perspectives on the world

Perspectives on the WorldReflections of 2011-2012

The Faculty of Humanities

Humanities 01

A word from the Dean

Professor W. van den Doel Dean

Preparing for the future. This could well be said to have been the theme for the 2011-2012 academic year. Leiden

University formulated its response to the challenges that were set out in the Dutch government’s Strategic Agenda

for Higher Education, Research and Science. New objectives were defined, for example in such areas as study

success: objectives that will have to be achieved in the coming years. All in all, the profile of the University and

its Faculties has now been given a much clearer definition.

The Faculty of Humanities will focus on Dynamics of Diversity, a concept that encompasses the mobility of people,

language, culture, ideas, art and institutions in a globalising world, and their interconnectivity through the ages.

The Faculty is an international centre for the study of languages, cultures, arts and societies worldwide, in their

historical contexts from prehistory to the present. In other words, the Faculty casts its net wide in terms of cultural,

linguistic and geographical regions and in terms of historical periods. We employ in-depth linguistic, historical and

cultural knowledge, focusing particular attention on the analytical and interpretive power of explicit and implicit

comparison, within disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks of theory and method. In disciplinary terms,

we apply a broad definition of the Humanities, drawing no absolute boundaries between the Humanities and

such disciplines as Social Science and Law. Instead we seek synergy.

On the basis of this profile, the Faculty contributes to the themes that typify the University’s chosen profile, namely

the Global Interaction of Civilizations and Languages; The Asian Challenge; Health, Life and Biosciences; and Law,

Democracy and Governance: Legitimacy in a Multilevel Setting. In focusing on this profile, we will apply ourselves

to delivering exciting teaching programmes and carrying out innovative research projects.

These aims apply not only to the future; today, too, all the Faculty’s seven institutes are engaged in exciting and

innovative research. In this publication, four scientists and four master’s students talk about their current research

projects. From Egyptian goddesses and a seventeenth-century print collection to Dutch asylum practice and

Chinese twitter messages: you can read about eight examples of the groundbreaking work carried out by Leiden’s

inspiring Humanities researchers. Together, their activities cover a field of study that encompasses all periods of

human history and has the whole world as its domain.

I hope you will enjoy reading Perspectives on the World.

Wim van den Doel

Dean

HumanitiesHumanities 0302

philosophy in all its facets, in relation to the many disciplines

taught at the University;

• TheLeidenUniversityInstituteforReligiousStudies(LIRS)

includes all religions within its range of expertise.

The Faculty of Humanities is home to more than 4,500 students,

who are able to choose from no fewer than 26 BA programmes

and 36 MA programmes, including research masters. In 2011, the

Faculty’s 700 staff members were engaged in teaching and research

activities based on a turnover of some J 50 million. Between

September 2011 and June 2012, 65 students received their PhD.

World-class researchThe Faculty is ranked among the top five Arts and Humanities

universities outside the English-speaking world. The quality of

the Faculty’s research is recognised internationally, as witnessed

by the fact that our researchers are regularly awarded signifi-

cant national and international research grants. An example is

Professor Willem Adelaar, who last year was awarded an Advan-

ced Investigator Grant for excellent research by the European

ResearchCouncil(ERC).Hereceivedthisprizeinrecognition

of his work on the Amerindian languages of Central and South

America. Besides European subsidies, the Netherlands Organi-

sationforScientificResearch(NWO),too,financesanumberof

Multidisciplinary collaborationThe Faculty of Humanities was formed in 2008. Merging the

diverse departments to create the current institutes has enabled

us to engage in collaboration at a multidisciplinary level and

given us the opportunity to extend our scope beyond the limits

of the former departments. The Faculty’s research activities are

currently structured within seven institutes:

• TheAcademyofCreativeandPerformingArts(ACPA)

focuses on bringing together art and science;

• TheLeidenUniversityInstituteforAreaStudies(LIAS)

combines thorough knowledge of language and culture with

disciplinary approaches from the humanities, social sciences

and law;

• TheLeidenUniversityCentrefortheArtsinSociety(LUCAS,

formerlyLUICD)coversthefieldofliteratureandliterary

studies, the history of art and material culture, and

film and new media studies;

• TheLeidenUniversityInstituteforHistory(LUIH)wasranked

nineteenth in the 2012 QS World University Ranking for

History, and number 1 outside the English-speaking world;

• TheLeidenUniversityCentreforLinguistics(LUCL)brings

together all the Faculty’s linguistic research;

• TheLeidenUniversityInstituteforPhilosophy(LUIPh)studies

Humanities at Leiden University

Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is an international centre for studying the world’s languages, cultures and nations.

