Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe: Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture (People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities) 9819931886, 9789819931880

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People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities

Alison L. Kahn

Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture

People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities Series Editors Sunita Reddy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi, India Sanghmitra S. Acharya, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi, India Editorial Board Tulsi Patel, Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, Delhi, Delhi, India Ash Narain Roy, New Delhi, India Ramesh C. Gaur, Director (Library & Information) & Head Kalanidhi Division, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, India Robert Tian, School of Business, Huaihua University, Hunan, China Maisam Najafizada, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL, Canada Shalina Mehta, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India K. K. Mishra, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Uttar Pradesh, India Alison L. Kahn, Stanford University Overseas Program, Oxford, UK

The series proposes to capture the diversities in people and their communities in India. It provides a unique and innovative resource for anthropological knowledge, philosophy, methods, and tools to understand, analyse and formulate sustainable, innovative solutions to address socio-cultural issues in India. India is a repository of varied cultures and diversities. With the globalisation and development process, the cultural fabric is changing. Customs, traditions, beliefs, on one hand, food habits, art and craft, weaving, dyeing, and handloom artefacts, on the other, are undergoing a metamorphosis. It is imperative to explore, understand and document the process of changing diversity and relational inequalities. The series encompasses richness in art, craft, language, dance, music, folklore, food culture and beliefs, traditions and practices. It addresses the issues of development disparities, inequality, and segregation on the axes of caste, class, religion, region, ethnicity, and gender. The series publishes methodologically rigorous and theoretically sound, critical and comparative, empirical research peer-reviewed volumes related to non-codified healing practices, gender-based violence, migration induced vulnerabilities, child abuse, social identity-based work on a national, regional and local level, welcoming case studies, as well as comparative and applied research. The series is of interest to the academicians and students in the discipline of sociology, anthropology, psychology, social work, history, philosophy, and public health, and to all of those interested in a wide-ranging overview of art, culture, and politics. It accepts monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks.

Alison L. Kahn

Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture

Alison L. Kahn Material, Visual and Digital Anthropology Stanford University Overseas Program Oxford, UK

ISSN 2662-6616 ISSN 2662-6624 (electronic) People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities ISBN 978-981-99-3188-0 ISBN 978-981-99-3189-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’ (1915) I Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. II Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. III Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. Thomas Hardy

For my mother and father, Sylvia Alice and Leslie Arthur Wates

Preface

Many ethnographic collections housed in national institutions around the world were collected, or at least influenced, by missionaries. Ethnographic collections of Catholic missionaries remain a largely untapped and unchallenged area of material cultural and museum studies. These collections inhabit seminaries, churches, mission houses, schools and other institutions owned and run by the Catholic Church throughout the world. One of the most significant collections, as one might imagine, resides within the walls of the Vatican itself. Most of my early research on this topic took place in the Vatican during a six-year period from 1998 to 2004, with frequent visits from 2000 to 2012. My last visit to the museum was in January 2019. I first entered what was then called the Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Vatican (MEMV) to conduct an interview with the Head of Collections, Ester Console, a non-clerical ethnologist; I also met and discussed the museum with its director, Monsignor Zagnoli. At the time, they were the only permanent staff of the museum, and both had been arranging the transfer of the museum’s library to a fire-proof facility in the heart of the administrative area of the Vatican. I was informed of Console’s plans for a conservation programme for some of the most fragile objects in collections and repairs to the museum that were being undertaken. At the time of my visit in 1998, the museum had been closed for five years and was one of many institutions in Rome that was being refurbished, repaired and cleaned in time for the celebrations of the 2000th anniversary of Christianity. I was fascinated by the existence of the diverse collections of ethnographic materials in this little-known museum and set out to better understand its nature, origin and structure. It took a good part of an MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College at the University of London, an M.Phil. in Material Culture and Museum Ethnology and a D.Phil. at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, to get to grips with its history, notwithstanding an intense learning curve in language acquisition to communicate in Italian and French, and to read basic German and Latin. Although my fieldwork was based in archives, the nonverbal language, codes and customs of the Vatican officials (from the papacy down to the security guards) had to be understood and strategies negotiated to access, and sustain access to archives, which are rarely opened to non-clerical persons. When ix

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putting together the history of the ‘tribe’ of Vatican Museum functionaries in Rome and the Catholic missionary ‘tribe’ in the field, a certain unpacking of events needed to be undertaken to reveal their mutual influences. Building on the anthropological and historical origins of the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition in 1925, I explored the wider picture of Italian politics under fascism and papal manoeuvres to restore the Catholic Church’s place on the European stage. The exhibition is seen as central to the papal agenda which included demonstrating to the world the role Catholics had taken in the progress of science, redefining its place as a missionary empire alongside Mussolini’s expansionist foreign policy, and readdressing the issues of centralisation within the Church itself. These collections are private, and I am very much indebted to the curators and directors of the Vatican’s ethnological museums for allowing me continued access to the museum and its archives. I am extremely grateful to the former directors; Fr. Josef Penkowski SVD who showed me the collections when I first arrived, and to Msgr. Roberto Zagnoli, who gave me permission to research in the museum’s archives for many years. Also, my immense thanks to Ester Console, Head of Collections, whose guidance and kindness proved invaluable. I am also thankful for the kind permission of Fr. Nicola Mapelli, the present director of the Ethnological-Missionary museum, now renamed, Anima Mundi, for allowing the publication of images from the archives. I am most indebted to the Divine Word Society (SVD), who were welcoming and kind to me during my visits to the Generalate in Rome: especially to Fr. Franz Bosold, the archivist in their library, for his help in my quest to find context to the Vatican’s ethnographic collections, and whose generous hospitality left me with happy memories of pleasant discussions with other members of the SVD, around the dining room table. I am also very grateful to Carlos, Ilaria and Federica, for their kindness and helpfulness while exploring the missionary archives at SEDOS in Rome. I would like to acknowledge my Ph.D. supervisor, Robert Barnes, for his wisdom and understanding that helped develop these ideas as a student at the University of Oxford, and to others who have guided me in my research and taken the time to read through drafts and listen to my thoughts: Ruggero Taradel, Wendy James, Tony Dunn, Sunita Reddy, Lola Martínez, Christoph Rippe and Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez. Before going to press I had the wonderful experience of presenting a couple of chapters from this book to researchers in the Religious Matters group at the University of Utrecht. My thanks to the project leader, Birgit Meyer, who led the discussions, Ana Rita Amaral who facilitated the event, and the whole team, who gave much appreciated feedback. I take full responsibility for the shortcomings in this book. Finally, thanks to my husband Aaron Kahn, and our three patient children, Helena, Seth and Lukas, and my even more patient mother, Sylvia. I regret that my father, Leslie, did not live to see the publication of this book. Oxford, UK

Alison L. Kahn

Introduction

Housed in palatial buildings and establishment institutions, with the ambitious endeavour to collect, curate and catalogue objects from faraway places, often with a focus on lesser-known, small-scale societies for scientific and cultural heritage purposes, the Western European ethnographic museum now is under attack. Although one cannot help thinking that the attacks are well deserved, a new generation of directors and curators has attempted to address some of the issues that affect the image of this type of national institution, whose roots lie deep in the murky waters of Western colonial expansion. Enormous efforts have been put forth to re-establish the reputation and changing role of the European ethnographic museum, that has now become a contemporary safe space for twenty-first century critical thinking about its collections. At its best the ethnographic museum now provides a place to teach, communicate, to facilitate cultural exchange and to contemplate, apologise, forgive and redefine collective histories, and hopefully to restore faith in humanity. Recent public demonstrations in the UK, including by Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall and in Bristol after the murder of George Floyd, remind us of the importance of framing collections in ways that are relatable and sensitive to the historical context of their existence. There are still many outsiders in the ethnographic museum experience, and for most of the population in the UK, this type of institution remains a place for intellectuals, school visits and the middle classes. Museum anthropological approaches need to become more inclusive to a wider demographic, and the exploration of the history of the ethnographic museum in Europe becomes more accessible to the everyday visitor. This book goes some way to provide an historical overview of the history of this elusive institution that is now just beginning to provide the public with opportunities to explore the nature of social relations within European society and Europeans’ relationship with the wider world. Here we trace the roots of the national European ethnographic museum beyond the UK to offer a fuller understanding of the political, religious and emerging scientific climate in which they were founded. Central to this study is a dialectic approach to concepts and identities of ‘otherness’ in museum anthropological readings. The categories of otherness have been packaged thus far as having cultural difference xi

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due to language, tradition, class, religion and economics. However, there is also an endeavour to introduce other contributors to a discussion about ethnographic museums. Why do we deem some cultures more important to collect and exhibit? What types of ‘otherness’ are we happy to display within our own societies, and why is there still mistrust between the museum builders, the gatekeepers of European cultural heritage, scholars, activists and the source communities whose collections we store? Ethnographic museums, their colonial histories and legacies are not just topics of academic discourse: in the last few years, calls for repatriation have risen in the public consciousness and the museum is now a focus of critique in popular culture and political importance at the level of national governance. In this study, I propose an overarching concept of museum dynasty as a framework of interpretation for this type of national institution; the term, dynasty here, refers to groups of Europeans who make up a kinship system based on power (and access to it), and economic autonomy. In many cases, these elite dynastic families have the social connections to stand in authority regarding matters of cultural perception due to distinction of birth, wealth, class, ethnicity, race, education or gender, and operate alongside a Western-style democracy, and sometimes within it. Among these autonomous bodies of power and influence have been philanthropists and benefactors who have helped to preserve cultural heritage; others are commissions and trustees without whom we would not have a museum heritage to critique. However, it is important to highlight that decisions about cultural heritage in European nations lie in the hands of the few, and politics within these institutions are as raw and questionable as the government officials we see operating in our parliaments. Here, I build on the work of historians of anthropology such as Stocking Jr. (1968, 1987, 1992, 1995) and Penny (2002, 2003, 2021), both of whom remind us of non-Anglo-Saxon narratives that have largely been ignored in anthropological degree courses in Britain and the USA since World War II. It is important to untangle some roots of the historical and semantic notions that have combined to create, in our imagination, as much as in its material form, that resilient manifestation we continue to engage with: the ethnographic (ethnological) museum.

Classical Roots of Ethnographic Museums Cross-cultural art and artefactual collections are not new by any means, nor are the politics that accompany the representation of others.1 Classical European collections were also evident at the apex of classical Europe, and there are many examples of the appropriation of Egyptian cultural symbols and artefacts into Roman life well after the conquering of Egypt by Rome in 30 BC. At the National Roman Museum in Rome, there is a Roman floor mosaic with a Nile scene depicting a man and a hippopotamus. In the New York MET, an artefact exists of an Egyptian scene 1

See Barrett (2017).

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in a Roman mosaic floor from the Mid Imperial period (Late Hadriadic or Early Antonine. Date: ca. AD 130–150). This reveals how dominant Roman cultural forms combined with Egyptian motifs and were used in the decoration of floors, Roman wall paintings, and images of sphinxes appeared on Eastern Roman coinage as a symbol of hope. Roman emperors and citizens were also influenced by Egyptian religious ideologies. There are no fewer than 37 Egyptian obelisks in Rome today: Roman visual and material culture generated numerous representations of landscapes, people, deities, and consumer goods that either evoke Egyptian origins or allude to Roman constructions of “Egypt.” However, the relationship among images, objects, values, and meanings is far from straightforward. Much debate still surrounds modern scholarly interpretations of Roman “Aegyptiaca,” and even in antiquity, similar images might mean quite different things in different contexts or to different viewers. The “meaning” of many Roman images of Egypt thus resists reduction to any single fixed interpretation, remaining open to contestation, renegotiation, and reinterpretation according to changing circumstances. (Barrett, 2017: 1)

On the one hand, Egypt was conquered and annexed as a province of the Roman Empire, and was embedded within the imperial economic political framework, but at the same time Romans opted for a cultural appropriation of certain things. For example, the cult of Isis and Osiris became extremely popular throughout Rome and the Empire, just in the same way Eastern thought was incorporated within Western value systems, and many Westerners convert to Buddhism, or Shivaism, or go to India to follow their Guru. The Romans were no different: they were fascinated by the Egyptian mysteries and in many cases, mutual influence generated a syncretic material culture despite the imperial dominance of the Romans. Late twentieth and turn-of-the-twenty-first century studies illuminate the path of discovery of the history of Western Museum anthropology, be it as a lesson in renegotiation of authority in the museum. Stocking’s edited publication in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (1985) gathered a range of authors who surveyed the collecting and curating practices of ethnographic material of the twentieth century from British and North American perspectives. They highlighted the rising contentions between museum practice and anthropology as an academic discipline: But despite the embeddedness of the present essays in documentary historical material, they do in fact raise important broader issues: the problematic interaction of museum arrangement and anthropological theory; the tension between anthropological research and popular education; the contribution of museum ethnography to aesthetic practice; the relationship of humanist culture and anthropological culture; and of ethnic artifact and fine art, and most generally, the representation of culture in material objects––to mention only some of the more obvious focusing themes. (Stocking, 1985: 3)

Van Keuren’s article on cabinets of culture in the context of Victorian anthropology (1989) informed on nineteenth-century British attitudes to collecting and curating ethnographic objects. The object as a form of agency and its meaning within a cultural context was brought to the fore and questions regarding the changing significance of the museum collection hailed in a new political emphasis on the role of museum, and the role of its curators as potential arbiters of representation for the voiceless

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collections they housed. Further studies wrenched the methodological practice and publication of anthropological discourse from the written archive to other ontologies that promised a refreshed perspective in three-dimensional analyses. In the edited volume, Writing Culture: the poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), Clifford and Marcus plunged academic anthropology into what is now referred to as a ‘crisis of representation’. This view was born out of the political realities that were brought to bear in the intellectual forums of the 1980s and in part, in reaction to Edward Saïd’s seminal work, Orientalism (1978). In short, all notions revealed that Western writers could no longer portray non-Western peoples with unchallenged authority, and the process of cultural representation was inescapably contingent, historical and contestable.2 Museum and material cultural studies scholars have long been preoccupied with political landscapes of European collecting and colonialism, and the nature of relationships between diverse sets of peoples. Some have seen colonial encounters as an opportunity to dissect collecting practices (Gosden & Knowles, 2000); others have attempted to disentangle objects from their colonial past (Thomas, 1991; Clifford, 1986, 1997). Museum artefacts have been described as metonymic and used as metaphors to represent associated ideologies attached to different kinds of museum spaces (Price, 1989). We learned that we might consider objects as having lives of their own and are in fact biographical entities (Hoskins, 1998), or as part and parcel of the culture that wraps them in their own specific cultural norms (Hendry, 1995). Further work focusing on the nature of authenticity and paradigms about primitivism was high on the agenda as exhibitions of art and aesthetics demanded a rethink through a clearer post-colonial lens. Although politics in Europe had shifted to new models of education, this was yet to be seen in the national museums that held so much non-Western cultural heritage. There was a sociological conflict between certain art forms; television, popular music and film (UK and USA in particular) seemed to have captured the zeitgeist of a multicultural society, but national museums lagged behind. Progressive anthropologists spoke of art as ‘agency’ (Gell, 1998), and others explored the symbolic beyond aesthetics (Pinney & Thomas, 2001). Aesthetics and art became fluid terms reassessing appreciation and value in cross-cultural contexts, and new categories branched out of singular terms such as ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’. The object became imbued with agencies beyond its familiar place, on the edge of anthropological theory, but instead at the centre if it, creating an exciting new role for it as an active social agent that had capacities to bind people together and capable of a social relationship (Appadurai, 1986). Tim Barringer’s edited volume, Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (1997), demonstrated the impact of colonial contact with other cultures on the material culture of both the colonised and the imperial nation. An exhibition entitled Paradise, with objects from New Guinea, was held at the Museum of Mankind in London in 2000 by Michael O’Hanlon, who attempted to tackle the problem of the display case and its potential to represent other cultures in a way that provoked thoughts on the unequal bias of Western exchange. These have 2

Further studies include: Jones (1993) and Butler (2000).

