton Dekker (2002), De Nederlandse volkskunde. De verweten schappelijking van een emotionele belangstelling. Amsterdam: Aksant (Dutch Folklore Studies. The Professionalisation of an Emotional Interest). Available in English: Han Vermeulen & Jean Kommers (eds) (2002), Tales from Academia. History of Anthropology in the Netherlands, 2 vols. Saarbrücken: Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik, including several chapters on (indigenous) anthropology and ethnology; cf. also: Jeremy Boissevain and Jojada Verrips (1989), Dutch Dilemmas. Anthropologists Look at the Netherlands. Assen: Van Gorcum. In the last decade various studies have been published on the history of Folklore Studies and the wider cultural and intellectual climate, all in the Dutch language: Rob van Ginkel (1999), Op zoek naar eigenheid. Denkbeelden en discussies over cultuur en identiteit in Nederland. Den Haag: SDU (In Search of Individuality. Ideas and Discussions on Culture and Identity in the Netherlands). Martin Eickhoff, Barbara Henkes and Frank van Vree (eds) (2000), Volkseigen. Ras, cultuur en wetenschap in Nederland 1900–1950. Zutphen: Walburg Pers (National Identity. Race, Culture and Science in the Netherlands 1900–1950; special issue of the Jaarboek van het Nederlands Insituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie 11). Albert van der Zeijden (2000), De voorgeschiedenis van het Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur. De ondersteuning van de volkscultuurbeoefening in Nederland 1949–1992. Utrecht: NCV (The History Preceding the Establishment of the Dutch Center for Popular Culture. The Support of Popular Cultural Practices in the Netherlands). Rob van Ginkel (2000), Volkscultuur als valkuil. Over antropologie, volkskunde en cultuurpolitiek. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis (Popular Culture as a Trap. On Anthropology, Folkloristics and Cultural Politics). Barbara Henkes and Herman Roodenburg (eds) (2003), Volkskunde, vaderlandsliefde en levensverhalen. [special issue] Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 29(2), 129–244 (Folklore, Patriotism and Life Stories). Martijn Eickhoff (2003), De oorsprong van het ‘eigene’, Nederlands vroegste verleden, archeologie en nationaal-socialisme. Amsterdam: Boom (The Origin of the ‘Typical’, The Earliest History of the Netherlands, Archaeology and National Socialism). Barbara Henkes (2005), Uit liefde voor het volk. Volkskundigen op zoek naar de Nederlandse identiteit 1918–1948. Amsterdam: Atheneum – Polak & Van Gennep (Love of One’s People: Folklorists in Search of Dutch Identity 1918–1948).

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology

275

Literature Selection The following sections provide a systematic and chronological selection of publications from ethnological and cultural-historical research carried out in the Netherlands over the last twenty-five years. Feast and Ritual Ton Dekker (1982). De opkomst van kerstboom en kerstviering in Nederland (ca. 1835–1880), Volkskundig Bulletin 8, 129–179 (The Advent of the Christmas Tree and Christmas Celebrations in the Netherlands). Frans Grijzenhout (1989), Feesten voor het vaderland. Patriotse en Bataafse feesten 1780–1806. Zwolle: Waanders (Celebrations for King and Country. Patriotic and Batavian Festivities). Ton Dekker (1991), Ausbreitung und Verbürgerlichung in der niederländischen Festkultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, in Ton Dekker et al. (eds), Ausbreitung bürgerlicher Kultur in den Niederlanden und Nordwestdeutschland. Münster: Coppenrath, 42–56. Jeremy Boissevain (ed.) (1991), Feestelijke vernieuwing in Nederland? Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut (Festive innovations in the Netherlands?). Herman Roodenburg (1991), “The Hand of Friendship”. Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Gesture from Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity Press, 152–189. Henk te Velde (1992), Gemeenschapszin en plichtsbesef. Liberalisme en nationalisme in Nederland, 1870–1918. Den Haag: Sdu (Sense of Community and Responsibility. Liberalism and Nationalism in the Netherlands). Henk te Velde (1993), L’origine des fêtes nationales en France et aux Pays Bas dans les années 1880, in Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff (eds), Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 105–109. Heidi de Mare and Anna Vos (eds) (1993), Urban Rituals in Italy and the Netherlands. Historical Contrasts in the Use of Public Space, Architecture and Urban Environment. Assen: Van Gorcum. Gerard Rooijakkers (1994), Rituele repertoires. Volkscultuur in oostelijk NoordBrabant 1559–1853. Nijmegen: Sun (Ritual Repertoires. Popular Culture in Eastern North-Brabant). Mirjam van Leer (1995), Geven rond Sinterklaas. Een ritueel als spiegel van veranderende relaties. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis (Gifts During Saint Nicolas: a Ritual Reflecting Changing Relationships). Paul Knolle (ed.) (1996), ‘Een groot gedruis en eene onbesuisde vrolykheit’. Feest in de 18e eeuw. Leiden: Primavera Pers (What Raucous and Reckless Merriment, Feasts in the 18th Century). Frans Groot (1999), Papists and Beggars. National Festivals and Nation Building in the Netherlands during the 19th Century, in Peter van der Veer and Hartmut

