Marieke Bloembergen is senior researcher at the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and professor of Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the politics and networks of cultural knowledge production and heritage formation, with late colonial and post-colonial Indonesia as point of departure, studied at local, transnational and global levels, and in relation to (epistemic) violence. In the same framework, more recently her focus turned to the makings and moral economy of (Asian/ Southeast Asian) art and of ecological/ environmental knowledge, and to the forms and impact of countercultural knowledge of the 1970s in long term perspective. Her books include Colonial spectacles. The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies Indies at the world exhbitions, 1880-1931 (SUP, 2006), and The politics of heritage in Indonesia: a cultural history (Cambridge University Press, 2020) , co-authored with Martijn Eickhoff. Currently, she works on a research project-cum-book manuscript, entitled ‘Indonesia and the moral geography of Greater India. Moveable objects, enchanted scholars, and spiritual seekers across empires, 1880s-1990s’, which has generated various publications.  

What I find most appealing of the CO-OP program is its intention to have scholars from very different disciplines and regional expertise together, junior as well as senior, from within and outside the region, and its intention to co-create knowledge with experts at location in the region. I expect we can learn greatly from each other when we reflect precisely on the background and disciplines we are formed by, and on how that may have influenced our looking at the problems at stake: concerning the violent histories and circumstances of collecting across (precolonial, colonial and postcolonial) times and across space; concerning the politics and changing taxonomies that make ‘Asian Art’;  concerning restitution, and what that implies when we consider the circulation, exchange and transformation of objects and their meanings, when they change ownership, and draw new interested parties or publics, or are imprisoned in depots. What is the local of local epistemologies, and what makes colonial knowledge colonial? Where do we see (epistemic) violence at work, for whom (not)? how to study this, and how may this help us get further in the effort to decentre or decolonize knowledge production on Southeast Asia’s cultural political past and present? I hope we will manage to listen to the objects and the alternative histories they can tell us, while gaining insight in their social lives across a wider world, beyond our own horizons and those of (post-)colonial states, and outside the context of heritage institutions and disciplines of ‘Asian Art’, history and archaeology.