The Faculty’s research stretches from prehistoric times to the present day, and adopts a broad perspective that

encompasses fields as diverse as religion, philosophy, literature, art and technology.

top researchers every year. Its prestigious VICI award, one of the

largest personal scientific awards in the Netherlands, has been

awarded to a Leiden Humanities researcher eleven times since its

inception in 2002. Last year, two Leiden Humanities researchers

received VICI awards: Manon van der Heijden for her research on

women and criminality, and Mirjam de Bruijn for her research

on mobile communication in Central Africa. The contribution of

the Faculty of Humanities plays a key role in positioning Leiden

University among the top three recipients of VICI awards.

Profile themesIn order to facilitate cutting-edge fundamental research at

national and international level, Leiden University has chosen

to focus on six profile themes from among eleven multi-

disciplinary fields of research. The Faculty of Humanities

is engaged in research relating to four of these themes:

• GlobalInteractionofCivilizationsandLanguages

• TheAsianChallenge

• Health,LifeandBiosciences

• Law,DemocracyandGovernance:Legitimacy

in a Multilevel Setting

More about the Faculty of HumanitiesFor more information about the Faculty, its programmes

and institutes, see: hum.leiden.edu.

The recipients of scientific awards are listed at:

hum.leiden.edu/research/hall-of-fame.

A list of candidates who recently received their PhD

can be found at: hum.leiden.edu/research/PhDs.

Subsidies received by researchers are listed at:

hum.leiden.edu/research.


Ten years ago, Dr Nadine Akkerman began studying the letters of Elizabeth Stuart, seventeenth-century Queen of

Bohemia. At that time Akkerman was carrying out research for her PhD in English literature; she hoped the letters would

expose an interesting literary network from the period. Instead, she discovered a large number of letters that had little

to do with art or culture but were more concerned with politics and warfare. As a result, Akkerman’s research subject

proved to be an influential, early modern stateswoman.

Boxes and boxes of an early modern stateswoman’s letters

Nadine Akkerman (1978) has by now read around 1800 letters

from and to the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662).

ElizabethwasthedaughterofKingJames(VIofScotland,Iof

England);shemarriedFrederickV,whobecameKingofBohemia

in 1619. Within a year, however, the Bohemian army had been

defeated and Elizabeth and her husband fled as exiles to The

Hague. Frederick died in 1632.

Akkerman obtained her PhD based on a selection of the letters.

A collection of around six hundred, dating from the period

when Elizabeth was politically active during her widowhood,

was published last autumn by Oxford University Press: The

Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume

II (1632-1642). Akkerman is currently a researcher and lecturer

at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

A politically engaged queen‘It took a while before I realised I would not be unravelling

literary networks, but that I was actually dealing with much more

interesting material,’ Akkerman explains. ‘When I started, around

two hundred of Elizabeth’s letters had been found. I had hoped to

discover a few new ones, but I actually found a great many more.

And in these letters she only writes about war and the army, about

spies and diplomats.’

In other words, Elizabeth turned out to be highly politically

engaged. This goes against the clichéd image of a queen who

liked romances and plays and cared more for her court with its

monkeys and dogs than for her own children. In Akkerman’s

opinion, Elizabeth introduced the Republic to ‘a true royal court’.

‘She attracted painters, for example, and competed with other

courts in terms of culture,’ Akkerman observes. ‘But at the same

time Elizabeth was corresponding about political matters, trying

to mobilise armies and organising meetings of ambassadors.’


Nadine Akkerman

‘Elizabeth had so many contacts that just about everyone who was of importance in the seventeenth century is mentioned in her letters.’

conduct this research. ‘Both the National Archives and the Royal

Archives in The Hague are nearby, and Leiden University is the

only Dutch university to have purchased the British State Papers

(1509-1714) in digital format. We can now easily view these papers

while working in the lecture halls.’

Of course, Akkerman herself has not been inactive either. Two

other parts of the trilogy about Elizabeth Stuart are due to be

published later this year and next year. Her new research project

will subsequently look at women spies in the early modern age.

‘There are already many books about the history of espionage,

but women are conspicuously absent from them. I have found the

names of so many women in the letters, however, that I now need

a database to record them all.’

