tis the season... to think critically about culture and race?

So, once again proving that anthropologists can never really go on vacation (at least in the sense of leaving their work behind), look what I found when I was in Rotterdam:


Yep, you know I had a lot of questions about this one. I will come back to it a bit later...

As I wrote about before, the tradition of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet have intruigued me since before I arrived, but seeing how this festive season unfolds first-hand has got my brain a-buzzing in geeky as well as childish delight. I was lucky enough to see the official arrival of the saint in the Netherlands earlier in November. And on Tuesday evening I was told by my flatmates that I needed to bring a shoe down to the kitchen. I was a little confused, since I thought that Sinterklaas came on December 5th. Apparently though, since he's here from mid-November, he is available to pick up children's letters and leave some presents before then. So, when I went downstairs with my boot I found that laid out on the kitchen table (since we have no fireplace) were all of our shoes, a bowl of water and a carrot for the white horse of Sinterklaas. Then we stood around our shoes and had to sing some songs to show that we were nice. I didn't know any of the words to the songs, and so one of my flatmates suggested that I write Sinterklaas a letter and ask him to bring me the songs. I wrote my little letter (in Dutch, of course) and stuck it in my boot and then was told to go to bed. The next morning I was pleased to find that Sinterklaas did think I had been nice enough, and he had left me not only a nice chocolate figure of himself and his helper, but a magazine with a nice cd with all the songs! Very exciting.

Going from these gezellig traditions among friends to thinking critically about the history and imagry of them makes one little anthropologist very happy. The range of discussion about Sinterklaas and his Zwarte Pieten friends is quite broad here. And this is where the bizarre poster I alluded to above comes in. It should be noted that I came across it after walking past a parade with the saint, and many Zwarte Pieten playing instruments and promenading through the downtown heart of Rotterdam. There were two others posters like this one of a deranged Sinterklaas, but featuring a shirtless Zwarte Piet with the words "zwarte van roet" (black as soot) written across his chest, and some crazy, woolly horned character who I had never seen before. The link takes you to STEREOPIET.nl, which seems to be a project in which the author urges Dutch people not to stop celebrating their traditions, but to think critically about their history. As of now, there is only a summary of the research and a whole lot of reactions (mostly in Dutch) to the site, which also show the spectrum of feelings over the holiday. Interesting!