Things Collective Available to Purchase

This chapter concerns a particular set of objects that troubled Dutch authorities. While also considered fetishes, they involved different political, cultural, and ontological trajectories than jimat: keris, heirloom daggers, particularly those belonging to rulers of indigenous polities. Beginning with the conquest of Klungkung on Bali, this chapter involves a resography, an analytic narrative following a particular object or objects. It tracks the unexpected consequences of policies involving the confiscation of kris and their display in museums in the colonial capital and the Netherlands. Rather than defanging the potency of these objects, such practices generated new collectives (and actual collectors) around their purported “magical powers,” adding immeasurably to their aesthetic and monetary value. The “magic” of such things now moves across worlds, most recently in the designation of kris as world heritage.