1. I took the term ‘cultural aphasia’, an adaptation of Ann Laura Stoler’s ‘colonial aphasia’, from Paulus Bijl. Cf. his ‘Nederlands als Geesteswetenschap’, Nieuwsbrief voor afgestudeerden van de opleiding Nederlands van de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam nr. 36, September 2011, 23-27, 26. His unpublished doctoral dissertation, Emerging Memory. Photographs of Colonial Atrocities in Dutch Cultural Remembrance (2011), was at the time of writing this article not yet available to me. I integrate in this article parts of a paper presented at the ‘Power of the Mask’ conference of SIEF’s Ritual Year Working Group in Kaunas in 2009, which is yet to be published. The present article builds and expands on that paper, of which a slightly abridged Dutch version can be found in Helsloot (2009). Comments made by an anonymous reviewer were used to the benefit of the article.