Standard workIn order to chart Elizabeth’s efforts, Akkerman searched through

boxes full of letters in British and German, as well as Swedish and

American archives, collecting material from 47 different locations.

She is very careful in maintaining a literary approach in analysing

the documents. ‘I constantly take into account questions such

as: how does a text come into existence, who is writing it, who is

reading it, how was it circulated? And, of course, I look at the

rhetoric, which eventually fuses with the content. It is because

of this that the publication, apart from what it reveals about

Elizabeth herself, is of great historical value. It is also about the

oral and epistolary cultures of the period.’

‘Besides, Elizabeth had so many contacts that just about everyone

who was of importance in the seventeenth century is mentioned,’

Akkerman continues. ‘The Thirty Years’ War plays a major role

in the correspondence, and there is also information in it about

the various military skirmishes. Anglophone researchers are in-

trigued, because in many of their court studies there are missing

years in the accounts of the lives of people in exile.’

Akkerman also spent a year studying and subsequently cracking

the coded language she found in the letters. ‘A substitution system

was used in which numbers stood for certain letters: important

figures were also referred to in numeric code. By sharing the key

to the code, the elite created their own language, leading to the

development of political factions. In some letters, only parts were

written in code, sometimes it was only the subject of the letter.

You can then decipher the letter as if it were a kind of puzzle,

while charting social networks at the same time. Other research-

ers can now use these systems for their work.’

Undiscovered research territoriesHaving found through Elizabeth’s letters that particular

women played a more influential role than was previously

thought, Akkerman is convinced that there is a whole field of

research still to be discovered. Leiden is an excellent place to

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Humanities 0908

Daan van Esch (1989) completed a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Culture. Now he is pursuing his Master’s

in Chinese Studies, specialising in linguistics.

Dialects on “Twitter”

‘Last summer I travelled through rural areas in China. I was

intrigued by the vast differences in language. How great would

it be to do a few months of field work over there? Back in the

Netherlands I learned a new Chinese word, a dialect word. Over

here a Dutch language dictionary will note that a dialect word

comes from the Limburg area, for example, but in China the use

of dialect is discouraged. A Chinese dictionary will say that a

word is part of a dialect, but not which dialect. I wondered how

you would go about tracking the origins of such a word. The next

day I read about an American study that analyses Twitter to see

which words are used more frequently in New York, compared

to L.A., for instance. This type of research is often carried out on

newspaper articles, but Twitter is closer to everyday language. On

Twitter, people don’t just write that they want more democracy;

they also write things like: “I can’t sleep”, and “She doesn’t even

know I exist…” It occurred to me that this kind of study would

also work for Mandarin.’

‘It seemed like a fun experiment; I hadn’t thought of it as a dis-

sertation project at that point at all. Using Weibo, the Chinese

version of Twitter, I obtained five million randomly selected

messages. I then rented a kind of super-computer that can process

this kind of data. After I had written software that could analyse

the use of language in the messages, the computer processed away

for twelve hours. Now you can easily browse through the mess-

ages, and see when and where a message containing a particular

word was written.’

‘You should see this method as a new tool; it allows you to analyse

a lot of data very quickly. First, I tried around a hundred dialect

words; which showed that words which are listed as dialect in the

Daan van Esch

‘Using Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, I obtained a selection of five million messages that you can now browse online.’

dictionary are, in fact, often used throughout all of China. I also

looked to see whether certain words may be associated with a

specific city, and ran a list of the five thousand most common

words through the programme, to see if they occurred more in

certain places than others. Besides that, I made the data openly

accessible via a website. Within an hour of sending the link to

a mailing list of colleagues, there were already two hundred

visitors to the website. I also received all sorts of emails in my

inbox. Since then I have received even more reactions, including

from researchers at Stanford. The results of my research show

that this is indeed a good way of identifying dialect words,

but of course there are many more possibilities. This is

just the start of a whole range of things we can do

with this data.’

Van Esch speaks about his research with great passion and

precision(hecalculatedhowmanymetresofbookcasesare

needed to store all the messages in his database – easily 46).

By co-operating with other researchers and with the help of

external funding, he hopes to be able to continue his work

for some time. Technically it is possible to use messages in

the database five minutes after they appear on Weibo.

To him, that sounds fantastic.

Humanities


have an in-built propensity for violence, according to contemp-

orary philosopher Fukuyama. The – at times – brutal behaviour

of soldiers in war zones is an obvious example of this tendency.

