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Museum collections, and the data that go with them, are important sources of information about Enggano. Four museum collections form the core of our knowledge of Engganese material culture. The oldest ones are the collections of the Museum Nasional (National Museum) in Jakarta, and the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden. To a certain extent these two collections are more or less similar, since the same people collected them. People like Von Rosenberg and Helfrich worked for the Dutch authorities, and they collected for both the Bataviaasch Genootschap voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen and the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde. The ethnographic collection of the Bataviaasch Genootschap later became the collection of the National Museum in Jakarta. Some collectors, like the two mentioned above, ensured that their collections were well documented. A very important collection is that made by Modigliani, and now stored in the Museo Nazionale di Antropologia e Etnologia in Florence, Italy. It appears that Modigliani was still able to collect objects that were to disappear rapidly from the map of Engganese material culture at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The boat ornaments (photo), the women's headdresses (photo), and many other objects Modigliani collected, have an aesthetic quality that cannot be found in later times. In many cases the objects were no longer made, and disappeared entirely. In this respect Abbott's collection is a good reference point. W.L. Abbott stayed on Enggano in the beginning of the twentieth-century, in fact just a few years later than Modigliani, and his sample of Enggano material is quite different from Modigliani's. Although Abbott collected the same kind of objects, a superficial glance already shows a clear difference in aesthetic quality. Apparently Modigliani collected all, or most of the 'good' pieces, and the people could not make, or did not want to make, new ones of the same quality. Abbott was on Enggano for three months in 1906, and his collection is now in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Apart from the four most important Enggano collections (Jakarta, Leiden, Florence, and Washington), there are some smaller collections worth mentioning because of the rarity of the objects or the aesthetic qualities. The small Enggano collection of the Museum of Ethnology in Rotterdam contains a beautiful door frame (MvVR 7958) (Marschall 1988). The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam owns three shields (TM 244-4, 5 and 6) from Enggano. Apart from the ones Modigliani wrote about, no other objects of this type are known. Even the old collections from the museums in Jakarta and Leiden do not include shields. |
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