Abstracts Plenary Session on Mission Archaeology, Queen’s Theatre Supported by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monday 15 th September, 4pm Mission Archaeology in the Pacific: from Matavai Bay to the Bay of Islands Angela Middleton, University of Otago Mission outreach into the Pacific began with London Missionary Society arrivals at Matavai Bay, Tahiti, in 1797. This initiated an evangelical network extending across the islands of the Pacific Ocean to Port Jackson (Sydney), and Bay of Islands, northern New Zealand. This expanding network of mission sites and personnel will be explored, along with an examination of the current state of knowledge of mission archaeology in the Pacific. This year is the bicentenary of New Zealand’s first mission station and first permanent European settlement, established at Hohi in the Bay of Islands in December 1814. Particular reference will be made to archaeological investigations at Hohi and its successor at nearby Te Puna. These were examples of the ‘household’ mission, modelled on the Christian family, the male missionary as household head and the wife teaching domestic arts to indigenous Maori. Consideration will be given to how the New Zealand examples compare with other Pacific localities, and the shared and opposing characteristics of mission engagement across the region. Not Built in a Day: the evolving landscape of the Botshabelo Mission Station, South Africa Natalie Swanepoel, University of South Africa On the nineteenthcentury South African landscape, a “mission” may have been comprised of anything from a single building on the outskirts of a local village, to a full blown mission complex containing church and educational facilities, houses belonging both to missionaries and their converts, and industrial operations such as a forge, wagonmaker’s and/or mill. While we experience the latter category as a cohesive arrangement of buildings and structures reflecting the religious, economic and political worldviews of the missionaries, it is important to note that even the most developed mission complex coalesced over time as the needs of those who lived there altered, the community grew, and the socio political and economic context changed. Drawing on archaeological, documentary and oral sources, I explore this idea through a discussion of the Berlin Missionary Society station of Botshabelo in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Established as a “place of refuge” in 1865, it grew over time to become an important religious, economic, and educational centre. This growth is variously reflected in the evolution of the built environment and the organisation of settlement on the Botshabelo landscape as a whole.
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Abstracts Plenary Session on Mission Archaeology, Queen’s Theatre Supported by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monday 15th September, 4pm
Mission Archaeology in the Pacific: from Matavai Bay to the Bay of Islands Angela Middleton, University of Otago Mission outreach into the Pacific began with London Missionary Society arrivals at Matavai Bay, Tahiti, in 1797. This initiated an evangelical network extending across the islands of the Pacific Ocean to Port Jackson (Sydney), and Bay of Islands, northern New Zealand. This expanding network of mission sites and personnel will be explored, along with an examination of the current state of knowledge of mission archaeology in the Pacific. This year is the bicentenary of New Zealand’s first mission station and first permanent European settlement, established at Hohi in the Bay of Islands in December 1814. Particular reference will be made to archaeological investigations at Hohi and its successor at nearby Te Puna. These were examples of the ‘household’ mission, modelled on the Christian family, the male missionary as household head and the wife teaching domestic arts to indigenous Maori. Consideration will be given to how the New Zealand examples compare with other Pacific localities, and the shared and opposing characteristics of mission engagement across the region. Not Built in a Day: the evolving landscape of the Botshabelo Mission Station, South Africa Natalie Swanepoel, University of South Africa On the nineteenth-‐century South African landscape, a “mission” may have been comprised of anything from a single building on the outskirts of a local village, to a full blown mission complex containing church and educational facilities, houses belonging both to missionaries and their converts, and industrial operations such as a forge, wagon-‐maker’s and/or mill. While we experience the latter category as a cohesive arrangement of buildings and structures reflecting the religious, economic and political worldviews of the missionaries, it is important to note that even the most developed mission complex coalesced over time as the needs of those who lived there altered, the community grew, and the socio-‐political and economic context changed. Drawing on archaeological, documentary and oral sources, I explore this idea through a discussion of the Berlin Missionary Society station of Botshabelo in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Established as a “place of refuge” in 1865, it grew over time to become an important religious, economic, and educational centre. This growth is variously reflected in the evolution of the built environment and the organisation of settlement on the Botshabelo landscape as a whole.
'From Wales to Madagascar: Recognition and Misrecognition in the Missionary Encounter' Zoe Crossland, Columbia University In 1820 David Jones arrived in the highlands of Madagascar. Sent by the London Missionary Society he quickly established a missionary school house and attracted scholars from among the elite of the highland kingdom where he was based. The mission grew rapidly over the next few years, its accomplishments masking the profound misunderstandings that underwrote its expansion. In this presentation I turn to landscape and architecture to explore the processes of recognition and misrecognition in the establishment of the mission and their consequences for its successes and failures. A Spatial Archaeology of 19th Century Missionary Settlement in the Khwebe Hills, Northwest Botswana Ceri Ashley, University of Pretoria In 1892, following decades of lobbying and failed attempts, the London Missionary Society (LMS) established a mission station amongst the BaTawana in Ngamiland. Situated in the Khwebe Hills, some 50km south of the main village, and several hundred kilometres from the nearest LMS mission station, this was a mission on the margin. Over the following five years, Alfred Wookey (missionary), John Reid (carpenter) and two ‘native teachers’ – Shomolekae and Mogodi -‐ battled to make the Lake Ngami mission a success. Ultimately destroyed by disease, hunger and isolation, Wookey left the mission in 1896 never to return. This paper will present results of archaeological excavation at the mission buildings, combined with archival research, in an examination of how the LMS community sought to recreate European notions of order, structure and rationalism in their settlement. It has long been recognised that missionary conversion was as much about changing quotidian life and practice as it was about moral and spiritual transformation. Archaeology therefore, holds much potential to explore and elucidate the banal, hidden or forgotten aspects of such daily practice. This paper will focus in particular on how the Khwebe Hills missionaries utilised and manipulated space to reinforce their worldview. Excavating 19th century mission compounds: New findings from southern Vanuatu Matthew Spriggs, James Flexner, Stuart Bedford & Richard Shing, The Australian National University and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre From the mid-‐19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, dozens of missionaries from the Presbyterian Church settled in the southern islands of the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu). The southernmost island of Aneityum saw the first island-‐wide conversion to Christianity in Melanesia over the course of the 1850s through the efforts of the tireless Nova Scotian missionary John Geddie, his Scottish counterpart John Inglis, and their Polynesian assistants. The lime mortar walls of Geddie’s original house and church are still partially standing on the island, making them some of the oldest European standing architecture in the region. On the nearby islands of Tanna and Erromango,
mission progress was slower and more sporadic. From the 1850s through the 1870s, mission stations were established, and then abandoned as European missionaries as well as Polynesian teachers were chased off of the islands, or on Erromango, killed outright. In these early mission encounters, the mission house was a crucial locus of interaction, providing a variety of functions, from shelter for the mission family, to schoolhouse, to showcase of civilization. Archaeological survey and excavation of mission compounds on Aneityum, Erromango, and Tanna have produced innovative perspectives about the nature of these early interactions between missionaries and Melanesians.