276

Reframing Dutch Culture

Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion. Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. E. Boer (1999/2000), Saintly and Generous. Saint Nicholas and the Low Countries, The Low Countries. Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands. A Yearbook, 108–115. John Helsloot (2000), Die Nationalisierung des Nikolausfestes in den Niederlanden im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Skizze anhand der Fragebogen des Meertens-Instituts von 1943 und 1994. Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 45, 217–244. John Helsloot (2001), An Element of Christian Liturgy? The Feast of St Martin in the Netherlands in the 20th Century, in Paul Post et al. (eds), Christian Feast and Festival. The Dynamics of Western Liturgy and Culture. Leuven: Peeters, 493–518. Jef de Jager (2001), Rituelen. Nieuwe en oude gebruiken in Nederland. Utrecht: Het Spectrum (Rituals. New and Old Customs in the Netherlands). Nathal Dessing (2001), Rituals of Birth, Circumcision, Marriage, and Death among Muslims in the Netherlands. Leuven: Peeters. John Helsloot (2001), Halloween in Holland, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 97, 249–253. Peter Jan Margry and Henk te Velde (2003), Contested Rituals and the Battle for Public Space: the Netherlands, in Christopher Clark & Wolfram Kaiser (eds), Culture Wars: Secular-Clerical Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 129–151, 347–350. Post, Paul, Albertina Nugteren and Hessel Zondag (2003), Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual Repertoire. Leuven: Peeters. Peter Jan Margry (2003), The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in the Netherlands? Etnofoor 16, 102–127. Irene Stengs (2003), Ephemeral Memorials against ‘Senseless Violence’: materialisations of public outcry. Etnofoor 16, 26–40. John Helsloot (2005), Das Schweigen durchbrechen. Der Triumphzug des Valentinstags in den Niederlanden – nach 50 Jahren. Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 50, 141–168. Heritage, Nation and the ‘Traditional’ Kitty P.C. de Leeuw (1991), Kleding in Nederland 1813–1920. Van een traditioneel bepaald kleedpatroon naar een begin van modern kleedgedrag. Tilburg: De Leeuw. (Clothing in the Netherlands 1813–1920. From Clothing Designs Prescribed by Tradition to the Beginnings of Modern Fashion). Dolly Verhoeven et al. (eds) (1998), Klederdracht en kleedgedrag. Het Kostuum Harer Majesteits onderdanen, 1898–1998. Nijmegen, Sun (National Dress and Clothing Customs. Her Majesty’s Subjects’s Clothing). Marianne Havermans (1998), Aangekleed gaat uit. Streekkleding en cultuur in Noord-Holland 1750–1900. Zwolle: Waanders (Traditional Costumes Become

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology

277

Unfashionable. Traditional Regional Clothing and Culture in North Holland 1750–1900). Ad de Jong (2001), De dirigenten van de herinnering. Musealisering en nationalisering van de volkscultuur in Nederland, (1815–1940). Nijmegen: Sun (The Conductors of Memory: ‘Museumisation’ and ‘Nationalisation’ of Folk Culture in the Netherlands). Henk Slechte, Niederlande: ‘Durch eigene Höllandische Kunst angeregt fühle ich, daß ich Holländer bin’, in Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen: ein europäisches Panorama. München: Koehler & Amelang, 223–247. Rob van der Laarse (2005), Bezeten van vroeger. Erfgoed, identiteit en musealisering. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis (Obsessed by the Past. Heritage, Identity and ‘Museumisation’). Joep Leerssen (2006), De bronnen van het vaderland. Taal, literatuur en de afbakening van Nederland, 1806–1890. Nijmegen: Vantilt (The Nation’s Sources. Language and Literature defining the Netherlands, 1806–1890). Identity, Immigration, Emigration, Integration, Ethnicity Annemieke Galema et al. (eds) (1993), Images of a Nation. Different Meanings of Dutchness, 1870–1940. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. John Helsloot (1998), St. Nicholas as a public festival in Java, 1870–1920. Articulating Dutch popular culture as ethnic culture. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 154, 613–637. Annette Stott (1998), Holland Mania. The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture. Woodstock: Overlook Press. Hester Dibbits (2000). “In Turkije gaat het tegenwoordig net zo”. De culturele repertoires van een Turks gezin in een multi-etnische wijk, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 27, 314–344 (‘This is how it’s done in Turkey these days’, The Cultural Repertoires of a Turkish Family in a Multi-Ethnic Neighbourhood). Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx (eds) (2000), Immigrant Integration. The Dutch Case. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Willem Frijhoff (2000), Reinventing an Old Fatherland. The Management of Dutch Identity in Early Modern America, in Regina Bendix and Herman Roodenburg (eds), Managing Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History and Anthropology. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 121–141. Theo Meder (2004), “There were a Turk, a Moroccan and a Dutchman...” Narrative repertoires in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Lombok in the Dutch city of Utrecht, in Sabine Wienker-Piepho and Klaus Roth (eds), Erzählen zwischen den Kulturen. Münster: Waxmann: 237–258. Rob van Ginkel (2004), Re-creating ‘Dutchness’. Cultural colonisation in post-war Holland, Nations and Nationalism. Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism 10(4), 421–438. Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover (eds) (2006), Veranderingen van het alledaagse. Cultuur en Migratie in Nederland 1950–2000. Den Haag: Sdu

