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Christian trophies or Asmat ethnografica?

Fr. Zegwaard and the American Museum of Natural History Asmat Collection,1958-9

Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, USA, elh2005{at}columbia.edu

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.

Key Words: Asmat • collection histories • conversion • missionaries • museum anthropology • West Papua (Irian Jaya)

Journal of Social Archaeology, Vol. 6, No. 2, 147-174 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1469605306064238


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