Landscapes & Building, Queens Theatre Tuesday 16th September, 9am Brimstone & Burnt Fingers: The Gradual Consecration & Syncretic Use Of Early Christian Buildings in 19th Century Tonga Andy Mills, University of East Anglia Outside of contemporary missionary journals themselves, little has been written about the cosmological status of early Christian buildings in Tonga. Their cultural relationship with (on one hand) the pre-‐existing fale ‘otua temples of the pagan religion, and (on the other) the conventionalised fale lotu churches of established Methodism, remains unclear. Here I will discuss a small number of historical events between 1800 and 1840, which suggest the gradual permeation of the notion of Christian sacred space into the minds of both Christian and pagan Tongans, as well as a drawn-‐out struggle for orthodox thought about the use of that space. What emerges is a more blurred and syncretic image of early Tongan Christianity than the accounts of ecstatic mass conversions would lead us to believe. Foraging for missionaries: ǀXam hunter-‐gatherer strategies for exploiting the material resources of the ‘Bushman Mission’ (Northern Cape, South Africa) Mark McGranaghan, University of Witwatersrand In the late eighteenth century, the attentions of the London Missionary Society (LMS) were directed towards the northern frontiers of the Cape Colony by the efforts of several ǀXam ‘Bushman chiefs’ requesting religious instruction. The establishment of their ‘Bushman mission’ relied upon prior material routes set up by traders, hunting parties, and transhumant pastoralists: missionaries represented one component in the suite of colonial populations that had recently expanded into ǀXam territories. These groups brought with them new forms of material culture, and they were all particularly concerned with modifying the ways in which ǀXam groups interacted with livestock. Drawing upon the Bleek-‐Lloyd archive (recording verbatim testimony of ǀXam hunter-‐gatherers), archaeological material from the Zak River LMS mission station, and the ethnographic collections of W. J. Burchell, this paper outlines ǀXam engagements with mission stations as part of their 4eneralized ‘foraging’ strategies. It examines the ways in which opportunities for interactions with a new range of populations shaped ǀXam subsistence and economic practices in the nineteenth century, and argues that their broader incorporations of colonial material culture (and integration within colonial economic networks) were fundamental to their engagement with missionary endeavours. Housing Christianity and Marketing Modernity: Reflections on the Archaeology of 19th Century LMS Mission Stations in Botswana. Paul Lane, Uppsala University This paper presents the results of the study of the spatial and material organization of a sample of 19th century LMS mission stations and adjacent
Tswana settlements in Botswana. An initial aim is to summarise what is known about the composition of these sites, their landscape locations and constituent elements. A broader goal is to relate the physical evidence concerning the spatial layout of these places and their associated artefactual assemblages to the wider religious, social, political and economic orientations of their inhabitants. Previous studies of these sites have tended to stress the agency of the Tswana political elites as a determining factor in collective resistance to missionary driven ‘colonisation of consciousness’ among the wider populace. In contrast, using a combination of archaeological, historical and ethnographic data this paper aims to explore the manner in which other sections of the populace engaged with the dual externalities of Christian evangelism and the processes of commodification. Among The Headless Hordes: Struggles For ‘Tribes’ And Labour In The Wittebergen Native Reserve (South Africa), 1850-‐1879 Rachel King, University of Oxford /University of the Witwatersrand In 1850 the Cape Colony and the Wesleyan Missionary Society jointly established the Wittebergen Native Reserve with two aims: 1) to control the nomadism of the ‘acephalous’ peoples dispersed by early nineteenth-‐century frontier conflicts through Christianity and peasant labour; and 2) to curb the power of Moshoeshoe I’s Sotho nation by acting as a buffer between his people and potential ally nations to the south and west. While these missions broadly resonate with ‘colonisation of consciousness’ projects, the significance of Wittebergen lies in its as-‐yet-‐unexplored position as a node in a landscape deliberately crafted by peripatetic raiding polities on the frontier. This paper presents the first in-‐depth study of how these creolised, cattle-‐raiding polities established mobile chieftaincies to exploit the eastern Cape-‐Basutoland frontier, and thus crafted novel relationships between chiefly authority and aspects of the landscape. Where this authority inhered in specific physical loci, these conflicted with Wittebergen’s administration of the peasant landscape, resulting in clashes between traditional and colonial land tenure and use. Employing new archaeological and archival evidence, this paper explores how Wittebergen’s fields, mountains, and homesteads became the battleground for control over these heterodox polities and the socioeconomic propositions they entailed. Session 2 -‐ Tuesday 16th September, 11am ‘Beautiful...practical and healthy for everybody’: The Architecture, Layout, and Construction of Mission Leprosy Settlements in Colonial Uganda Kathleen Vongsathorn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science In colonial Uganda, missionary leprosy settlements were one of the most popular destinations for visitors seeking evidence of the potential successes of colonialism and the civilising mission. Designed as ‘model villages’, these settlements offered missionaries a unique opportunity to transform minds through the transformation of physical space. Missionaries carefully considered where to locate the settlements, how to lay them out, and how to build them, and
the end result – as well as the act of building and then maintaining the settlements – was meant to bring Ugandans closer to modernity and civilization. The ways in which buildings were clustered was meant to encourage moral and appropriately sociable lifestyles. Straight paths lined by flowerbeds or trees were meant to encourage a sense of order and appreciation for beauty. Brick-‐laying was one option for patients prescribed occupational therapy. The materials with which patient homes were constructed could be a reflection of the supposed inner state of its occupants. Comparing the leprosy settlements of the Anglican Church Missionary Society and the Irish Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa, this paper will explore the visible, material manifestations of mission agendas, and the hybridity that resulted from their interaction with the vision of Ugandan patients. Building ‘something modern’ in the Spiritual Empire: Irish mission architecture in Nigeria, 1947-‐1965 Lisa Godson, National College of Art and Design, Dublin This paper presents research initially undertaken for the feature documentary Build Something Modern (Ireland, 2011). This addressed the previously undocumented phenomenon of Irish architects who produced work for Catholic missionary orders in Africa in the mid-‐twentieth century. The paper draws on evidence gathered through oral history and from personal slide collections, architectural drawings and correspondence. A key feature of this architectural corpus was that it was resolutely modernist, the architects charged by the missionary orders to ‘just build something modern’. The ‘modern’ approach promoted by Irish missionary orders was innovative, with architects often interpreting aspects of the ‘tropical modern’ movement, best known through the buildings and publications of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. The work in Africa contrasts with much ecclesiastical architecture built in Ireland during this time, where the most powerful members of the Hierarchy championed a traditionalist idiom, to the extent of interfering with architecture competitions for new churches. The paper seeks to elucidate parallels between the supposedly totalising narratives of modernism, colonialism and missionary activity as materialised in architectural design, and discourses around building and modernity in Irish missionary periodicals of the period. It also focuses on the working methods of these architects to explore ideas of exchange and circulation in relation to construction techniques and different modes of representation including drawing, photography and film. Exploring the Missionary Heritage Landscape? Adventures in London and southern Africa Chris Wingfield, University of Cambridge Building on research on the London Missionary Society museum and exhibitions in Britain, this paper will ask where missionary landscapes are to be located? In doing so it will attempt to move away from the consideration of mission stations
as “other places” in remote locations, marked by their differences to surrounding areas. Instead, it will be suggest that mission stations should be understood as highly connected locations that constituted nodes in networks of global movement, traffic and travel. The movement of humans and things enabled mission stations to be connected with each other, with coordinating central offices, but also with supporting congregations in other parts of the world. Tracking the movement of artefacts of different types enables the shifting configurations of these networks to become more visible.
