Ms Marianne Hulsbosch
Visual Art Education, Faculty of Education
University of Sydney
m.hulsbosch@edfac.usyd.edu.au
Marianne is a textile designer who is the director of visual art education and her research interest includes arts informed enquiry. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis focusing on the fundamental basis of identity, dress and the body.
Dress and Ethnic Identity Construction in a Colonial Context
Many centuries of Western colonialism dramatically changed the material world of the Ambonese people who live in the eastern islands of the Indonesian archipelago. This paper considers the construction of personal ethnic identity within a colonial context, as negotiated through specific items of dress and adornment. The history of dress and appearance has the methodological facility to reassess the representation and subjectivity of colonized subjects in relation to the colonizer. Ambonese society during the late Dutch colonial period (1860 - 1950), underwent great social change. The 19th century was the time that marked cultural reorientation and a rethinking of the attributes of dress and the body. Ambonese dress style developed during this colonial period, was not only reflective of a Christian understanding of a duality of mind/body, but simultaneously it was strongly informed by ethnic cultural values and embodied experiences. "Dress as a form of inscription, operates at the level of the body, constructing differences which produce the social body as a textured object with multi-dimensional layers, touched by the rich weave of history and culture" (Maynard 1994:3). This paper is concerned with ethnic Ambonese identity construction through dress as practiced within Dutch colonial context. By charting the changes in relationships between the coloniser and the colonised, as expressed through the development, designs, production, use and meaning of bridal wear worn by the Ambonese, re-evaluation of received history may overturn misconceptions and may facilitate re-identification of Christian Ambonese.
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