Linguist and experimental psychologist Pinker refers to the “rage

circuit”: people can go berserk and become addicted to violence

and sadism. This is why I also drew on psychology. I related all

these elements to events in the novels Blindness and William

Golding’s Lord of the Flies.’

‘My conclusion: literature is relevant in offering an explanation

for violence and war. It allows us to experience how anxious

people become when there is no government, how people can

become addicted to power and violence and how important

loyalty, compassion and self-control are within society. Through

literature we can understand people’s dilemmas: should I fight or

flee, or put up some resistance? Literature about history allows

us to share these experiences. It acts as a warning; we can learn

from it. In the past, life used to be relatively much more violent.

The reason that levels of violence have decreased, according to

Pinker, is that people have become more civilised and more

intelligent. But literature also plays a role because having the

opportunity to empathise with others helps us to become

more tolerant.’

‘As a teacher, I have always been greatly interested in literature.

I read José Saramago’s Blindness, which is about what happens

when there is no central authority within a society. Groups are

after each other’s blood, violence breaks out. How does that come

about? Why does man have this tendency? Philosophers Hobbes

and Rousseau both believe that we need a form of government

to guarantee safety. Hobbes argues that violence occurs because

of the struggle for land and food, and especially for power and

reputation, whereas for Rousseau, honour and recognition are

the most important causes. Eventually, people who are not violent

by nature begin to turn to violence, too, to protect themselves.

What Hobbes and Rousseau failed to recognise, however, is that

man is also a social being. He doesn’t simply roam around by

himself, shoot an animal when he is hungry and then continue

on his way, alone.’

‘I also started to look for proof of how this sort of thing occurs

in real life by applying insights from archaeology and cultural

anthropology to my research. Both disciplines show that nomadic

hunter-gatherers are in general less violent. The problems usually

develop when people settle somewhere and start owning land.

Actually, there has never been a situation in which people did not

live in groups. However, that does not mean that man does not

Yvonne Hassing (1950) did a Master’s in Philosophy of European Languages and Cultures (Philosophy of the Humanities).

She had previously studied English, Linguistics and Translation Studies and worked as an English teacher.

Hassing enjoys the fact that her research both starts and finishes

with literature. She does not really expect this dissertation to lead

to more extensive academic work; for her the most important

thing is that she has found answers to a number of questions that

had been occupying her for a long time.

Yvonne Hassing

‘Literature is relevant in offering an explanation for violence and war. And empathising with others helps us to become more tolerant.’

Literature of violence


In her PhD thesis, Murre-van den Berg described the transition of

Aramaic from a spoken to a written language, strongly influenced

by the work of missionaries. Her new book is about the Christian

minority population in the area encompassed by modern-day

Iraq, between 1500 and 1850. ‘There are hardly any archives in

which we can do research, but a great many manuscripts have

been preserved. These are mainly liturgical texts, copied by

scribes, who also left behind a printer’s mark, or a colophon,’ she

explains. It is these colophons that she is focusing on. ‘The scribe

used a colophon to prove that the text was reliable. This means

that there is a name, a date and a place; comparable to how we

sign things.’

Over the years, however, scribes began to include more and more

information. ‘All sorts of adjectives were added and the colophon

became a genre in itself, which is valuable especially in a religious

context. Ruling religious leaders and their place in the community

are described, for instance. Political games were also played in the

colophons, because of the rivalry between leaders and villages.

All of this says something about that time: what was happening,

how did people look at the world and at the role of the Christian

minority in an Islamic society? My focus is on the language and

the dynamics within it; I look at who propagates what and what

kind of texts are used for the different purposes. You could see the

colophons as a route into the culture of the Church of the East.’

Not a lost era The period has a different image from the way Murre-van

den Berg would herself describe it, based on her research. ‘We

Westerners – in fact, Christians in the Middle East just as much

– have the tendency to write off this early modern period as one

in which people were lagging behind; one in which their own

culture came to a standstill, leading to isolation and decline. One

reason for this is that relatively few new texts seem to have been

written, and those that were don’t appear to introduce anything

new. The developments were indeed not rapid, but it is nonethe-

less not a lost era. In fact, it was a crucial period for conveying the

ancient Syrian Christian culture. Without the scribes in Northern

Iraq, many old texts would have been lost.’