Words & Bodies, Harrods Room Tuesday 16th September, 9am Building Schools and Political Parties: The Hooper dynasty in Kahuhia, Kikuyu/Central Province, Kenya Ben Knighton, Oxford Centre for Mission Studies The mere physical presence of missionaries brought change in Africa, and religion as a vehicle and dynamo of change made it all the more potent. As John Woodberry has shown quantitatively, the Protestant way of going about their work, campaigning against customs, inculcating new norms, and founding institutions was to have a long legacy for the political shape of the states that colonialism founded. Materially the shifts from sacred tree or grave to warm-‐blooded herd to angular school-‐desk appeared to be shockingly colonizing. Indeed the splash it made in Gky culture produced waves that were not stopped. Using oral memories of CMS the schools that they built at a mission station, which shortly became a leading educational centre in Kenya, a highly unusual story can be told. Far from colonizing the consciousness and minds of sons of the peasantry, they deliberately conscientized them, to the extent that they could imagine a new nation. Technologies of work and prayer: education for the modern world at New Norcia, Western Australia Katharine Massam, University of Divinity, Australia When the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado established the Benedictine mission of New Norcia in the British colony of Western Australia in 1846, he was adamant that training for meaningful work, not education for its own sake, would secure the future for the Aboriginal Yuat people. Committed to the sixth-‐century Rule of Benedict, Salvado and his monks shared an understanding of manual work that was framed by ideals of holiness as much as by the practical demands of missionary life; their Rule held that the pots and pans and other tools of trade were as sacred as any vessels of the liturgy. Salvado continued to privilege work over education as the key lever for social change at New Norcia, even as he established schools in the town; first for Aboriginal boys in the 1850s, and later, in 1861, St Joseph’s, a ‘native college’ for Aboriginal girls and unmarried women. This paper considers the documentary records and material culture of St Joseph’s school, alongside evidence from the telegraph office that opened at New Norcia in 1873. It examines assumptions about work and its relationship to holy living for women and for men in the mission town. In particular, it highlights the work of two Aboriginal telegraph operators, Helen Pangerian Cuper and Sarah Ninak, and sets their nineteenth-‐century engagement with Western technology alongside the celebration of needlework that dominated the education offered to Aboriginal girls in the mission school in the twentieth-‐century. While the Morse key and the embroidery needles were equally means of holiness in a lifestyle governed by monastic principles of work, their significance was a world apart outside the mission town.
Missionary nuns and the material culture of convent schooling, 1830-‐1940 Deirdre Raftery, University College Dublin The nineteenth century witnessed a 'devotional revolution' in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, resulting in a huge growth in missionary orders of women religious (nuns). By the early 20th century, there was one nun per 400 people in Ireland; a significant number of these women joined missionary orders and went -‐ often in large groups -‐ to South East Asia, India, Japan, the Americas, and Australia. This research paper draws on new and original work, demonstrating ways in which these missionaries developed the material and academic cultures of the convent schools which they founded and staffed. The paper starts by outlining the influence of novitiate life on missionary nuns; throughout their preparation for religious life in Irish convents, these young women were given insight into missionary work via magic lantern-‐slide shows, pamphlets, and specially-‐produced post cards that came from the countries to which they would be missioned. Once the young Sisters were ready to leave, their 'voyage out' was planned in some detail, and their luggage often included objects that would be used in mission schools (such as sheet music and Irish harps). The practicalities of planning long sea-‐voyages required nuns to -‐ at least temporarily -‐ become concerned with material goods and physical comfort, and the paper comments on the way in which the religious vow of Poverty was challenged on missionary voyages. Early pioneers wrote back to Irish convents, in the 1840s and 1850s, giving advice to the next groups of travellers on how best to equip themselves for the journey, and many nuns were adept at taking photographs and writing journal entries about things that impressed them enroute. The paper throws new light on how these women negotiated change and perceived the world into which they travelled. On arrival in the countries to which Irish nuns were missioned, Sisters often found that there was no convent dwelling ready for them. The paper concludes by discussing how nuns accumulated goods (cars, silverware, machinery, cameras, musical instruments); designed, furnished and equipped convent schools; and often amassed considerable material wealth, during their missionary projects. 'Ora Et Labora': Education and The Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society in the 19th and 20th Century Kerala Divya Kannan, Jawaharlal Nehru University The persistence of high literacy rates in the state of Kerala, south-‐western India, has been attributed, among other factors, to the educational work of the European Protestant missionaries. However, studies on Kerala history have tended to view mission schooling in the simplistic 'impact/response' framework and failed to account for the complex nature of interactions that ensued on the field. The Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society ( more popularly known as the Basel Mission) aimed at making their converts 'model' Christians, embodying the ideals of their
Pietism influenced faith. Towards this purpose, they established schools and later, factories.By examining the textbooks and tracts used by the Basel Mission, this paper shall highlight the internal contradictions, tensions and ambiguities that marked this missionary enterprise. In attempting to institute ' disciplinary' regimes to forge the new identities of a 'Christian' self, 'true', the Mission had to engage with racial, societal and gender divisions. This paper shall highlight the role of the Basel Mission in shaping a discourse on poverty and work in the region through the provision of education.
Tools & Technology, Harrods Room Tuesday 16th September, 11am The Christian desa: communal agricultural enterprises under missionary leadership Maryse Kruithof, Erasmus University Rotterdam Dutch missionaries active in nineteenth century Java realized that the unsuccessfulness of their work could primarily be explained by the overtly negative reactions conversion to Christianity evoked in society. Converts risked being excluded from social and economic life in Muslim regions. Traditionally agricultural land was communally owned and a conversion could lead to losing one’s part of the communal grounds and thus one’s source of livelihood. Some missionaries therefore made it priority to create a save, social and prosperous environment for Christians through the founding of a Christian desa (village) with communal land. Such a shared agricultural enterprise would strengthen the Christian community and increase their welfare and as a result attract new members. In addition, the Christian desa would be an asylum for Christians were they would not be subjective to Muslim leaders and by harassed by Muslim fanatics. The missionary acted as both the spiritual as the worldly leader in the Christian desa. These desas formed small Christian enclaves within the Muslim society. Together they formed a network through which goods, ideas and people moved. Consequently Dutch missionaries transformed the social, religious and economic landscape of nineteenth century Java with the founding of Christian desas. Practical Tools to Unhinge the Gates of Japan: Society of Jesus’ Shipments to Japan during the Early 17th Century Daniele Frison, CHAM/UAç – Lisbon Through the information left behind by the missionaries of the Society of Jesus, we are going to see what kind of daily objects the Jesuits required and requested from Europe and the Estado da Índia for their apostolic endeavour in Japan. Our attention will focus in particular on the documentation produced for practical reasons by the procurators and other key figures of the Society of Jesus in Macao and Nagasaki in the first years of the 17th century. We are going to see what the missionaries of the Society were supposed to receive when they travelled from Macao to Japan, what were the daily things those missionaries needed in Japan, as well as the typology of liturgical aids implemented in the evangelization of the Japanese country. Clearly, along with a detailed knowledge of those practical needs, we are going to see also the amount of money the Society invested in such things and, therefore, the importance which those instruments had for the success of the mission. Old and New in the technology communicated overseas by the Württemberg missionaries of the Basel Mission to 1914. Paul Jenkins and Ulrike Sill, University of Ghana / Basel Mission, University of Basel
The majority of the missionaries sent out by the Basel Mission in the 19th century were from Württemberg. Industrialisation came to this region (e.g. cars/lorries/bicycles, engineering, electricity, chemicals) only in the very late 19th century. So a generation ago Paul Jenkins analysed these missionaries’ background as a pre-‐industrial rural milieu. Visual sources confirmed this: a home culture using bullocks as draught animals and traditional hand-‐tools led straight over into vernacular stone and wood-‐frame mission houses with shingled roofs in Ghana – the model for cocoa-‐farmers’ houses c.1900. In 2005-‐6 the authors of this paper, however, were involved in sometimes heated discussions, as doctoral student and co-‐supervisor, as to whether this traditional home culture was really dominant in the history of the Basel Mission before 1914. So this paper will also present the traces of modernisation Ulrike Sill – not least since she was analysing women in the Basel Mission -‐ identified as early as the mid-‐19th century, leading into a rapidly shifting balance between tradition and modernity as the 20th century began. We now suggest that a bi-‐valent view of the missionaries’ potentalities opens the way for a more comprehensive approach to the material heritage of the Basel Mission and its Trading Company. It has room for the motor vehicles they were selling and servicing in Ghana from c.1910. It also points up the change from workshop to factory production in Basel Mission Industries in S. India c.1900 (weaving, tile-‐making). We now see these missionaries as living on a cusp between tradition and the modern, experiencing transformations abroad at the same time as their siblings did back home. They were capable of calling up their traditional technology overseas, but were also increasingly introducing practicable modern technologies as these became available and appropriate. Localising the Global: Industrial Schools in the Missionary Discussions (British India, 1880s-‐1940) Arun Kumar, German Historical Institute / University of Gottingen This paper makes a historical inquiry into the functioning of industrial schools established by missionaries for the poor natives, who were deemed unfit for the proper book-‐learning, in colonial India. Histories of these industrial schools were attached within the networks of a distinctive intra-‐continental discourse on education for the poor and their turning into productive bodies in the nineteenth century. It will discuss how certain global ideas about industrial schools were experimented and employed in colonial India by missionaries which also simultaneously marked their missions departure from a predominant ecclesiastical concern to industrial and material production. The paper will also highlight how pedagogic practices, machineries and tools, and curriculum or notions and practices of modernity were imported from the west and reworked in colonial setting by missionaries for native bodies. It studies about the ideas which made transition to colony and which failed to do. Rather than sticking to the idea of colonial difference, raising such questions allow us to which one encounters while studying the experiences of missionary industrial school in Asia, Africa, and in the West. The paper will specifically discuss the pedagogic
efforts of the Society for the Propagation of Gospels, the American Arcot Mission, and the United Free Church of Scotland Mission. My findings are based on annual missionary reports of industrial schools, everyday school records, notes from Diaries, and newspapers.
