Indonesian Tourism Workers on Volcanoes and Geotourism's Colonial Origins: Making a Subaltern History Visible

Abstract

Indonesia's volcanoes are places of recreation, aesthetic production, and scientific knowledge-gathering, as well as sites of pilgrimage, spirituality, and natural disasters for locals as well as international travellers. In this article, I focus on volcanoes as historic sites of labour to demonstrate the entanglement of colonial tourism and science with local forms of work and knowledge, and to reveal the origins of the porting and guiding work that takes place on Indonesia's volcanoes to this day. Using Tina Campt's method of “listening to images,” I show how colonial photographs, albeit partial sources, make modes of subaltern labour visible that written sources routinely minimised, restoring porters, guides, and what I call “camp domestics” to histories of service, science and geotourism in Indonesia. Recognising the homosocial setting of the colonial scientific expedition and the peculiar physical challenges of the volcano environment, I also examine the negotiation of Indonesian and European masculinities and their intersection with class and racial hierarchies on the volcano. The article thus reflects on how Javanese workers’ spatial and social mobility entailed the negotiation of opportunity as well as exploitation on tour.

In March 1913 the Java-based botanist and microbiologist, Pedro Arens, wrote to his family in Germany about his recent tour of Bali. His letter told the stories behind several photographs enclosed depicting locals Arens had met on his journey. Most were Balinese nobles and their families, but some were the ordinary people whose services Europeans travelling in the Netherlands East Indies routinely employed. One photograph shows a man of the Sudra caste staring into the camera lens (Figure 1). Among the records accompanying the 679 surviving images that document Arens's life and career in the Indies, now held at Amsterdam's Wereldmuseum,¹ he is identified as I Tulus,² a mantri jalan (guide) from Selat, Karangasem Regency. He was the only guide Arens ever named among the scores he hired over a decade of documented volcano tours. The rarity of this instance is broadly representative. Porters and guides were seldom named in Europeans’ personal records about mountaineering on Indonesia's volcanoes, which had, by the early twentieth century, emerged as important centres of what would now be considered geotourism.³

Figure 1. Pedro Arens. “I Tulus, mantri djalan of Selat, my escort to Agung,” 1 June 1912, Bali. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10024039.

Attending to photographs such as those of I Tulus can clarify the hidden, entangled histories of capitalist activity and disciplined knowledge production that converged on Indonesia's volcanoes through late-colonial tourism and science,⁴ activities that were linked to the Netherlands’ extraction of Indonesia's environmental, animal, and human resources. This article thus links to Toivanen and Greiner's framing of tourism as development. It also sheds light on tourism as labour and consumption and provides a focused lens on histories of imperialism, for it is chiefly in photographs that we get a sense of what the labour of Indonesian tourism workers who facilitated these activities entailed. I build on Marieke Bloembergen's work on the politics of heritage and “sites of knowledge” generated at religious monuments in Indonesia,⁵ and scholarship on the archival traces of subaltern colonial labour in Asia,⁶ to examine how Indonesian and European work was entangled through colonial tourism on volcanoes. I foreground these landscapes as work sites that captured locals’ as well as visitors’ endeavours, and, in the process, reflect critically on the historical challenges of making subalterns visible in colonial histories of geotourism. The Arens collection reveals how work often intersected with leisure—in this case, botanical research and hiking—for the European elite comprising the technocracy and bureaucracy of the Netherlands East Indies.⁷ However, by methodologically re-focusing and re-centring the Indonesians who stare out at us, often boldly, from European tourist photography, I show how volcanoes were also work sites for the Indonesians whom foreign tourists valued for their geographical and environmental knowledge. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, European geotourists were enabled by a hybrid Dutch-Indonesian travel infrastructure and a substantial local workforce that performed three types of labour. The first was porting, often a collaboration between men and draft horses that bore passengers as well as camp equipment and scientific instruments. The second occupation was guiding, which relied on the geographical knowledge of the mantri jalan. The third type of work was domestic service, the labour of tending to Europeans requiring food, rest, and protection on their journeys.

Arens’ letter describes I Tulus as his “loyal companion on my tour to the summit of [Mount] Agung” and says they “spent two nights all alone together above in an isolated temple.”⁸ In this context, the portrait of I Tulus perhaps remains as a token of the comradeship that developed between an employer and his servant. It was a type of souvenir that Arens produced over the next five years of increasingly ambitious volcano tours with ever greater flair for intimate portraits that showed some of the character and individuality of his porters and guides.