‘Besides, this Christian minority was much less isolated than was

sometimes assumed. They had increasing contact with the Roman

Catholic Church, for instance. Thanks to this, new ideas from

Europe about religion, church and society reached Northern Iraq

relatively rapidly. You can find these outside influences in the texts.

Christian tradition in the Middle East

What do language and religion have to do with each other? A lot in some cases, as the research carried out by Professor

Heleen Murre-van den Berg (1964) shows time and again. She herself studied Semitic Languages and has become increasingly

involved in religious studies in the course of her career. With a new book – groundbreaking, according to some – about

the early modern history of the Church of the East, she again takes language and language development as a starting

point for studying and explaining religion. In so doing she is not only charting part of history; she is also helping us gain

a better understanding of recent developments in the Middle East.

Heleen Murre-van den Berg

‘Without the early modern scribes from Northern Iraq, many old texts would have been lost.’


There was a schism within the minority population, for example:

one group of people wanted this type of contact while another

group was opposed to it.’

‘The’ Christians do not exist Conclusions about how different groups of Christians behaved

at the time can be useful in explaining recent developments

in the Middle East. ‘We often talk about ‘the’ Christians in the

Middle East, as if they live in enclaves, with no wider context,’

says Murre-van den Berg. ‘We either assume that these societies

are highly sectarian, and fail to look at how different groups are

related to one another, or we only see the general picture without

paying attention to the differences. It’s a pitfall I try to avoid. A

story with subtle differences of meaning is, of course, less easily

translated into simple advice on the question of whether or not to

invade Syria, for example. Whatever you answer to that question

is necessarily a political point of view. This is not science with

absolute results. So, what can I contribute? I can provide texts

and explanations about how we should look at Christians in Syria

today. Why do many of them support the Assad regime? Because

of uncertainty about the future, mainly: Assad is also part of a

minority population. But it also has to do with social class, region

and old political alliances, so by no means all Christians feel

the same way about it. History helps us understand why certain

Christians adopt certain positions.’

ExpertiseBecause Murre-van den Berg’s research interacts with so many

academic disciplines, she believes that Leiden is a pre-eminently

suitable place for her work. ‘We have the Institute for Area Studies

with its Middle East department and the Centre for Linguistics

where the focus is on such aspects as sociolinguistics. I myself

work for the Institute for Religious Studies. The Faculty also

houses all the relevant language programmes. I know of nowhere

else in the Netherlands where you can find this much expertise in

one place.’

‘Sometimes it’s easier to do things on an ambitious scale,’ Henley

states. ‘It can immediately yield insights that you don’t get if

you’re concentrating on an individual community or country.

With Tracking Development, as the research programme was

called, we were able to make extremely good use of the resources

and expertise we have in Leiden. The two institutes were involved

in the same kind of questions and topics, building up the same

kind of area-specific, in-depth knowledge.

A joint endeavourAnd so an ambitious project was born. It is Henley’s conviction

that this kind of comparative research has to be based on real

expertise, only obtainable by making it a joint endeavour. ‘Both

institutes have people that have spent their whole professional

lives looking at their respective regions. And apart from the

people, there were also library resources: ASC, like KITLV,

has one of the best research libraries in the world for the region

it specialises in.’

After gaining funding, Tracking Development included, initially,

eight PhD students and a dozen postdoc researchers, contributing

expertise on Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria,

Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. ‘We put students together in pairs

and had them travel to their counterpart countries, so they could

acquire personal experience.’ Henley’s role has been to bring people

together, supervise, organise events, conferences, and discussions,

and also to write and edit publications, of which the last are still

to appear.

Corruption versus rural developmentThe outcomes after five years of comparative research are rather

poignant. ‘There’s a widespread assumption that the economic

Asian successes in poverty reduction

Fifty years ago, both Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa suffered from severe poverty. While most Southeast Asian

countries have since managed to achieve rapid growth, most African countries have not. When Professor David Henley

(1963) realised that the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), where he had

been working since 1993, had a sister institute in Leiden called the African Studies Centre (ASC) with the same kind of

expertise on another region, he decided to start an international research programme on the development trajectories

of the two regions.

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David Henley

‘Good governance and the rule of law didn’t have anything to do with development success in Asia.’

problems in Africa are strongly related to institutional failure and

corruption. We concluded quite quickly that this is not true, or

at least not nearly as true as is generally thought. Indonesia, for

instance, at the period of its greatest success in poverty reduction

was also one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according

to the standard indices. In the aid literature and the practice of

development co-operation, there is still an awful lot of emphasis

on good governance and the rule of law – things that didn’t have

anything to do with development success in Asia.’

