Tea Cups, Cameras and Family Life: Picturing Domesticity in Elite European and Javanese Family Photographs from the Netherlands Indies, ca. 1900–42

Abstract

This article examines the representation of tea drinking in photographs and the commemoration of this pastime in European and Javanese family photograph albums, in the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) during the early twentieth century. As ego documents (autobiographical sources), family photographs of tea-time reveal how the expression of social categories like race, class and gender were choreographed in the home by colonial family members for their own viewing. As sources for social history, such photographs reflect not just on markers of social differentiation, but also on familial cohesion and, importantly, on an emerging class solidarity between Javanese and Europeans that transcended racial distinctions. Worldliness, domesticity and a peculiar mode of civility that would in the European context have been considered middle class, but in the Indies were considered elite, were the normative cultural standards by which the photogenicity of the colonial family was measured in photographs of tea drinking. Tea cups and cameras were thus wielded by amateur family photographers to reproduce both the hierarchy and unity that simultaneously divided and connected sectors of elite colonial society in the early twentieth century.