There were limits, however, to Arens's sympathy. His 1913 letter went on:

As a reward for his help and diligence I gave him a white mens’ suit of mine, which had already not been in good order when I left for Bali, and did not improve during the tour. He danced with joy at this, and as we arrived at the bottom [of Agung] again he had nothing more urgent to do than to show everyone his new treasure. He also wanted to be photographed in his new suit. This favour, however, I did not do for him. ⁹

In withholding from I Tulus the portrait he wanted, which would have shown him pass as higher status in clothes given by a European, Arens reasserted his power as an employer and a white man holding a camera in the Indies, thereby enacting what Ariella Azoulay has described as an “imperial right” to photograph in ways that ignored the will of others.¹⁰ However, in registering I Tulus's request to be photographed a certain way, Arens also exposed photography as vernacular practice that, in Tina Campt's words, was “an everyday strategy of affirmation and a confrontational practice of visibility” that the camera's subjects sought to negotiate, not just submit to.¹¹ The episode also illustrates Arnout van der Meer's contention that the “performance of power” and contests over cultural hegemony informed matters of etiquette in quotidian public encounters between Europeans and Indonesians. In 1904, Van der Meer explains, the Dutch colonial government had issued the first circular to reform deference codes (hormat) on Java, with the aim of gradually eradicating practices that had Indonesians treat Europeans “as they would their own aristocracy.” The reform circulars met with “conservative resistance” from all sections of European society, which, in turn, sparked the beginning of a “national awakening” among Indonesians. Arens's visit to Bali, however, occurred half a year before the advent of the Indonesian movements that followed the fourth hormat circular in August 1913—organised actions that sought to reinforce Indonesians’ rights to respect and dignity in relations with Europeans.¹²

Pedro Arens's portrait of I Tulus in early 1913 is thus located in the eye of a political storm that Van der Meer has described developing around the cultural signalling of racial and class boundaries in late-colonial Indonesia. It is loaded with the colonial baggage of geotourism's origins—baggage that requires careful methods of unpacking if we are to handle the fragile, fragmented image of the local workers who enabled early twentieth-century European travel. The many extant photographic portraits of such workers in Dutch colonial archives present historians with a paradox. Without photographers like Arens there would be no substantial historical record of the local labour force which still supports volcano tourism in Java and Bali today. Indonesians were frequently absent from the travel accounts of nineteenth-century European tourists.¹³ Even in the twentieth century, Indonesians rarely featured in tourist guidebooks except in notes about where to hire labour and how much it cost.¹⁴ By contrast, colonial photography operated in a more intimate register that attended carefully to Europeans’ encounters with porters and guides. A similar frankness characterised photography from other contexts where colonial endeavours relied on a significant contingent of Indonesian auxiliaries, notably in the colonial army (Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger, or KNIL), where military logistics depended on coolies and convict labourers.¹⁵ On the other hand, as Arens's records also suggest, photographs by European employers do not necessarily show tourism workers in all the dimensions they would have chosen to represent themselves.

Arens's narration of Indonesians’ labour was frequently ambivalent. In letters to his family from Salatiga (Central Java) in 1908, Arens spoke highly of his “Malay” lab assistants who, once trained, did their jobs adeptly. More frequently, however, he doubted the competence of the Indonesians working with him, all of whom he characterised as “servants” (Diener) rather than colleagues, even when they worked in the laboratory independently. He was generally disparaging of “natives” (Eingeborene), whom he considered childlike and unreliable, with the exception of individual assistants who proved useful to him. In tales of his volcano adventures, he minimised the knowledge and efforts of his porters and guides as he became a more confident hiker, attributing achievements such as reaching craters and summits to his own shrewdness and intrepidity.¹⁶ Yet in his photographs, Indonesian tourism workers feature everywhere.

