 The Hawaiian God of War, Kū. Peabody Essex Museum |  The British Museum's example. Only one other is extant, at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. |
Ever since I started this project, I have been aware that missionaries were collectors of the very objects they professed to scorn: "heathen" idols. In Andover such objects were put on display at local fundraising events for the missions, especially events designed to attract children. I didn't quite understand the full reason why until I read Stephen Hooper's account of comparable objects sent home by British missionaries, Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860, the exhibition catalogue for the eponymous show on view at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia in 2006. I thought the idols were merely meant to be curiosities, like objects in cabinets of curiosity, but they were much more than that to the missionaries and to the people back home whose dollars supported the missionaries' ventures.
“Evidence of the triumphs of Christianity through mission work, and of the need for funds to sustain it, was embodied in captured idols which were sent back to Europe for display in mission museums and in fund-raising exhibitions," writes Hooper, director of the University of East Anglia's research unit. [1] “Those religious objects which were not destroyed by zealous converts under the direction of the missionaries were collected as trophies for despatch to missionary museums in Europe. Here they functioned as performance indicators, to use the modern idiom, and as vehicles for fundraising campaigns in which the public was presented with the grotesque horrors of idolatry and encouraged to support continuing mission work." [2]
Besides religious objects, missionaries collected everyday objects, many of which are beautiful to behold, including carved bowls, drums, whisk handles fan handles, necklaces, fish hooks, and head rests. The missionaries didn't collect them because of the objects' aesthetics, however. As Hooper writes of material collected in Polynesia: "Everyday items deemed not explicitly religious, were also collected to show the capacity of Polynesians for useful arts, and therefore their ability to achieve salvation. It was important for missionaries to stress that idolaters were not beyond redemption, and therefore worthy of expenditures of energy and funds.” [3]
The late Jeffrey Cox, a historian of Britain and religion who taught at the University of Iowa, wrote in one of his books that "for most British children in the nineteenth century, the single largest source of information about what foreign peoples were like came from the foreign missionary societies of their respective denominations.'" [4] I would venture that the same went for many American children of the period, certainly ones in Andover.
The London Missionary Society Museum was established 1814; it opened the following year. By the early twentieth century, when the museum had outlived its effectiveness as a fundraising tool, it closed, and the collections were dispersed to other institutions, including the British Museum. Similar collections found their way into American museums. “The natural-history cabinets of most of the New England colleges owed the diversity of their specimens to devoted missionary sons around the globe, who sent back everything from volcanic rocks in Hawaii to the Assyrian slabs and tablets reposing in the Nineveh Gallery at Amherst,” Clifton Jackson Phillips wrote in Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860. [5]
The Andover seminary's collections were dispersed long ago, with much of the material eventually going to the Peabody Essex Museum. Those objects are rarely exhibited, but when they are the signage says "Andover Newtown Theological School," reflecting the seminary's early twentieth-century merger with the Newton Theological Institution of Newton Centre, Massachusetts. [6] The colossal war god on permanent display in the PEM's newest wing entered its collection in 1846 from a source no longer known, but it may well have been a missionary. The similar one at the British Museum was donated by W. Howard in 1839, according to the museum's website. No information is given about who W. Howard was. The website does say that the carved-breadfruit figure, which, like PEM's, is over six feet tall, may have been brought to England by King Litholiho (Kamehameha II) in 1824, as a gift to King George IV. [7] Chris Wingfield, a Hooper colleague, has written of an unintended consequence of the missionary collections. It is that they are "extremely significant as a unique and early source of information" about existing religions in the various parts of the world where the missionaries attempted to proselytize." [8] True. But at what cost?
_________________
1. Stephen Hooper, Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860 (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), 65.
2. Ibid., 27.
3. Ibid.
4. Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 97. Quoted in Hooper, 125.
5. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University, East Asian Research Center, 1969), 302. Phillips has an interesting background: According to the DePauw Libraries, where his papers are archives: "His interest in Asia while he was stationed in Japan with the Occupation Forces following World War II and after his discharge when he stayed on in a civilian education job with the Department of Defense. Phillips entered Hiram College in 1938 working as a preacher at a nearby church to pay his way. After graduation in 1941 and before entering the service, Phillips received a B.Th. degree from the Starr King School of Theology in 1944. He returned to the United States in 1949 and entered Harvard University where he received an M.A. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1954." https://depauw.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/472 Retrieved June 8, 2022.
6. In July of 2015, the Andover Newton Theological School announced that it would sell its campus and become part of Yale Divinity School, a process it completed two years later.
7. https://smarthistory.org/temple-figure-of-war-god-ku-kaili-moku/ Retrieved June 7, 2022. It's unclear to me why the Peabody Essex Museum decided to cover its god's genitals with a loin cloth. As Hooper comments in his catalogue of the 2006 exhibition, in which the British Museum's example was shown: "The genitals are disproportionately small, yet the posture is vigorous."
