Emilie Wellfelt

In 2016 I successfully defended my doctoral thesis at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. The thesis is entitled Historyscapes in Alor: Approaching indigenous histories in eastern Indonesia. After finishing my PhD I was guest researcher in Copenhagen and Leiden and held a two year-position as postdoctor at Stockholm University. After that I have worked as senior lecturer and researcher at Stockholm University, Linnaeus University, and since spring 2023 Lund University. During the spring semester 2024 I hold a temporary position as lecturer in history at Lund University.

I have spent much time in Southeast Asia, which has influenced my take on history. My geographical speciality is (eastern) Indonesia. In my research I pair an interest in local indigenous history with global history. Local and global is interconnected in complex ways. Through circulations of objects and ideas, history, also at the most local level, is impacted by global factors.

My research is often situated in the borderland between history and anthropology. I am interested in interpretations of the world and how humans relate to history; how objects and stories connect people to the past and to places. This approach also involves the relationship between people, culture and the environment.

In my research, I engage with archives, with texts and objects, and with peoples, the oral, and the self-experienced. I have sought collaborations in inter- and transdisciplinary projects where different perspectives and knowledges are used to approach shared problems, and have worked in close collaborations with local and indigenous people in Southeast Asia.

Below I describe the main research and documentation projects I have undertaken over the past two decades. The presentation begins with a future project that is under development.

Under development: New Guinea 1948-59 & 2025, a transdisciplinary study of nature and culture based on Sten Bergman's collections

New Guinea is a large island north of Australia, which is characterized by its enormous species richness and cultural diversity, the latter expressed among other things in language diversity. This project connects Sweden and New Guinea, and involves researchers from the subjects of history, ethnography/art history and zoology. Using transdisciplinary environmental and cultural research methods, we want to shed light on changes that have taken place in New Guinea since the middle of the 20th century, and analyse how these changes affect biodiversity and cultural diversity.

As a basis for our research, we analyze material from the Swedish explorer Sten Bergman (1895 - 1975) who made three expeditions to Dutch New Guinea during the period 1948-1959. Each expedition lasted more than a year. We study and compare Bergman's observations and collections from the mid-20th century with the conditions in Indonesian New Guinea three quarters of a century later.

Following the Feathers: A Global History of Birds of Paradise

2017-present. There are about 40 known species of bird of paradise. All occur naturally in the New Guinea region. The birds (ie males) have developed spectacular feathers, which make them attractive to humans. While other birds are traded alive, bird of paradise have long been used locally and exported as feathered objects.

In the project, I investigate how these animal objects have been interpreted and used in different cultures over 500 years. The project shows how charismatic objects and animals have been part of the global circulations of material culture and ideas since the early 16th  century. Interpretations and uses of birds of paradise have changed over time and in the various places where they have ended up through trade and as gifts. In the 2000s, the spectacular birds continue to attract people, now mainly through nature films and exclusive bird watching.

Ujir: documentation of an endangered language, Aru Islands, Indonesia

2013-2016. The Ujir language that has not yet been described by linguists. It is an Austronesian language spoken on an island on the west side of the Aru Archipelago, eastern Indonesia. The island is strategically located for trade with inland rainforests and the east side of Aru, as well as with regional and long-distance trade hubs in Maluku, (the Spice Islands). Historically Ujir used to be the easternmost reach of Islam. Archival sources show that Islam was introduced in the mid-17th century. My work in Ujir consisted of multimedia documentation of language, culture and historical traditions. The project was funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung in Germany and the documentation is preserved in The Language Archive (TLA), Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Link to TLA: https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/

Historyscapes: History and uses of history in oral cultures in Alor, Indonesia

2009-2016. Alor is a mountainous island with 165,000 inhabitants who speak about twenty languages. My interest in the history of Alor was aroused by a great interest in history that arose on the island a few years after the fall of the country's authoritarian Suharto regime in 1999.

Decentralization and democratic reforms had changed the political map of Indonesia. The previous focus on the centre (Java, Jakarta) gave rise to a new interest in regional and local history. In Alor in the early 2000’s everybody, from high-ranking officials to village elders and school teachers, seemed to be involved in projects aiming at producing written histories from Alor. This proved to be complicated as the local historical sources were oral traditions, memorabilia and places in the landscape, sources that did not easily translate into text.

In my doctoral research, I documented history from different language groups and used narratological methods to analyse the data I collected. Oral traditions generated a new picture of the island's history, which in many ways contested history based on colonial sources from the Dutch archives.

The anthropologist, the collection, the legends - Cora Du Bois and the Abui people

2007-2009. During the years 1938-39, the American anthropologist Cora Du Bois lived with the Abui people in Alor, Indonesia. Her goal was to investigate connections between culture and personality, and to try methods from psychoanalysis on people who were not influenced by Western culture. Du Bois corresponded with Walter Kaudern, a museum director in Gothenburg, Sweden who had published research from Celebes (Sulawesi). Kaudern persuaded Du Bois to collect objects from Alor and send them to Sweden. Their intention was that the collection would be presented in a book about the material culture of Alor, but the Second world war and the sudden death of Kaudern put a halt to these plans. The only documentation was a list of the objects. I have worked on documentation of the collection, among other things by doing interviews about all objects in the valley where they were collected. It turned out that Cora Du Bois was reputable in Alor and had taken on a mythological form amongst some Abui speaking groups. I have documented people who remembered Cora since they were children, and the stories that are told about the anthropologist.

Muslims and Christians in Ternate (Alor) - Religious coexistence in eastern Indonesia

2002-2007. In the early 2000s, violent conflicts raged in Maluku, eastern Indonesia. The battle line came to stand between Muslims and Christians.

During this critical period, I visited a small island called Ternate in the strait between Alor and Pantar. The island is named after the larger and more famous island Ternate in Maluku. I was invited to a big feast in the village Uma Pura, celebrating the new roof on a clan house, and noticed that the guests were both Muslims and Christians. When I asked questions about this, the villagers claimed that "two religions are twice as good as one". Uma Pura is a Muslim village, but the neighbours are Christians. At religious and traditional celebrations, the villages invite each other. Two religions meant twice as many feasts. I conducted fieldwork in Ternate (Alor) in 2002 and 2003 to study how this interfaith coexistence worked. The result was a master's thesis in social anthropology.

Textiles and traditions in Indonesia

1998-ongoing. I have a long-lasting interest in Indonesian textiles. Hand-woven fabrics are filled with symbolic and other meanings, and textiles are a way of approaching the world of women. My interest began with ethnographic documentation of material culture and textile traditions on the island of Sumba, Indonesia. Several periods of fieldwork resulted in photographic documentation for the Ethnographic Museum, now the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg. Parts of the visuals were included in a museum exhibition entitled “Life and Death om Sumba - The woven world”.

Link to photographic collection (Wellfelt) in the World Culture Museums database Carlotta: https://collections.smvk.se/carlotta-vkm/web

I have continued to do research on textiles parallel to other projects and have published an article on textile production and local trade networks with raw materials and handicraft products in the Flores-Pantar-Alor region. The article won a prize awarded by the Textile Society of America and can be accessed here:

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/943/