The Arens collection is thus emblematic of the coloniality of Dutch archives—that is, their capacity to make visible while not “speaking” for the subaltern Indonesian labour that enabled tourism in the archipelago.¹⁷ The photographs require critical handling as partial sources on Indonesian workers’ lives that were made primarily with the needs and purposes of European travellers and scientists in mind. To complicate matters, Arens's surviving letters are an incomplete record. They only cover the years 1908–13, whereas most of his photographs were from the period 1913–19. We therefore lack crucial information that might narrate the context of his later photographs, which include some of the most expressive colonial portraits of Indonesian porters and guides in Dutch archives. Yet the absence of Arens's “voice-over” for these images opens a critical space for what Campt calls “listening” to the “quiet,” quotidian images of profusely identified but largely unnamed and spoken-for people.¹⁸

Sources and Settings: Tourist-photographers on Indonesia's Volcanoes

The main sources for this article come from the collection of the Peruvian-born, German-speaking botanist Dr Pedro Arens (1884–1954). His records include photographs by his senior colleague, Swiss-born Theophil Würth (1875–1922), who shared Arens's passion for geotourism, which yielded plant samples for their research. Both men were botanists at the leading research plantations and laboratories (proefstationen) that served the burgeoning plantation-industrial complexes of Java and Sumatra, where they worked to improve the quality of lucrative export crops like tea and rubber. Both were also authors of the Handbook for Rubber Cultivation in the Netherlands Indies (1921).¹⁹ Arens began his East Indies career at the Central Java Experiment Station at Salatiga (1908–11), then moved to the Malang Experiment Station (where Würth was director) from 1911 to 1921, before serving as director of research at the Amsterdam Rubber Cultivation Company (Rubber Cultuurmaatschappij), Galang, on Sumatra's East Coast.²⁰ Arens undertook at least nineteen volcano tours between 1907 and 1919, some of them with Würth in later years when his climbs became increasingly ambitious, involving ever larger parties of Europeans and their local servants. The Arens collection contains numerous images attributable to Würth. Their photographic collaborations—the outcome of travelling and working together—reveal that late-colonial “geotourism” was, in fact, a spectrum of practices that accommodated leisure and work, tourism and exploration, and attracted both experts and amateurs.

To the Arens(-Würth) collection I add research from thirty-eight personal albums covering the period ca. 1900–1950, now held at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam and the Special Collections of the Leiden University Library.²¹ They contain hundreds of amateur photographs, many made by Europeans who left no other egodocuments, often combined with prints purchased from well-known commercial photographers. Personal albums reveal an early twentieth-century visual culture constituted by expanding amateur production during the advent of mass photography and commercial consumption of photographs.²² They show how geotourism in Indonesia flourished in the first half of the twentieth century with the crucial contribution of local porters and guides. In fact, personal photograph collections dating from the early 1900s reveal geotourism's advent in the East Indies more than a decade before colonial tourist associations began promoting the industry through guidebooks in the 1920s.²³

In this period, Indonesia's volcanic ranges were subject to growing traffic from European tourists journeying there for leisure (see Arnout van der Meer's article in this special issue), as well as what Mikko Toivanen calls “invalid travel” to resorts for health cures.²⁴ On Java, such journeys were enabled by an advanced network of roads, railways, and accommodations whose construction, using unfree labour, had commenced in the early nineteenth century, partly to expedite colonial military forces.²⁵ During the 1910s and 1920s, three additional things facilitated tourism's expansion: the proliferation of cars,²⁶ the boom in mass-produced guidebooks and tourist literature promoting volcano tours, and the expansion of amateur and mass photography,²⁷ which hikers embraced to capture their conquests. Volcanic mountain ranges therefore accommodated a variety of touristic activities ranging from convalescence and retreat to adventuring and exploration. Hill station resorts hosted diverse guests with different agendas: visitors seeking health cures, tourists planning to climb nearby volcanoes, and—as the Arens collection reveals—male companies of researchers undertaking fieldwork. Hotels brought these mostly European tourists together with Indonesian hospitality workers. Among them were the porters and guides hired to carry gear and passengers, to safely lead the way through sometimes difficult and dangerous terrain, and, in the case of scientific expeditions, to assist with surveying and collecting.

Researchers used the same infrastructure as ordinary tourists. All were travellers who photographically reconstructed their itineraries in chronological order, beginning with a road trip by car, taking in views of and from European resorts and local shelters, and concluding with the goal of reaching picturesque summits and volcano craters.²⁸ Arens, Würth, and the other European researchers who sometimes travelled with them broke their journeys at grand hotels or more modest rest stations, like the “hunting lodge” at Lalijiwo en route to the Arjuno-Welirang strata volcano in East Java.²⁹ They stopped at plantations nestled in mountain foothills.³⁰ They rested at the pesanggrahans (government-run guest houses) advertised in guidebooks.³¹ They recruited local porters and guides from hotels or villages along well-established routes (Figure 2), a practice sometimes enabled by the wedana (district chief) acting as middle-man, or by the local Dutch administrator. Other recruitment sites were plantations, where coolies already contracted to an estate could be hired out to passing travellers.³² Tourism therefore relied on the common systems of contracted or unfree labour underpinning the colonial extraction economy. Perhaps because of this structural feature, together with the seasonal natures of rural labour in general and geotourism specifically (optimally, mountaineering was a dry season activity), no figures for the size of the geotourism work force are given in colonial tourist literature, nor was it recognised as a category in the 1930 Census.³³

Figure 2. Photographer unknown. Porters in the village of Princi (Printji) posing with Theophil Würth, East Java, 24 April 1916. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023593.