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all engaged with lenses of critical theory on histories of ethnographic museums and colonial collections, and they recognise that museums are historical entities subject to cultural and ideological transformation. There has been a significant move towards collaboration, negotiation and active creation of space within the physical and ideological space of Western European ethnographic museums in response to demand for change and a call for more voices to be included within the museums space. Repatriation is a word that has caused no end of debate and strikingly contrasting views from communities and curators alike. Thomas recognises the importance of publications such as Exhibiting Cultures (1991) and Museums and Communities (1992) but called for more unpacking of terms such as ‘community’: Given that commentators and students were preoccupied with questions of ‘representation’ and the politics of identity that underpinned the rhetoric of the period, the response- almost necessarily, but in any case constructively- took the form of dialogue and collaboration between museums and communities: people would have a say in how they and their cultures and traditions were represented…. Less adequately examined has been the more general question of who or what constituted “community”. If this notion was too anodyne or no longer fit for purpose in disciplines such as sociology, it was powerfully reinvigorated in the museum context […] (and) became increasingly central to curatorial practice, especially but not exclusively among those charged with the care of ethnographic collections. (Thomas, 2016: 31)3

Acknowledging late twentieth and early twenty-first century debates about imperial legacies and curatorial challenges of representation has produced renewed forms of negotiation and collaboration with cultural envoys to assist in the coproduction of exhibitions and archives. While many UK and continental ethnographic museums are explicitly confronting the problematic origins of their collections, this study asks the reader to consider the variables involved in some of the larger swathes of understood history. Elizabeth Edwards reminds us that: The challenge for museums is to represent this history without lapsing into apologism on the one hand or a sanitized celebration of multiculturalism on the other. Museums must find a way of articulating this difficult history in a way that can account for complexity while remaining relevant. (Edwards, 2013: 20)

Europe is not a homogeneous society, and concepts of the cultural other cannot be confined to attitudes of power solely concerned with imperial discourses that regard colonial powers as simply the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, or as an issue or racial relations alone. Although these factors are of great significance, it is important to incorporate into any historical debate other elements of historical oppression and inequality that have significance, such as class, religion and gender, which are all subdivisions of these overarching political positions. Museums can also store elitist discourses along with the collections they hold, a residue of the powerful voice that Trouillot calls intellectual colonialism (1995). Said warned us to be aware of the ‘fantasy of other’ when shaping our narratives from colonial histories. If we are to attribute a fair share of voices to collections and diverse registers of those 3

See also Lavine and Karp (1991), Peers and Brown (2003), and Clifford (1997).

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voices to the intellectual space of the museum, we must accommodate the cultural imaginations that are stakeholders in our society, one that is mutually influenced by a range of participants. We should also remind ourselves of the undying attitudes behind belief systems that underpin political agendas: despite the secular positions of most European governments today, religion still plays an important role in the descriptions and representation of culture. Contemporary developments in certain institutions need further commentary on the role of religion in the history of collecting practices, and how agendas of the past need to be preserved and accounted for to address the role of such museums today. With this aim in mind this book seeks primarily to unravel a lesser-known history of the creators of European museums, largely unmentioned in current material cultural studies cases, and urges the reader to step outside the binary focus of current dialectics that oversimplify complex relationships between societies and within societies. The ‘us’ and ‘them’; the ‘Western’ and the ‘NonWestern’, and ‘pre’ and ‘post-colonial’ often create obstacles for the scholar who needs to uncover the longer spanning influence of ideologies and societal practices that affect the way we see cultural heritage. We share in mutual histories of global contact at every level of existence, and if we are to give credence to past collections, we must continue to unravel our own transforming cultural self. We must be aware of the ebb and flow of diverse cultural imaginations as being just as important as the political spheres that we inhabit. Christopher Pinney points out that, ‘colonialism refuses historiographical compartmentalisation: it rapidly unfolds into the history of the modern world: modernity and globalisation are intimately entangled with colonialism’ (Pinney, 2006: 382). Our decision-making process in assessing collections and their heritage depends on our imagined selves in a fragmented culture, and a leap of the imagination is necessary to understand ethnographic collections from another time and place. In Britain, our perception of the concept of a dynasty often consists of a grand hereditary family or empire with influence far beyond their palace walls. However, there are other types of dynasties of generational power that are connected to knowledge and authority. The class struggle in Western European societies has always been about access to power through wealth and knowledge. The lack of access to certain types of knowledge has excluded lower classes from entering professions and societies because of a lack of education, family connections, or social and behavioural similarities to the heritage gatekeepers. Powerful groups of people usually determine the dominant discourse in historical knowledge and, as such, influence how the rest of the people see themselves in relation to society. These power groups of people shape the agendas of leading institutions, such as governments, universities, churches, libraries, galleries, archives, schools and museums. The control of these places is of great importance as they hold the material wealth of our lived and shared pasts, and they influence the present and the future. The empowered few dominate the mainstream narrative in their respective societies through the decisions they make for the rest to follow. Ideas, protocols, customs and laws are integrated into our material cultural knowledge and passed down through the ages much like monarchical lineage, all of which

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withstand challenges to their existence in terms of power, influence, wealth, belief and ideology. We are familiar with historical dynasties such as the Tudors and the Stuarts, who embodied the wealth-power dynamic of fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Britain by preserving vestiges of eras gone-by, and they can be safely visited annually by children studying history from the national curriculum or adults watching television dramas. However, in this book the idea of dynasties of knowledge-power is proposed as a separate but connected conceit to the ancient regimes of dynastic power. They are of course not mutually exclusive, but mutually influential; it is useful to separate the converging power dynamics since these two sets of power relations play out to great effect in the ethnographic museum. The processes through which the territorial and political reshaping and the dissolution of Europe’s empires led to a religious, economic and political shift of paradigm. The result was the birth of the idea and ideology of the nation state and the development of specific national cultures and political systems. The material legacy of the ideas attached to the regimes of power resides in the national archives of Europe’s nation states. Attempting to piece together fragments of the story of the ethnographic museum in Europe is far from a straight-forward task as it is an enigmatic space that projects varied emotional and intellectual responses. University courses on ethnographic museums in English-speaking countries focus on American, Canadian and British authors and museum practices. This is an enigma as the American and Canadian story is rather different from the European one and can never be extrapolated from the story of the foundation of the USA and its relations with the indigenous American, African American and other ethnic minority communities. When the USA became an independent country in the late eighteenth century, it was just a slither of the North American continent (Georgia to present-day Maine), but it saw the vast lands to the West towards the Pacific Ocean as an opportunity for expansion, which the founding settlers justified by creating the myth of ‘manifest destiny’. In the same way the European monarchs had believed in the ‘divine right of kings’ as the natural order of things, the first US settlers in the West interpreted their right to dominate and annex territories for their own gain as God’s plan. The relationship of the USA with the ethnic and cultural ‘other’ is a different set of histories that lies outside the sphere of this study. European ethnographic museums have their roots in national exhibitions, and subsequently, World Fairs. Tracing early examples of ethnographic exhibitions in Europe, we find some of the first organised displays of regional curiosities and crafts in the eighteenth-century market displays of France. These grew exponentially throughout Europe to become regional and national shows and expositions, culminating in Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851. This event heralded the start of a new museum age in Europe and began a new set of dynastic knowledge-power relations played out in significant metropolises of knowledge and culture of the late nineteenth century: London, Vienna, Paris and Berlin. The natural history and ethnographic museums built during the second half of the nineteenth century created new forums of dialogue based on Liberal Humanist ideologies and positivist approaches to the material world. These storehouses of thought were built by kings and queens and were immediately recognised as institutions of authority. Ironically, despite their

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auspicious beginnings as princely archives, they were set to challenge the status quo in terms of belief and endeavour. Darwin’s evolutionary theories and Europe’s material turn in terms of science and economic independence would ultimately undermine the political power of the Catholic Church in Europe and outlive all but one imperial dynasty by the end of 1918: the British Royal Family. These two dynasties mark the beginning and end of this inquiry in terms of chronology of ethnographic museum building, Here we concern ourselves with the rise and fall of the influence of the ethnographic museum between 1851 and 1929. Although there existed many exhibitions and institutions preceding the modern ethnographic museum, this time is inextricably linked with European imperial agendas that entangled colonialism with the Christian missionary enterprise. This included the rise of nationalism as a political force in Europe. This book provides a narrative to discuss how ethnographic museums in Europe were constructed as pillars of understanding through their definitions of cultures, classification systems of objects and progressive Liberal Humanist agendas. Endeavouring to piece together important museums within their political, social and physical institutional structures is like looking through a dusty bell jar where one has to rub vigorously through the glass in order to see inside. However, this attempt to link up some of the legacies of empire, national agendas and evangelical aspirations ultimately unravels a set of networks that help us understand the trajectory of ideas behind a selection of Europe’s most important national ethnographic museums. This study situates London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace as the first such international forum, marking the beginning of the museum age open to the wider public. A brief overview of some important world fairs of the nineteenth century provides a broader understanding of European cultural climate in which the Vatican’s Pontifical Missionary Exhibition (PME) of 1925 was first imagined. The PME was the brainchild of Pope Pius XI (1922–1939)4 and engineered by Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD (1868–1954).

The National and University Ethnographic Museum as a Reflection of European Dynasties The rule over Europe’s national and university museums, much like the rule of the land, is dynastic, as they represent a set of ideologies formalised and patronised by the elite of the land, which form part of a lineage drawn from privileged families, the privately educated and intellectuals within the establishment. Nineteenth-century ethnographic agendas have been immortalised in glass, stone, classification systems and display cabinets that continue to influence the way we understand non-European cultures and how we see ourselves in relation to them. The word ‘ethnographic’ or ‘ethnological’, just like the similar concept of ‘the anthropological’, remains words 4

Dates provided for popes, monarchs and emperors are regnal. All others are dates of birth and death.

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used and accessed by a small group of people, usually from the educated and upper classes, and privy to the worlds attached to collections held in stately institutions. Artists, amateurs, specialists and tourists form a large audience for the exhibitions and permanent exhibits on show, but the objects in a display case are often silent and a short description of the provenance and material of the object does little more than scratch the surface of much deeper narratives and complex histories inextricably linked to the collections. The dynasties of museum builders and directors of the ethnographic display in Western Europe came in different manifestations, and they slot into different tribes depending on their bloodlines, families, alliances, businesses, schools, clubs and societies. In the Europe of the nineteenth century, there were relatively few individuals with the credentials necessary to form part of the elite that influenced how museums were created. Leaders, politicians, academics and founders of institutions were drawn from a much smaller pot of stakeholders, and the rest of the population had little to do with the relevant decisions. Few women would have been included in this exclusive set in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and those who were would have been empowered through association rather than by holding an important office independently. The exception of course to this set of relationships was Queen Victoria (1837–1901), but her role was extraordinary in every respect. In addition, it was her husband, Prince Albert (1819–1861), who masterminded the 1851 Great Exhibition, albeit in her honour. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, however, a new middleclass was on the move by the mid nineteenth century, and this newly literate and wealthy set sought access to cultural artefacts in places hitherto only accessible to the governing class of the nation. Evidence of historical interactions between Europeans and non-European cultures remains in the European ethnographic museum. The entangled roots of empire that came to dominate the world in terms of economic and political strength are uncovered by questioning the provenance of collections in the ethnographic museum. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a new set of palaces was constructed as national or scholarly museums in the European capitals and university towns: in 1873 in Berlin, the Museum für Völkerkunde, in 1876, the Welt Museum or Ethnology Museum in Vienna, followed in Paris by the Musée d’Ethnographie in 1878, and shortly after, in 1884, the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. These museums drew material from across the world through their trading and diplomatic networks and echoed the European penchant for collecting that had grown exponentially in terms of numbers of artefacts and systems of classification since the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. These collections include a wide range of artefacts such as paintings, photographs and sacred objects that might have been brought into Europe by traders, missionaries, colonial families, scientists, explorers and the like, and then bought by curators, collectors, agents and individuals for museums, art galleries, commercial collectors and universities. Collectors of all nationalities sought after artefacts from abroad in the late nineteenth century, and their displays could be as part of a wider collection on the country of origin or as a piece that was admired for its aesthetic value, just like any form of collecting and curating practice today. Material culture from small-scale

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societies, or those who were ethnically different in terms of belief and custom, were often considered less valuable, but collectable all the same, especially as conversation pieces for the wealthy, and as they entered forums of the political and intellectual classes, they began to take on new significance5 ; they became worthy of study in the universities. In an era obsessed with cataloguing, ordering and seeking origins, the humble ethnographic objects played an enormous role in explaining origins of Mankind.6 Ideas emerged about what to do with the proliferation of material culture arriving from European empires as collections overflowed from offices, houses, palaces, scholarly departments and international trading ports. Architects were contracted to create edifices that would combine a recognisable aesthetic based on classical and religious emblems, evoking meaningful associations with the sacred and the sublime. The buildings embodied the physical and spiritual symbols associated with temples, churches, cathedrals and libraries of the ancient European world. Museum building coincided with European empire building, and they were placed at the heart of European capitals. They became the storage facilities for the ever-growing collections obtained from non-European cultures. Within the proto-scientific descriptions of how non-Europeans lived and worked, these few objects were held up as evidence of the diversity of human invention and tradition and furnished the intellectuals and social elite of the day with amusement, entertainment and food for thought about the evolution of the human species. From the teacup to the urn, from the wooden sculpture to the totem pole and from the feathered headdress to the sacred stone, each artefact represented a specific cultural phenomenon and a meaningful social relationship in the eyes of the beholder; these meanings were considered and published by Western intellectuals without consulting the communities from whence they came. Very few connections were made between the objects and the communities and individuals from which they originated, and, without voices to tell, the European receiver of the material decided what they were and what should be done with them. It was reasoned that the new arrivals to Europe should be exhibited in one way or another, decided ultimately by the gatekeepers who worked in the museum or the funding bodies and organisations that held control. People and objects alike were traded as commodities. Since Europeans held the reigns of a diverse set of networks across the world, they bought the artefacts at a price decided by these players in the game of exchange and trade, creating a diverse set of new relationships based on demands from the scientific and entertainment communities seeking to gain proof of a theory or an audience, or both. The European powers that propelled these networks in the late nineteenth century were principally Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and German, all of whom had expansionist policies based 5

There were exceptions to this, as explained by Penny (2021: 80–84), regarding the carved bronze and ivory artefacts of Africa seized by the British during a punitive expedition to the Kingdom of Benin in February of 1897. This resulted in a bidding frenzy by the Germans headed by Felix von Luschan, who knew they were valuable pieces of material culture and were prepared to pay great sums of money for them. 6 See Penny (2021: 1–14).

