Making an island in time: Dutch Folklore Studies, painting, tourism, and craniometry around 1900

There are roughly two ways to write the history of one's discipline: 'insider' accounts, written from within the discipline's framework of shared assumptions, and 'outsider' accounts, written from a broader and generally less self-celebratory perspective--one that considers the social and ideological alliances that helped shape the discipline but were more or less discarded at a later stage. This article traces the emergence of Dutch Folklore Studies around 1900 and describes how isolated fishing communities in the Netherlands raised the curiosity of folklorists and craniometrists and almost simultaneously attracted painters and travelers. This common curiosity resulted in numerous forms of representation, including sociographic reports, studies by physical anthropologists, travel accounts, and paintings. The records about Marken from the decades around 1900 illustrate how the popular and scholarly imaginations implicated one another and offer a valuable understanding of the discourses informing those perceptions. In particular, Roodenburg discusses how ideas about primitivity, race, and allochrony influenced and are reflected in these representations of Marken and its inhabitants.
IN THE LAST decades of the nineteenth century a colorful group of painters, travelers, and scholars became fascinated with the island of Marken, a small fishing community some ten miles [...]