Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0002-2145-5579
Abstract
When Sigmund Freud visited the Netherlands in the 1920s, he oversaw the Dutch landscape while travelling by rowing boats, carriages, and on foot. The reclamation of the Zuyderzee especially made an impression. He concluded that this drive for culture to control nature was similar to how the Ego wanted to control the Id. Of course, this was not a recent phenomenon in the Netherlands. During two earlier visits (in 1908 and 1910), Freud visited the major museums of the Netherlands where he was especially interested in the landscape painters of the seventeenth century. Landscape is actually one of those Dutch words that was adopted in many other languages. Embodying the scaped land, or, exploring the ways in which nature is scaped by men, painters like van Jacob van Ruisdael, Albert Cuyp, and Rembrandt van Rijn, may be seen as part of a particularly Dutch tradition of engineering that also included creative thinkers like Simon Stevin, Antonie van Leeuwenhoeck, and Christaan Huygens. The Dutch not only felt the need to control the sea (ergo the unknown, the Id) in the Netherlands but also in their former colonies, in particular, Indonesia. Overcoding its islands and seas with their ideas of control had major consequences for how the land and the sea could be lived. Nowadays, we need to imagine a life otherwise. With Amitav Ghosh, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and especially the stories and songs of those who live at the coast, we need not to control but to understand the sea again. It is time, once more, to understand the ways all the organic and non-organic forms of life transcode themselves into each other, resonate together, and offer us the sonorous hum of life.
Recommended Citation
Dolphijn, Rick
(2025)
"Living the Coast: On Property and Possession, the Netherlands and Indonesia, and
the Free Sea,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
46, Article 10.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2159
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss46/10