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on economic control, strategic strength and Christian ideologies that fortified their sense of entitlement to enter foreign waters and foreign lands. European intellectuals saw ethnographic museums as the scientific storehouse and laboratory for the investigation of non-European cultures. Adolf Bastian’s vision of classification system had been formed to order the vast range of material culture that had been accumulated, and the creators of the objects were sometimes also put on display. Their presence formed part of the landscape, photographed or gazed upon as if in a zoo; individuals were sparsely clothed, depicted in the act of physical labour, crafting, carrying, digging or staring curiously into the camera. The ethnographic display was one of many types of exhibitions where non-European small-scale societies were seen. They were set apart from the ‘freak shows’ attached to travelling circus and public fairs, and for the more discerning or educated, the Wunderkammers, natural history cabinets, cabinets of curiosities and royal collections with limited access to the public, which also included material from non-European lands. A new kind of dynasty was thus formed that would build its reputation on the earnest endeavour of the European intellectual, who saw himself as the natural inheritor of the world’s curios. As collections from abroad grew, they were divided into different categories according to commercial value, aesthetic appreciation and appeal to the European imagination. Since so little was known about non-Western cultures, especially small-scale societies, their curation depended on few facts and a lot of fantasy. Therefore, decisions were taken as matters of expediency and logistical appropriation, and theoretical scientific ‘truths’ were decided upon with little evidence to support the case, and classification systems and taxonomies were built upon in a highly autonomous manner by the museum officials of the time. The effects of these decisions curated an understanding of the world that contributed to a cultural revolution in Europe.

Inherited Dynasties of Princely and Scholastic Museum Enterprise Bridging Empires and Nations The rise of the museum age of the late nineteenth century represents a material manifestation of ideologies that can be identified as Liberal Humanism and positivist approaches to the curating and collection of objects. This era coincided with the height of several European empires, including the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire, the French Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. These ancient empires soon clashed with waves of nationalism that spread across Europe, and their imperial collections would be incorporated into museums for purposes of national identity that would influence the generation that closed the nineteenth century. In many ways, Liberal Humanist ideas paved the way for the success of the museum age, transforming cabinets of curiosities, Kunstakammers and exotic collections previously only open to the few into a rigorous set of display cases and galleries

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that showcased the success of European powers across the world. This core of activity that began to inform Europeans of the natural world around them, progress in science and definitions of self and other would shape education systems and research into the twentieth century. However, it could be argued that the move away from a moral and religious-based set of values towards a more empirical scientific world would contort the initial spirit of progressive Liberal Humanism and be used for a much more dangerous agendas attached to nationalism and notions of racial superiority in the twentieth century. Penny reminds us of the Liberal Humanist agendas of Bastian’s Museum that preceded the dangerous decline that led to the tragic history of German ethnology7 : Over time, we also all but forgot that nineteenth-century German ethnology, or Wölkerkunde, was incredibly pluralistic, characterised by its practioners’ refusal to entertain unproven racial hierarchies and by their quest to analyse and understand the great diversity of unitary humanity across space and time—a quest that set German ethnology apart from its counterparts in America, Britain, France, and much of the rest of Europe. Yet that too was forgotten, and with that moment of forgetting we lost as well as the understanding that these museums, as houses of human history, were never meant to be sites for the exhibition of exotic others. They were meant to be locations for helping people better understand the human condition, and thus themselves. (Penny, 2021: 11)

This study, however, traces the rise of what was deemed at the time as the progressive spirit of Liberal Humanism, an ideology that Bastian championed, and which became strongly associated with museum building in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here, ‘liberal humanism’ is used as a term to encapsulate the spirit of an age such terms as museum building, but its progressive agenda and idealism should be understood as thoroughly of its time: Western, ethnocentric, sexist, racist and elitist, and thoroughly problematic by today’s standards of liberalism and humanism. Here I introduce the Vatican’s new museum era that began with the PME in 1925 and incorporated the spirit of mid-nineteenth century Liberal Humanist agendas, which were intent on revealing the unknown world in order to understand it, and the people that inhabit it better. This is contrasted to the late nineteenth century nationalistic and more extreme eugenic-based ideologies that occurred as a by-product of biological evolutionism. The Vatican’s ‘great’ exhibition provides the closing bookend to this study and, although it takes place in 1925, it is asserted here as the last great nineteenth century European exhibition that fulfils the Liberal Humanist agendas from the mid-1800s. The term, museum dynasty, is a vehicle through which we might address the artifice of exhibition to expose cultural transformation beyond nationhood, and cultural identity beyond ethnicity and religion. Asking questions that focus on social interactions of object exchange attempts to see the ethnographic museum as a series of changing relationships that created the many contracts and disputes about belongings. Curators of national museums represent an historical thread, traditionally serving as a mouthpiece of the Establishment. Any historical study of bygone eras should include 7

See Penny (2021) for an extensive study of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum and the work of Adolf Bastian and Alexander von Humboldt.

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the challenge of understanding the actions of their predecessors’ policies within the cultural norms of the time. The origins of nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographic museums in the Western Hemisphere lie firmly in the colonial era; actions and attitudes of the colonial era are currently at the centre of a move to decolonise the museum. It has been suggested that historical artefacts beyond the museum, such as statues to men of power from an era with which our current society no longer identifies, should be destroyed, and collections from other cultures and nations, previously under colonial control or influence, should be repatriated. Here I consider these tensions with the concept of the dynastic nature of museum creation and legacies of empire in mind. Museums were places of interest for the leisure classes of Europe; they served as a space for thought and contemplation by those who had the time to engage in the exhibits on display. However, the museum was also a public display of philanthropy and social reform with a mission to educate. An extension of the colonial fair and the temporary exhibition, the museum became a place for permanent displays, a place to see and be seen, much like the opera and the theatre, and as a rule, if the rituals of the museum visit were adhered to, almost everyone was welcome. The institutional European ethnographic museum is a product of a series of networks that merged evangelical empires, colonial empires and nation states. Understanding the history of the ethnographic museum within a dynastic framework and drawing on an entangled history of evangelical and colonial relationships with objects and people, we are prompted to consider the mutual influences of object-related power relations within a range of political, social and anthropological histories. Nowadays, the national European ethnographic museum is, in many cases, an extreme example of tensions that exist between the heard and the unheard, as its collections highlight the political, economic and historical differences between the collectors, curators and the societies they seek to represent. The argument, which is elaborated upon throughout this book, uses examples of European ethnographic exhibitions, and those enterprises associated with the visual culture in the context of the time. I propose to maintain the conceit that museums are always influenced by their creators’ original agendas and are thus tied to their dynastic heritage if they continue to exhibit the same collections to the same set of audiences. We cannot change history, or histories, but we can broaden debates around collections and their original and contemporary contexts by discussing their constant re appropriations with a wider set of stakeholders. The contradictions that emerge through the dynamics of dialogue and polylogue create and release tensions and lived experience spawned from cultural pillage and transformation. Understanding the success and failure of the aims of Liberal Humanism, as a reason for the rise and fall of the ethnographic museum in Europe between 1851 and 1929, is a pathway upon which we tread to understand how closely linked museums are to the political and socially climate of their day. When observing debates about postcolonialism, and the fate of the European ethnographic museum in the twentieth century, it is worth considering the details at a more granular level. The period of history in which we understand to be that of European colonial expansion was made up of different forces of enterprise; some

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were indeed a national endeavour to expand territory and control economic markets, but others were of an intellectual kind. In Germany, two influential figures could have changed the course of history if their ideas had been upheld by the end of the nineteenth century: Alexander von Humboldt and Adolf Bastian. Penny reminds us that: Bastian knew the power of objects. He also knew that knowledge, science and display should not be divided. He knew that his museum had to be more than a municipal or national display, more than a statement of grandeur- static, didactic, and, to his mind, boring. The central point of drawing together those hundreds of thousands of objects was to allow to interact through juxtapositions that would be dynamic, active, enlightening. The point was to have the objects teach us to see, to have them teach us about the areas of human history for which there are few or no written records. The point was to use the visual displays to help locate the consistencies that cut across the endless variations in humanity. (Penny, 2021: 10)

In many ways, the projects of Humboldt and his pupil, Bastian, had similar ideological problems as those of today’s ethnographic museums. They knew that possessing objects alone was futile if they had no clear method in which to display them for the purpose of the production of knowledge; a knowledge that could only reveal itself by creating a forum of debate that included many voices. But this pluralism of voice was to be explored much later and attitudes of the time were far from egalitarian, and their promise of the museum as a place to use objects to open minds, was not to be. After Bastian’s death in 1905, another set of agendas took precedence in Germany, and the first age of the Museum Era, ended as Europe descended into the chaos of war.

Introducing the Pontifical Missionary and Ethnological Museum to the History of Ethnographic Museums Although missionary quests and collections have been included in recent studies of material culture and colonialism, few have inquired as to the hierarchies of missionary collecting, that is, the infrastructure of the Catholic Church and its missions. One of my principal objectives is to demonstrate how the Vatican’s collections represent a unique set of histories that connect the Catholic Church at its highest level to colonial discourses of collecting and curating of non-Western artefacts. The ‘tribe’ in question here is not the present or past inhabitants of New Guinea, for example, provenance of the largest single collections in the PME. Rather it is the highest authority of the Vatican, consisting of the pontiff and his council, and one of its missionary orders, the Society of the Divine Word (abbreviated SVD for the Latin name Societas Verbi Divini). Examining the relations between the apex of the Catholic Church and its missionaries in New Guinea provides us with a perspective where we might consider several layers of colonialism, which occur separately and simultaneously: Europeans had different allegiances, and their presence in New Guinea was largely due to economic, scientific, anthropological and evangelical interest. Christian organisations encountered the colonial administration and the native population already

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there. The SVD were not the first missionaries to venture to New Guinea; indeed, the London Missionary Society and the Methodists had arrived several years prior to the Catholics. However, the SVD had an important presence in northeast New Guinea between 1900 and 1939: they were successful ship and railway builders, plantation, sawmill and school owners, and it is their story that is relevant to this study. To understand the Vatican’s collection from New Guinea, the largest collection within its Ethnographic Museum, we must consider it in the context of other museum collections gathered from that region during the early twentieth century, such as those made by A. B. Lewis for the Field Museum in Chicago, Beatrice Blackwood’s collection from New Britain for the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, Gregory Bateson’s collection for Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam’s Museum, E. W. Brandes’s collections from the Sepik Region for the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. O’Hanlon (2000) points out that the collecting of artefacts represents agendas beyond the colonial and the local and individual cases have been overlooked in material culture studies to categorise the past; this is certainly the case for the Vatican’s New Guinea collection. However, while the colonisers drew from their colonised subjects for material goods to fill up their museums and prove their anthropological theories, indigenous peoples were not always passive in the process. Each party was continually recategorising the other; it was like a tug-of-war where the mark in the middle was continually being shifted. These localised interactions can be seen as mutual influence that only occurred in the field; this is expanded upon when we learn the missionary approach to collecting and documenting material culture may be far removed from the curator’s approach back in Europe. My case study centres around the collections of the SVD missionary Fr. Franz Kirschbaum (1882–1939); his second collection from New Guinea in 1932 is noteworthy as there was no trading involved. The collection came about as a reaction to colonial and missionary intervention and marked a moment in time when indigenous beliefs were challenged to breaking point. The result was the so-called Christian Awakening when large numbers of indigenous people converted to Christianity and sought to rid themselves of reminders of their traditional ways. When the Sepik River natives threw their sacred objects into the river, they literally threw away their beliefs. Fr. Kirschbaum’s action in collecting them before they sank to the bottom brought about a new set of relationships between the collectors and collected. As a representative of Christianity and ‘collector’ of indigenous belief, he became destroyer and conserver of Sepik heritage. The setting of this study relates to the period of high colonialism and extensive missionary activity worldwide when objects from non-Western domains were flowing into Europe at a faster rate than their receivers could organise them. Regarding the PME of 1925, it was the sheer quantity of artefacts that was impressive to the visitor rather than the distinction between them. Categorisation above the geographical origins of the material was an unnecessary task since the Church’s exhibitors’ aim was to promote the work of the missionaries and not to identify indigenous people’s lives and artefacts. Gardner’s account of the George Brown collection from the Bismarck Archipelago in Hunting the Gatherers (2000) can be compared to Kirschbaum’s collections from the Sepik since both arose from missionary agendas, albeit with

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fundamental differences, and both came to represent a unique contact between the evangeliser and the evangelised. Brown’s scientific agenda and Methodist persuasion can be compared to Kirschbaum’s primarily linguistic agenda and Catholic persuasion. Both used objects to understand the peoples with whom they worked and to further their own knowledge of the natural world. When Brown sent examples of Melanesian shell money from the Bismarck Archipelago to E. B. Tylor, he was contributing to ethnological theory within an evolutionist paradigm of human cultures. Kirschbaum sent his first collection to Fr. Schmidt in 1923 as a contribution to Schmidt’s ethnological understanding of Man’s notion of God, based on a non-linear perspective of human development. Thus, the missionary as field worker contributed to the ordering of Man and its practices from a European perspective. In contrast to the George Brown collection, which has appeared in auction halls three times since the 1970s, most of the original Kirschbaum collection resides in the Vatican’s newly monikered ‘Ethnological Museum’, which is currently inaccessible to scholars. Both Brown and Kirschbaum adhered to scientific agendas but also became pioneers in their profession in setting up mission posts in uncharted territories. Both missionaries are known to have met other well-known travellers and scientists of their day; Brown is linked with von Müeller, Lorimer, Fison, von Hügel and E. B. Tylor. Kirschbaum met A. B. Lewis, E. W. Brandes, Speiser and Gregory Bateson in the field, as well as Schmidt back in the Vatican. Acknowledging intellectual debates surrounding approaches to museum representation and authority, I argue that, while all other Western European ethnographic museums have begun to come to terms with the post-imperial nature of representation, the Vatican’s ethnographic museum lies outside the parameters of Western post-imperial history. While one may talk of a post-colonial world, there are yet no plans afoot for a post-Catholic world. Thus, the histories of the Vatican’s collections cannot be assessed using the same criteria. Here we examine the nature of the ‘Catholicised’ ethnographic object and its place in the history of the Catholic Church, early twentieth-century anthropology, Pacific history, museology and material culture studies. This is primarily an historical study of an era when the discipline of ethnology was used by the Catholic Church to educate missionaries and advance their cause, as well as step into twentieth-century discourses on science and religion. We see how German anthropologists of the mid-to-late nineteenth century grappled with ideas of fixed natural time and Darwinian evolutionism. Furthermore, their concentration on collections and archive fieldwork engendered a Historical-Cultural approach in Vienna, which was influential in early nineteenth-century continental anthropology. When Franz Boas left for America in the early twentieth century, he took with him ideas from the German school of cultural relativism, whereas Wilhelm Schmidt came to represent the Historical-Cultural School, which incorporated Diffusionist ideas and the concept of culture circles. The very nature of these subjects demanded historical contextualisation, and Schmidt always placed his work with an historical framework. The Vatican’s ethnographic collections have often been overlooked in academic studies concerning ethnology and collecting of ethnographic objects; the Church and its missions had a great impact in the collecting of non-Western artefacts before and after the height of colonialism and its famous anthropologists.

