The Missionary Exhibit

Abstract

Although Franz Boas' research at the American Museum Natural History was defined by an American focus, his direction of the Jesup Expedition and the East Asiatic Committee demonstrate that he was eager to expand the institution's collections beyond the Americas. This article explores his engagement with the Missionary Exhibit, a previously underestimated facet of his work. The collection was gathered for and displayed at the Ecumenical Conference of Foreign Missions of 1900 and later reinstalled at the AMNH. The exhibit gave Boas the opportunity to establish a rapport with missionaries, whose collecting activities supplemented the museum's representation of regions like Burma, which were otherwise tangential to the institution's research. This paper explores how the collection proved to be as much of a promise as a frustration for Boas. The exhibit provides an entrée to the discipline's sustained, but complicated, engagement with missionaries, and the museum's early production of ethnological knowledge about Asia.