The work of commercial photographers active on Java, such as Onnes Kurkdjian, Thilly Weissenborn, S. Satake, and others, undoubtedly influenced the expansion of geotourism in the early twentieth century (Figures 3, 4, 5). Their well-known photographs of spectacular eruptions, stunning summit views, and dynamic crater landscapes were published in tourist books and albums and avidly collected by hobby hikers and amateur photographers.³⁴ Some include images of porters and guides (Figure 6).³⁵ Such images added a new, sublime dimension to an established modern colonial visual culture of the “beautiful Indies” (mooi Indië) that characterised Dutch encounters with the fertile, volcanic landscapes of the archipelago.³⁶

Figure 3. Photografisch Atelier Kurkdjian N.V. A man and a pony standing before Gunung Bromo and the Sand Sea, East Java, ca. 1915. Leiden University Library, KITLV Collections, A1143, 142938.

Figure 4. S. Satake (Tosari studio). A porter with a pony and two men on horseback in the Sand Sea at Gunungs Batok and Bromo, East Java, ca. 1919. Leiden University Library, KITLV Collections, A1293, 49835.

Figure 5. Thilly Weissenborn/Atelier “Lux” Garoet. Bromo near Tosari from the album Beautiful Java. Leiden University Library, Edwards Collection, Or.27.372.

Figure 6. Thilly Weissenborn/Atelier “Lux” Garoet. A guide by a fumarole at Kawah Kamojan, West Java, from the album Garoet en omstreken. Leiden University Library, Edwards Collection, Or.27.371.

Hybrid tourist infrastructures were built on Indonesian routes and expanded by colonial capitalism. Paths were formed and knowledge gained by Indonesians who lived and farmed on the fertile slopes of volcanoes and traversed their craters and summits—the homes of gods and places of revelation for ascetics—such as Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim pilgrims and supplicants.³⁷ Guidebooks encouraged European tourists to learn about and observe local rituals at sites like Gunung Bromo in East Java.³⁸ Occasionally, Dutch travellers relayed their porters’ and guides’ fear of the ghosts (hantu) that inhabited craters and mountain forests at night.³⁹ As Adam Bobbette has argued, these physical and spiritual geographies, with their attendant forms of local knowledge, have been overlaid and sometimes appropriated, other times obscured, by European “processions” of researchers pursuing their own secular gods and agendas.⁴⁰

Hierarchies of Visibility in Colonial Tourist Photography: Intrepid Europeans, Visible Tourism Workers, and Invisible Indonesian Knowledge-Work

While Pedro Arens frequently pictured the tourism workers who made expeditions possible, he subsumed the knowledge of his assistants, recording the Latin names of grasses collected but not their names in local languages, nor the topographical and botanical knowledge of the guides who led him to these “samples.” As histories of European science and archaeology have repeatedly shown, colonial records and their metadata often encourage us to focus on the intrepidity of the persons who created these sources.⁴¹ One of Arens's photographs shows rocks tagged by Dutch climbers with their own names (Figure 7), inscribing the arrival of European explorers in both the graffiti and its photographic commemoration, and eliding the more numerous, nameless Indonesians who had made the same journey with and before them. Archives can perpetuate the invisibility of subaltern labour in these settings. For example, one photograph in the Arens collection shows Europeans posing on a steep rockface they had scaled. The archival metadata describes “Europeans who have placed a ladder beside a waterfall on the volcano Gunung Kelud,” but it would have been the local porters, two of whom are depicted in the photograph, who did the heavy lifting.⁴²

Figure 7. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. “A Hinsen” and “A Zemann” written on rocks at the summit of Gunung Arjuno-Welirang, East Java, 12 August 1916. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023760.