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Collections of ethnographic artefacts sent to the Vatican for the PME were offered by as gifts for Pope Pius XI from the local communities where the mission houses were stationed around the world; this included Kirschbaum’s own Sepik collection of 1923, originally housed at his mission station in Rabaul. Fearing it may fall into alien (Australian colonial) hands, he offered it to Schmidt for safekeeping, but attached instructions for its final resting place after the exhibition. Once in Rome the collection joined the thousands of other artefacts from the entire mission world and was organised according to Schmidt’s instructions. They were displayed to represent missionary progress while denying the visitor information of the processes that had enabled the objects to be sent there in the first place. There have been studies made on the missionary and colonial links in every region of the world. Gosden and Knowles define colonialism as a ‘mass of small processes with global effects’ (2001: xix), emphasising challenges European anthropologists and museum curators overcame to produce collections from the Pacific. They talk of the processes of trade and exchange that occurred locally and outline the wider effects on the histories of the collectors and the collected. Hirsch reminds us that the landscape of powers between mission, administration and native was a constant battle, as each strove to achieve different ends: ‘To form a landscape is to form one’s vision of power; one’s vision of persons and places in particular times, and … in particular encounters and contentions’ (2003: 17). In many ways, ethnographic objects arriving at the Vatican from non-European contexts underwent a reversal of this procedure. They underwent a process of desanctification, as in the case of religious artefacts; the detachment from their indigenous communities demystified their original significance. Most of the Kirschbaum collections sent to the PME and the MEML were of a religious nature. Although he acknowledged the singular importance of his communities’ artefacts and attached photographs and notes to them, much of his research was lost or burnt during World War II before it even reached Rome. However, once in the Vatican, the objects were de-elevated, sometimes including rituals similar to exorcism, and functioned only as symbols of missionary progress. Their display, cluttered together with other like or unlike objects, devalued their original status. Since 1925, the Vatican New Guinea objects have not been studied with great attention, and their original purpose in New Guinea, as well as in the Vatican, has long since been forgotten. Finally, I assess the importance of understanding the original agendas of the dynasties in question to understand their legacies as a way to address the ongoing issues outlined in the recent conference in 2019 in Heidelberg. Many of the discussions centred around issues that stemmed from the imperialist agendas of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe: cultural memory and issues surrounding the de-colonisation of objects in the ethnographic museum. While these issues are not new, in the twenty-first century we have witnessed a radical change in agenda for the ethnographic museum and its reconfiguration of displays in some, stress the importance of being seen to have created new priorities that respond to the political, social changes in the European psyche. Rethinking displays and community projects associated with the collections break with the past both in terms of structure and ideology. We have seen a new building at Paris, in the form of the Musée du Quai Branly, the

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rebranded interior of Vienna’s Welt Museum and the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin, all of which hold major national ethnographic collections. Based on discussions held at the 2019 Heidelberg Conference, ethnographic museum curators ongoing issues still purvey the conversations. Treating the symptom of disharmony and intellectual malady in an institution is never enough, as if the cause is unknown the sickness will strike again and could eventually be fatal. Our journey begins with an overview of the concept Liberal Humanism, an ideal of progressive thought that drives the spirit of the age between 1840 and 1900. Drawing from the traditions of Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau and the exploration of ideas during the Age of Enlightenment, Chap. 1 analyses the roots of the modern European ethnographic museum in the international world fairs and exhibitions. As the century progressed, Liberal Humanism inspired considerations of the cultural other, both within Europe and in lands beyond the continent. In conjunction with the growth of industry and technology, a burgeoning middle class, colonial expansion and the rise of nationalism in Europe, Liberal Humanism manifested itself as an expression of the self in the form of International World Fairs and, subsequently, ethnographic museums, in London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. The methods used to organised cultures from other lands and religions at these events influenced the approach of the man who would later curate the PME, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD. Chapter 2 reveals how Schmidt’s ethnology and his desire to establish monotheistic religious origins in humankind, while also celebrating the missionary work for which his order, the Society of the Divine Word, was founded in 1875. Expressing his wishes to hold a missionary exhibition in the same vein as the international events held in Europe’s capitals, his efforts were frustrated by a growing anti-modernist stance from within the Roman Catholic Church. Throughout the years leading up to the PME, Schmidt made a name for himself as a linguist, and he developed his methods of ethnological study so that missionaries could apply them and further his research into Primeval Monotheism and culture circles; in addition, his studies of science and history would contribute to the advancement of the missions. Ultimately, with the election of Pope Pius XI in 1922, Schmidt found a willing supporter, and the time had come for an exhibition like the one Schmidt had always envisaged. Chapter 3 studies the culture of German anthropology in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which can be compared with the culture of Vatican anthropology in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Outlining the structural, cultural and ideological aspects of German anthropology from the 1860s, I draw on similarities with and differences between Wilhelm Schmidt’s Vatican policies a generation later. I argue that, although influenced by the methodology of Fritz Graebner (1877– 1934) and Bernhard Ankermann (1859–1943), who made their mark in German anthropology in 1904 with the creation of the theory of culture circles, Schmidt’s attitude was more akin to that of the older generation, such as Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) and Felix von Luschan (1854–1924). By the early twentieth century, Darwinism dominated, or at least influenced, much of modern science and philosophy, but another more dubious strand of thinking had emerged from physical anthropology that would mark a change of direction in studies

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from museum-based ethnology to racial classification. Schmidt devoted much of his life to maintaining the attitude towards religion and science that was dominant in Germany between 1860 and 1890. While the academic and political climate changed in Germany, Schmidt embodied a former age of progressive humanitarianism and unchallenged Christianity. The SVD played a crucial role in the establishment of the PME, as the largest collection of material sent for the exhibition came from the order’s mission houses in New Guinea. Chapter 4 outlines the SVD’s history in New Guinea, emphasising the juxtaposition of the missions and colonialism that resulted in mutual benefit for both sides. These dynastic networks made the PME possible, and it was the SVD that provided curators for the exhibition and the subsequent museums in the Lateran Palace and then the Vatican Museums, until 1997. As trustees of the Vatican’s ethnographic collections, the SVD effectively ruled as a dynasty over the museum long after Schmidt’s practices held ethnological influence in the collecting or curating of the objects. Crucial to the success of the SVD and the colonial administrations, as well as the conservation of indigenous artefacts in New Guinea, was the presence of Fr. Franz Kirschbaum SVD. Kirschbaum lived and worked in New Guinea from 1906 until his tragic death in a plane crash nearly 34 years later. Trained as a linguist and not as an ethnologist, Kirschbaum nonetheless played a vital role in collecting objects that still form part of the Vatican’s ethnographic collections. Chapter 5 studies Kirschbaum’s significance in the exploratory and missionary expeditions in the Sepik River Valley. It is important to gain some insight into Kirschbaum’s character and role in New Guinea during the time he was collecting to understand the exact circumstances in which the objects were found, while also gaining insight into why the labelling and notes in the current archive are so inconsistent. He was greatly admired by all with whom he came into contact, and his death was deeply mourned. Chapter 6 brings together these major players in the foundation of the PME. In response to Schmidt’s requests for objects and information, a series of letters reveals the relationship and varying agendas of archivists like Schmidt in Rome and those out in the field like Kirschbaum in New Guinea; in addition, the correspondence reveals Kirschbaum’s attitude towards the purpose of the PME and the MEML and how differently his priorities regarding the objects in his collections were to those organising the displays. In fact, after cooperating at the outset, one letter demonstrates that Kirschbaum had become impatient with requests from Rome and was unwilling to sacrifice a lifetime of fieldwork to support the ethnological theories of his colleagues in Europe. This chapter delves into the correspondence of the key players and discovers the entangled agendas of the collectors and curators. It also provides some explanation about the state of the Kirschbaum collections in the Vatican museums today. Coming towards the end of the path, Chap. 7 studies Schmidt’s ideology behind the displays of the PME of 1925, especially his theories of Primeval Monotheism and his quest for ethnology to serve the missions and the faith. I address the question of how successful the exhibition was, in terms of fulfilling its goals and establishing a legacy, or dynasty, of the Church’s presence and influence. Included is an overview

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of the structure and organisation of the PME according to the official accounts of the exhibition, and the collections that it contained. I will address the question of why the PME, although taking place a quarter of the way through the twentieth century, should be considered the last Great Exhibition of the nineteenth century. At the time of the closure of the PME in 1926, work had already begun on the establishment of a permanent Pontifical Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Lateran Palace in Rome; however, the Golden Age of the Western ethnographic museum was coming to an end. Chapter 8 explores how, despite the eradication of most of Europe’s great empires by the end of World War I, in Rome in the 1920s, evangelical and imperial aspirations became aligned as the Roman Catholic Church sought to hail the success of its missions, and Benito Mussolini’s (1883–1945) Italy harked back to the days of Ancient Rome to establish his imperial vision of the country. It can be argued that the PME and the MEML helped pave the way for the concordat signed on 11 February 1929, between the Holy See and Mussolini’s Government, establishing statehood for the Vatican and reinstating Catholicism as the state religion of the kingdom. A study of the ideology and organisation of the MEML also reveals how Pius XI had broken from Vatican tradition by placing so much emphasis on the role missionaries had played in the history of science in his new museum. A brief epilogue provides a historical overview of the legacy of the Vatican’s ethnographic collections and ethnological museums, including the closure of the MEML in 1963, the incorporation of the Missionary and Ethnological Museum into the Vatican Museums (MEMV) in 1973, subsequent closures and openings to public viewing and, finally, the eradication of the missions from the story of the museum, in the recently renamed Ethnological Museum, Anima Mundi. As stated above, while we live in a post-colonial era, we should not forget the origins of the Vatican’s collections, nor the missionaries who acted as destroyer and preserver of objects from an entanglement of relationships they had on their travels. They sat in many camps, both figuratively and literally: they represented the colonial trader; the foreign explorer; the private entrepreneur; the scientist; the linguist; the confidant; the outsider and the insider; and most importantly to them, the person who would influence their belief systems. In their quest to evangelise, the missionary translated and interpreted material culture both ways, and their influence and legacies live on in many museums and private collections around the world.

References Appadurai, A. (Ed.). 1986. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press. Barrett, C. E. (2017). Egypt in Roman visual and material culture. In G. Williams (Ed.), Oxford handbook online: Classical studies. Oxford University Press. Barringer, T., & Flynn, T. (1997). Colonialism and the object: Empire, material culture and the museum. Routledge. Butler, S. R. (2000). The politics of exhibiting culture: Legacies and possibilities. Museum Anthropology, 23(3), 74–92.

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Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: 20th century ethnography, literature and art. Harvard UP. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.) (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press. Edwards, E., & Mead, M. (2013). Absent histories and absent images: Photographs, museums and the colonial past. Museum and Society, 11(1), 19–38. Gardner, H. (2000). Gathering for god: George Brown and the Christian economy in the collection of artefacts. In M. O’Hanlon, & R. L. Welsch (Eds.), Hunting the gatherers: Ethnographic collectors, agents and agency in melanesia (1870s–1930s). Berghahn. Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford University Press. Gosden, C., & Knowles. C (2001). Collecting colonialism. Berg. Hendry, J. (1995). Wrapping culture: Politeness, presentation and power in Japan and other societies. Clarendon. Hirsch, E. (2003). A landscape of powers in highland Papua, c. 1899–1918. History and Anthropology, 14(1), 3–22. Hoskins, J. (1998). Biographical objects: How things tell the stories of people’s lives. Routledge. Jones, A. L. (1993). Exploding canons: The anthropology of museums. Annual Review of Anthropology, 22, 201–220. Lavine, S. D., & Karp, I. (Eds.) (1991). Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of the museum display. Smithsonian Books. O’Hanlon, M., & Welsch, R. L. (Eds.) (2000). Hunting the gatherers: Ethnographic collectors, agents and agency in Melanesia (1870s–1930s). Berghahn. Peers, L., & Brown, A. (Eds.). (2003). Museums and source communities. Routledge. Glenn, P. H. (2002). Objects of culture: Ethnology and ethnographic museums in imperial Germany. University of North Carolina Press. Glenn, P. H. (2021). In Humboldt’s shadow: A tragic history of German ethnology. Princeton University Press. Glenn, P. H., & Bunzl, M. (Eds.) (2003). Worldly provincialism: German anthropology in the ages of empire. University of Michigan Press. Penny, G., & Rinke, S. (2015). Germans abroad: Respatializing German narrative. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 41, 173–196. Pinney, C. (2006). Four types of visual culture. In C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Küchler, M. Rowlands, & P. Spyer (Eds.), The handbook of material culture. Sage Publications. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/ 9781848607972.n9. Pinney, C., & Thomas, N. (Eds.) (2001). Beyond aesthetics: Art and the technologies of enchantment. Routledge. Price, S. (1989). Primitive art in civilized places. University of Chicago Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books. Stocking, G. (1968). Race, culture and evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. The Free Press. Stocking, G. (1985). Objects and others: Essays museums and material culture. University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G. (1987). Victorian anthropology. The Free Press. Stocking, G. (1992). The ethnographer’s magic and other essays in the history of anthropology. University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G. (1995). After Tylor: British social anthropology, 1888–1951. University of Wisconsin Press. Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled objects: Exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press. Thomas, N. (2016). The return of curiosity: What museums are good for in the 21st century. Reaktion. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press. Van Keuren, D. K. (1989). Cabinets and culture: Victorian anthropology and the museum context. Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, 25(1), 26–39.