8. Chris Wingfield, “‘Scarcely more than a Christian trophy case’? The Global Collections of the London Missionary Society Museum (1814–1910), Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 29 no. 1 (2017): 109.
“Evidence of the triumphs of Christianity through mission work, and of the need for funds to sustain it, was embodied in captured idols which were sent back to Europe for display in mission museums and in fund-raising exhibitions," writes Hooper, director of the University of East Anglia's research unit. [1] “Those religious objects which were not destroyed by zealous converts under the direction of the missionaries were collected as trophies for despatch to missionary museums in Europe. Here they functioned as performance indicators, to use the modern idiom, and as vehicles for fundraising campaigns in which the public was presented with the grotesque horrors of idolatry and encouraged to support continuing mission work." [2]
Besides religious objects, missionaries collected everyday objects, many of which are beautiful to behold, including carved bowls, drums, whisk handles fan handles, necklaces, fish hooks, and head rests. The missionaries didn't collect them because of the objects' aesthetics, however. As Hooper writes of material collected in Polynesia: "Everyday items deemed not explicitly religious, were also collected to show the capacity of Polynesians for useful arts, and therefore their ability to achieve salvation. It was important for missionaries to stress that idolaters were not beyond redemption, and therefore worthy of expenditures of energy and funds.” [3]
The late Jeffrey Cox, a historian of Britain and religion who taught at the University of Iowa, wrote in one of his books that "for most British children in the nineteenth century, the single largest source of information about what foreign peoples were like came from the foreign missionary societies of their respective denominations.'" [4] I would venture that the same went for many American children of the period, certainly ones in Andover.
The London Missionary Society Museum was established 1814; it opened the following year. By the early twentieth century, when the museum had outlived its effectiveness as a fundraising tool, it closed, and the collections were dispersed to other institutions, including the British Museum. Similar collections found their way into American museums. “The natural-history cabinets of most of the New England colleges owed the diversity of their specimens to devoted missionary sons around the globe, who sent back everything from volcanic rocks in Hawaii to the Assyrian slabs and tablets reposing in the Nineveh Gallery at Amherst,” Clifton Jackson Phillips wrote in Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860. [5]
The Andover seminary's collections were dispersed long ago, with much of the material eventually going to the Peabody Essex Museum. Those objects are rarely exhibited, but when they are the signage says "Andover Newtown Theological School," reflecting the seminary's early twentieth-century merger with the Newton Theological Institution of Newton Centre, Massachusetts. [6] The colossal war god on permanent display in the PEM's newest wing entered its collection in 1846 from a source no longer known, but it may well have been a missionary. The similar one at the British Museum was donated by W. Howard in 1839, according to the museum's website. No information is given about who W. Howard was. The website does say that the carved-breadfruit figure, which, like PEM's, is over six feet tall, may have been brought to England by King Litholiho (Kamehameha II) in 1824, as a gift to King George IV. [7] Chris Wingfield, a Hooper colleague, has written of an unintended consequence of the missionary collections. It is that they are "extremely significant as a unique and early source of information" about existing religions in the various parts of the world where the missionaries attempted to proselytize." [8] True. But at what cost?
_________________
1. Stephen Hooper, Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860 (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), 65.
2. Ibid., 27.
3. Ibid.
4. Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 97. Quoted in Hooper, 125.
5. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University, East Asian Research Center, 1969), 302. Phillips has an interesting background: According to the DePauw Libraries, where his papers are archives: "His interest in Asia while he was stationed in Japan with the Occupation Forces following World War II and after his discharge when he stayed on in a civilian education job with the Department of Defense. Phillips entered Hiram College in 1938 working as a preacher at a nearby church to pay his way. After graduation in 1941 and before entering the service, Phillips received a B.Th. degree from the Starr King School of Theology in 1944. He returned to the United States in 1949 and entered Harvard University where he received an M.A. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1954." https://depauw.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/472 Retrieved June 8, 2022.
6. In July of 2015, the Andover Newton Theological School announced that it would sell its campus and become part of Yale Divinity School, a process it completed two years later.
7. https://smarthistory.org/temple-figure-of-war-god-ku-kaili-moku/ Retrieved June 7, 2022. It's unclear to me why the Peabody Essex Museum decided to cover its god's genitals with a loin cloth. As Hooper comments in his catalogue of the 2006 exhibition, in which the British Museum's example was shown: "The genitals are disproportionately small, yet the posture is vigorous."
8. Chris Wingfield, “‘Scarcely more than a Christian trophy case’? The Global Collections of the London Missionary Society Museum (1814–1910), Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 29 no. 1 (2017): 109.
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