Wayang in Museums: The Reverse Repatriation of Javanese Puppets
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transported to museum settings, wayang puppets from Java (Indonesia) are inevitably disembedded from performance traditions and the techniques and events animating and framing them. But this essay argues that it is possible to involve puppets in processes of “reverse repatriation,” bringing home to objects far from their sites of origin, as well as catalyzing new dialogues in sites of storage, exhibition, and performance. Puppets in the British Museum collected in Java by T. S. Raffles during the 1810s are venerated by Javanese visitors, but generally museum visitors were more taken by <i>wayang hip hop</i> puppets acquired in 2016 and displayed alongside Raffles’s figures in the exhibition <i>Shadow Puppet Theatre from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand</i>. (2016–17). The new puppets serve to challenge Orientalist preconceptions of wayang as an unchanging tradition. A wayang performance occasioned by the exhibition <i>Die Welt des Schattentheaters: Von Asien bis Europa</i> (The world of shadow theatre: From Asia to Europe) (2015–16) at the Linden Museum Stuttgart enabled an intergenerational dialogue about the tradition of wayang for a German Javanese diasporic family. A set of puppets collected in Java over several generations by a Chinese Indonesian family, gifted in 2006 to Simon Fraser University’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in British Columbia, has been used to explain stories of migration and multiculturalism in Canada. The private museum Rumah Wayang 2 (House of Wayang 2) in Tegal, Indonesia, is a way station for the puppets of puppeteer Enthus Susmono. Rather than safeguarding puppets, Enthus’s museum promotes his reputation as an innovator and whets appetites for his puppets’ future sale.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it