St Nicholas as a public festival in Java, 1870-1920; Articulating Dutch popular culture as ethnic culture

Abstract

King drew attention to the fact that 'the first globally multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-continental societies on any substantial scale' were the colonial societies, in particular colonial cities. [...]a consideration of colonial history holds the promise of being theoretically relevant - King even describes it as 'an essential pre-requisite' - in providing a comparative empirical basis for current debates about cultural and ethnic identities in Europe (King 1991:8,7). [...]nowadays in the Indies, the festival of St Nicholas is increasingly celebrated outdoors by adults and children alike' (BN 3-12-1892). [...]a constant deep longing for the mother country was a prominent and pervasive mental characteristic of those who saw their stay in the Indies as temporary (the so-called trekkers; see, for example, De Vries 1996:47, 120; for an ambivalent attitude, see Reitsma-Brutel de la Riviere 1920:66). [...]of their special efforts on this particular day, some of these confectioneries, later restaurants - in particular Kuijl & Versteeg and Vogelpoel in Bandung, Versteeg, Leroux and Stam & Weijns in Batavia, and Grimm and Hellendoorn in Surabaya - won a great reputation not only in their respective cities, but throughout the Indies as a whole.