Plenary Session – Missionaries and Media Tuesday 16th September, 1:30 pm Spiritual Invention of a Nation: Missionaries and Media on Indian Land Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto I am particularly eager to participate in this conference, as its concerns are directly connected with my current book project, “The Spiritual Invention of a Nation: Missionaries and Media on Indian Land.” The book examines how stories, and their mediation, were at the heart of the colonizing processes that created Canada as a political nation grounded on spiritual claims. Focused on missionary engagement with Indigenous peoples in northern Ontario and northwestern British Columbia at the turn of the twentieth century, the project focuses on how exchange of stories in missionary-‐Indigenous interactions was shaped by what we in the digital age might now consider to be the introduction of relatively “slow media”: glass plate photography, the printing press, hand-‐drawn maps, and the radio. Each chapter of the book focuses on how the materiality of a particular media technology—photography, the printing press, maps, and radio—shaped the ethics of storytelling in missionary-‐Indigenous relations, and further shaped spiritual and political imaginations that fuelled both the Canadian nation and First Nations. My goal at the conference would be to present a short overview of the project, with a focus on the analytic possibilities opened up by consideration of the materiality of particular forms of media in missionary-‐indigenous interactions. Photographing Poonindie Mission, South Australia Jane Lydon, The University of Western Australia The like feelings [of]...Etonians and Harrovians at the cricket matches at Lord’s proving incontestably that the Anglican aristocracy of England and the ‘noble savage’ who ran wild in the Australian woods are linked together in one brotherhood of blood.
Augustus Short, 1872. A visit to Poonindie: and some accounts of that mission to the Aborigines of South Australia. Adelaide: William Kyffin Thomas.
Poonindie mission, the Anglican church’s ‘Christian village’ established in 1850 on the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, represented an idealistic experiment. Its first few years were seemingly crowned with success when eleven young Indigenous residents were baptised by Bishop Short and Archdeacon Hale in February 1853. For their supporters, the gentlemanly demeanour of the converts revealed their essential humanity and capacity, demonstrated by several series of photographic portraits commissioned during this period – newly rediscovered in Australian and British collections in recent years. This relatively large and early archive of related, contemporary, material held in the Hale Papers in the Library of the University of Bristol, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, at Mill Cottage in Port Lincoln, at Ayers House (National Trust of South Australia) and in South Australian cultural institutions, re-‐writes the history of photographing Indigenous Australians. These photographs reveal that the
Anglican church actively commissioned photographic portraits of its Indigenous congregation as part of a program of documenting its work. At Poonindie ‘the nucleus of the native Church’ was defined in distinctively classed terms, and a narrative of redemption was expressed through an exceptionally high quality series of images. During the late 19th century Poonindie’s increasingly disputed existence was defended by missionaries who continued to assert its worth through visual evidence. These remarkable photographic portraits remain a testament to a generation of Indigenous people struggling to survive the first decades of colonisation and dispossession dispossession, and are now valued by descendants as family portraits.
Personal Memories, Institutional Narratives And Public Propaganda: The Missionary Albums Of Fr. Con Macnamara C.S.Sp. Fiona Loughnane, NUI Maynooth Despite growing academic interest in the photographic cultures of mission (Jenkins, Thompson, Gullestad); many aspects of the field remain unexplored and many rich archives of material unexamined. This paper represents part of a critical study of photographic albums, depicting Irish Catholic foreign missions, accessed through extensive research in the archives of Irish religious institutes. This paper will discuss five albums in the Irish Spiritan archive, listed by the archive as the personal property of Fr. Con MacNamara, but which seem to have been compiled by Fr. Paddy O'Connor, a Holy Ghost (Spiritan) missionary in East Africa from 1920 to 1927. The albums demonstrate a conflation of personal and institutional narratives. Several images depict African subjects as exemplars of need, making a direct appeal to Irish viewers. The effect of these photographs is to dissolve geographic and cultural distance, bringing Ireland and East Africa into an imaginative proximity. However, other images present individuals rather than symbols and pay attention to the specificity of place, reminding the viewer that these albums are also a material trace of Fr. O'Connor's direct experience of mission. This paper will unpick the multiple functions of the albums, to consider the interactions of personal memory and public propaganda in mission photography. It will make use of Ariella Azoulay's conception of the 'event of photography' to explore how these oscillations between the private and institutional, impact on the relations between the albums' compiler, subjects and viewers. The Congo Collar and the Weight of Representation Amelia King, University of Oxford This paper discusses 'The Congo Collar', a brass collar in the Pitt Rivers Museum (2000.49.1) and its photographic representations in the work of Baptist missionary John Whitehead, in Bolobo and Lukolela during the first decade of the twentieth century. Treating the photo montages as material heritage, I interrogate the particular narrative of emancipation woven between the collar and the photographic images. I ask what role the materiality of the collar played in representing the plight of the Congolese people in Britain as part of the Congo reform movement. The reconstruction of a 'social life' of the collar was intrinsic to the narrative it
was professed to convey one of humanitarian crisis and the liberation of its wearer through the work of the Baptist Missionary Society. I attempt to construct an alternative social history of the collar from that deconstructing the documentary material associated with the collar, I also ask how it might be displayed to represent the multiple narratives which have been brought to bear on it.
Media and Messages, Queens Theatre Tuesday 16th September, 3:30pm Missionary Printings: Japanese Mission in Catholic Modern Europe politics (17th century) Ana Fernandes Pinto, CHAM – Universidade Nova de Lisboa From 1545-‐1640, during the so-‐called «Christian Century», Catholic missionaries evangelized in Japan. The Japanese political attitude towards Christianity changed over that time, determined by the military unification and political centralization processes. Generally speaking, Oda Nobunaga protected the missionaries, Toyotomi Hideyoshi decreed their expulsion, and Tokugawa Ieyasu was committed to put an end to Christian faith in Japan. In fact, under Tokugawa authority the idea of Christianity as a peril to national authority definitely emerged. Consequently Christians became to be harassed and a missionary discourse about martyrdom emerged. Since their settlement in Japan, missionaries reported their activity to their superiors in Europe on a regular basis. With the systematic persecution of Christians, missionaries reported amazing news of Christian endurance against Japanese harassment and persecution. Some of those writings were published. In fact, through printing press news of Christian’s persecution circulated in Europe, in the form of letters written from Japan, or compilation of reports, histories and even pamphlets composed in Europe. This paper will reveal the network underlying those published writings. Furthermore, it will provide insight into the missionaries’ interests in printing this narrative about martyrdom in the context of the religious politics of Catholic Modern Europe. The importance of printing for two protestant missionary cousins: William Colenso, missionary printer to New Zealand, and John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Gwilym Colenso This paper aims to compare the experiences of William Colenso (1811-‐1899) and John William Colenso (1814-‐1883) who, working in very different mission fields, both saw the printing press as central to their missionary work. In New Zealand, the fervently evangelical William Colenso saw the printing press as a tool for spreading the gospel among the heathen but both he and the press were seen by the colonial authorities as a resource to be commandeered in the cause of reaching a political settlement with the Maori in the form of the Treaty of Waitangi, which was printed by William Colenso, later recognised as a pioneer of printing in New Zealand. Disillusioned with colonial rule in Natal, Bishop Colenso made his mission station a centre of opposition to the government’s ‘native policy’. His printing press became devoted to the production of information challenging claims made by Natal officials to justify their subjugation of the Zulu people.
