Dr. Brown's Study: Methodist Missionaries and the Collection of Material Culture in the Pacific (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies, 2021
Review of: Trophies, Relics and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific, Karen Jacobs, Chantal Knowles and Chris Wingfield (eds) (2015) Leiden: Sidestone Press, 220 pp., ISBN 978 9 08890 271 0 (pbk), €34.95
Taking the example of ‘Studies in black and white’, a genre of photographs taken around the end of the nineteenth century by Methodist missionaries in the Pacific, this article seeks to go beyond conventional analyses that scrutinize colonial photography for forms of domination. I argue that these photographs, and the context in which some of them were published, reveal a complex interplay between two contradictory principles: on the one hand, a Christian humanism, articulating a vision of commonality and equality, and on the other, paternalism, articulating a vision of superiority and inequality.
2020
This thesis has been an adventure, sometimes joyful and sometimes challenging, but always a thought-provoking puzzle to untangle. Many people have supported me and facilitated my research along the way, and I have nothing but gratitude for all of those who have been involved. First, I thank my supervisor and chair of panel, Matthew Spriggs. He has shown unfailing enthusiasm and support from the day he suggested I be involved in his Laureate project. He has inspired me with his passion for archaeology, and by always having confidence in my abilities. I am deeply thankful to my supervisor Hilary Howes, who's intellectually engaging conversations over coffee (coffee coffee) and perpetual encouragement and long-lasting friendship have helped me refine my ideas and kept me going through the challenging times. I also owe the deepest gratitude to my supervisor Bronwen Douglas, an inspiring woman of fierce intellect and unbounded kindness. Our discussions as we walked around Mount Ainslie challenged me to think deeply and have shaped my scholarly approach. Finally, I thank Liz Bonshek for her role as an advisor on my supervisory panel, particularly our conversations around museum collections early in the thesis, which reminded me of the centrality of 'things' in my own approach to research.
2003
This thesis centres on the varying representations in missionary and other contemporary writings of Pacific Islanders by Anglophone Protestant missionaries, particularly Methodists, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I examine the attitudes of missionaries, focussing on their roles in training, education and employment, and recognising that all such attitudes were vitally influenced by prevalent assumptions and debates about racial hierarchies and differential racial abilities. Alongside racially-based social evolutionism developed by metropolitan anthropologists, often with the aid of observations from missionary-ethnographers, missionaries also held a profound belief, grounded in Christian theology, in human similitude. Many
Melanesia: Art and Encounter , 2013
Teasing out the ‘making and remaking of relationships’ (Strathern 1993:91) that occurred during transactions between Papuan communities and representatives of the London Missionary Society, in this chapter I explore the intentions, histories and experiences materialized in the collections of the Reverends James Chalmers and John H. Holmes. These men’s collections form the bulk of the LMS’s Papuan objects in the British Museum, and collectively span forty-two years of their experiences in Papua (1877–1919). To complicate our understanding of these collections, I bring the actions of Pacific Island teachers, specifically those of Rarotongans, into view. Doing so reveals how Pacific Islanders played a critical, but unacknowledged role, in the movement of objects into museums, and points to the historical entanglement of Polynesia and Melanesia in the making of contemporary Oceania (Thomas 1989). Finally, I reflect on how material embodiments of these histories continue to shape sociality in PNG.