European photographers and the institutions that now hold their work can thus perpetuate colonial misrecognition of the Indonesian workers who supported geotourism. The outcome is an archive that is both prolific on the widespread presence of these workers on volcanoes, yet silent on the details of their contributions, motives, and experiences. A critical approach to the archive must, therefore, as a first step, acknowledge the people obscured by metadata. In writing the captions to the photographs reproduced here, I have reversed the syntax of almost every description given on archive databases to centre the presence and labour of Indonesian porters and guides.

Photographs can still be eloquent in showing the muscle-work of porting, which frequently involved a collaboration between human and animal labour. Peter Boomgaard examined the trade in horses in the Indonesian archipelago and concluded that, apart from their use as status markers and hunting aids for Indonesian royals and Dutch elites, they had little use as draft animals for smallholders and, by the mid- to late nineteenth century, were being replaced by mechanised power.⁴³ Yet the photographic record from the early twentieth century shows that horses were commonly used as mounts and pack animals in geotourism. Ponies were widespread in group portraits of Indonesian workers on volcano tours (Figure 8). The mountain horses of Java were lauded for being the most sure-footed among the local breeds that otherwise exasperated European travellers for their stubbornness and unpredictability.⁴⁴ The Arens collection includes a photograph showing the progress of a caravan (Figure 9). It reveals how Europeans rode on horseback for longer treks while Javanese workers walked beside the pack animals, a practice that status-conscious tourists similarly recorded (Figure 10).

Figure 8. Personal album, photographer unknown. Javanese porters, guides, and ponies with European tourists on a volcano tour, Java, 1927. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-ALB-2009-129.

Figure 9. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. Caravan travelling in the Hyang-Argopuro complex of East Java, 21 May 1916. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023591.

Figure 10. Collection A.H. Ballet de Saint Simon. A guide holds a horse by the reins as it bears its rider up a steep ascent, ca. 1940. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-ALB-0076-30.

Colonial guidebooks tell us some of the places where porters and ponies could be engaged, at around f1-1.50 per day—less than the price of the book itself.⁴⁵ On Pedro Arens’ tours, ponies and porters carried vessels for collecting samples and hauled camp equipment, cameras, and scientific instruments often made from heavy, brittle materials like glass.⁴⁶ On a trip to Gunung Papandayan near Bandung, where Arens was living in June 1909, he described how the horses had to be abandoned and the journey resumed on foot at a point where he could not “proceed any further without a guide, if one doesn't want to perish in hot glowing sulfur or boiling water.” “Over time,” he explained,

the surface has formed a hard crust of sulfur and mud that is not hard enough everywhere to carry a person's weight. The guides know exactly where one must go. They guide one through the middle of the sulfur fumes that often make breathing very difficult…⁴⁷

As he became a more experienced geotourist, Arens's letters record how his “coolies” resisted exposure to dangers he had made the privileged decision to pursue. He glossed their refusal to put themselves at risk as laziness and cowardice rather than rational aversion, even on a climb where he admitted to being surprised by a “very steep crater drop” soon after a porter had abandoned him⁴⁸—probably because the latter had foreseen the hazardous landscape ahead. In guidebooks, Dutch writers advised their readers that “coolies often have to be pushed.”⁴⁹ One recounted how his workers could not tell him how long a climb would take, claiming it would be impossible to complete before nightfall, a prediction that turned out to be false. He explained their withholding as stubbornness and stupidity, but it could equally be interpreted as refusal to share information, reluctance to assist, and resistance to coercion (which failed, in this instance). The same author, C.W. Wormser, whose book Bergenweelde described the “mountain wealth” of Java, is a rare textual reflection on a Dutch mountaineer's interactions with his local porters and guides. In it he declared “[a] native will not dare to go somewhere where going does not bring immediate and tangible benefits.”⁵⁰ In seeking to contrast his own flair for adventure with the transactional pragmatism of local workers, Wormser reveals how Dutch geotourists gave primacy to their vision of the volcano as a site of leisure and conquest, one that was made accessible to them through their servants’ labour, for whom the volcano was actually a workplace.

Some journeys, like the Würth expedition to Gunung Kelud following the May 1919 eruption, progressed through treacherous landscapes along the narrow spines of crumbling hills. Even here, porters had to carry on their shoulders large cases that would have fallen from the backs of ponies (Figure 11). Candid portraits taken during porters’ respite reveal the effects of such strenuous work. One photograph shows four porters resting in the grass atop Gunung Butak (East Java). A senior man sits composed while three younger men collapse on the ground, two in an exhausted sleep, another stirring in surprise at the photographer's intrusion (Figure 12). One guidebook recommended individual coolies be given a maximum of 20 kg to carry!⁵¹ Sometimes, despite their masters’ insistence, they gave up in rough terrain and asked to be left behind. Occasionally, they even died in harsh conditions when Europeans insisted on continuing despite planning failures.⁵²

Figure 11. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. Porters climbing Gunung Kelud in 1919. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023737.

