Resource Spotlight | “The Man Who Would Not Be Polite: The Story of the Danish Colonial Doctor Agner Møller” by Jesper Kurt-Nielsen
The Man Who Would Not Be Polite
The Story of the Danish Colonial Doctor Agner Møller
by Jesper Kurt-Nielsen
Published by Gyldendal.
In the 1920s, the Danish doctor and passionate collector Agner Møller (1892-1976) ended up on the small Indonesian island of Nias off the coast of Sumatra. Agner Møller was far more interested in culture and ethnography than in taking care of his work as a doctor — and one of Møller's achievements for posterity is that he bought a large number of cultural objects and an entire chief's house, which he had towed to Copenhagen and the National Museum of Denmark.
The wayward Møller also married a young princess' daughter from Nias, whom he took home to Denmark despite strong opposition from the authorities and his wife.
Museum curator at the National Museum and author Jesper Kurt-Nielsen has written a biographical portrait of a large, angular personality, whose life contained many conflicts and dramas.
Click the image below to watch a visually illustrated lecture with Jesper Kurt-Nielsen.
Jesper Kurt-Nielsen
Jesper Kurt-Nielsen is the curator in charge of the African, Indian, and Middle Eastern collections in the National Museum of Denmark. He has an MA in history and museum ethnology from the University of Copenhagen and has been a volunteer officer in the Royal Danish Army and Naval Homeguard since 1979.
He is presently co-editor and co-writer of a three-volume book, in cooperation with the Royal Danish Geographical Society and the National Museum of Denmark, concerning 400 years of global Danish exploration history.
Jesper Kurt-Nielsen is furthermore associated with Denmark’s oldest publishing house Gyldendal, as a writer. His primary focus is on Danish expeditions and Danes that collected ethnographic objects in a colonial context. In 2019 he was admitted to the Yale University Writers Workshop, due to an essay concerning the cultural history of the gorilla.
In 2003 he traveled to Nias to photograph the southern villages where the Danish medical doctor and Dutch colonial officer Agner Møller lived and worked in 1924-27. His latest book is a biography concerning Agner Møller with a focus on Møllers work for the National Museum of Denmark on Nias, but also a broader view of Dutch colonialism, with the use of several primary sources, such as Danish medical doctors and planters in the Dutch East Indies.
Jesper Kurt-Nielsen is currently working on a book concerning the last years of the Danish colonial settlement on the Gold Coast in West Africa 1842-50, and he is researching the Knud Holmboe cross-continental expedition in Africa 1930.
Art of the Ancestors extends gratitude to Finette Lemaire of the legendary Gallery Lemaire in Amsterdam.
Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. Art of the Ancestors does not receive a commission should any of our readers purchase the aforementioned book. Art of the Ancestors is a strictly non-commercial educational platform and has no vested interest in the professional activities of the author listed above.