When asked what does work, Henley names three important

preconditions for sustained economic growth with rapid poverty

reduction. Since the turn of the millennium, two of these have

generally been met in both regions: sound macroeconomic

management and economic freedom for small farmers and small

entrepreneurs. The most important difference between devel-

opment strategies in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa,

however, is the much greater priority given, especially in the

early stages, by the Asian governments to rural and agricultural

development. ‘The consistency of that contrast surprised me.

And it is extremely important for the future,’ Henley says.

Practical‘With few exceptions, African leaders are simply not very

interested in smallholder agriculture. And so their efforts to

achieve economic growth are very unlikely to benefit large num-

bers of poor people quickly.’ Why this indifference? Here we find

ourselves in a speculative area, the professor warns. But he does

have an opinion. ‘The Asian states were facing, or had recently

faced, the threats of a communist take-over. The forces of the

Left had drawn most of their support from the rural poor, so

there was a strong incentive for the elite to do something about

the situation of this group.’

‘But I don’t think that’s the whole story,’ he continues. ‘There’s

also a difference in world view at some deeper level. I’d say

African political elites are interested in transforming their

societies, acquiring things that rich countries have: technology,

modernity, knowledge. Asian models of development are much

more practical, not directed at an ideal image of the future.

This yields a much more inclusive development strategy.

The difference probably has something to do with the fact that

the experience of colonialism involved a more traumatic rupture

with the past in Africa than it did in Southeast Asia.’

Nevertheless, the Tracking Development research programme

deliberately did not concentrate on deep historical determinants

of developmental divergence. ‘We’ve been saying that it doesn’t

matter what the past was like; as long as you adopt the right

policies now, you can make a big difference quickly.’ Accordingly,

Henley is now taking his results to a wider audience. Already he

has presented some of the results to the World Bank. In the near

future he and his colleagues will take part in a number of inter-

national events intended to reach African policy makers, spreading

the message about what works in development, and what doesn’t.

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he collected. For most of these prints we do not know who the

designer was, who made them, or when and where they were

pub lished; Thysius unfortunately cut out the images along the

out lines, so that the captions are missing. That makes it difficult,

but also more fun. The print becomes a kind of puzzle. It means

I have to search for stylistic clues, for instance. Sometimes I can

find part of a signature and I then search the reference works to

see whose signature it could be.’

‘Once I have managed to decipher it all, I hope to be able to say

more about Thysius as a collector and about the importance

of the scrapbook within the collection culture of the Golden

Century. Thysius is primarily known as a collector of books, but

among experts he does not have a great reputation as a print

collector. He is thought not to have been passionate enough

about print collecting. My goal is to get a more complete picture

of who he was. In the preliminary study, I looked at how and

why seventeenth century prints were collected and who collected

them. I concluded that for Thysius, collecting prints was not an

overriding ambition, as it was for many other collectors. Thysius

collected prints as a personal passion; he was particularly inter-

ested in French prints and prints that belonged to the moralising

genre. This interest can be seen in the scrapbook.’

‘During my Book and Publishing minor I found a seventeenth-

century scrapbook in the Leiden Thysiana Library. The Library

was established in 1653 as a bequest in the will of Johannes

Thysius (1622-1653). Thysius was the son of a rich merchant, but

he lost both his parents while he was still young. Over the course

of his lifetime he assembled an extensive book collection. The

scrapbook that is central to my thesis – which I am going to

write next year on the basis of preliminary studies I carried out

this year – is an 85-page book in which Thysius pasted the prints

Daphne Wouts (1990) is taking two master’s programmes: Book and Digital Media Studies and the Research Master’s

in Art and Literature. She has already completed a Bachelor’s in Art History and developed an interest in early-modern

printing art and book history.

‘The book is also a bit of an encyclopaedia. The prints depict

flora, fauna and people, and are pasted in a certain order. It might

very well be that with this systematic ordering Thysius was trying

to model a microcosm, drawing a parallel with creation as a

macrocosm. His aim was to understand the world better. Thysius

was an intellectual, whose aim with his collections was to achieve

a humanistic ideal of knowledge. Human development and the

acquisition of knowledge are key aspects here. But I will only be

able to draw real conclusions after I have carried out the study.

Which is what I will be doing next year.’