278

Reframing Dutch Culture

(Changes in Daily Routines, Culture and Migration in the Netherlands). Joanne van der Leun and John Schuster (eds) (2006), Materiële Cultuur [Material Culture], [special issue] Migrantenstudies, 22(2), 33–107. Leisure, Tourism, Visual Culture John Helsloot (1995), Vermaak tussen beschaving en kerstening. Goes 1867– 1896. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut (Entertainment between Civilisation and Christianity. Goes 1867–1896). Carla Wijers (1995), Prinsen en clowns in het Limburgse narrenrijk. Het carnaval in Simpelveld en Roermond 1945–1992. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut (Princes and Jesters in Limburg’s Kingdom of Fools. Carnival in Simpelveld and Roermond). Eva Leitolf, Mark Power and Stephan Vanfleteren (2000), Neighbours: the Netherlands as seen by three foreign photographers. Amsterdam: De Verbeelding. Morad Bouchakour (2002), Party! in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Artimo. Tracy Metz (2002), Pret! Leisure en landschap. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers (Fun! Leisure and the Landscape). Herman W. Roodenburg (2002), Making an island in time. Dutch folklore studies, painting, tourism and craniometry around 1900, Journal of Folklore Research 39, 173–200. Hans Kraan (2002), Dromen van Holland. Buitenlandse kunstenaars schilderen Holland, 1800–1914. Zwolle: Waanders (Dreams of Holland: Foreign Artists Paint Holland 1800–1914). Marjolein Efting Dijkstra (2004), The Animal Prop: Animals as Play Objects in Dutch Folkloristic Games. Western Folklore, 63(1/2), 169–188. Folk Narrative Research and Orality A.M.A Cox-Leick and H.L. Cox (1977), Märchen der Niederlande (Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs Verlag. Anton J. Dekker (1978), 150 Jaar Nederlands volksverhaalonderzoek. Volkskundig Bulletin 4, 1–28 (150 Years Research of Dutch Folktales). Jurjen van der Kooi (1984), Volksverhalen in Friesland. Lectuur en mondelinge overlevering. Een typencatalogus. Groningen: Stifting FFYRUG [Folktales in Friesland. Oral and Written Transmission. A Catalogue of Types]. Aernout van Overbeke (1991), Anecdota sive historiae jocosae. Een zeventiendeeeuwse verzameling moppen en anekdotes, Rudolf Dekker and Herman Roodenburg (eds). Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Eric Venbrux and Theo Meder (1995), The False Teeth in the Cod. A Legend put into Context. Contemporary Legend 5, 15–131. Ton Dekker, Jurjen van der Kooi and Theo Meder (1997), Van Aladdin tot Zwaan kleef aan. Lexicon van sprookjes: ontstaan, ontwikkeling, variaties. Nijmegen: SUN (From Aladdin to the Golden Goose. A Lexicon of Fairy Tales: Origins,

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology

279

Development, Variations). Herman Roodenburg (1997), To converse agreeably: civility and the telling of jokes in seventeenth-century Holland, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour. From Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity Press, 112–133. Ton Dekker and Theo Meder (eds) (1998), Van mondeling verhaal tot themapark. De waardering en receptie van sprookjes. Nijmegen: Sun (From Spoken Story to Theme Park: the Appreciation and Reception of Fairy Tales). Eric Venbrux and Theo Meder (1999), Anders Bijma’s Folktale Repertoire and its Collectors. Fabula 40(3/4), 259–277. Jurjen van der Kooi (2000), Niederlande. Enzyklopädie des Märchens 10(1), 24–34. Giselinde Kuipers (2000), ‘The difference between a Surinamese and a Turk: Ethnic jokes and the position of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands’, Humor 13(2), 141–175. Theo Meder (2001), Vertelcultuur in Waterland. De volksverhalen uit de collectie Bakker (ca. 1900). Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG (Story-Telling Culture in Waterland. Folktales from the Bakker Collection (ca.1900)). Eric Venbrux and Theo Meder (2004), Authenticity as an analytic concept in folkloristics: a case of collecting folktales in Friesland. Etnofoor 17(1/2), 199–214. Peter Burger and Willem Koetsenruijter (eds) (2004), Mediahypes en moderne sagen. Sterke verhalen in het nieuws. Leiden: Stichting Neerlandistiek Leiden (Media Hype and Modern Legends. Tall tales in the News). Theo Meder and Cor Hendriks (2005), Vertelcultuur in Nederland. Volksverhalen uit de Collectie Boekenoogen (ca. 1900). Amsterdam: Aksant (The Culture of Story-Telling in the Netherlands. Folktales from the Boekenoogen Collection (ca. 1900)). Music and Ballads Ton Dekker, Marie van Dijk and Henk Kuijer (eds) (1987–1991), Onder de groene linde. Verhalende liederen uit de mondelinge overlevering verzameld door Ate Doornbosch, 3 vols. Amsterdam/Abcoude: Uniepers (Under the Green Lime Tree, Ballads from the Oral Tradition Collected by Ate Doornbosch). Louis Peter Grijp (1991), Het Nederlandse lied in de Gouden Eeuw. Het mechanisme van de contrafactuur. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut (Dutch Songs during the Golden Age. The Contrafaction Mechanism). Jozef Vos (1993), De spiegel der volksziel. Volksliedbegrip en cultuurpolitiek engagement in het bijzonder in het socialistische en katholieke jeugdidealisme tijdens het interbellum. Nijmegen: Sun (Reflecting the Folk’s soul. Understanding Folksongs and Cultural Political Engagement, Specifically Socialist and Catholic Youth Idealism during the Inter-Bellum).