Contents

1 The Ethnographic Exhibit as a Showcase of Liberal Humanism in Nineteenth-Century Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Liberal Humanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 International Exhibitions and World Fairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 The Great Exhibition of 1851 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Musée Du Palais Trocadéro in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Kunsthistorisches and Welt Museum in Vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Berlin’s Industrial Exhibition of 1896 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.7 The Unification of Italy and the Captivus Vaticani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 4 6 8 11 14 15 19

2 The Making of the Vatican’s ‘Modern’ Museum Dynasty: The Ethnology of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Primeval Monotheism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Schmidt and Kulturkreise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Schmidt’s Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 23 24 27 33

3 Old and New Dynastic Orders: German Anthropology in the Era of Bismarck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Structure and Culture of German Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 German Physical Anthropology 1860–1910 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Failure of Virchow’s Craniology and Rise of Neo-Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Comparisons of the GAS and Schmidt’s Vatican Ethnology . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Dynastic Networks: The Collision of Christianity and Colonialism in New Guinea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The SVD and Its Founder, St. Arnold Janssen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The SVD in New Guinea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Colonial and Missionary Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35 37 41 43 44 50 53 54 55 56

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4.4 Plantations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Railways, Ships and Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 World War I and the Inter-War Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Fr. Franz Kirschbaum’s Contribution to Collecting in New Guinea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Kirschbaum, the Collector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Kirschbaum in New Guinea: Missionary and Explorer . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Kirschbaum and the US Agricultural Exhibition to New Guinea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 A Retrospective Account of the SVD in New Guinea . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Kirschbaum’s Final Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 58 59 60 62 63 64 66 70 72 73 75

6 Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters . . . . 6.1 Instructions and Ethological Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Guidelines for Collecting Material Culture for the PME . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Kirschbaum’s Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Preparations for the MEML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Letters Concerning the Kirschbaum Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 78 80 81 83 88

7 The Pontifical Missionary Exhibition (1925): The Last Great Nineteenth-Century Exhibition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Official Accounts of the PME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Centralisation of the Missions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 The Scientific Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Structure of the PME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 The Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.6 The Ideology of the Displays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.7 Beyond the PME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95 96 98 100 102 103 105 108 113

8 Empires End and Ominous Beginnings: The Missionary and Ethnological Museum (1927) and the Lateran Treaty (1929) . . . . 8.1 The ‘Self’ of the Vatican: An Ideological ‘Self’ Versus a Cultural ‘Self’ and the Distinction Between Western Ethnographic Museums and Missionary and Ethnographic Museums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 An Outline of the Structure, Collections and Displays of the MEML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 An Outline and Tour of the Museum According to Wilhelm Schmidt’s Lateran Guidebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Pius and Schmidt’s Achievements and Failures in the MEML . . . . . 8.6 The Aesthetic and the Scientific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115

118 121 122 124 125 127 135

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Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

About the Author

Alison L. Kahn was trained as Anthropologist at the universities of London (M.A.) and Oxford (M.Phil., D.Phil.). She works in the digital archive management sector and in academia, lecturing on documentary filmmaking and museum anthropology. She integrates the use of audio-visual artifacts and digital media as tools and products of her research. Her area of study includes the Vatican’s ethnographic collections and colonial and post-colonial discourses in India, focusing on Naga material culture in European museums and Anglo-Indian global diasporas. Alison is Director of the Oxford Documentary Film Institute, Visiting Fellow in Digital Learning Systems at Loughborough University, and Senior Tutorial Fellow in Museum Anthropology at Stanford University’s Overseas Program in Oxford. Her research portfolio spans across museum curatorship, digital learning, and collaborative ethnographic filmmaking. Her current research investigates how children engage with multimedia activities, including: film, AI, and online learning platforms.

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Vertumnus (1591) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, showing Rudolph II (1552–1612), Holy Roman Emperor from 1576, as Vertumnus, ancient Roman god of seasons who presided over gardens. World History Archive

Chapter 1

The Ethnographic Exhibit as a Showcase of Liberal Humanism in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Liberal Humanism came about in the nineteenth century due to the rise of the middle classes, the Industrial Revolution and the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment; the spirit of the age that included positivist and materialist approaches to scientific knowledge, formed the overarching political and intellectual foundations of the ethnographic museum in Europe. The forerunners of these museums take the form of international world fairs from 1851 to 1900. This chapter discusses the ideological origins of these events in the context of four major European powers: The British Empire, the French Empire and subsequent Third Republic, the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I turn to the rise of nationalism in the Italian Peninsula and the Kingdom of Italy, which had a profound effect on the Papacy. Once Italy was established as a new nation of Italy, the papacy self-imposed a retreat from the world between 1871 and 1922 in what was known as captivus vaticanus—imprisoned in the Vatican; the establishment of the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition of 1925 demarcated a fresh narrative that would secure the place of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century.

1.1 Liberal Humanism Liberal Humanism is defined here as a philosophical and cultural movement that places humankind and freedom of choice and existence at the centre of the universe. This slow-burning concept that articulated a set of social and individual values and which upheld inalienable human rights of existence was lit during the Renaissance, when a revived interest in Ancient Greek and Roman ideas questioned the medieval scholasticism that had dominated European ideology for many centuries. Liberal Humanism is a term that evokes the often contradictory historical trajectory of the development of the discourses and institutions built on the works and treatises commonly associated with John Locke (1632–1704), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_1

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and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788).1 We recall John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government in 1689 in which he stated that a political society was essential for the sake of protecting the individual welfare of its people in the phrase ‘life, liberty and property’; these he considered inalienable rights of Man. The liberal element of the rationale was based on certain notions of freedoms of the individual and were redefined and problematised by other political philosophers, such as Hobbes, who counterargues that life without some form of absolute ruler would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, believing that Man did not hold any innate form of morality. While Hobbes’s theory in his social contract supports an absolute sovereign without giving value to the individual within the state, Rousseau takes the middle path between his predecessors and argues for shared power between the constitutionalism of Locke and the absolutism of Hobbes. From Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange used philosophy as a weapon to overthrow what he considered to be a tyrannical regime to become King William III (1689–1702), through to Lafayette in the late eighteenth century when the French monarchy was eradicated in the French Revolution, social reformers and revolutionaries in Europe justified political agitation with liberal philosophy. Intellectual freedom and social equality came in fits and starts across Europe, but after the French Revolution a new dial was set as monarchies adopted new forms of shared governance with a wider electorate who sought freedoms that included free speech and participation in affairs of state. This devolved power emphasised free markets and a laissez-faire approach to trade and commerce, enabling individual profit from industry, and it influenced reforms in institutions such as prisons, schools and factories. Reformist ideals came from all sections of society, notably Protestant groups, such as the Quakers and the Methodists, all of which began to change society from the grass roots up and from the monarchy down, through to the university and the established Church in the city and the province. By the mid-nineteenth century a wave of unrest swept across the continent, significantly for this study, in France, the German states, the Austrian Empire and the Italian states; uncoordinated in character, but ideologically connected, an epidemic of uprisings led by the disenfranchised workers and liberal socialist agitators marked 1848 1

In Locke’s Two Treatises on Natural Law and Natural Rights Men he claimed that Men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made people all subject to a monarch, and that ‘People have rights to life, liberty and prosperity’ (..) Hobbes, an English political philosopher laid theoretical grounds for a social contract at the level of government between the State and the People. He proposed a ‘science of morality’ in his Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil of 1651, although he still believed in certain ‘absolutist’ powers of a leader. This was an essential standpoint as he saw the blamed that ideas of freedom for all had led to religious and anti-establishment revolutions such as the Reformation and the English Civil War (1642–1649). He believed that the ‘state of Nature’ could descend into chaos which ‘was of all against all’ (…) He famously asserted that life is ‘poor nasty, brutish and short’ (…). Jean-Jacques Rousseau is always associated with the Age of Enlightenment and his work, The Social Contract 1762 made an great impact which influenced the French Revolution of 1789. In this work he developed a theory for conservative socialism, which was a form of direct democracy, as be witnessed, ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is chains’ (…). His work also influenced the American Declaration of Independence.

1.1 Liberal Humanism

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as a turning point in European politics. In the period we focus on here, we see various forms of liberalism taking place across Europe; as an ideological weapon of workers’ unions, it was used against what they believed to be archaic forms of imperial rule out of touch with the masses. The liberal political class pushed for reform spurred on by social and cultural progress engendered by the industrial revolution. Liberal Humanism became a dominant ideology of the intellectual classes and pervaded European monarchies and universities from the 1840s, reaching its zenith in the 1880s when many museums were built to exhibit new classification systems encased within Eurocentric hierarchies. Furthermore, although each European country experienced its own form of Liberal Humanist ideologies in the nineteenth century, it is worth considering that there was an acknowledgement by the ruling class that built them that museums were institutions that could help educate and fascinate a new ‘middling class’. These people would then influence a poorer working class, and as a result, create a larger, literate, urban class. Arcimboldo’s painting Vertumnus embodies many of the ideas in this book. His composition, a portrait of the Habsburg ruler Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612), incorporates exotic specimens of fruit, corn, and eggplant in a cornucopia of abundance, all of which were rare cultivars from the New World and beyond. The masterpiece, produced near the end of the painter’s life, exposes a scientific fluency that pays tribute to his patron’s curiosity in the new disciplines of botany, zoology and natural sciences. The Habsburgs were great collectors, founding the Kunstkammer, a predecessor of the modern museum, and Rudolf’s descendants would go on to collect thousands of artefacts, curiosities, specimens and examples of ethnographica over the next 300 years as a result of exploration and trade with the wider world. These collections would remain privy to the imperial family and its visitors until the nineteenth century, when another Habsburg, Emperor Franz Josef (1848–1916), would create bespoke museums for the purpose of exhibiting these treasures to the public. Arcimboldo’s painting is of a playful nature, in tune with the spirit of the Renaissance, at once obscure as it needs some sophistication to decode the imagery, but also appealing to the eye in its vibrancy, due to a sumptuous use of colour, exaggerating in caricature an absurd reference to his patron. Having been part of the Habsburg dynasty for two generations, Arcimboldo’s eccentric character and mannerist style of painting would have been familiar to his benefactor, who would have shared in his fascination with the new, the rare and the wonderful. Eventually Arcimboldo’s own work would be immortalised as part of the Habsburg’s Kunstkammer collections, which would endure the same twists of fate of its owners, and ultimately survive over the next three centuries. Arcimboldo’s work embraces the themes of religious and secular empires, European expansionism and colonialism, classification and taxonomies of objects, and the scientific and artistic endeavours of its day, all of which would be factors that would eventually challenge Europe’s medieval values determined by a Catholic ruling class of popes, kings and emperors. Vertumnus is also the very end of this study, which sees the disintegration of European empires, the disempowerment of the Catholic Church and the disillusionment of the Liberal Humanist agendas that were put into motion during the Renaissance. Arcimboldo’s work, rediscovered by the art world

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in the late nineteenth century, was re-appropriated for a new generation and became the inspiration to the Surrealist painters of the 1920s. For them it depicts another side of history: the failure of Liberal Humanism and the breakdown of Western society. Rudolf’s portrait is seen to reflect the profligacy of the human form, now dissected into absurd fragments. Vertumnus represents the cycle of life. In Roman mythology he is the god of seasons, change and plant growth, along with gardens and fruit trees; he is the fitting symbol of the beginning and end of a book about dynasties. In this case dynastic enterprise is not just linked with the lines of royal houses or papal descendance; it refers to a of line of thought that stems from sixteenth-century Europe with the rebirth and connection to the so-called Golden Age of Greek and Roman civilisation and its continuing influence on philosophical and theological thought through to the twentieth century. In the same way that Vertumnus symbolises the material abundance of exotic collections from the New World in the form of a painting, this study investigates a new medium of representation that would embody Europe’s classical and medieval heritage: the modern national ethnographic museum. Built in the late nineteenth century in the most influential capitals in Europe, specifically London, Vienna, Paris and Berlin, the ethnographic museum would preside over these cities alongside other national museums dedicated to art and natural science and accommodating the princely and missionary collections amassed since the Renaissance. Museums of ethnology created in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century were built as architectural monuments in the image of both cathedral and palace to imitate the architecture of Europe’s secular and spiritual rulers. These dynasties of rule would come under significant threat by the mid-nineteenth century as a series of disconnected popular uprisings created a chain reaction in many of the countries in Europe where workers, sometimes encouraged by the liberal elite, expressed mounting dissatisfaction with laws that denied them individual human and civil rights. Europeans were on the move, itching to get footholds in the institutions and societies that held power and influence. Amidst all this disruption, perhaps despite it, or probably as a result of it, the building of national museums, and in particular, ethnographic museums, in the major capitals of Europe and its associated universities became a political objective for kings and governments. This chapter discusses the ideas that contributed to the Liberal Humanist agenda that manifested itself in the international world fairs and national ethnographic museums built to house the objects that would represent the ideals and achievements that a liberal agenda had brought in the form of communication technologies, crafting of raw materials and social reform.

1.2 International Exhibitions and World Fairs Preceding the public ethnographic museums were the international world fairs and universal exhibitions, putting Liberal Humanism into practice. ‘World fairs were central modes of self-representation and self-admiration for the industrial capitalist

1.2 International Exhibitions and World Fairs

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societies of the nineteenth century’ (Steinmetz, 2017: 47). A middle-class white European walking around one of these international fairs would be forgiven for thinking that a relative peace had dawned upon Europe, and life for the masses was improving in terms of health, prosperity and happiness. Wars were being waged elsewhere, and opportunities and liberties were beginning to emerge for an individual born into a family of no great wealth, status or education. However, it is important to remind ourselves that Europe is not, and never has been, a homogenous culture, but one made up of diverse groups who differ in language, religion, class, traditions and in many other cultural specificities according to dialects and customs born out of broader political and geographical entities. The world fairs created a space for Europeans to see each other for the first time in an urban setting; in this way, many of the groups indigenous to the nation met on mutually foreign ground: the city. This arrangement of artificial phenomena represented a mutually unfamiliar space, one that was also unfamiliar to the urban dweller who saw his city become a stage complete with sideshows of unknown activities. Cycling and balloon racing were the pastimes of the rich but became popular sites of curiosity for all to witness; other sites would be glamorous, fit for the kings and queens who would also pass through. The most awe-striking would be the modern machinery on display. It is hard to imagine what a peasant from a rural village would have thought of the ‘moving sidewalk’, or the impression the Eiffel Tower made on its first appearance at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. Along with uncommon sites were uncommon people, and everyone was on show. These fairs would be the site of first contact where sets of Europeans intermingled. Different classes of Europeans saw each other as the cultural ‘other’ within European society. A ‘foreigner’ might have been someone from a different part of town, different region, different dialect, different religion, or different Christian church. Communities were smaller, and the provinces would have a different sense of society than the urban dwellers in every class. Sets of families made up small tribes and the tribes of Europe found themselves under different rulers. The foreigner came from another village, and for the illiterate, an average worldview was rarely made up of a perspective beyond the borders of country, unless one was a member of the ruling class, a trader or a seaman. Women would not have travelled far unless they were a member of the aristocracy or had some association with people from other walks of life. Women of all classes led very different lives to their male counterparts even if they shared the same domestic space. There were equal inequalities and unequal equalities between social groups across Europe based on wealth and power; and to add to the entanglements of cultural otherness, tiny groups of privileged individuals, associated with the intellectual classes, set about creating a new set of classifications for humankind based on ethnocentric ideas connecting material wealth to degrees of ‘civilisation’ as defined by the elite few. Darwin’s theory of evolution had upturned scholastic understanding of the origin of the human species, which led to a European fixation on origins. Classification systems demanded justification in terms of heritage, provenance, linear attribution and authentication in history and family dynasty. Material culture, custom and appearance of humankind was pinned on the body of knowledge emerging from a

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Europe that was trying to come to terms with new empirical disciplines that tested and drew conclusions on the natural and scientific world underlined, but not defined by, a Judeo-Christian traditional belief system. This rigid sets of taxonomies and classification systems imposed from above often set a misleading pseudoscientific basis for human categorisation in terms of development and established an evolutionary historical timeline to organise the world from savage to civilised, heathen to monotheistic. Different ethnographic museums would put varied emphases on certain aspects of material culture in relation to small-scale and large-scale societies. They simplified ethnicities into regions and most museums were set up in a geographical ordering to be identified easily on a map of the world by the not-specialist visitor. Other systems, such as typological displays, were used by other ethnographic curators, notably in the Pitt Rivers Museum, where objects were displayed in accordance with their type and function.