Over the past year Daphne has come to feel very much at home

at Leiden University. She might do a PhD, but at this point she

has no firm plans. Instead, she optimistically seizes whatever

opportunity comes her way. She might be just as happy in a

museum or a print library.

Daphne Wouts

‘The captions of the prints are missing. That makes it difficult, but also fun. It means the print becomes a kind of puzzle.’

Print collection


Sandra Ottens (1967) is taking the Egyptology research master’s, a follow-up on her bachelor’s in the same discipline,

which she combined with a minor in Arabic.

Prophets of fate

‘I am very interested in religion and popular belief. My thesis is

about the Hathors, seven goddesses of Ancient Egypt who proph-

esied fate. There are many depictions of these goddesses; they

appear in relief on the walls of temples and are mentioned in fairy

tales and magic spells. Researchers have listed these depictions in

the past, but the records are incomplete. When I was allowed to

join the professor of my programme early in 2012 on a trip to the

excavation sites of the Dakhla oasis in Egypt, we discovered a new

stone block with a relief of a goddess playing the tambourine.

Only the Hathors are known to have done that. I came across

more depictions of goddesses with tambourines, probably also

Hathors, in another temple in Egypt. I now have a collection

of sixty depictions.’

‘In this overview I describe what is depicted; I note the date and

the accompanying text. My overview also includes a drawing or

a photograph, and a small map. I describe the clothing of the

goddesses and their attributes: possibly a tambourine or a

sistrum, a kind of rattle. I also study the context: what are the

goddesses doing and what is the occasion on which they are

appearing? For instance, in temples the goddesses are often

present at the birth of a god. Sometimes they are also shown

playing music or breast-feeding the child. Their basic function

is to bring good wishes for a long and happy life.’

‘Once I have finished collecting these examples, I will start

analysing them. I want to find out, for instance, how the god dess es

are depicted. Egyptian artists liked to show every detail as clearly

as possible. For them it was important that both the hands

playing the tambourine were clearly depicted. This meant that the

arm positions of the figures shown were sometimes rather

unnatural. This analysis is at least in part about the depictive style

of Ancient Egypt. Another example is that every Hathor has a

different origin: Hathor of Dendera, of Thebes, or of somewhere

else. But these are not always the same seven place names. There

is a lot of variation. These are probably places where there were

Hathor temples. The relationship of the Hathors to fate is also

very interesting. In one preliminary study I analysed how

Egyptians feel about this. My conclusion was that fate is easily

manipulated in Egyptian culture. If you make sacrifices and

exhibit good behaviour, you can give your fate a favourable

turn. Other gods will then be willing to save you.’

Ottens submits modestly to the interview; it’s difficult to explain

to a stranger what is so exciting about a ‘dead’ culture. Her own

‘Egyptoblogy’, dedicated to her excavation exploits and other

Egypt-related activities, bears witness to her passion. She

doesn’t know yet whether she wants to make it her career.

But she will certainly continue to read and write about it,

and maybe teach it too.

Sandra Ottens

‘In the Dakhla oasis in Egypt we discovered a new stone block with a relief of a goddess playing the tambourine.’


As every historian - Walaardt included - knows, it is unique to be

given the opportunity to analyse personal files. In many countries,

the use of this kind of source material is simply not permitted.

The difference between this research and Walaardt’s work within

refugee practice is that these files also show the outcome of the

procedure. ‘At the Council for Refugees I helped asylum seekers

prepare for their procedure, whereas at the IND I only saw the

first step in the procedure. I missed the overview: I never heard

what happened to these people in the end.’

The files contain letters to and from the courts, from neigh-

bours, friends and employers, children’s drawings made by little

classmates, country reports and legal documents. Walaardt made

a selection from the thickest files, because he was interested in the

arguments used in lengthy procedures. ‘Many people’s applica-

tions are at first rejected, but in the end it turns out that a high

proportion of them somehow manage to stay.’ Since the 1950s, the

Dutch Refugee Act has formed the basis for Dutch immigration

policy; it states that a refugee who has reasons to fear persecution

in his country of origin may not be sent back. But since the refu-

gee and the people responsible for making decisions in these cases

often fail to agree on this issue, other arguments end up being

Unravelling the arguments in Dutch refugee practice

Dutch immigration policy has for decades been the subject of vehement political debate. Dr Tycho Walaardt (1975)

has witnessed the practice from different perspectives: he has worked as a volunteer for the Dutch Council for

Refugees, as well as for the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) and the UNHCR in Ghana and Eritrea.