Initially seen as an aid to religious conversion, the printing press could also become a weapon to be used either for or against colonial governments. Its possession was a source either of co-‐operation or of conflict in the often ambiguous relationship between missionaries and secular authorities. The Welsh Presbyterian Mission, the Printed Word and the Modernisation of the Khasi Society in North East India Dr.B.L.Nongbri, John Roberts Theological Seminary / Dr. Homiwell Lyngdoh Centre for Indigenous Studies [HoLCIS], Shillong, INDIA. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the contribution of the Welsh missionaries to the emergence and growth of Khasi literature in its written form and its role in the modernisation and transformation of the Khasi society and their cultural identity. The Welsh Presbyterian Church (Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church) established its first foreign mission field in Khasi Jaintia Hills District of the present state of Meghalaya (North East India) in 1841. From there, it spread to different parts of the region. Through its various activities both social and religious, it played an important role as an agent in the process of social change in the region. The Khasis, like many other tribes in north east India did not possess a written script and literature until it was introduced by the missionaries. Apart from evangelisation and engagement in health care and educational enterprise the Welsh missionaries played a pioneering role in reducing the Khasi language into a written form and also in setting the strong foundation of Khasi literature. Rev. Thomas Jones (1810-‐1849) who introduced the alphabets using the Roman script is known as the “Father of Khasi Alphabets”. He is revered till today as a ‘national’ hero by the people, irrespective of their religious persuasion. Rev. Dr. John Roberts (1842-‐1908) is acknowledged as the “Father of Khasi Literature” in recognition for his pioneering work on various aspects of Khasi literature. Apart from them, many other missionaries have written many books in the Khasi language that range from grammar, poetry, dictionary to religious literature. This study concludes that the Welsh missionaries did play a major role in the modernisation of the Khasi Society and the transformation of their cultural identity. Their work especially in the field of Khasi language and literature has resulted in the preservation of the minority language from being supplanted by the language of the majority (Bengali). The native people perceived the printed word as a tool that enabled them to reconfigure their social position and cultural identity vis a vis their dominant neighbours who traditionally nicknamed them as junglee (forest dwellers) for their lack of a written script. This study, also noted that by the introduction of a standard dialect, it has promoted solidarity among the different sub-‐tribes of the Khasi society. Further, Khasi language, has undergone a transformation from being only a spoken language into becoming one of the medium of instruction. It is recognised today as one of the Major Indian Language (MIL) and studied up to the graduate and post graduate level in the colleges and university. Therefore, this aspect of the interface between the Welsh Presbyterian mission and the Khasi culture has been one of the main
factors that have contributed to the process of modernisation of the Khasi society. Session Two, Wednesday 17th September, 9am Missionaries and the printed word Dr. Stefan Halikowski Smith, Swansea University In a forthcoming book, I analyze two inedited accounts by the missionary adventurers Nicolà Cima O.E.S.A.and Guy Tachard S.J. in Southeast Asia at the watershed between seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whilst I have previously tried to develop the concept of a ‘floating clergy’, rootless and disoriented individuals full of delusional projects and unable to secure themselves a place in a sheltered institutional context, I want here to address questions of publics and publication strategies. Neither of the two texts presented in the book made it out of manuscript form. While Tachard had considerable experience of seeing relazioni of his earlier India missions in press, and both were indefatigable lobbyists at the highest levels of state power, for Cima, publishing in the Venetian Republic outside the backing of one’s Order and as an individual was an expensive proposition, as Nicolao Manucci found out, despite producing one of the most comprehensive and detailed ethnological accounts of eighteenth-‐century India. Thus in this paper I present some reflections on the costs of missionary publication and the requisite ecclesiastical or lay patronage in that age. Dr. Stefan Halikowski Smith, Department of History and Classics, Swansea University SA2 8PP. The Jesuit missions in America. Building the loyalty of indigenous people to the Society of Jesus through the arts. Guido L. Croxatto, Universidad de Buenos Aires The purpose of this paper is to describe in detail the ways of building the indigenous peoples’ loyalty to the Society of Jesus through images, rituals, and the arts. The aim is to analyse the Jesuit inheritance in the art of the indigenous people of Mexico (through theatre) and Bolivia (through music), analysing the recourse to theatre and music (in Mexico and Bolivia respectively) as didactic methods of evangelism. Theatre and music were the two fields that moulded communication in missions most completely. It attempts to analyse the music collections of the old reductions of Chiquitos. The purpose is to highlight, through the analysis of such collections, the significant role of music in the evangelism of the American peoples. It attempts to demonstrate how different objects and arts (different spaces, methods of exhibition) have moulded beliefs and (and beliefs as) forms of communication, making communication (on which missionaries have always bet, for instance, by means of their determined efforts to understand the native language to speak to them in their own language) a belief in itself, confirming, once again, a hugely important subject: the indivisible link between the path of the arts and the path of faith, where the arts and faith are essentially one thing: communication, ways to communicate.
Assembling an archive of Irish missionary films 1930-‐1997: a cinema of amateurs? Edel Robinson This paper represents a project that involves the gathering, documentation and preservation of films made and commissioned by Irish Catholic missionary institutes. This documentation is the basis for a critical study of films and filmmaking by Irish missionary societies. To date, thirteen missionary societies have participated, providing over one hundred films. This collection is now housed in the Irish Film Archive. The paper will focus on two feature-‐length documentaries that pioneered a new approach to independent distribution, and successfully bridged the traditional boundary between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ filmmaking. They are Visitation: the Story of the Medical Missionaries of Mary (1947), commissioned by the Medical Missionaries of Mary and Out of the Darkness (1949) commissioned by the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary. Visitation and Out of the Darkness began a flow of film-‐making by other missionary societies to promote vocations and boost fundraising on a national and international circuit. Their pioneering approach has fascinating parallels with contemporary independent film production. Rise of the Working Classes: An explanation of mission evolution from 1945-‐1960 Lane Sunwall, University of Wisconsin -‐ Madison This presentation will argue that many of the radical changes in British missionary work made between 1945 -‐ 1960 were the direct result of efforts to attract the interest and support of the British working-‐classes. In the late-‐1940s, some though not all missionary organizations realized that the middle-‐ and upper-‐ class financial support upon which they were previously dependent was rapidly disappearing in the face of high post-‐War taxation policies. In response to these financial challenges and in order to maintain missionary activities abroad, several of these missionary organizations created new marketing campaigns targeted at the increasingly prosperous British working-‐classes. The change in missionary marketing strategies helps us better explain the startling developments in missionary work during this period, especially the decreasing support of colonialism, the increasing emphasis on humanitarianism, and the increasingly ambivalent attitude towards proselytization. This presentation is based upon research of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), Movement of World Evangelization, and the Missionary Aviation Fellowship archives conducted towards the completion of my doctoral dissertation. Very briefly, my dissertation explores how missionary organizations adapted to the radical social, religious, and economic changes occurring in Britain from 1945 -‐ 1970.
