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.
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