But these unsentimental recollections suggest no easy interpretation: were these
relations utterly bereft of tenderness, or was care and nurturing factored into the
sale of emotional labor, cherished and valued only by those Dutch who were
recipients of it? Perhaps this apparent lack of sentiment reflected a more general
Javanese aversion to emotional d i ~ p l a y ?O~ 'r were we deaf to sentiments
expressed in unfamiliar ways? As the rest of this paper explores, a focus on memory-work points to "the content of the form"42: to how and why former
servants talk without sentimentality about sentiment and recollect the colonial
past without telling scripted, storied na~sativ