Carel M.A. Groenevelt, a collector in Australian New Guinea (1959-62): networked provenance of an Abelam assemblage, Museum voor Land- en Volkenkunde (Wereldmuseum), Rotterdam

This article focuses on the assemblage collected by the professional collector Carel Maria A. Groenevelt between 1959 and 1962 in the Abelam and Arapesh regions (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea) on behalf of the then Museum voor Land- en Volkenkunde (today Wereldmuseum), Rotterdam. This collection comprises around 375 objects from various locations, including a large range of sculptures, sago-spathe painted panels, shell rings, body adornments, waken headdresses, baba masks, yam ornaments, bone ‘daggers’, spinning tops, netbags, drums, etc. Although some of the New Guinean material acquired by Groenevelt for the museums in Rotterdam and Amsterdam is well-known, the collection he gathered in north-eastern New Guinea has remained relatively understudied, in comparison for example with the Asmat material he assembled in the 1950s.
This article therefore proposes to expose the specificities of this so far overlooked Abelam and Arapesh collection, while piecing together the collected objects with the archival documentation assembled along the collected enterprise – namely the correspondence between Carel M.A. Groenevelt and J. Victor Jansen, Curator, and Christiaan Nooteboom, Director of the Museum voor Land- en Volkenkunde (stored at the Stadsarchief Rotterdam) and the photographs taken by Groenevelt in the field (now held at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam).
From this focused case study, it aims to eventually rethink ethnographic collections as complex assemblages of not only collected artefacts, but also archival documents and photographs, as well as the multiplicity of actors involved in the collecting process. It proposes to reinsert this collection in the broader historical collecting and colonial contexts of the 1950s and 1960s in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, by shedding light on how intertwined the formation of this specific assemblage is with other museum collections dating back to the same period. As such, it aims to better understand the collecting processes, dynamics and motivations for such an enterprise. In turn, this article advocates for provenance research to account for a multi-sited, multi-agentive and relational history of museum collections.