Jan Broekhuijse

Broekhuijse, the son of a farmer from Haarzuilens in the center of the Netherlands, studied Non-Western Sociology at Utrecht University where he graduated cum laude in 1958. In January 1959 he left for Dutch New Guinea to become a civil servant of the Dutch government there. Broekhuijse was researching the living conditions of the urbanized Papuans in Hollandia, when he was transferred that same year to post Wamena in the eastern highlands, where the Dutch government still lacked a firm foothold. As a staff member of the Kantoor Bevolkingszaken (Population Affairs Office), a government office promoting anthropological, linguistic and demographic research among the Papuans, he researched the culture of the Dani people in the Baliem Valley, a warlike mountain tribe that had not yet been brought under Dutch control. In those years, Broekhuijse was also an advisor and participant of the American Harvard-Peabody Expedition (1961–1965) to the Dani, led by the cinematographer and anthropologist Robert Gardner. The expedition resulted in Gardner's prize winning documentary film Dead birds (1963), on the warfare of the Dani people. However, expedition member and sound engineer Michael C. Rockefeller, son of the politician Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared without a trace in November 1961.

After returning to the Netherlands in 1964, Broekhuijse served for several years as a civil servant at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs while he prepared his Dutch PhD thesis for his doctorate in 1967 with professor Henri Théodore Fischer (1901–1976) at Utrecht University. The same year he joined the Anthropology Department of the Royal Tropical Institute (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, KIT) in Amsterdam as a scientific officer, with Jan van Baal (1909–1992), Dutch anthropologist and former governor of New Guinea, at the helm since 1959. Until his retirement in 1994 Broekhuijse was affiliated with KIT, where he mainly conducted research in Africa for development projects. In the early 1970s he joined an acquisition tour in Burkina Faso for the Tropenmuseum (Museum of the Tropics), resulting in hundreds of ethnographic photographs.

Broekhuijse later donated his extensive collection of ethnographic objects from the Dani and the Lani people of Western New Guinea to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam; his photographic collection was donated to the African Studies Centre Leiden. Broekhuijse died in 2020 at the age of 90.^[3]

Photographs by Jan Broekhuijse:

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  A local healer is treating a woman with cupping therapy in front of a loamstone wall.
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  Kakare, a magic object to secure a prosperous hunt.
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  A man is preparing the wickerwork for a new storage shed.
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  A man is sounding the warhorn.
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  Two youngsters get ready for a wrestling match accompanied by drummers.
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  A dancing man-woman in an orange antelope mask with two horns.
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  A shepherd feeds goats and a zebus.