280

Reframing Dutch Culture

Jan Smelik (1997), Eén in lied en leven. Het stichtelijk lied bij Nederlandse protestanten tussen 1866 en 1938. Den Haag: SDU (Joined in Song and Life. The Edifying Song of the Dutch Protestants from 1866 to 1938). Louis Peter Grijp (ed.), (1998), Nationale hymnen. Het Wilhelmus en zijn buren. Nijmegen: SUN (= Volkskundig bulletin 24, Special Issue) ([National Hymns. The Wilhelmus and its Neighbours). Martine de Bruin, Johan Oosterman et al. (2001), Repertorium van het Nederlandse lied tot 1600 / Repertory of Dutch songs until 1600. 2 vols. Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal en Literatuur / Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Louis Peter Grijp (ed.) (2001), Een Muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Amsterdam University Press (A Music History of the Netherlands). Dieuwke E. van der Poel et al. (2004), Het Antwerps Liedboek [1544], 2 vols. Tielt: Lannoo (The Antwerp Songbook). Public Folklore Albert van der Zeijden, The Dutch center for popular culture and the cultivation of ethnic traditions and popular culture in the Netherlands, in Ton Dekker et al. (eds) (2000), Roots and Rituals. The Construction of Ethnic Identities. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 205–216. Albert van der Zeijden (2004), Volkscultuur van en voor een breed publiek. Enkele theoretische premissen en conceptuele uitgangspunten. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur (Folklore for a Wide Audience. Several Theoretical Premises and Conceptual Assumptions). Simon J. Bronner (2006), The Year of Folklore, and other Dutch Lessons in Public Heritage. Volkskunde 107(4), 343–360. See also the public folklore journal Levend Erfgoed. Vakblad voor Public Folklore & Public History (Living Heritage. Professional Journal for Public Folklore and Public History). Religion, Magic and Witchcraft P.J. Meertens and Maurits de Meyer (eds) (1959–1969), Volkskunde-Atlas voor Nederland en Vlaams-België. Amsterdam/Antwerp: Standaard Boekhandel (Folklore-Atlas of the Netherlands and Flemish Belgium; on folk medicine and healer saints). Jojada Verrips (1973), The Preacher and the Farmers. The Church as a Political Arena in a Dutch Community. American Anthropologist 75, 852–868. Gerard Rooijakkers and Theo van der Zee (eds) (1986), Religieuze volkscultuur. De spanning tussen de voorgeschreven orde en de geleefde praktijk. Nijmegen: Sun (Religious Popular Culture. The Tension Between the Canon and Real-Life Practice). Willem de Blécourt (1990), Termen van toverij. De veranderende betekenis van

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology

281

toverij in Noordoost-Nederland tussen de zestiende en twintigste eeuw. Nijmegen: Sun (Terms of Magic. The Change in Meaning of Magic in the North-Eastern Netherlands between the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries). Fred Matter (ed.) (1990), Toverij in Nederland, 1795–1985. Bibliografie. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut (Magic in the Netherlands, 1795–1985. Bibliography). Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Willem Frijhoff (1991), Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century. Rotterdam: University Press. A.Th. van Deursen and G.J. Schutte (1996), Geleefd geloven. Geschiedenis van de protestantse vroomheid in Nederland. Assen: Van Gorcum (History of Protestant Piety in the Netherlands). Peter Jan Margry and Charles Caspers (eds) (1997–2004), Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland, 4 vol. Verloren: Hilversum (Places of Pilgrimage in the Netherlands; updated internet version: www.meertens.knaw.nl/bol/). Paul Post et al. (1998), The Modern Pilgrim: Multidisciplinary explorations of Christian pilgrimage. Leuven: Peeters. Willem Frijhoff (1998), Heiligen, Idolen, Iconen. Nijmegen: Sun (Saints, Idols and Icons). Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra et al. (1999), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. London: Athlone Press, 102–113. Willem de Blécourt (1999), Het Amazonenleger: Irreguliere genezeressen in Nederland, 1850–1930. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (The Amazon Army: irregular women healers in the Netherlands, 1850–1930). Jacques Janssen (2000), Magical Healing in Modern Times. The Case of a Dutch Medium [= Jomanda]. Archiv für Religionspsychologie 23, 71–80. Cor Hoffer (2000), Volksgeloof en religieuze geneeswijzen onder moslims in Nederland. Een historisch-sociologische analyse van religieus-medisch denken en handelen. Amsterdam: Thela (Moslem Popular Belief and Religious Healing in the Netherlands. A Historical-Sociological Analysis of Religious-Medical Thought and Action). Willem Frijhoff (2002), Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History. Hilversum: Verloren. Charles Caspers and Peter Jan Margry (2003), Cults and Pilgrimage Sites in the Netherlands, in: Graham Jones (ed.), Saints of Europe: Studies towards a Survey of Cults and Culture. Donington: Shaun Tyas Publishing, 29–42. Arie-Jan Gelderblom, Jan L. de Jong and Marc Van Vaeck (eds) (2004), The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs. Leiden: Brill. Peter Jan Margry (2003/2004), Sakrale materielle Kultur in den Niederlanden der Gegenwart: Persönliche Altäre und private Heiligtümer. Rheinisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 35, 247–263. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (2004), The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands 1450–1800. Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing. Joris van Eijnatten and Fred van Lieburg (2006), Nederlandse Religiegeschiedenis. Hilversum: Verloren (Dutch Religious History).

