Sharing the divisions of the colonial past: an assessment of the Netherlands-Indonesia shared cultural heritage project, 2003-2006

While recognised for advancing historical scholarship on collecting in the colonial Netherlands East Indies, the Netherlands-Indonesia Shared Cultural Heritage Project of 2003-2006 merits analysis in its own right as a heritage process. From the perspective of heritage studies theory, this article demonstrates how the project both illustrates and contradicts several influential conceptions of heritage. It also reveals that such heritage negotiations can benefit states dealing with the legacy of the colonial past in European museums, when they forgo competition in the interest of a workable consensus. However, the project also offers counterpoints and paradoxes connected to remembering and forgetting, between its orientation to the present and to the past, and in its relationship to the tangible and intangible heritage of Dutch colonialism.