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II. Collecting history: the past The Kamoro Collection, comprising more than thirteen hundred objects, held in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnology, hereafter the RMV) is by far the world's most important to be found outside the region of origin. The larger part of the collection was collected long ago; objects were already being acquired as early as a century before the establishment of the first administrative post in the Mimika region. These can now be seen in the RMV. They were collected in 1828 by Salomon Müller [13] during the Triton Expedition. Other expeditions followed over the years, collecting important material for the Museum: for example, the 1903 expedition led by the Assistant Resident, J.A. Kroesen (the W. de Jong collection [14] ), and the South-west New Guinea expedition mounted by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society in 1904-1905. Almost six hundred of the objects held in the Kamoro Collection, a major part of it, were assembled by Antony J. Gooszen, leader of the South New Guinea detachment of the Military Exploration Team [15], during the first military exploration of Dutch New Guinea in the period 1907-1915. [16]
The objects collected by Gooszen include several masterpieces. In particular, the larger-than-lifesize statues of pregnant women, which were displayed during initiation rituals, are completely unique, and of immense cultural value. After the collecting boom of the Gooszen period up to World War Two, collecting took place only occasionally. After World War Two up to the year 2000, the number of acquisitions was confined to roughly one hundred objects. [17] Especially worth mentioning here, is the material Jan Pouwer collected in the early 1950s, during his field work. These objects include the mbitoro (spirit pole), some seven metres high, that still stood in the museum hall in the 1990s. The present collection offers a good cross-section of the traditional art and material culture of the Kamoro, particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century. The collection presents a comparatively large number of ceremonial woodcarvings (spirit poles , figures , panels , prow ornaments , drums and others)yet it also contains a varied range of objects of everyday practical use.
In addition, the collection includes articles made for sale to outsiders, for example the objects made from ironwood, as made from the 1950s onwards. Innovative woodcarvings have recently been added to the collection. [18] | |