282

Reframing Dutch Culture

Social Life and Material Culture Jojada Verrips (1978; rev, 2005), En boven de polder de hemel. Een antropologische studie van een Nederlands dorp, 1850–1971. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis (The Polder and the Heavens Above. An Anthropological Study of a Dutch Village). Herman Roodenburg (1985), The Autobiography of Isabella de Moerloose: Sex, Childbearing and Popular Belief in Seventeenth-Century Holland. Journal of Social History 18(4), 517–40. Gerrit H. Jansen (1987), Een roes van vrijheid. Kermis in Nederland. Meppel: Boom [The Glow of Freedom. Fun Fairs in the Netherlands]. Anneke H. van Otterloo, (1990), Eten en eetlust in Nederland (1840–1990). Een historisch-sociologische studie. Amsterdam: Bakker (Food and Appetite in the Netherlands (1840–19900. A Historical-Sociological Study). David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (eds) (1991), Art in History / History in Art. Studies in seventeenth-century Dutch culture. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Anton Blok (1991), De bokkerijders. Roversbenden en geheime genootschappen in het land van Overmaas (1730–1774). Amsterdam: Prometheus (The Goat Riders. Bandits and Secret Societies in the Overmaas Region, 1730–1774). Peter te Boekhorst, Peter Burke and Willem Frijhoff (eds) (1992), Cultuur en maatschappij in Nederland 1500–1850. Een historisch-antropologisch perspectief. Meppel: Boom / Heerlen: Open Universiteit (Culture and Society in the Netherlands 1500–1850. A Historical-Anthropological Perspective). Rob van Ginkel (1993), Tussen Scylla en Charybdis. Een etnohistorie van Texels vissersvolk (1812–1932). Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis (Between Scylla and Charybdis. An Ethnological History of Texel’s Fishing People, 1812–1932). Eva Abraham-Van der Mark (ed.) (1993), Successful Home Birth and Midwivery. The Dutch Model. Westport: Bergin & Garvey. Anton Schuurman and L.S. Walsh (eds) (1994), Material Culture: Consumption, Life-style, Standard of Living, 1500–1900/ Culture matérielle: consommation, style de vie, niveau de vie, 1500–1900. Proceedings Eleventh International Economic History Congress Milan. Milan, 43–54. Vincent Sleebe (1994), In termen van fatsoen. Sociale controle in het Groningse kleigebied 1770–1914. Assen: Van Gorcum (In Terms of Decency. Social Control in Groningen’s Clay Area, 1770–1914). Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen and Marijke Huisman (eds) (1994), Women of the Golden Age. An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England and Italy. Hilversum: Verloren. Henk de Haan (1994), In the Shadow of the Tree: Kinship, Property and Inheritance among Farm Families. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Jozien Jobse-van Putten (1995), Eenvoudig maar voedzaam. Cultuurgeschiedenis van de dagelijkse maaltijd in Nederland. Nijmegen: Sun (Simple but Nutritious. Cultural History of the Daily Meal in the Netherlands).