Figure 12. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. Porters resting at the peak of Gunung Butak, East Java, 22 April 1916. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023753.

In addition to doing the heavy labour, Indonesian porters and guides frequently acted as body servants, hired to spare Europeans discomfort, toil, and inconvenience by diverting them from danger through rough, unfamiliar terrain, as well as carrying them and their gear and providing their meals. Historians of domestic and hospitality servitude in Southeast Asia have entirely neglected this class of worker.⁵³ Guides often served their masters food on tour (Figure 13).⁵⁴ European women, in particular, sometimes demanded physical assistance, leaning on guides for support and engaging coolies to carry them in sedan chairs (Figures 14, 15).⁵⁵ Fieldworkers could expect Javanese staff to act as attendants, carrying their hats and holding parasols (payongs) to shade them from the sun (Figure 16).⁵⁶ Pedro Arens recorded how, when the path became too impenetrable for horses to navigate, his coolies made a tandu (a chair similar to a stretcher, also used to bear injured soldiers in the colonial army), taking turns in two sets of four to carry their masters.⁵⁷

Figure 13. Personal album, photographer unknown. Page showing (top) pressed leaves and flowers gathered from Gunung Kelud, and (bottom) a picnic laid by the porters and guides for European hikers, ca. 1910. KITLV A949, 409125 and 409126.

Figure 14. Personal album, photographer unknown. A guide supports a woman on the ascent of Gunung Papandayan, West Java, ca. 1920-1. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-ALB-2047-49.

Figure 15. Personal album, photographer unknown. Coolies carry a woman in a sedan chair en route to Kawah Kamojang, West Java, ca. 1930-5. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-ALB-2207-32.

Figure 16. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. Porters rest, sheltering their faces from the sun. One of their crew shades a European with a payong at the summit of Gunung Raung, East Java, 17 July 1913. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023602.

Colonial photographs of Indonesian workers whom I call “camp domestics” generally adhered to the conventions of family photography from the East Indies, which conspicuously featured servants as workers commanded by masters.⁵⁸ Unlike commercial and studio photographs, family photographs—particularly those taken by amateurs at home in the twentieth century—expressed little interest in Indonesia's ethnic “types.”⁵⁹ Instead, Indonesian tourism workers on volcanoes were photographed as members of a travelling household, different from the Indonesians encountered on expedition, whom European photographers frequently cast as exotic members of groups discernible by the styles of their hair, ornaments, clothing, and accoutrements.⁶⁰ Although Indonesian porters and guides on volcano tours were always shown “in their place” in European photography, such photographs nevertheless extended insider status to them, depicting them as mobile travellers in their own right rather than as members of “static, unchanging and timeless religious or caste communities.”⁶¹

Negotiating Power on Tour: Masculinity, Race, and Class on the Volcano

Pedro Arens was much in demand as a man with a camera among the Indonesians he met during his 1913 visit to Bali. His letters are unclear as to whether he acquiesced to the requests of the people who sat for him—like the Javanese opium dealer far from home, who wished for his parents to see the face of the grandchild they had never met.⁶² Certainly, many portraits were viewed by an audience of strangers: Arens's family in Germany, for whom they served as anecdotes of his local encounters. Among them was a portrait of a Javanese man whom Arens described in a letter as a “pasanggrahan mandur” (guesthouse manager) who looked after his “wellbeing for a day, and who did a very good job of that” (Figure 17).

Figure 17. Pedro Arens. Guesthouse manager sitting with a boy, Bali, May 1912. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10024103.

