This talk examines the work of building contractors—referred to as aannemers/anémers—in Indonesia from the early to mid-twentieth century. It focuses on Bandung-based family entrepreneurs of ethnic Chinese Sundanese descent who worked with Dutch architects and plantation interests during the late Dutch colonial period, and later with Indonesian engineers in the early Indonesia's post-Independence era. 

Drawing on archival sources, family albums, and oral history, the paper analyses how contractors’ political alignments, intermediary roles, building trades, intermarriages, and gendered labour shaped racialised landscapes and urban space, both in the development of a hill station project in the 1920s and, later, in the postcolonial setting of the 1955 Bandung Conference.

Speaker

Rina Priyani is an architectural and urban historian who is currently a visiting fellow at KITLV. She is an incoming Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the racialization of urban space and landscape of colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia.

Moderator

Ward Berenschot is a professor of comparative political anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at KITLV. Studying politics in India and Indonesia, his research focuses on the role of money and informality in election campaigns, while a second field of research concerns the character of civil society and citizenship in these countries.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Tuesday 14 July from 15.00–16.30 PM (CET).  

Image

Thio Tjoan Tek’s aannemersbureau 1940. Source: Thio Tjoan Tek’s family album.

Flyer

PDF version