Bep Schrieke

Bertram Johannes Otto Schrieke (* 1890 in Zandvoort, † 1945 in London) was a Dutch Orientalist, anthropologist and politician.

Schrieke, son of an official who grew up in Enschede and Kampen and took a 1909 study of Oriental languages ​​at the University of Leiden, where Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje 's class. In 1915 he published his first scientific study, an investigation into the early Arab traditions about the ascension of Muhammad. In it, he argued that these traditions constitute resulting not only after the death of the Prophet legends, but went back to a real religious experience of Muhammad.

In 1916 received his doctorate with a dissertation on Schrieke the Javanese saint Sunan Bonang and the Islamization of Java. Immediately after graduation, he placed himself in the service of the colonial administration in the Dutch East Indies. From 1917, he worked as a research assistant in the Department of the affairs of the locals. From this position he carried out an extensive study on male and female circumcision rites in the various areas of the Dutch East Indies, whose results were published 1921/1922. The various circumcision instruments he had collected during his investigation, were shown at an exhibition at the Congress of the Far Eastern Association for Tropical Medicine in August 1921 in Batavia.

1923 Schrieke director of the Museum of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Faculty of Law in Batavia. During this time he mainly dealt with the Asian cultures as well as with Buddhism in Japan. In his 1926 essay published The Evolution of Culture in the Pacific, he sat down critically with the diffusionist theories of Fritz Graebner and William Halse Rivers Rivers. 1929 Schrieke was appointed within the Dutch East Indies government as Minister of Education and Religious Affairs. In this role, he was confronted primarily with the damage caused by the world economic crisis financial constraints.

1933 received from the Julius Rosenwald Fund Schrieke the invitation to stay in the United States in order to conduct a study of the life and the education of blacks, especially in the southern states. Result of this visit was his 1936 study published Alien Americans who generally dealt not only with blacks, but with migration and race relations in the United States.

After his return to the Netherlands in 1935 Schrieke was appointed associate professor of colonial anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In 1937 he represented the Netherlands at the Nine - Power Conference in Brussels. After overseeing the ethnological department of the Colonial Institute he had been transferred in 1938, he was appointed in the summer of 1939, as Minister of Education, Arts and Sciences in the cabinet of Hendrikus Colijn. During the German occupation, he was interned several times.

Schrieke lived the last years of his life in Wassenaar north of The Hague. He was with Pauline Schrieke, born Loeff, married. In 1945 he died childless in London, where he had last acts as a Dutch delegate at the first conference of the United Nations after the Allied victory. A study of the institution of kingship in pre-Islamic Java from an anthropological perspective, the Schrieke could not complete, in English translation appeared in 1957 as the second volume of his posthumously published writings.

Works

• " The heavenly journey of Muhammad " in Islam 6 (1916 ), pp. 1-30.
• Het Boek van Bonang, PhD. dissertation, Leiden. Here available online: http://archive.org/stream/MN42089ucmf_1 # page/n3/mode/2up
• " All sorts over de besnijdenis in the Indian Archipelago ," Tijdschrift voor in Indian Taal -, Land-en Folklore 60 ( 1921), 373-578; 61 (1922 ), 1-94.
• "The Evolution of Culture in the Pacific in Relation to the Theories of the ' cultural - historical ' and the ' Manchester ' Schools of Social Anthropology ," in Proceedings of the Third Pan - Pacific Science Congress, Tokyo, 1926. Vol. II, p from 2423 to 2441.
• Alien Americans. A Study of Race Relations. New York 1936.
• Indonesian sociological studies; Selected writings of B [ ertram John Otto ] Schrieke. 2 vols The Hague 1955-57.