Abstract
Underlying research was undertaken through a doctoral studentship at the University of Birmingham, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Award no. 126750). The resulting thesis is: C. Wingfield, ‘The Moving Objects of the London Missionary Society: An Experiment in Symmetrical Anthropology’ (University of Birmingham, 2012).
Highlights
Richard Altick did a good job of dismissing the significance of the London Missionary Society museum in the two paragraphs he devoted to it in his book, The Shows of London, describing it as ‘the least known and probably the least rewarding’ of London’s ‘handful of privately owned exhibitions of exotica’.1 Altick concluded that ‘in spirit the collection was scarcely more than a Christian trophy case’, suggesting that ‘the museum’s purpose was not to advance learning but to publicize the Missionary Society’s success in the field and attract subscriptions for the cause’
This paper demonstrates some of the ways in which collections from different areas of the world reflected particular histories of local missionary activity, and came to influence missionary collecting practices in other regions of the globe
Rather than attempting to characterize missionary collecting as a single practice, this paper pays attention to the collections of a single missionary museum: it aims to suggest some of the ways in which motivations for collecting and the significance of collections for the London Missionary Society shifted over the course of the long nineteenth century
Summary
Recent accounts of the lms museum have concentrated on the display of ‘idols’ as missionary trophies.[4] Steven Hooper has even suggested that abandoned ‘idols’ might be understood as ‘performance indicators’ through which missionaries demonstrated their success in conversion.[5] It is noteworthy, that this perspective has predominated among Pacific scholars, for whom early religious ‘idols’ at the lms museum are extremely significant as a unique and early source of information on pre-Christian religion in the region. In describing the late nineteenth-century lms museum from an Africanist perspective, she suggested that ‘items in its collection would have been associated with conversion, suppression of the slave-trade, philanthropy and education; the four main activities which British congregations associated with the missionary endeavour.’[7]
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