The term mandur for Indonesian supervisors was a Dutch co-optation of a Malay word that Dutch colonists applied to a wide range of colonial work sites, from plantations and factories to convict prisons. In using this term, Arens evoked the colonial, capitalist hierarchy derived from the export sector of the economy, where he himself was employed, and where certain classes of “native” workers were charged with managing indentured and convict labourers.⁶³ His photograph, however, reveals none of that structure. Arens's charming portrait shows the manager, together with a boy who might have been his son, beaming into the camera with humour and dignity. Arens explained why in his letter:

He is laughing because I just told him the Controleur has to come now and see him sit like a great Lord on the chair of the pasangrahan (sic)[;] he would give him a right scolding. As I left he asked me confidentially, surely I wouldn't let the Controleur see the pictures.⁶⁴

As with the portrait of I Tulus, Arens's characterisation of a man who had served him well on tour starts with praise but ends with a taunt about status and power. To have his portrait taken at the public entrance to a guesthouse where he was hosting a European, in a posture associated with status and respectability—seated on a chair, rather than cross-legged on the ground in the subservient sila position—clearly appealed to the sitter.⁶⁵ To do so at Arens's request, the two perhaps having established a good rapport, may even have been a pleasure. But Arens's joke about showing the photograph to the local Dutch civil servant signalled the risks of such liberties. The manager's request for reassurance alludes to the veiled threat of punishment that a word from the master in this relationship, Arens, could unleash on any “native” man who, in the eyes of many Dutch authorities at that time, needed to be reminded of his place.

Similarly, an episode in Wormser's Bergenweelde during a volcano climb in the Preanger Ranges of West Java describes a guide who designated himself the mandur of the work group and requested additional payment for having procured a camera and assisted with the photography. “In the Indies,” Wormser wryly remarked, “every coolie has his coolie.”⁶⁶ Indeed, there were ranks within Indonesian work groups, which Pedro Arens's expedition photographs register. Clothing and sitting/standing orders were differential markers of status. Higher-ranked men stood for portraits, carried walking sticks and pocket-watches, and wore tailored ensembles similar to those of Europeans. Coolies squatted, went shirtless, and wore unpatterned headcloths (Figure 18). Wormser narrated how he denigrated “his” mandur, whom he considered conceited, before his inferiors: “While settling the payment we expressed our views by giving the mandur the usual reward, but paying his coolie double.”⁶⁷ Power flexes like this reveal how European employers considered themselves the final arbiter of all hierarchies in the East Indies, in all circumstances.

Figure 18. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. Porters and guides atop Merbabu, Central Java, date unknown. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023754.

Spiteful anecdotes like these complicate the companionate view of the homosocial geotourism that Pedro Arens and Theophil Würth conducted, often in small companies of European men with large entourages of local porters and guides. This sphere of Arens's life comprised the greater part of his image collection, with only a small portion covering his wife, children, and social life. Was he, like other male European tourists in this period, “more at home in camp tents and drawing rooms, happier in the company of the men they recruited for their expeditions, and the porters, guides and bearers in their entourage, than among the arm chair travellers who celebrated their exploits”?⁶⁸ Focused on his work, the Arens photographs reveal how colonial tourism, particularly where it intersected with masculine scientific pursuits, furnished sites of what Robert Aldrich calls “social promiscuity” between men of different ranks. Organised toward particular goals, such men were certainly divided by racial and class hierarchies, but with “porous boundaries” that permitted “mutually beneficial relationships as well as exploitation.”⁶⁹

Every expedition in the Arens collection rendered portraits of the full male party, with some photographs acknowledging the team effort of reaching a volcano's summit (Figure 19). For almost half the expeditions there was at least one portrait devoted exclusively to its porters and guides. Some of Arens's photographs were poignant images of the men whose labour and companionship may have been a source of social and emotional as well as physical support for him and others on expedition. As Aldrich notes, “[t]he gendered nature of expansion, in which men monopolised many imperial activities, and where manly virtues were championed, created situations congenial to intimate male bonding.”⁷⁰ It was not uncommon in colonial photography from Southeast Asia for European men to show quite intimate relations between themselves as masters and their male, Asian domestic servants.⁷¹ Unusually, one guidebook included a staged photograph of “Madjani, our loyal body-servant” who, the author believed, hailed from “the more civilised section of the population.” The portrait subverted convention by naming a servant who, as the image showed, “allowed himself to be carried like a gentleman” on a sedan chair.⁷²

Figure 19. Arens Collection, photographer unknown. Porters and scientists rest during a climb on the eastern side of Gunung Kelud, East Java, May 1919. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-10023723.