1.3 The Great Exhibition of 1851 Setting the standard for the first international showcase of material culture was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in the purpose-built wonder structure that was the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park. The event was a great success and set the gold standard for the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, in terms of grandeur, aesthetics, artefact and international relations. The Crystal Palace, made of wrought iron, steel and glass, became the architectural symbol of Britain’s stature in the world and was reconstructed after the exhibition in Sydenham, south of the Thames, as a permanent fixture on London’s horizon. It heralded in an era of mass entertainment and cultural exchange that would last another seventy years. It became not just a great exhibition, but the Great Exhibition and was a landmark of technological showmanship and international prestige that brought international trade relations to the centre of the British Empire: London. The establishment of the Royal Commission under Prince Albert in 1850 was a significant step towards dealing with the scale of the project. Occurring at the height of the colonial period and revealing the material results of the Industrial Revolution the Exhibition needed a clear set of protocols for the collecting and curating of the objects that would eventually be accepted by international contributors. This amalgamation of cultural and economic knowledge would influence generations. Its objects would populate the minds of everyone who visited, and its atmosphere would witness the first cultural and trade space to see the Queen, country, imperial subjects and international allies meet under the same roof. It was an unprecedented gathering of people from different classes, creeds and social standing that connected the human mind and body within one context and one cultural experience. This shared cultural experience boosted the influence of the monarchy and drew together social and economic agendas in an explicit way that cemented the core values of the modern Victorian: progressive science, religious moderation and social purpose. It would also be the most documented exhibition of all-time, amassing thousands

1.3 The Great Exhibition of 1851

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of publications, photographs and objects, notwithstanding the accounts of the royal site it occupied in Hyde Park and the original structure it inhabited as a landmark architectural feature of the Industrial age. One of the criticisms of the Great Exhibition at the time was that it did not address the plight of the working classes and appeared to some as mere British grandstanding and a display of patriotism. Having arrived in London in 1849 in exile, Karl Marx (1818–1883) witnessed the construction of the Crystal Palace, labelling it a ‘pantheon in which the bourgeoisie had erected gods in its own image and was now worshipping them’ (Piggott 2004: 24). The urban and peasant working classes were the cultural other within Europe; the foreign non-European was the cultural other from without. The audience of the Great Exhibition was an interesting ethnographic experiment in itself, as it shuffled together different social classes of the British nation for the first time ever under the same roof. Before the Great Exhibition had gone ahead there were reservations among the British elite which were addressed at the level of Parliament. Some felt that the event would bring too many foreigners to London, which would overwhelm the city and bring in disease from abroad. There was also a concern that the so-called dangerous classes, that is to say, the working-classes, would be a threat to the peace of Britain. Europe was still reeling from the uprisings that had exploded around Europe in 1848, and many reformers had escaped to London, which had not experienced such violence or rebellion. Karl Marx benefitted from the comparative freedom of expression that London allowed him as an exile from the Continent. A libertine himself, he sought refuge for his family after the revolutions in Europe in 1848 had provoked violence and retribution. For the most part, the Great Exhibition succeeded in its purpose as being a British expression of an age of utilitarianism, social reform and ambitious enterprise, organised with the blessing of its monarch and Church, both distinctly separated from the turmoil being experienced by its neighbours across the Channel. The British were seen as largely non-violent progressives by their radical counterparts, and the new institution of ‘Bobbies’ who policed the streets without guns or sharp-edged weapons became ambassadors of a Britain in relative control over its dominion. The worry about imminent disorder and chaos in London was dispelled by the overwhelming attendance of the event and with order being maintained on the streets. The public opinion of the Crystal Palace, which had been paid for by the British public themselves through a penny tax on every household, was deemed worthy of the nation’s efforts, and nationalism and pride in the British accomplishments of the Industrial Revolution overcame dissent. This unchartered territory of social intermingling at the Crystal Palace proved to its European brethren that the British system functioned peacefully, as different sections of society wandered through the great halls and galleries of the exhibition. Even before confronting the exhibits themselves on display the most interesting element of the display were the visitors themselves. As we have seen with the Crystal Palace in London, which paved the way for numerous other museums in London’s fashionable Westend, the origins of the Musée de L’Homme, situated at the heart of Paris’s most desirable arrondissement, the imperial Habsburg museums in Vienna and the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, the establishment of museum buildings to house the growing ethnographic collections

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in Europe grew substantially and ostentatiously in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is important to remind ourselves that the cultural other was seen by the ruling classes as anything that was not part of their own class, and the elite groups that ruled Europe was a small, powerful interconnected group that was vehemently opposed to allowing positions of influence or power to fall into the hands of those who did not fulfil the requirements of their selective membership criteria; and if you were not white, male, landed or part of a scholarly enterprise that could reach funds and benefactors, you were the cultural other. In the case of the legacies of the cultural classes, the poor leave little if anything behind. Their possessions in many cases have been seen as not worthy of collecting. Only the guilds that had been set up as a form of trade union for the craftsmen would have collected some of their own traditional objects, but European families who did not own property, which was most of them, lived and died leaving nothing behind. It was simply a social fact that these people were seen by the social elite as inconsequential. The Crystal Palace gave hope of a better future for all as anyone who could afford a shilling, an affordable sum for a worker who saved up, could enter an arena for the first time and be part of the audience; it is the first time in which all people, despite their class, colour or creed, could be part of a visiting public and be seen in a leisure activity. The Great Exhibition, and its subsequent museum, the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, became a forum where working class people could perform other roles and become part of the exhibited event out in front of the displays, peering in for the first time. This was a stark contrast to their normal roles in Victorian England, providing a visual and physical manifestation of the Liberal Humanist ideas that were previously only conceptual, untested realities.

1.4 Musée Du Palais Trocadéro in Paris While the Great Exhibition was the grandest international fair to date, France already had a history of internal regional fairs that can be traced back to the eighteenth century. The first official national ‘expos’ were spearheaded by the Marquis d’Aveze, the Commissioner of the late Royal Manufactories of the Grobelins, of Sevres and of the Savonnerie. Discussions began as early as 1757, finally coming to realisation after the French Revolution in 1798, with a second one in 1801, which took place ‘in the quadrangle of the Louvre, under elegant porticos prepared for the occasion’ (A Guide to The Great Exhibition, 1854: 4). In February 1849, M. Buiffet, the French Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, had put the idea forward to the Chambers of Commerce of France, suggesting that products of skill in agriculture and manufactures from neighbouring nations should be admitted to their approaching exposition, and asked the opinion of the manufacturers upon the subject. Britain pipped the French to the post but would return the compliment of France’s participation at the London event by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s presence at France’s first international world fair in 1855. This act of friendship and commitment to France’s aspirations sealed

1.4 Musée Du Palais Trocadéro in Paris

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an Anglo-French alliance, and, significantly, it was the first time a British monarch has set foot in France since 1422. The world exhibition had become a stage upon which international relations at the highest level would be played out, and by the 1855 Fair in Paris there were new political backdrops that influenced the event; the Second French Empire had been declared in 1852 and Emperor Napoleon III (1852–1870) seized the opportunity to showcase French progress. He possibly hoped it would also legitimise his regime’s existence abroad. The French would hold five international expositions in their capital during this period: 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900. The fairs of 1855 and 1867 were imperial affairs, whereas the remaining three took place under the Third French Republic. The 1889 Exhibition was boycotted by countries with monarchs as it celebrated the centenary of the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution, which witnessed the overthrow and execution of King Louis XVI (1774–1792) and Marie Antoinette (1775–1792). The 1900 Exposition Universelle was held in conjunction with the second modern Olympic Games. Each represented a Eurocentric view of the world. The precursor of the Musée de l’Homme, the Trocadéro Museum (Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro) was housed in the Palais du Trocadéro at the close of the Universal Exhibition of 1878, where temporary exhibits of indigenous smallscale societies from non-European origins were featured as part of the attraction and entertainment for visitors. Villages were filled with imported people from French colonies of Senegal, Tonkin, and Tahiti, which stood as a metonymy and metaphor for France’s imperial dominions and power. At the Universal Exhibition of 1889, live exhibits of indigenous cultures from France’s empire were displayed. Villages from Java were recreated, streets of Cairo were rebuilt and a bazaar from India was replicated. These exhibits stood to present a commercialised exoticism, as native villages drew in audiences and blurred the boundaries between commercial enterprise, anthropological study and colonial power. The reconstructions of native villages combined the image of economic progress with the new science of anthropology and a form of entertainment that was attractive to the visitors of the exhibition. In France, there was considerable radical thought boiling under the surface, and anthropology as a discipline and a scientific movement influenced a public beyond the elite intellectual circles of the universities. One of the main sources of the spread of a new radical form of scientific humanism was the Paris World’s Fair of 1889 where leaflets and exhibits of plaster-caste human brains were displayed to promote the ideas of the Society of Mutual Autopsy. The anticlerical, phrenological-based propositions of the Society were introduced by August Coudereau at a meeting of the Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris, ‘an institution widely acknowledged as the international centre of anthropological studies’ (Hecht, 2003: 9). The founding members included Paul Broca, who contributed to the establishment’s prestige and authority by adding a laboratory, a school, a museum, and a library. Many members were leading professors in anthropology whose expertise lay in medicine, economics, demographics, linguistics, archaeology, art and aesthetics. They bonded in a new progressively styled society by sharing similar views on politics; they advocated feminism and socialism, they were anticlerical, particularly

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anti-Catholic, and they believed that science would rid the world of meddling priests, raise the status of women in society and improve the standard of living for all. Members offered each other their corpses to use to further the study of the human brain; they felt it misleading to science that the bodies of the poor were the only ones being dissected by scientists of the day, and no one had any idea who they were or how their material afterlife corresponded to how they were during life. This material distinction between the bodies of the white European working-classes in relation to the privileged classes represents another illustration of how the poor were seen as ‘other’, with no voice in life or death, and were used for scientific means without their permission, and with complete disregard for their spiritual beliefs. ‘In leaving their bodies to the society, members were rejecting the power of religion to invest meaning in their death’ (14). These progressive liberals felt that they should offer their own bodies up for the sake of scientific progress, but it must be remembered that they chose to do this; if their body parts were pickled and displayed for view in a museum, it was with their name and life’s work attached, ‘requesting that the “scientifically useful” parts of their bodies not only be examined and discussed but also preserved and publicly displayed’ (14). Their ‘heroic’ decision, it could be argued, was not just to be dissected, but to be preserved in a museum, which guaranteed within their discipline, some form of immortality. The society’s aims were clear: ‘There could be no more direct way to contemplate the weird connection between the material self, on the one hand, and life, consciousness, feeling, and thought, on the other’ (12). It was also a self-conceit that one’s own body was worthy of collecting, as it had a name and a known provenance. This contrast of the value and regard for bodies of the upper and lower classes, as the unnamed and the named brings into view the ethnographic collections that were also being accumulated at the time; the display of the non-Western cultural other was undertaken with a different regard for their creators or the peoples they represented. Firstly, although the material culture was from unknown individuals, they were a different cultural other. They were an unknown unknown as opposed to the working-class Europeans who were a known unknown. Secondly, the non-Western individual was seen in a collective sense, not as an individual, and was also not named, but his objects were deemed collectable, unlike the objects of the working classes. However, it was not just the foreign non-Western other’s material culture that was collectible, but also the people themselves. Unlike the dead bodies of the working classes that were used by the scientists and medics of the day to test theory and practice, the non-Western indigenous other was subjected to an exterior form of body snatching in the name of progress. The physical anthropologists of the day seized the opportunity to measure, photograph and display the non-Western other as part of the process of classification, cultural investigation, and military display of conquest. But as is often true, the best way to hide a crime is to celebrate it. Any moral misgivings that might have occurred among the organisers of the European fairs and subsequent ethnographic museums were hidden in plain sight as the audience enjoyed the displays of the exotic and the unfamiliar, and they shared a common belief that they were either born superior by birth rite within their own culture, or

1.5 Kunsthistorisches and Welt Museum in Vienna

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within their own, empire, nation or continent. It was a game of winners and losers, and the winners took it all. Leading anthropologists in France were named ‘freethinkers’ and created a dynasty of their own outside the confines of church or monarchical tradition and belief. Only a few could enter this elite group as it was fiercely intellectual and a privilege of the few who could afford the time to consider the implications of their own corporeal, spiritual and scientific afterlives. ‘The freethinking anthropologists managed to create elite careers for themselves’ and most ‘were able to make their living from a combination of politics and anthropology. They curated anthropological museums and exhibits, organized anthropological conferences, applied for government grants for fieldwork or to visit foreign anthropological museums […] They also earned an income from books and articles’ (136). One such anthropologist, Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–1898), was appointed conservator of the National Museum of Antiques at Saint-Germain, which had been founded by Napoleon III in 1862. He also organised and arranged exhibits at the Paris World Fair in 1889, served as Mayor of Saint-Germain, ran for a seat in parliament, and was elected deputy of Seine-et-Oise, all while retaining his post at the museum until 1885. Politics and professorial ambition went hand-in-hand, and these highranking political and scholarly positions were controlled tightly by a small cluster of freethinking anthropologists, as a good income and a pleasant life was to be gained from the various channels of income offered by the state in the form of generous salaries and subscriptions to their journals. A dynastic control over ethnographic material at the heart of the state thus began, and fathers installed their sons in positions of prestige and influence. Anthropology and the managing of the ethnographic museum lay outside the auspices of the mainstream French university, outside mainstream scholarship, not able to grant degrees, and made up of the privileged few who adapted a new form of hierarchy based on connections and wealth, creating over time what has been described as their own ‘little church’ (138). Here we find a group of intellectuals, so liberally progressive that they form their own social hierarchy directly in parallel with the existing one, sharing a belief system of a common methodology and spirit of action with evangelical ambitions; one that wanted to devour its own corpus in the name of a higher power, and all this without a woman in sight.