He recently completed his five-year research project with a dissertation for which he studied nearly five hundred

personal files. His conclusion: there is a gap between refugee policy and practice, which allows for the ‘quiet granting’

of asylum applications.

used. These arguments were the subject of Walaardt’s study.

‘I wanted to see whether there was a pattern: what were the

decisive arguments, and did these arguments change throughout

the time period covered by the study?’

Refugees with an identity‘You can distinguish periods during which particular arguments

play an important role,’ Walaardt continues. In buoyant econo-

mic times, for instance, the issue of the labour market is often

used. In the late 1960s, for deserters from the Portuguese army

their leftist image was a key factor. ‘These men were opposed to

colonial warfare. According to public opinion, they were heroes.’

With the Christian families fleeing Turkey, the argument of hu-

manitarianism entered the discussion. “These cases also involved

women and children; in the opinion of many, a vulnerable group.

Tycho Walaardt

‘What is the point of these lengthy procedures if asylum seekers end up staying anyway?’


Perspectives on the WorldReflections of 2011-2012

Faculty of Humanities

EditorsJesca Zweijtzer

Lise-Lotte Kerkhof

[Red.] voor tekst en taal, Edith Kroon

InterviewsSchonewille Schrijft, Marie-Louise Schonewille

TranslationAcademic Language Centre, Faculty of Humanities

Portrait photographyHielco Kuipers

DesignRatio Design, Haarlem

Graphic productionUFB / GrafiMedia

September 2012

Despite substantial lobbying by

the church, their cases went on

for years. In the end, they were

allowed to stay on humanitarian

grounds: they had had to wait for

a long time, the women had been

traumatised and the children

had become westernised.’ Due

to the limited availability of

sources, the study only goes up to

1994, but Walaardt sees the same

arguments coming back in the

current debate. ‘Think of Mauro

or Sahar: westernised children, with many sympathisers.’ There

has also been little change in the method of communication used

by the defenders. ‘In the press, asylum seekers become individual

cases with an identity. This has always been a popular strategy;

as early as the 1950s there were campaigns with children’s faces.

If someone is or could be your neighbour, it changes the way

you look at the situation. To proceed with deportation in such

cases, the IND or politicians have to be particularly sure of

their grounds.’

Quiet consentWalaardt also sees little change in the opposition’s arguments.

They focus, for instance, on housing: ‘refugees steal our cheap

houses’. Or on the labour market, where refugees are viewed as

‘social benefits abusers’ or on the other hand, as competition

for Dutch citizens. For some time now, the argument that ‘the

Netherlands is full’ has also played a role. ‘These kinds of argu-

ments are then disproved by the defenders with images of

empty meadows in Groningen and stories about the labour

potential of asylum seekers,’ Walaardt comments.

The mismatch between policy and practice leaves some scope for

resolving difficult cases. The impossibility of deporting asylum

seekerswhosestoriesofpersecutionare(accordingtothecivil

servants)implausiblemeanstheauthoritiesareforcedincertain

cases to grant ‘quiet consent’. Walaardt is critical: ‘What is the

point of these lengthy procedures, if the asylum seekers end up

staying anyway? Take, for example, the Somalis and Iraqis in

Ter Apel, who recently made it into the news. Experience teaches

us that the odds of them being sent back are zero. I would say:

why not look for a permanent solution sooner.’ This is where the

‘honey pot effect’ argument always crops up. ‘But its existence has

never been proved. Imagine that these Somalis and Iraqis were

allowed to stay; in no way does this mean that there will suddenly

be many more refugees from these countries, because it’s not at

all an obvious choice for people to just come here. The journey

itself is a serious selection criterion.’

With the Leiden Institute for History, that specialises in research

in the field of migration history, as his home base, Walaardt

already has ideas for new research. He wants to investigate how

the Dutch Embassy deals with visa applications. If he can get

the funds, he will once again delve into the gap between policy

and practice.

Interested in how civil servants manage to solve difficult cases?

Walaardt’s dissertation, Geruisloos Inwilligen. Argumentatie en

speelruimte in de Nederlandse asielprocedure, 1945-1994, was

published in April 2012 by Verloren.

The Faculty of Humanities

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Lipsius Building

Cleveringaplaats 12311 BD Leiden

Telephone: 071 527 27 27(LeidenUniversityswitchboard)

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