Article ID: CBB001022672

The Enlightened Image of Nature in the Dutch East Indies: Consequences of Postmodernist Doctrine for Broad Structures and Intimate Life (2011)

unapi

Eighteenth-century natural-history illustration in the Dutch East Indies reveals verisimilitude as a goal shared between colonial artists and their counterparts in Europe. Natural-history images more generally exhibit common styles in the world settled and dominated by Europeans. Apparently dramatic differences in the local settings of the artists produced only trivial variations in representing nature pictorially, in just the way that astronomy and physics in the European colonies and spheres of influence departed hardly at all from European practice. The overwhelming strength of disciplinary norms, in science and in art, is the standard explanation for this circumstance. An alternative explanation from social history is proposed. It centers on the hypothesis of a homology between households in colonial settings and in Europe. The alternative explanation implies that both the observatory and the artist's workshop were insensitive to superstructural variation in costume and architecture, as well as variation in climate and cuisine. The hypothesis behind the alternative explanation, designated by the term complementarity, derives directly from the postmodernist dictum that ideas are extrusions of social interactions. Nevertheless, just as the strength of disciplinary norms is unresolved in postmodernist doctrine, so complementarity directly challenges the postmodernist predilection for affirming the distinctiveness of colonial cultures.

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Description On 18th-century natural-history illustration in the Dutch East Indies.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001022672/

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Authors & Contributors
John A. Edgington
Jorink, Eric
Adam, Luthfi
Cherry, Haydon
Wingerden, Pieter van
Vermij, Rienk H.
Concepts
Science and art
Visual representation; visual communication
Natural history
Painters and painting
Scientific illustration
Illustrations
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century, early
20th century
16th century
Places
Netherlands
East Indies
Australia
Great Britain
Southern Africa
Indonesia
Institutions
McGill University (Canada)
Natural History Museum (London, England)
British Library
Dutch East India Company
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