1.5 Kunsthistorisches and Welt Museum in Vienna Other international fairs were held in large sites, the most notable for this study being Vienna’s 1873 ‘failed’ exhibition, which unfortunately suffered from bad timing as it coincided with Vienna’s last cholera epidemic and the first global financial crisis that left a huge deficit in the country’s treasury. It was also criticised for its lack of integration of the wider Austro-Hungarian empire that had been created in 1867. However, Vienna would play a leading role in museum building by the 1880s when Emperor

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Franz Josef decided that an immense proportion of the Habsburg imperial collections would be housed in newly appointed public buildings of palatial dimensions and exquisite decoration dedicated to the arts and natural science. He would set the standard for other European monarchs to display royal collections alongside newly acquired specimens, curiosities, artworks and ethnographic and religious artefacts. Material culture, old and new, was being produced, amassed, bought, and sold by traders, explorers, scientists, anthropologists, artists and the emerging leisure classes that were profiting from a liberal laissez-faire attitude towards trade in European internal and external trade. World fairs and museums became a forum to celebrate this exchange where exhibitors, exhibits and the visiting audiences would soak up the visual feast, and some of the core material, remnants of the extravaganzas, would be incorporated in a national and cultural narrative. By the end of the nineteenth-century Vienna would be seen as an equal to Paris and London as an intellectual cultural capital; its geographic and historical position in Europe bequeathed a full set of credentials, and its monarchical wealth knew no bounds. Still part of the far-reaching Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was situated at the heart of power struggles between king and country, empire and states and gentry and peasants, and the rise of nationalism had caused great consternation among its leaders. The international world fair was part of a series of attempts to rationalise and visualise the many separate ethnicities, cultures, religions and customs that had been ruled over by the Habsburg dynasty for centuries. Opened in 1873 by Franz Josef, the Fifth World’s Fair in Vienna celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the emperor’s coronation and replicating the aims of the Prince Albert’s address at the Great Exhibition in 1851, ‘confirmed the status of Austria-Hungary as a major European power and as an advanced industrial and economic state’. As the opening address of Archduke Karl Ludwig (1833–1896) to the emperor asserted, the fair served to ‘direct the gaze of the world toward Austria and ensure the recognition of the participation of our fatherland in the promotion of the wellbeing of mankind through work and instruction’ (Rampley, 2011: 110). The World Fair in Vienna prompted the establishment in 1875 of the Oriental Museum in Vienna, which housed substantial collections of Japanese, Chinese and Islamic artefacts (129). These royal collections give us insight into another kind of appropriation of other cultures, those of large-scale non-European cultures with whom the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had established trade relations over a long period of time dating back to the sixteenth century. In fact, Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern cultures had been trading luxury items with Europe for centuries, and the courts of the royal European palaces often dedicated entire rooms to display their appreciation of the aesthetics of the foreign other; not all non-European cultures were seen as contemptible, even if they did not share the same belief system. Material cultural wealth in terms of craftsmanship and luxury materials, such as gold, silver, porcelain and silk, were highly collectable pieces by the European elite, and remained in private and public collections of the royal houses. In terms of colonial displays of the nineteenth century, ‘the fair also provided a platform for many countries beyond Europe to present themselves as modern states’ (130).

1.5 Kunsthistorisches and Welt Museum in Vienna

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Rampley discusses the use of the reproduced village scene in world fairs in the case of the Viennese World Fair of 1873, and it is evident that the ideology behind the use of this aesthetic of the peasant was not based on racial terms, but on terms that differentiated the life of a peasant with that of the urban dweller. ‘Although the city was the site of modernization and its problems, the countryside was the locus of tradition, in which the putative failure to adapt to technical, economic, and social change was seen as an index of cultural development. The village hence became the object of an ethnographically informed museology’ (131). The rural setting of the farmhouse depicted a cultural change from within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one which would eventually break it up into nation states. The nation state was, and still is, extremely influential in the creation of the national museum, especially regarding defining the cultural self and the cultural other to its European indigenous audience. The fair also played an important role in furthering Austrian economic, cultural and political objectives and opened important new economic and diplomatic links, not least with the Meiji dynasty of Japan. The ethnographic object began to gain its own set of hierarchies; not all were examples of material, cultural and spiritual poverty. There were groups of culture otherness all over Europe, and the rise of nationalist ideas in Europe brought to the fore the differences between ethnic groups, peasant and urban traditions. A sense of historical time was drawn into the equation of cultural relativity, when a different type of museum was borne out of the world fairs: the folk museum, otherwise known as the Völkskunde tradition. Rampley draws our attention to the use of the farmhouse as an example of the inclusion of rural culture from the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the World Fair in Vienna in 1873: If, on the one hand, the peasant village at the Vienna Fair and the responses to it can be compared to the intermingling of nationalist, ethnographic, and colonial discourses across much of the rest of Europe, the ideological matrix from which Austrian ethnography emerged was nevertheless quite distinct. (125)

He notes how the Habsburgs featured a ‘single structure’ at the 1873 fair adopting a neo-Baroque style facade to its building that coincide with the debate about visual identity of the empire in the 1870s: [It] assiduously avoided any reference to local vernacular forms and consisted instead of a neo-Renaissance facade that reflected the monarchy’s persistent adoption of a cosmopolitan image that refused to identify with any one of the individual linguistic and cultural communities of the empire […] the neo-Baroque style was able both to provide continuity with the past and also to embody the imperial cosmopolitanism of the present. (131)

In intellectual circles ethnography was put at the ‘service of the fatherland’, thus looking to create a new set of legitimised Habsburg dynastic control over diverse peoples of Europe at the world fair and the museum buildings that would continue the dynastic legacies. Rampley underlines the importance of Czoernig’s Ethnography,2 2

Carl Freiherr Czoernig von Czernhaussen (1804–1889) was the director of the commission for administrative statistics in the Austrian Empire and worked on a program aimed at centralizing and modernising the Monarchy from 1852 to 1865.

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which ‘was closely aligned with the legitimizing ideology of the Habsburg dynasty, which sought to promote the identity of the empire as cosmopolitan and diverse’ (125). Two important museums were borne out of the 1873 Viennese World Fair: the Naturhistorisches Hofmuseum (Imperial Museum of Natural History) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which opened in 1891. The Naturhistorisches museum contained the Anthropological-Ethnographic Collection, which included Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s (1863–1914) collection from his 1892–93 trip around the world. A new wing of the Neue Burg, originally designed to house imperial apartments that became independently known as the Weltmuseum Wien, was formally opened to the public in 1889. Emperor Francis I (1804–1835) took a great interest in accumulating an eclectic collection of natural and ethnographic objects; he purchased a lot of over two hundred of such objects originating in Oceania and North America, which had been assembled by Captain James Cook (1728–1779) during his exploratory voyages. This acquisition enlarged the Hof-Naturalien-Cabinette (imperial cabinets of natural objects) by adding an ethnographic collection.

1.6 Berlin’s Industrial Exhibition of 1896 In neighbouring Germany, after the success of the international exhibitions in Britain and arch-enemy France, the national press demanded a world fair be held in Berlin to demonstrate the military, industrial and colonial might of the empire. A threemonth industrial exhibition in 1879 demonstrated domestic progress, but the 1896 Industrial Exposition of Berlin, which simultaneously celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Berlin’s establishment as capital of the empire, was grander affair. The event contained sections exhibiting a variety of German industries, such as food, science, textiles, and machinery. It also included the German Colonial Exhibition, with displays of buildings, villages, and tools from the indigenous populations of the country’s imperial territories. Furthermore, dozens of people from Africa and New Guinea made the trek to Berlin to become human exhibitions in the native villages. While the use of living human beings provided a concrete representation of German superiority, there was also another motive behind their presence: ‘savagery sold tickets’ (Ciarlo, 2010: 57). Ciarlo describes that the human exhibitions were carefully orchestrated to legitamise German imperialism and to encourage investment in colonial territories. If European businessmen saw the African ‘savage’ as a peaceful and completely controlled by his German master, they would be more inclined to send their money abroad. The industrial might of the German Reich contrasted greatly with the primitive tools and dwellings of the inhabitants of the Negro Villages, as the section of the Exhibition was titled. More than a million people visited the Colonial Exhibition (58). The presence of these colonial subjects also presented German anthropologist Felix von Luschan the opportunity to measure their physical features. Each person measured was labelled with a number, and the data provided further evidence of German superiority.

1.7 The Unification of Italy and the Captivus Vaticani

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The Industrial Exhibition successfully demonstrated the industrial, commercial and colonial capabilities of the empire. The rise of German nationalism that culminated in the formation of the Second German Reich in 1871 under the imperial sovereignty of the Prussian monarchs threw Germany into the game of the international exhibition to prove their place on the world stage. Kaisar Wilhelm II (1888– 1918), who had initially disagreed with the idea of holding such an event, viewed the year 1896 as a turning point that saw Berlin transition from a great city to a global city (59). He even had a special throne for him and the empress placed in a pavilion that contained an emperor exhibit (Steinmetz, 2017: 51). However, with the Colonial Exhibition and the anthropometric methods employed on the indigenous ‘guests’, we see a shift in Liberal Humanism leading Germany and humanity down a dark moral path.

1.7 The Unification of Italy and the Captivus Vaticani Like Germany, the drive towards unification in Italy gained momentum after 1848, much to the worry of Pope Pius IX, who can be said to have endured rather than enjoyed the longest reign by an elected pope. As the various Italian states combined, culminating in the declaration of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the Holy Father in Rome was protected by the French armies of Emperor Napoleon III; however, those garrisons were recalled at the start of the Franco-Prussian War in July of 1870. Within two months, after French defeat at the Battle of Sedan on 1 September, the Empire collapsed, and Pius IX retreated inside the walls of the Vatican; it would be nearly sixty years before a pope once again left its sanctuary. Italy continued its push to claim Rome as the nation’s capital, but this created an obvious affront to the pope. The Roman Question, addressing the disputed rights to the control of Rome, came to a head that September. After Pius refused diplomatic solutions to the issue and commanded his troops to resist, the Italian Army besieged the Eternal City, finally entering on 20 September, a date that would become a new national holiday. King Victor Emmanuel II (1861–1878) offered the pontiff the Leonine City but was rebuked by a pope who refused to recognise this new authority in the city bequeathed to him by St. Peter himself. Instead, partly out of fear for his own safety outside of the Vatican and partly because of his pride, Pius IX declared himself Captivus Vaticani, a prisoner within the Vatican. The annexation of Rome to the new kingdom ended papal temporal rule in central Italy that had endured in one form or another since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, nearly a millennium and a half. He and his successors then looked to strengthen their role as spiritual leaders to the world’s Catholics, and while European colonial expansion continued to flourish the popes relied on the evangelical expansion of the missions; if he could not gain new lands, he could certainly strive to gain new souls. The Italian parliament extended an olive branch of sorts to the pope by ratifying the Law of Papal Guarantees on 13 May 1871, providing assurances that the Holy Father and his successors would remain sovereign in the Vatican and that the Church and all its members would enjoy the same rights and freedoms as all Italians. The

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Vatican would be a de facto independent state with the popes granted monarchical status, but on even terms with the Italian Kings. The measure included an annuity to be paid to cover Vatican expenses. However, Pius IX did not recognise, nor did he have faith in, a law enacted by a foreign government that took away the Papal States from his control and attempted to define his very existence; if this foreign legislature created the law, they could also revoke it just as unilaterally. The money set aside for the Vatican was renewed annually by the Italian parliament, but never accepted by the pontiffs; accepting cash from the Kingdom of Italy would then recognise its existence. As the nineteenth century was ending, calls for a pontifical exhibition in the same vein as the international world fairs became more prevalent; however, the political situation prevented such endeavours. When Pope Benedict XV (1914–1922) ascended the throne in 1914, still self-incarcerated in the Vatican, he felt it was time to act, addressing the Church’s political status in Italy while also striving to assert its spiritual prowess globally. Although Benedict would not live to fulfil his wish to resolve the Roman Question, his successor, Pius XI, would take up the baton. This also coincided with the long-held ambition of one of Rome’s most influential priests living in Vienna, who would prove his tenacity and belief in an older order in line with Pius’s conservative approach, and one that was firmly rooted in the ethnology of Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow. Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD would stage the last nineteenth-century Great Exhibition in the Vatican, and with it establish clarity of the Church’s scientific credentials as relevant and operative for the twentieth century. He was only twenty-five years late, a mere nanosecond when you are thinking in terms of eternity.

Map of the Austrian (Austro-Hungarian), Empire. 1850. World History Archive

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Crystal Palace, London, designed by Joseph Paxton: Queen Victoria arriving to open Great Exhibition, 1 May 1851. Emblems of British Empire surrounding corners. Le Blond Print. World History Archive

Illustration of H.R.H. Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, done in 1861. Drawn from another picture done from life at Buckingham Palace. Husband of Queen Victoria. World History Archive

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Cartoon depicting Prince Albert handing Joseph Paxton a £20,000 slice of “Solid Pudding” from the surplus from the Great Exhibition. Albert, Prince Consort (1819– 1861). World History Archive

Illustration depicting the International Exposition of 1867 (Exposition Universelle d’art et l’Industrie), was the second world’s fair to be held in Paris, from 1 April to 3 November 1867. Forty-two nations were represented at the fair. Following a decree of Emperor Napoleon III, the exposition was prepared as early as 1864, during the renovation of Paris, marking the culmination of the Second French Empire. World History Archive

References

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Eiffel Tower and Champ de Mars seen from Trocadéro Palace, Paris Exposition, 1889. World History Archive

References Ciarlo, D. (2010). Advertising empire: Race and visual culture in imperial Germany. Harvard UP. Hecht, J. (2003). The end of the soul: Scientific Modernity, atheism, and anthropology in France. Columbia University Press. Piggott. (2004). Palace of the people: The crystal palace at Sydenham 1854–1936. C. Hurst & Co. Rampley, M. (2011). Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic display and the 1873 world’s fair. Austrian History Yearbook, 42, 110–132. Steinmetz, G. (2017). Empire in three keys: Forging the imperial imaginary at the 1896 Berlin trade exhibition. Thesis Eleven, 139(1), 46–68.

Chapter 2

The Making of the Vatican’s ‘Modern’ Museum Dynasty: The Ethnology of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD

As the global prominence of mission houses steadily declined with the rise of the technological and social advances displayed in the Universal Exhibitions and Worlds Fairs, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD, who likely attended some of these events, continued his push towards a global missionary exhibition to assert the Church’s relevance in the modern world. As a scientist and linguist, as well as a Catholic priest, Schmidt understood that any such exhibition would only gain credibility in the international community if its purpose had roots in science and reason, and not just the desire for more souls or material gain; therefore, he dedicated most of his studies to ‘proving’ the importance of God and the Catholic missions to human existence itself.