Collecting & Collections, Harrods Room Tuesday 16th September, 3:30pm Christ, Idol and Magic: Missionary Collecting in Taiwan, 1850-‐1900 Hui Du, Minzu University of China, Beijing As an essential global economic transit and political arena, Taiwan (or Formosa) became the contact zone filling with entangled and interactive powers from the 19th to 20th century. With the expansion of colonial economy and extension of frontier of empire, the network connected this island with mainland China and other European or American countries was constructed by means of global colonial economy, political and religious power. Missionaries had entered into Taiwan, spread gospel, shared and involved in constructing the cross-‐regional network since the 17th century, at the same time, they travelled among towns and aboriginal tribes, observed and described Han or aboriginal people’s religion or belief, and also played roles of collectors. During 1850 to 1900, mission stations were built around the island and connected into the region collection came from and the network missionaries shared these objects and knowledge about local people. And the boom of missionary collecting in Taiwan also appeared during this period. These collections were converted artifacts, gifts, exchanged or purchased from Han or aboriginal people. Missionary collecting in Taiwan was actually one part of great project of establishing human knowledge system and cilizing. Meanwhile, missionaries also used these collections to serve spread gospel, train local people to be native missionaries, and even try to construct a “spiritual empire”. Collecting for transnational friendship networks: from Western Australia to Rome John Kinder, The University of Western Australia New Norcia, Australia’s only ‘monastic town’, was established 100 km north of Perth, Western Australia, in 1846. It was founded as a ‘mission to the Aborigines’ by Benedictine monks, led by the Spaniard Rosendo Salvado, who led the mission until his death in 1900. Salvado was not a collector of material culture objects. However he did send at least three collections of objects to Italy, for reasons that suggest new understandings of why and how such consignments took place. Salvado’s consignments were all realised through the operation of intersecting friendship networks and were designed to meet the obligations attaching to those networks. The various individuals involved had their own motivations for taking part. The first was sent to repay a debt to, and satisfy the curiosity of, a friend of a friend in Italy. The second two were sent to the recipient of the first consignment, but only so that he could forward them to other friends of his. These – Gaetano Chierici and Luigi Pigorini – were pioneers of prehistoric archeology, or paleo-‐ethnology, in Italy. They requested the objects for scientific research and cited them in comparative studies of Australian Aboriginal cultures and the prehistoric peoples of central Italy.
Re-‐collecting the land of the bible: Collections of Palestinian Material Culture as entangled history Tobias Mörike This talk looks on the motives of amulet collecting by protestant and evangelical missionaries in Palestine in the early twentieth century. The talk highlights five biographies of the collectors and collections that will be presented as an entangled history, meaningful for the history of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology and therefore the history of scholarship. Building on existing studies the talk will extend theoretical models from African Studies into a different locality, the historic Palestine from 1880 till 1936 and provide a new explanation for amulet collections and exhibitions by protestant scholars, missionaries and physicians. In a first place, the relationship between specific collectors will be analyzed as a network. Secondly the objects concerned will be regarded according to their change of meaning and appreciation, drawing on models from material culture studies. Eventually the general historical framework with be looked at with a special attention to knowledge production by the protestant church and missionaries. Emphasis will be given on Tawfiq Canaan (1882-‐1964), a Palestinian Lutheran physician who built one of the largest collections of Palestinian amulets consisting of over 1,400 objects. He was the centerpiece of a network of British and German collectors, who were brought together by their ethnographic interest, protestant faith and for most of them, by their medical profession. The object of missionary anthropology: Neuendettelsau missionaries, Richard Neuhauss and objectivity in German New Guinea around 1910 Daniel Midena, University of Copenhagen The scientific photographer Richard Neuhauss (1855 – 1915) became a leading expert on New Guinea on the back of his three-‐volume work, Deutsch Neu-‐Guinea (German New Guinea, 1911). The work relied on the expertise of Lutheran missionaries from Neuendettelsau in Bavaria who had evangelised among Papuans since 1886. When it came to making scientific objects in the field, however, the Neuendettelsau missionaries practiced and advocated an epistemological basis for ethnographic fieldwork radically different from the professional anthropologists with whom they collaborated. In his Mission and Music (1920), for example, Neuendettelsau missionary Heinrich Zahn proposed an understanding of ‘objectivity’ explicitly opposed to the method and conclusions of Neuhauss’ Deutsch Neu-‐Guinea. This paper contrasts Heinrich Zahn’s ethno-‐musicological research with Richard Neuhauss’ ethnographic photography in order to illustrates the role of missionaries during a major shift in German anthropology away from materiality. The first part highlights the limits of the motif of missionaries as collectors when discussing missionaries from a history of science perspective. The second part of the paper demonstrates how an understanding of missionaries as modern is nevertheless central to understanding Zahn’s ‘prerequisites for a proper [ethnographic] judgement’ as well as missionary anthropology around 1900 in general.
Session Two, Wednesday 17th September, 9am Understanding souls and collecting objects: Catholic missionary ethnography in Cabinda (Angola) Ana Rita Amaral, University of Lisbon One year after the young Dutch missionaries of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit Jan Vissers and his brother Frans arrived in Cabinda, in 1945, they met Scheuttist Father Leo Bittremieux. A veteran missionary ethnographer working in the neighbouring Belgian Congo, Bittremieux was crossing Cabinda in study trip. His interest in ethnography had already built up to influential publications on the region (1922, 1936, 1937), as well as collections and strong ties to the ethnologists of the Congo Museum in Tervuren. Jan Vissers recalled him as an inspiring enthusiast of African art, recognising his foundational role in the constitution of a small group of catholic missionary ethnologists, working on the Portuguese side of the colonial Congo border. The group’s aim was to “understand the soul of the Fiote” (Vissers 1982). All members were Spiritan Fathers and included the Alsatian Joseph Troesch, the Portuguese Joaquim Martins, Manuelino de Oliveira and José Martins Vaz, and the Vissers brothers. They all worked in the four mission stations in the Enclave (Landana, Cabinda, Lukula and Mayombe), which had been built and developed by the Congregation. In fact, the catholic evangelization of Angola, from the second half of the nineteenth century throughout New state’s colonialism in the twentieth century, was predominantly undertaken by the Spiritans. In this paper I will develop the intertwined histories of this group of missionaries and their attitudes towards religion and ethnography, in order to analyse missionary ethnography as an encompassing practice that combines spiritual and material, salvation and transformation. With this approach I hope to account for a understanding of missionary ethnography in Cabinda -‐ acknowledging the missionary and ethnographic present in the context to modern colonialism in Angola, and of Cabinda -‐ crossing borders and following object circulation and the institutionalization of a regional corpus of ethnographic knowledge in Europe, in which these missionaries held a central part. Missionary Diasporas: The material legacy of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in Vanuatu Eve Haddow, National Museum Scotland Scottish museums house a number of significant collections from Vanuatu made by Presbyterian missionaries resident on the islands between 1840 and 1940. These artefacts can be considered in three categories: those that reveal the missionary endeavour to modify behaviour; those used in economic transactions; and those collected to display culture. Additionally, the collections include material transported by missionaries to effect change on the islands such as communion tokens and bible translations. The paper will explore how particular objects were used to foster and maintain relationships between Scots and ni-‐Vanuatu, and investigate what this reveals about wider historical
networks of contact and exchange. Through this material we can consider mission activity that led to religious conversion, but also explore the impact Presbyterian missionaries had on wider culture, economy, and population demographics. The paper will also draw on recent fieldwork on Aneityum, the location of Vanuatu’s first Presbyterian Church in the 1850s. The fieldwork sought to increase collections access and understand local perceptions of missionary activity, exploring the relevance of these missionary collections for islanders today. This has led to documentation of stories behind artefacts, some of which challenge assumptions about the place of Scottish missionaries in the communities they lived, and has increased understanding of a site-‐specific missionary context. The Bodding Collection – materiality redefined and implications for future management Tone Bleie, Arctic University of Tromsø (Norway) This paper will examine Scandinavian Lutheran missionaries, Santals of Central India and Norwegian museum conservators’ different notions of materiality and custodianship of the Bodding Collection. An interdisciplinary approach drawing on ethnography, political history and human rights law will be employed in order to examine the trajectory of arguably radically different and shifting meanings of materiality and custodianship to this comprehensive ethnographic and manuscript collection, donated to the University of Oslo by the distinguished linguist and missionary priest P.O. Bodding in the early 20th. Century. Building on these critical insights, the latter part of the paper will explore if digital repatriation is a distinct possibility -‐ through an analysis comparing Norwegian museum policy with current policies of relevant Indian stakeholders, including Santals-‐led civil society organizations and central and state universities. Widening the Audience for Missionary Collections Margarette Lincoln, National Maritime Museum The National Maritime Museum has recently acquired the collection of the London Missionary Society (LMS), later the Council of World Mission. It contains portraits of missionaries and examples of indigenous weapons and craftwork from Africa and the Pacific. Focussing on objects from the Pacific, I propose to explore motives for collecting and consider how these objects might be effectively exhibited in a museum context today. Exploration and missionary activity were connected with the expansion of Empire and the acquisition of new knowledge, but today our framework for understanding the LMS collection is constrained, partly by the nature of the objects themselves. The collection is clearly gendered, some pieces are compromised in that they are likely to have been created as souvenirs for a European market and others have a complex relationship with propaganda. For example, they may have been used to promote the activity of the LMS. Using contemporary journals, newspaper reports, charts and travel accounts, this paper will explore the degree to which we need to recover the original context
for collecting in order to determine the range of meanings these objects have today.
