Dr. Brown's Study: Methodist Missionaries and the Collection of Material Culture in the Pacific

Eves, Richard

doi:10.1525/mua.2000.24.1.26

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…Following a general trend in the post-colonial critique of museums, scholars working on missionary collections re-situate them in the historical contexts of appropriation and exhibition (Coombes, 1994;Corbey, 2000;Eves, 1998Eves, , 2000Gardner, 2000;Smith, 1997;Stanley, 1989Stanley, , 1994Thomas, 1991). These authors examine the objects' 'social lives' (cf.…”

Section: ■ Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Christian trophies or Asmat ethnografica?

Hasinoff

2006

Journal of Social Archaeology

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Missionary collections have been considered to be scarcely more than curious accumulations of Christian trophies, collected trappings of ‘savagery’ and ‘heathenism’ and articles displaying a readiness for missionary investment. On the contrary, ethnological collections, in their comprehensiveness, have been thought to provide tangible traces of a disciplinary methodology and scientific objectivity characteristic of the ethnological museum. In this article, I complicate these essentialized categories of things by reconsidering the convergent missionary and anthropology agendas that framed their appropriation and shaped their mutual display. In this vein, I discuss how missionary collecting - as evidenced by Fr. Gerard Zegwaard’s MSC Asmat Collection at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York - was structured by, and in turn contributed to, the production of post-Second World War anthropology and the popular imagination of the Asmat as living remnants of the ‘Stone Age’. This article is further intended to provide the first discussion of Zegwaard’s AMNH Asmat collection.

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Section: ■ Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%