Bibliographic Information on Dutch Ethnology

283

Anton Schuurman and Pieter Spierenburg (eds) (1996), Private Domain, Public Inquiry: Families and Life-styles in the Netherlands and Europe, 1550 to the Present. Hilversum: Verloren. Anton Schuurman, Jan de Vries and Anton van der Woude (eds) (1997), Aards geluk. De Nederlanders en hun spullen 1550–1850. Amsterdam: Balans, 307–324 (Worldly Pleasures. The Dutch and their belongings 1550–1850). Alex Strating (1997), De lijnrijders van Rijnsburg. Een antropologische studie van bloemenhandel, verwantschap en identiteit. Amsterdam: s.n. (The Rijnsburg Wholesale Flower Merchants. An Anthropological Study of the Flower Trade, Relationships and Identity). Johan A. Kamermans (1999), Materiële cultuur in de Krimpenerwaard in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw. Ontwikkeling en diversiteit. Wageningen: Landbouwuniversiteit (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Material Culture in Krimpenerwaard. Development and Diversity). Robert van der Laarse (2000), A Nation of Notables: Class, Politics and Religion in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century. Salford: European Studies Research Institute. Jaap Huisman et al. (2000), Honderd jaar wonen in Nederland 1900–2000. Rotterdam, uitgeverij 010 (A Hundred Years of Housing in the Netherlands 1900–2000). Robert Pool (2000), Negotiating a Good Death. Euthanasia in the Netherlands. Binghamton: Haworth Press. Hester Dibbits (2001), Vertrouwd bezit. Materiële cultuur in Doesburg en Maassluis, 1650–1800. Nijmegen: Sun (Familiar Belongings. Material Culture in Doesburg and Maassluis, 1650–1800). IJnte Botke (2002), Boer en heer. ‘De Groninger boer’ 1760–1960. Assen: Van Gorcum (Farmer and Gentleman. ‘The Groningen Farmer’1760–1960). Douwe Fokkema and Frans Grijzenhout (2004) (eds.) Dutch Culture in a European Perspective 5: Accounting for the Past; 1650-2000, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Herman Roodenburg (2004), The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic. Zwolle: Waanders. Hilje van der Horst and Jantine Messing (2006). ‘It’s not Dutch to close the curtains’: visual struggles on the threshold between public and private in a multi-ethnic Dutch neighborhood. Home Cultures 3(1), 21–37. Journals Modern Dutch Folklore Studies has published research results in the scientific journal (in Dutch) Volkskundig Bulletin. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse cultuurwetenschap 1 (1975) – 26 (2000) (Folklore Bulletin. Journal for Dutch Cultural Science). The successor to this journal, published mainly in Dutch, is called cULTUUR. Etnologisch tijdschrift (cULTURE Ethnological Journal) and started publication in 2005. The Yearbook Netherlands Open-Air Museum was published between 1995 and 2001.

284

Reframing Dutch Culture

The Belgian journal Volkskunde (Folkloristics) is also of importance for the study of Dutch ethnology. The new journal Levend Erfgoed. Vakblad voor Public Folklore & Public History (Living Heritage. Professional Journal for Public Folklore and Public History) was started in 2004. Online Databases Dutch Folktale Database (Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank) of the Meertens Instituut: www.verhalenbank.nl Dutch Song Database (Nederlandse Liederenbank): www.liederenbank.nl Global Folktale Almanac (Wereld Volksverhalen Almanak): www.beleven.org/ verhalen/index.html Holy places or places of pilgrimage in the Netherlands: www.meertens.nl/bol/ Family names in the Netherlands: www.meertens.knaw.nl/nfd/ Objects mentioned in Dutch probate inventories from the 17th–19th century: www. meertens.knaw.nl/boedelbank/index.php Organisations The only national scientific institution that studies ethnology and folklore in the Netherlands is the Ethnology Department of the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam. Its website gives information on the specific research programmes carried out and direct access to some major ethnological databases (Folksongs, Folktales, Pilgrimages, Feasts etc.) www.meertens.nl The National Open-Air Folk Museum (Nederlands Openluchtmuseum) website gives a good impression of the museum’s temporary exhibitions, and its important material culture collections including Dutch folklore and regional housing styles: www. openluchtmuseum.nl. The second open-air folk museum is located in Enkhuizen and gives a good impression of village and fishing life around the former inner sea, the Zuiderzee: www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl The Public Folklore Centre (Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur) in Utrecht deals mainly with public folklore and the diffusion of ethnological knowledge for both educational purposes and the general public; in relation to this goal it publishes two popular magazines: Traditie (Tradition) and Volkscultuur Magazine (Popular Culture Magazine); for further information visit their website: www.volkscultuur.nl

Appendix

Map of the Netherlands

This page intentionally left blank

Index

(References to illustrations are in bold) Achterhoek dialect 7, 225, 227, 229-30 Afro-Surinamese boys 14, 20-1 appropriation of consumer goods 88 meaning 87-8, 89 of modernity 94-100 of tradition 100-2 of Zen culture 188-9 authenticity 4, 5 cultural construction of 19 meaning 12-13 Mother’s Day/Father’s Day 6-7, 203, 206, 213-21 tradition as 205 baggy streetwear 18-22, 32 Bausinger, Hermann 262, 268-9 belief, and crop circles 146-7 Benedictine Rule 190 ‘black’, connotations of 16 bodily practices, Turkish-Dutch families 91-4 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 90 ‘distinction’ 103 habitus 248 hexis 94, 248 cereologists see ‘croppies’ clothing for church going 249 home-made 248-9 Islamic 31-2 Italian 22-3, 24, 25-7 and respectability 249 significance 248-9 street styles 13 see also baggy streetwear; costume conspiracy, and crop circles 144-5 consumer goods, appropriation of 88 consumption, as active process 88