Arens's photographs suggest that bonds of trust, respect, and camaraderie—not just obligation and servitude—may have connected him and other European men to their tour servants on lengthy and dangerous journeys. It was not unknown in late-colonial Indonesia for respectable Europeans to have sexual relationships with subaltern men and boys, as Marieke Bloembergen's study of the vice scandal that made newspaper headlines in the late 1930s demonstrates.⁷³ Intimacy by no means precludes bigotry and violence, of course. We cannot infer the nature and depth of Arens's relationships from photographs alone, no matter how poignant. His letters—and the texts of published guidebooks (where they deign to mention the porters and guides who assisted European geotourists)—reveal a conformist view of unequal relations between European and Indonesian men that firmly upheld colonial race and class prejudices.

The Limits of Visibility

“Lazy he is not; carefree, yes,” Wormser wrote about “the” Javanese at the end of his tour of Gunung Lawu. He paid his porter his due “reward, a few guilders,” and transcribed the conversation that followed:

What will you do with [the money]?

--Wager it on a cockfight at the market tomorrow.

And if you lose?

--If I win, I will get the cock and eat it.

Yes, but if you lose?

--Then I will climb the Lawu again with you.⁷⁴

Wormser then expounded on the Muslim fatalism misdirecting the lives of Java's lower orders, trapping coolies in cycles of servitude because they could not act as economically rational beings. Arens made similar judgements in letters to his family,⁷⁵ common also to Dutch colonial travel writing and fiction. Read against the grain, and from the perspective of the Javanese porter, Wormser's story is also a tale of contingent, low-wage labour, and of economic gains that brought limited social mobility. Eric Zuelow's concluding observations about the entanglement of exploitation and opportunity in colonial tourism are relevant here. Yet the unnamed porter's insistent, optimistic voice (“I will win tomorrow”) also expresses his agency: about how to spend his own time and money and how to feel (hopeful!) about his short-term future prospects. The worker's response to Wormser's boorish prompting—the white man's reminder that a coolie's agency operated within fragile limits (“what if you lose”)—explains his recently expired contract. Lugging European mens’ stuff up and down the local volcano so they could see the view might well be a Sisyphean labour, but it was worth attending to such opportunities because they paid. The foreigners could not do it alone, after all. “I will climb the Gunung Lawu again with you.”

Colonial tourism was built on structures of European expansion and exploration supported by the manual and intellectual labour of ubiquitous but not fully acknowledged Indonesian labour. It is perhaps appropriate that photography should be the most significant colonial source on the multiple forms of labour located on these volcanos, physical as well as knowledge-based, that brought Indonesian workers into contact, and contracts, with foreign tourists. Historically, Europeans used their cameras to signify their power to command servants in Southeast Asia. Commercial and amateur photography was key to stimulating tourism on volcanoes, and an important aid for scientific research, two activities that created work for Indonesians and Europeans in the Netherlands East Indies.

This article marks the first research to analyse colonial photographs as sources on early Indonesian geotourism. I have argued that these photographs at once make visible and preserve the “silence” of Indonesian tourism workers in these contexts, since they were represented by their masters rather than themselves. I have applied historical methodologies and some approaches derived from critical photo theory to unpack the colonial baggage surrounding these workers, and to consciously restructure the syntaxes we use to register their histories. It is difficult to hear Indonesian subalterns speak on their experience of colonial geotourism when they are being voiced over by elite Europeans. But it is possible to “listen to images” and perceive registers of self-representation among subaltern workers that colonial interlocutors may not have sensed.⁷⁶ We can choose to attend to the men still staring out at us, even after Indonesian independence, from photographs in which European makers and subjects suggest we should be looking at the volcano (Figure 20).

Figure 20. F. Broekstra. A guide looks into the camera; a European woman looks at the volcano, East Java, 1954. Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll. nr. TM-ALB-2247-27.

There is still much to learn from extending gender studies of colonialism in Indonesia to include the co-production of Dutch and Indonesian masculinities.⁷⁷ I have demonstrated how the domestic work of Indonesian manservants extended beyond the home into wider settings where Europeans demanded to be attended, including adventure tours and scientific expeditions, with conditions not unlike those of other homosocial colonial environments like the club and the army. Indeed, recognising volcanoes as sites of labour makes visible the Indonesian workers who enabled colonial tourism and science and identifies another node linked to the penal and indentured labour regimes that permeated colonial social and economic relations.⁷⁸ Making connections between homosocial practices and institutions in the Netherlands East Indies also advances historical understanding both of how Dutch colonial expansion was built on European collaborations, co-optations, and coercions of Indonesian labour, and the modes of negotiation, assertion, and refusal available to subalterns in those circumstances.⁷⁹