Along with global expansion of Christianity, the missionary enterprises to Asia and Latin America promoted a global project of knowledge creation. Catholic and later Protestant missionaries started to produce, systematize and circulate a great number of texts, images and objects, with the objective of understanding the diversity of customs, beliefs, languages and practices that they encountered around the world. This knowledge was a fundamental aspect of the missionary project, and became instrumental to demarcating territories, instituting colonial rule, promoting missionary vocations, and converting indigenous peoples to Christianity. Several missionary museums were established in Europe in the late 19th century to exhibit the ethnological findings and scientific achievements of religious workers in Asia and the Americas. They exalted missionary trajectories and narrated their histories as part of a modernizing project that brought Christianity and civilization to the colonies.

 

Since the last decades of the 20th century, Christians across the Global South have launched their own museum projects. Some of these museums are small community initiatives, while others are prestigious institutions supported by religious congregations at important historical sites. Regardless of size, all these museums are conceived and curated by local Catholics who pursue objectives that are significant to their communities in their specific national contexts. Yet there are no homogeneous Catholic communities in the Global South – conversion histories are crossed by racial, ethnic and class identities, that in the contemporary world continue to shape some communities as privileged and others as marginalized. Such historical differences produce conflicting and nuanced interpretations of mainstream narratives of colonial evangelization that are negotiated at these institutions by the diverse actors involved.

 

This workshop aimed to examine how missionary museums in Latin America and Southeast Asia have dealt with the colonial encounter and the legacy of Christian missionary work in their societies. Most of these museums are run on limited budgets and do not host relics or valuable examples of material culture. Yet they are interesting mainly because they have to deal with their missionary origins and the complicated histories of violence, discrimination and power in postcolonial settings that they carry. Although some of these museums are curated and managed by the same Catholic religious orders and Protestant denominations that operate museums in Europe, the perspective of the colonized is incorporated in nuanced ways when exhibits are produced for native audiences who have a critical stance towards the relationship between mission and colonization.

 

The workshop aimed to examine collections exhibited at Christian ethnological museums in former colonial territories to interpret how contemporary Christian communities make use of material culture to engage with the complicated legacy of colonial missionary projects. An object-centered approach to religious museums attempts to avoid a focus on ‘sacred art’ to examine technological, medical, educational and cultural items related to missionary work.

 

We welcomed presentations who can address some of these questions

• In which ways do Christian communities utilize museum spaces to negotiate their religious identities vis-à-vis the complicated legacy left by the colonial missionary projects

• What are the goals pursued by  museums when exhibiting material items of science, culture and entertainment brought from Europe by missionaries 

• How does material culture contribute to narratives of Catholic heritage conceived from the Global South amongst converted populations

• How is indigenous material and intellectual creation treated by host institutions  

 

This workshop invited participants to reflect on the importance of exploring the narratives of conversion and modernity from the perspective of Christians in the Global South, and offered a space to think of strategies to approach the study of important sites for reconciliation and the critical examination of missionary projects.

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This two-day workshop was organized by Professor Bernardo E. Brown with support from the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) of the International Christian University (ICU). 

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