‘cool’, connotations of 15 costume, traditional, Marken village 7, 24857 crop circles 5-6 balls-of-light theory 137-8, 150 and belief 146-7 belief in 136 communities 152 and conspiracy 144-5 cosmology 143-4 excitement of 149 images 137, 146 Julia Set 141, 142 modernity 150 narratives 136, 141-2, 143-7, 150-2, 153 origins 135, 137-8 ostension concept 6, 147-9 as rural art 140 and science 144 Scorpio 138-40, 141, 142 spirituality 149-50 Stonehenge 140-1 symbolism 143 traditionalism 150-1 ubiquity 135-6 see also ‘croppies’ ‘croppies’ 136, 137, 146 cultural capital 90 culture, as performance 119 De Noordoostpolder, promotion of popular folklore 71, 77 St Martin’s Eve celebrations 66, 67, 68, 72, 73, 76 detraditionalisation, Dutch culture 183-4, 187 De Vries, Jan 266-7 Diana, Princess 116, 167 Dibbits, Hester 11-35 ‘distinction’ concept 103 Dutch, in Tacitus’ Germania 262 Dutch Canon 1

288

Reframing Dutch Culture

Dutch Centre for Crop Circle Studies 136, 152 Dutch culture detraditionalisation 183-4, 187 and localism 49-50 Dutch dialect music 226-42 map 238 Normaal band 227-31 Dutch dialects 7 renaissance 233-4 statistics 239-40 Dutch East Indies boys 14 Dutch ethnology 3, 261-70 bibliographic information 273-84 early developments 262-3 eighteenth century 263-4 nineteenth century 264-5 recent developments 269-70 twentieth century 265-9 Dutch heritage, threats to 1 Dutch society alternative spirituality 189-90 Moroccans in 161, 173, 174-5, 177, 178 pillars concept 183 eating practices, Turkish-Dutch families 92-3 El Bejjati, silent march for 161, 162-4, 165, 178 ethnic identity, and music 234, 237 Father’s Day, Netherlands 212-13 see also Mother’s Day/Father’s Day femininity, masculinity, perception 16 festivals functions 37-8 and identity formation 37 Flevoland Province identity formation 75 origins 60 polder draining 62 public folklore 61 St Martin’s Eve celebrations 4, 65-7, 689, 70, 72-3, 74-5, 76 folklore studies Netherlands 60, 269 political use 59 see also Dutch ethnology; popular folklore

folklorism 204 Fortuyn, Pim assassination 2, 5 reaction to 112 commemoration day 115-16, 126 cult of 128-9 memorial sites 5, 109-10, 117, 119-20, 130-1 condolence registers 113 images 114, 122, 128 institutional 115-16 narrative dimension 118-19 political criticism 120-30 temporary 112-13 political concerns 110-11 silent march for 127 statue 126-7, 128 decapitation 109 see also Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) Fraters of Tilburg 185 mercy works 192 missionary work 187 Movement of Mercy 187 origins 186 see also Zin consultancy Frisian Association 64 gay vogue, Moroccan-Dutch boys 27-30 gift giving, and tradition 205 glocalisation 7 Grijp, Louis Peter 225-43 Gronings dialect, Ede Staal songs 231-3 habitus concept 248 Helsloot, John 203-24 hexis concept 94, 248 hip-hop culture 16, 18, 19-20 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan 2, 129, 175-6 identity formation 4 and festivals 37 Flevoland Province 75 Nordoostpolder 61-2 Texel festival 39 Joos, Anja memorial 171-3 silent march for 172, 173-5 Julia Set, crop circles 141, 142

Index kaatsen sport 64, 65 language choice, music 235-7 Lega Nord 129 Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) electoral fortunes 111, 130 establishment 110 see also Fortuyn, Pim localism 38-9 and Dutch culture 49-50 see also Texel festival Margry, Peter Jan 1-8, 109-33, 261-71 Marken village heritage-making 246-7 images 247 promenading 250 tourism 245-6 traditional costume 7, 248-57 abandonment 254-6 colour changes 251-2 as heirlooms 250-1 home-made 250 mourning dress 252, 253 masculinity, femininity, perceptions 16 Meder, Theo 135-57 Meertens, Pieter J. 63, 69, 71, 75-7, 267-9 memes 6, 142 memorial sites 116-17 Anja Joos 171-3 Madrid train attacks 118 and ‘performance of self’ 117-18 ‘senseless violence’ 162, 163, 164, 165, 176 Theo van Gogh 176 war 118 see also under Fortuyn, Pim modernity elements 85-6 and secularism 86 and tradition 84-7 Turkish-Dutch families 84, 102-3 Moroccan-Dutch boys 14 baggy streetwear 18-22, 32 clothing expenditure 11 Italian 22-3, 24, 25-7, 32 originality 30-1 styles 3, 4, 11-16, 17, 18-33