Plenary Lecture, Queens Theatre Tuesday 16th September, 5pm Chair: Prof. Nicholas Thomas Materiality, invisibility and Australian mission heritage Jane Lydon Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History The University of Western Australia In this paper I explore some of the contradictory ways in which archaeological concerns with material remains have informed Australian heritage practices. I explore these questions first by considering how colonial governance harnessed material infrastructures and practices on Aboriginal missions: missionaries’ objectives derived from Western assumptions about progress and transformation that were intimately bound up with everyday material practices, and evaluated ‘civilisation’ in terms of material culture. The missionary regime was structured by an imagined Cartesian opposition between spiritual and secular, however blurred in practice. This orientation continues to define and manage Aboriginal people within mainstream Australian heritage practice, as material remains are perceived to contain cultural essences. During the mid-‐twentieth century, a burgeoning preservationist movement triggered a process of recognition and preservation at Aboriginal missions around the continent, characterised by a Western aesthetic that privileged monumental relics, and especially churches. These discrete settlement structures have usually been interpreted as expressions of missionary values, and were long judged to be of greater significance than less visible, landscape-‐wide Indigenous attachments. Recent attempts to develop a more inclusive system have addressed a perceived division between ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ cultural forms, ironically reinscribing a social-‐material dualism that is inconsistent with Indigenous views. The continuing association of Indigeneity with the intangible defines Indigenous history and identity in terms of invisibility, nostalgia, and loss.
Plenary Session – Missionaries & Museums, Queens Theatre Wednesday 17th September, 11am Expressing the Missionary Message through Museums, Architecture, and Scientific Innovation at Protestant Universities in China Martha Lund Smalley, Yale University Divinity Library
Thirteen colleges and universities were founded by Protestant mission agencies in China during the last decades of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. These colleges and universities were pioneers of modern education in China and took leading roles in various fields. This paper will draw on the archival records of these institutions held at the Yale University Divinity Library to illustrate the material impact that they had on China in the areas of museums, architecture, and scientific innovation. These were areas in which the missionary founders and their Chinese colleagues expressed their educational ideals and their views on the place of the college or university in society. Museums established at a number of the Protestant universities were important arenas for the exchange of ideas. At a time when many new Chinese building projects were imitating Western styles, the architects of several of the Protestant colleges and universities sought to include Chinese elements of architecture in their buildings. There were various facets of interaction between Western and Chinese architectural styles during the construction of the college campuses, including aesthetic factors, definition of spaces, and economic and supply factors. The scientific innovation of the universities included the introduction of equipment, facilities, and techniques. A World of the Call Daniel Henschen, University of Southern Denmark This paper aims at analysing some main characteristics of missionary ethnographic presentations in the decades around WWI as they appear in the Danish missionary exhibitions– events which are now virtually forgotten but in the first half of the 1900s attracted large crowds of visitors and had a major impact in the public sphere. Concepts such as the 'ethnographic present' and the establishment of a temporal and spatial distance between Western and non-‐Western cultures are usually seen as fundamental premises for early ethnographic exhibitions. However despite their often stereotypical and dismissive attitude towards other religions, missionary exhibitions paradoxically gave a less distanced view of these peoples than their secular counterparts: Europeans and non-‐Christian peoples were presented as contemporaries. Their culture was brought to life as dynamic and non-‐static -‐ portraying a world where existing forms of life could be threatened by change or emerge. And the relations and actual contacts between the spectators and the non-‐Christian peoples were emphasised at the expense of the pure objectifying. In that way missionary exhibitions -‐ and probably also their foreign counterparts– anticipated practices which were not part of most secular ethnographic museums before after the mid-‐1900s.
‘Wisdom received from the ancestors’: the museum moment and the Second Vatican Council Nick Stanley, British Museum Christian missionization on the South Coast of Papua did not start until the 1950’s. This meant that contemporary theological thinking on culture could be incorporated into missionary thinking and practice, especially that developed at Vatican II (1962-‐1965). Concern for cultural retention at the point of conversion led the Crosier Order of missionaries in Asmat to collect historic artefacts at a time when the newly emergent Indonesian civil authority was seeking to destroy them in an attempt to extirpate head hunting. This paper examines how the creation of the Museum of Culture and Progress in Agats served to further the missionary programme and how it led to a struggle between church and the modern state to redefine the place of indigenous practices and beliefs in a developing region. This paper seeks to develop aspects of the argument currently active about Christian anthropology, notably in the work of Joel Robbins and John W O’Mally, S.J. Title Johanna Zetterstrom-‐Sharp, University College London / Horniman Museum Not unusually, Sierra Leone shares its colonial history with a long tradition of Christian missionary intervention. Legacies of both are pervasive and entwined in the countries material landscape today, shaping attitudes to the regions complex cultural practices and traditions. Missionary work is however by no means a thing of the past, as a new generation of Born Again preachers establish popular Pentecostal institutions in old colonial churches and new impressively large white-‐tiled buildings across the country. This paper will explore the Pentecostal presence at the Sierra Leone National Museum, in particular the apparent tensions emerging as staff remain committed to working with objects associated with the very traditions and practices their Church seeks to eradicate. The Museum is known to contain objects which are both dangerous and unpredictable, yet these objects hold an evocative value for the countries future. This paper argues that it is because of their faith, rather than despite it, that staff at the Museum are successful in their roles, in particular through the idea of Jesus as an evocative presence in the provision of institutional protection from otherwise harmful or disruptive esoteric forces.