289

traditional 31, 32, 33 Dutch youths, influence on 27-8 gay vogue 27-30 Moroccans, in Dutch society 161, 173, 1745, 177, 178 Moser, Hans 261, 268-9 Mother’s Day American origins 211 images 207, 218 Netherlands 206-12 see also Mother’s Day/Father’s Day Mother’s Day/Father’s Day authenticity 6-7, 203, 206, 213-21 discourses 206 Movement of Mercy, Fraters of Tilburg 187 music and ethnic identity 234, 237 language choice 235-7 and place 234 narratives Pim Fortuyn memorial sites 118-19 ‘senseless violence’ 167-70, 172, 175, 177-8 National Foundation Against Senseless Violence 162 Netherlands Father’s Day 212-13 folklore studies 60, 269 homogenisation, and diversity 51, 52 map 285 migration 14, 59 Mother’s Day 206-12 New Age spirituality 6 Noordoostpolder 4 colloquial speech 63 Cultural Committee 63 Cultural Council 69 identity formation 61-2 public folklore 61, 67-71, 74, 76 reclamation 60 regional associations 64-5 regional sports 64-5 see also Flevoland Province Normaal band 7, 225-6 Dutch dialect music 227-31 image 228 ‘Oet en Thoes’ association 64

290

Reframing Dutch Culture

ostension concept, crop circles 6, 147-9 Ouwe Sunderklaas festival see Texel festival ‘people with black hair’ 16 performance 5 Pim Fortuyn Foundation 115 place, and music 234 popular culture and public folklore 60 and social cohesion 59 public folklore Flevoland Province 61 Noordoostpolder 61, 67-71, 74, 76 and popular culture 60 promotion, by De Noordoostpolder 71, 77 and religious diversity 71-4, 77 Ramstedt, Martin 183-201 religion, vs spirituality 184-5, 191 religious diversity, and public folklore 71-4, 77 respect, connotations of 15 ringrijden custom 64, 65, 67, 68, 76 ritual, public 116-17, 120, 159 Röntgen, Julius 267 Roodenburg, Herman 1-8, 245-58, 261-71 Roukens, Winand 69-70 Rücklauf-process 73-4, 204 St Martin’s Eve celebrations Flevoland 4, 65-7, 68-9, 70, 72-3, 74-5, 76 promotion, by De Noordoostpolder 66, 67, 68, 72, 73, 76 St Nicholas feast 4, 64, 66-7 Schrijnen, Joseph 261, 265-7 science, and crop circles 144 Scorpio, crop circles 138-40, 141, 142 secularisation 183, 188 secularism, and modernity 86 ‘senseless violence’ 6, 159, 160 examples 166 features 161-2 meaning 165 memorial sites 162, 163, 164, 165, 176 narratives 167-70, 172, 175, 177-8 rituals 170-1 and silent march 161, 169, 170, 173-5

as social issue 165-6 see also National Foundation Against Senseless Violence silent march for Anja Joos 172, 173-5 for El Bejjati 161, 162-4, 165, 178 for Pim Fortuyn 127 for René Steegmans 169 ritual of 173 and ‘senseless violence’ 169, 170, 173-5 singers, Dutch dialect 226-7 Sinterklaas celebration 44, 50 sleeping practices, Turkish-Dutch families 93 social cohesion, and popular culture 59 social identities 13 spirituality alternative, Dutch society 189-90 marketing of 192 New Age 6 secular, Zin consultancy 193-6 subjective-life categories 191 Zin consultancy 194-6 vs religion 184-5, 191 Staal, Ede 7, 236 image 232 songs, Gronings dialect 231-3 Steegmans, René, silent march for 169 Stengs, Irene 159-79 Stonehenge, crop circles 140-1 street styles, clothing 13 Tacitus, Germania, Dutch in 262 Texel festival 4, 37-54 anti-authority 45-6, 47, 53 ‘display event’ 46 events 42-3 identity formation 39 images 44, 48 localism 38, 41, 46, 51-3 masquerade 42-3 origins 43 transformations 38, 43 Texel island economy 40 immigration 41 mainland influences 49 tourism 40, 51-2

Index tourism, Marken village 245-6 tradition as authenticity 205 and gift giving 205 Turkish language, and Turkish identity 15 Turkish-Dutch families 5 bodily practices 91-4 eating practices 92-3 on the floor 92 generation differences 97-8 houses 90-1, 99, 101 interior 96 modernity appropriation 94-100 and tradition 84, 102-3 research 89-103 rural origins 83 sitting practices 91-2 sleeping practices 93 tradition, appropriation 100-2 Turkish-Dutch youths 15 Urk island, folk culture 63

Van der Horst, Hilje 83-106 Van der Ven, Derk Jan 261, 266-9 Van der Zeijden, Albert 59-81 Van Ginkel, Rob 37-57 Van Gogh, Theo assassination 2, 6, 175-6, 177 memorial site 176 Volkskunde 265-9 Nazis and Volkskunde 267-8 Voskuil, J.J. (Han) 262, 268-9 William the Silent 112, 114 youth vernacular 20-1 Zen culture, appropriation 188-9 Zin consultancy 185, 186, 187-99 art programme 193-4 Fraters of Tilburg, tension 196 purpose 190 secular spirituality 193-9 see also Fraters of Tilburg

291