Missionaries & Modernity, Queens Theatre Wednesday 17th September, 1:30pm English Missionaries in Chinese Dress: Hudson Taylor and the Dress Policies of the China Inland Mission, 1866-‐1877 Katharine Crompton The nineteenth century saw an explosion of missionary activity throughout the globe. The interaction between missionaries and the people they lived among raised issues of identity, which questions about dress often highlighted. This dissertation examines the interactions between dress and identity by looking in detail at the rich archival material of the China Inland Mission, available at the School of Oriental and African Studies. One of the founding principles of the CIM was that all missionaries were required to wear Chinese dress, which caused much controversy with other mission organisations. This dissertation first examines the many practical benefits that members of the CIM discovered, before going on to discuss the reasons why, in light of these many advantages, the policy was not widely adopted. These reasons are divided into three main categories: the social, the personal, and the religious. For each of these categories, the dissertations examines how and why the CIM's view of identity differed from that of their missionary contemporaries. Crafting Orphans: the Making of a Global Consciousness in Early-‐Twentieth-‐Century Shanghai William Ma, University of California This paper focuses on the woodcarving workshop from the French Jesuit orphanage in Shanghai (Tushanwan) at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and its integration into the global aesthetic and commercial market place. Found in 1860s as part of the Xujiahui Catholic community in Shanghai, the workshop, one of many there, was meant to prepare Chinese orphaned boys with the necessary vocational skills to make a living as adult. The orphans were trained and supervised by European missionaries, making commercial secular and religious art products for the domestic and international audience. I will first look at how the Jesuit missionaries produced and transmitted pedagogical knowledge through their extensive network within China and across the globe. I argue that it was because of efforts by these missionaries, China contributed to global aesthetic movements (such as the Arts and Crafts) usually not associated with East Asia. Then I further explore how the art products made at the workshop were presented and displayed at international venues such as the 1915 San Francisco Panama-‐Pacific International Exposition in order to participate in a modernist visual regime of scientific precision and historical objectivity through a set of 86 pagoda models.
Images and objects: representing conversion in Northwest Amazonia Esteban Rozo, Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia) Since the 1940s, American evangelical missionaries visited the Upper Orinoco and Upper Rio Negro region and translated the Bible to several indigenous languages, fostering a massive process of conversion to Christianity among indigenous peoples. This paper explores how evangelical missionaries used and distributed among indigenous communities images through which specific meanings of conversion were conveyed. Specifically, I analyze the symbolic associations that missionaries established between the Bible and different kinds of objects. Through the images distributed by missionaries, the Bible was compared with objects such as mirrors, machetes, brakes and rudders. The associations drawn between the Bible and different objects articulated specific meanings of conversion that included ideas about self-‐estrangement, self-‐control, “worldliness,” commodities and money. For instance, the notion of the Bible as a mirror refers to how conversion produced a particular kind of estrangement between the convert and his own past, as well as new forms of self and social recognition (Keane 2007). In a similar vein, other images addressed how indigenous Christians should relate to “worldliness” and “worldly things” (which might include certain kinds of commodities). The paper concludes arguing that the images distributed by evangelical missionaries reveal an ambiguous relationship between indigenous Christians and “worldly things,” and this relationship indexes a particular understanding of modernity and commodities. Indigenous households, missionary efforts and material effects Christian Sørhaug, Telemark Research Institute Through a study of a village of Warao in the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela, this paper explores how the Capuchin missionaries have altered their householding practices. In their civilizing efforts the Capuchin have promoted; gardening of tubers as an alternative to palm starch; textiles and clothes; catholic masses rather than shamanic ritual healing; Catholic burial practices; stopping the practice of menstrual huts; the production of textiles for markets. However, as these colonial cultivating practices have proceeded a range of unintended consequences has been generated; shamanic ritual merging with Christian prayer, catholic festivities as drunken parties and what is termed a “hedonistic” and conspicuous consumption. The Catholic missions can tentatively be termed a global assemblage that generates a range of connections in the Warao householding assemblage. The very matter of the household is assembled in a somewhat different way through the efforts of the missionaries, however not the way that the Capuchin intended. The paper is an attempt at analyzing some of the material effects and existential transformation that the Warao householding composition has undergone as a consequence of the capuchin missionizing efforts.
Objects & Things, Harrods Room Wednesday 17th September, 1:30pm Collecting Monks, Museum Founding Nuns: Mission Museums in Switzerland, Austria and Germany Rebecca Loder-‐Neuhold, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Mission museums and collections, (travelling) mission exhibitions were and still are a link between Europe and missionary fields like Brazil or Tanzania. They represent global cultures since the 19th century, usually in rural areas of Europe. According to R. Habermas in German speaking countries there has been no research done on mission museums until today although one can literally put a hand on the objects of transfer via missionary networks. I will present an overview of the phenomenon of the “Mission Museum” in Switzerland, Austria and Germany (facts and figures, diversity…). As a case study the “Missions-‐Ethnographische Museum” from St Gabriel, a monastery by the Steyler missionaries (SVD) near Vienna will be presented. It was a well-‐equipped museum with a scientific approach. Linguist and ethnologist Father W. Schmidt (journal “Anthropos”) was the museum’s founder and his successors were also scientists. Next to the focus on global networks for purchasing the museum objects, the networks between mission museums, universities and ethnographical museums are up for discussion. The Duff Revisited: A Prelude to Iconoclasm Carmen Tomfohrde, University of Hong Kong A famous failure, the ship Duff deposited missionaries in Polynesia in 1797. Within two years, most had fled, were killed, or “went native.” The subject of a short historical book (Cathcart et al., 1990) and descriptions in numerous histories of missiology, the Duff is widely regarded as a case of poorly trained, linguistically incompetent artisans faced with severe culture shock. Upon inspection of the Duff missionaries’ journals and letters, an argument can be posited that the Duff missionaries set cultural precedents that enabled later English-‐speaking missionaries to trigger episodes of mass conversions to Christianity and sweeping culture change, with systematic iconoclasm and the establishment of Polynesian megachurches. Beginning with two objects in the British Museum’s collection, the Rosetta Stone and the A’a, brought from Raiatea to London in 1822 through missionary John Williams, before moving to an examination of representations of speech in the Duff missionaries’ writings, this paper fuses methodologies from literary studies and visual art to situate the Duff within a broader project of narrating cultural hierarchy. Focusing on the gap between the Duff and the later successful era of successful missions, this paper argues the Duff missionaries made a significant contribution, though not in the form they intended.
Teapots and Teaching : Missionary Representations of Womanhood in Eastern Polynesia. Deborah Pope, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Marseille When the first representatives of the London Missionary Society arrived on Tahiti in March 1797, five of the seventeen missionaries who would remain there were accompanied by their wives, women who from the outset considered themselves an integral part of the missionary enterprise. Subsequently few unmarried missionaries would be sent to the islands and, although little documented, the work of the mission's spouses would be both crucial and enduring. In keeping with the "civilizing" role attributed to women in the Evangelical revival of the times in Great Britain, their efforts particularly concerned the material changes to be wrought by the advent of Christianity. Actively involved in the religious and moral instruction of Polynesian women, they also set out to provide them with models of the Christian wife and mother and their agency in the practical concerns of everyday living can still be detected in these island societies today. It is this specifically feminine contribution to the material transformations behind the development of the modern world in eastern Polynesia and the interaction between the mission women and their Polynesian sisters this entailed which will be explored in this paper. Western Missionaries and Court Jewelry in the Qing Dynasty Qian Hua, City University of Hong Kong The Jewelry of the Qing court reveals diverse styles through its adoption of certain elements of the Chinese traditional costume on the one hand, and through using western materials like diamond, enamel and glass and imitating the western techniques of lapidary and inlay on the other. Functional items embedded with diamonds, such as clocks and boxes, have been presented to the Qing court in the 18th century. Occasionally, ornamental jewelry also entered the Chinese palace. On the basis of the imperial archive in the 10th year of Yongzheng reign, the list of tribute gifts presented by western missionaries includes one enamel ring. Apparently, western jewelry had been chosen to present to the Chinese emperor as one of all tribute gifts by the missionaries. The western missionaries would choose for their gifts to Chinese court objects that were representative of the latest technology and finest craftsmanship that Europe had to offer. The jewelry remained largely unrecognized in previous studies, unlike the clock which had become a standard presentation gift between courts and hence been studied extensively, but jewelry was the pride of princely ostentation. In this paper, jewelry will be used as one means of observing the incursion of western missionaries into China and the resultant effects on the intermingling of tastes and technology. Final Plenary Discussion, Queens Theatre Wednesday 17th September, 3:30pm
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