Wilhelm Schmidt SVD (February 16, 1868—February 10, 1954) was a GermanAustrian Catholic priest, linguist, and ethnologist. Anthropos Online Archive Born in Germany in 1868, Schmidt was among the foremost authorities on linguistics, ethnology and the history of religion in the first half of the twentieth century. He came to represent the Historical-Cultural School in Europe, which had its base in Vienna; Schmidt always placed his work within an historical framework. When © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_2

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lecturing to missionaries at his Catholic ethnology weeks, his lectures usually opened with a chronology of the scientific (including ethnological) contribution the Catholic Church had made to Western thought since the beginning of Christian time. This chapter looks at Schmidt’s rise in the ranks of the university and the Catholic Church, combining the two dynastic enterprises that made him influential in the main power bases in European society: knowledge-power and wealth-power. He managed to integrate the discipline of ethnology into the Catholic Church to educate and to further the missionary cause, as well as to create a credible stepping-stone for Pope Pius XI to address twentieth-century discourses on science and religion. In 1892, Schmidt was ordained as a Catholic priest in the SVD order and became a dedicated scholar of international recognition from 1895 until his death. In 1906, while working in Mödling, near Vienna, he founded Anthropos, which became an internationally renowned journal for ethnology and languages, and which he edited for many years. He was appointed the Vatican’s curator for ethnology in 1923 by Pius XI and served as the director of the PME and the subsequent Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Lateran Palace in Rome until 1939. He established the Anthropos Institute in 1931, which he directed until 1950, and served as a professor at the University of Vienna from 1921 to 1938. In 1938, under the protectorate of Pope Pius XII, Fr. Schmidt fled Austria to Rome, along with the Archbishop of Vienna after he had suffered the humiliation of having his room ransacked by the Nazis, who had been angered by his opposition to their evolutionist racism. From 1939 until 1951, he was a professor at the University of Freiberg, Switzerland, where he died six days before his eighty-sixth birthday in 1954.1 Crucial to understanding Schmidt’s contribution to ethnology, and as a result the Vatican’s ethnographic museum dynasty, is an exploration of his theories of Primeval Monotheism and his development of Kulturkreise (culture circles) in the first decade of the twentieth century. Schmidt’s career as priest, academic and ethnologist unfolded during a turbulent era for the Roman Catholic Church; there was a fierce tide of anti-Modernism running through the institution, culminating in the requirement for all clergy to take the Anti-Modernist Oath in 1910. This was followed by the Great War in 1914 and Italian Fascism with the advent of Mussolini’s government in 1922, and the Roman Question still had not been resolved. As the Church swayed back and forth in these waves of events, Schmidt and Pius XI relied on science, ethnology and the PME of 1925 to carve out a museum dynasty, the legacy of which still exists today. Schmidt’s position as priest and scientist compelled him to reconcile this apparent conflict during a time in which the Roman Catholic Church was at its weakest position politically. From the destructive consequences of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and the revolutions across Europe in 1848, to the crescendo of nationalism in Italy that approached its climax with the birth of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and reached its zenith with the absorption of Rome as the new nation’s capital in 1871, the Church found itself of its back foot. With the dawn of the twentieth 1

Biographical information about Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt comes from Bornemann (1982) and Brandewie (1990), in addition to research by the author in the archives of the Vatican Museums.

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century, rising nationalism and the desire for self-rule, along with the spread of Communism that after the Russian Revolution of 1917 would instil shocking fear throughout the political establishments of the West, a long succession of Holy Fathers increasingly resorted to closing ranks in defence against what they condemned as the pernicious influence of progress. One of the principal targets was science.

2.1 Primeval Monotheism To bring into fruition his desire for a missionary exhibition based in part on science, Schmidt relied on the theory of Primeval Monotheism to prove that Man came from monotheistic origins. Published in twelve volumes between 1915 and 1954, Schmidt’s The Origin of the Idea of God used extensive evidence from cultures throughout the world to support his theories. Schmidt’s principal ethnographic evidence came from the African pygmies, and he had dedicated a separate book to the study entitled The Place of Pygmies in the Evolutional History of Mankind (1910). In this book he laid down criteria that proved, according to his own culture circle and historical-cultural analysis, which peoples in the world were to be considered ethnographically the oldest. He categorised them on their material culture and on whether they had a monotheistic belief system. The ‘oldest’, therefore, were from tribal cultures with monotheistic beliefs. The subject of religion in anthropology had been made famous by two British scholars, E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang. Lang published his controversial monograph The Making of Religion in 1898, which contradicts Tylor’s then standardised theory of the origin of religion in his Primitive Religions (1871). From that period until the end of Schmidt’s life, he would see himself as an opponent, not of Darwinian evolutionism, but of E. B. Tylor’s explanation of God in His original form. Schmidt’s ideas of human society originating as monotheistic contrasted with Tylor’s more fashionable animistic theories. The first volume of The Origin of the Idea of God (1915) expanded upon the thesis of evolutionary and degeneration theories, and it contains the historical and critical sections where Schmidt discusses various theories of religion. He rejected the assumption that Tylor’s evolutionism was based on development of man from lower to higher, from the simple to the complex, from the rude to the less perfect, and from the perfect to the civilised. He also did not agree with evolution as explained by Darwin, as he felt that different societies grew at different rates and not in a linear fashion. Although he was torn between his dual role of priest and scientist, he felt no obligation to oppose Darwin’s theory, as he wrote to his superiors: In view of the fact that almost all specialists in anthropology and ethnology, Catholic as well as non-Catholic, accept some version of the theory of evolution, I feel it is very dangerous for exegesis to maintain its opposition. Since only the opposition from exegesis comes into question- philosophy and dogmatic theology cannot offer any serious objection- the whole situation takes on a similarity with the case of Galileo. If my own work helps, in any way, to avoid this, then I believe I have done a very good work. (Bornemann, 1982: 79–83)

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Schmidt agreed that Darwinian evolutionary theory had not been proven, but he knew it had been gaining acceptance in scientific circles, emphasising that the establishment of some sort of proof was a near certainty and that it would still be accepted scientific theory for generations to come. Secular academics criticised Schmidt for trying to present proof of primeval revelation on the basis of the religious beliefs of early twentieth-century ‘primitives’. Many felt that he allowed his personal faith to intervene on ethnological judgement, particularly in his references to Thomism as a central feature of his ethnological understanding. Schmidt based his claim primarily on the concept that all people, the earliest primitives included, had an inner, spontaneous drive to search out causes. In his Summa Theologia, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) drew on the work of St. Augustine (AD 354–430): ‘our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’; and St. Paul, ‘the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made’ (Romans 1:20). Zimon (1986) argues that ‘a clear indication of the influence of Thomistic philosophy on Schmidt is that he underscores the importance of the logical causal thinking in the formation of the idea of God’ (99). Schmidt repudiated nature-nurture debates, insisting that the minds of all men worked in the same fashion. In the first volume of The Origin of the Idea of God (1915), he states that one can understand culture through ‘process’, based on the idea that if one person can come to the idea of God causally, then anyone can; no human group exists in a state of pure nature, and thus culture and society do not fall under the rubric of natural law. For Schmidt, ethnology was concerned with whatever ‘has proceeded from the mind, has gone through the mind and bears its impress, and it is precisely through this process that it becomes a culture object’ (Schmidt, 1937: 7; quoted in Brandewie, 1990: 160). Schmidt’s attempts at procuring a truth for the origin of religion coincided with his scholastic learning, and religious belief was to be his motivation and arguably his intellectual downfall. Kinder critics would comment that ‘if Schmidt erred (and which scholar does not) the anthropologists who simply reject or ignore Schmidt (and perhaps never read him) err likewise’ (Rahmann, 1975: 211). Fr. Paul Schebesta (1887–1967), curator at the Volker Museum in Cologne, would say that Schmidt’s The Origin of the Idea of God ‘is a warm-hearted apology; however, not an apology for Christianity but for primordial man (Urmensch), whom Schmidt did not consider as a mere animal, but as fully human’ (Schebesta, 1954: 689; quoted in Rahmann, 1975: 211–12).

2.2 Schmidt and Kulturkreise Schmidt lived in a time when anthropology as an academic discipline was continually redefining itself against other growing disciplines such as sociology and biology. He comments that studying museology and objects formed an integral part of his ethnological training in the German Diffusionist school, and his search for a methodology such as culture circles proved pragmatic in his quest to further the cause of the

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Catholic missions; his theoretical approach was, in many respects, purely speculative, like those of most of his contemporaries. A great deal of information was becoming available to European scholars of ethnology, archaeology and other disciplines, previously impeded by the lack of contact with the rest of the world. Once travel, trade and transport made distant places more accessible to more people, many made use of colonial and evangelical links to and from Europe. However, information and objects from other cultures came into Europe in fragmented forms and scholars needed to order them. This is the point when Schmidt’s ethnology gained importance in the Catholic Church, and he received support for his theories at different levels of the clerical hierarchy. The term Kulturkreise, or culture circle, is generally used in association with Schmidt and was part of the method of culture history. It was a methodological tool that an observer might use to connect elements of a culture and classify it. Huber (1988) notes that it was not the point ‘to understand the meaning’ of the observed culture, because, it had none. A culture was the end-product of a long mixing of traits originating in the (reconstructed) primary cultures, making it into an arbitrary, ‘disordered and virtually meaningless’ array of elements (86), or ‘a melting-pot of such conflicting elements as a moon cult and a sun cult’ (Arndt, 1929, 1937, quoted by Dietrich, 1992: 117). Fr. Paul Arndt SVD (1886–1962), one of the first Verbite missionaries to be trained as an ethnologist, remarks: ‘in most cases I knew no better way for compiling [the ethnography] than simply to list the various accounts of each topic, one after the other. This method produces a colourful mixture of bits and pieces’ (Arndt, 1932: 3). How did the idea of Kulturkreise manifest itself in terms of cultural transformations of the identity and representation of the Catholic Church and its missions in the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition? For nearly a century, successive popes Gregory XVI (1831–1846), Pius IX (1846–1878) and Leo XIII (1878–1903) had taken a defensive position against Modernism through various encyclicals intended to maintain the conservative nature of the institution. Pope St. Pius X (1903–14) decided to bring the matter to a head: the decree from the Holy Office, Lamentabilsi (3 July 1907) condemned a list of sixty-five propositions embodying the errors of leading Modernists. This was followed by the Encyclical Pascendi (7 September 1907), in which he set forth at great length the various forms of the new heresy. Lastly, he used a severe measure to ensure the rejection of those who favoured the so-called heresy; by the Motu Proprio Sacrorum antistitum (1 September 1910), he ordered that an elaborate oath be taken by all those who held the position of preacher, confessor, parish priest, etc., officially titled the Anti-Modernist Oath. Schmidt’s development of culture circles was done as part of a methodological armoury of cultural history. In Vienna, ethnology was considered to be history and was, therefore, one of the following: Geisteswissenschaften, Kuturwissenschaften or Geschichtswissenschaft. These three German terms did not necessarily mean the same thing, but they were all contrasted with Naturwissenschaften (Makkreel, 1975: 39–40). The idea that ethnology was a Naturwissenschaften, one of the natural sciences, or a science that could discover natural laws, was an Anglo-Saxon or American approach, specific to social and cultural anthropology. However, there

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were exceptions to this rule, such as Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876–1970), R. H. Lowie (1883–1957) and Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), who remained committed to the historical sense of their discipline. For Schmidt, the idea of cultures having a history was central to his approach. The relationships between cultures could be analysed through their historical and ethnological ‘ages’, and any similarity between cultures, be it material, social or defined by their concept of a Supreme Being, made them comparable in Schmidt’s eyes (Brandewie, 1990: 98). The difference between the historical-cultural and historical approach is that the latter depends on written sources: inscriptions, monuments and drawings depicting major events in the daily life of the community. The former approach uses the cultural group in question as a source of data. Other research methods of the Historical-Cultural approach to ethnology, which included Schmidt and Graebner, were like Anglo-Saxon Social and Cultural anthropology. They both dealt with oral myths and social institutions, as well as building construction techniques and economic values. Existing relationships with outside groups were all based on a past set of rules and values from within the community concerning marriage, hunting, property and definitions marking physical and mental boundaries. The main difference between the Viennese school and the Anglo-Saxon school from 1911 (the date of Graebner’s publication of Methode der Ethnologie) onwards was that the former saw material culture as a central part of their analysis, similar to that used in archaeological research methods. The attention drawn to the ‘history’ of the cultures in question was also a major factor specific to the Historical-Cultural School in Vienna. Although Schmidt agreed that ethnology dealt primarily with Naturvölker, a definition of pre-literate peoples, his methods crossed the boundaries of archaeology, culture history, and history, including perhaps ethno-history, to obtain the best results. Schmidt believed that the role of ethnology for the missionary was to isolate the good elements in a culture (Dietrich, 1992: 117). Ethnology could help us understand the ‘ancient fact: Anima humana naturaliter christiana [the human soul is naturally Christian]’ (Gusinde, 1958: 14). Through his early studies in linguistics, he came to believe that the geographical limits set out by Graebner were unnecessary. Schmidt distinguished between different types of culture circles. They can be viewed as a methodology, or as a means of research in which culture circles were used to define ideal types, but these ideal types where hypothetical constructs of what a society might be; they were used to clarify and categorise cultures. In his definition of culture circles, Schmidt did not specify area or region, as he was mainly interested in content. This emphasis on content was associated with an emphasis on the organic nature of the relationship between the cultural elements that made up the culture circle. An assumption on Schmidt’s part was that where he found the elements he had previously found in another culture, he would conclude that the second culture had previously had the same infrastructure as the first. Schmidt’s employment of the historical-ethnological method concentrated on the study of material objects. Bornemann (1982) quotes one of Schmidt’s more obvious assumptions used to support the cultural circle’s theory: ‘as a result of this, if one can establish the existence of a part of a culture circle anywhere, one can immediately

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conclude that the entire culture circle was at one time more or less strongly present or is still present’ (44). In his own words, Schmidt describes his form of methodology for ethnological practice, and it is this method that would have been taught in missionary seminaries, including that of the SVD.

2.3 Schmidt’s Initiatives Despite this political and intellectual background, Schmidt managed to make ethnology relevant to the predicament of the Catholic Church in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The positive role that Schmidt’s ethnology played in the Catholic Church after 1910 until the early 1930s was significant. Aspects of his life as a priest and separate his approaches into three parts: theoretical (thesis), educational (missions) and methodological (museum and journals) shed light in the character and convictions of Schmidt. He used various approaches to convince his contemporaries of the positive results ethnology could achieve within the institutions of the Church. First, he used the language of the Catholic Church to promote his theory of Primeval Monotheism within the Church itself. He used ethnographic data and a comparative historical approach to inform his clerical peers of the development of ethnology as a missionary activity. Secondly, he applied his theoretical knowledge to the practical advancement of the missions. Schmidt’s work with missionaries from 1913 to the early 1930s gave him influence on missionary education across the world. Thirdly, he used his organisational skills in the development of his journal, Anthropos, for the creation of the PME, the MEML and its journals. (a) Theoretical (thesis): Schmidt argued his case from a Catholic standpoint and as an international scholar of ethnology and linguistics Schmidt paralleled the study of ethnology with the life of Christ and the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, and presented it as the only ‘pure’ discipline qualified to be embraced by Catholic scholars. Through textual analysis of his published lectures and seminars, I have found that he often used the same language and expressions that we find in papal encyclicals by Gregory XVI, Pius IX and Leo XIII. Schmidt’s subtle approach of side-stepping philosophical and theological discussions while promoting ethnology in the Church against a Modernist and Protestant offensive opened a new forum for debate that gave the Church an opportunity to step back modestly into the intellectual and philosophical Modernist climate of its day without having to reject its scholastic heritage. An acknowledgement of Schmidt’s outstanding achievement in the Church is inscribed on the walls of the Lateran Palace as the sixth proof of the existence of God achieved through ethnological scientific reason, after Aquinas’s Quinque viæ, or Five Ways, that present logical arguments to establish the existence of God. By opening the field of ethnology to the Catholic Church, Schmidt created a new forum of debate and a unique position that enabled Catholic missionaries and scholars

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to collect ethnography. The theological aspect of Schmidt’s ethnology was his case for Primeval Monotheism. His 1910 study of pygmies laid out scientific ethnological proof that man first worshipped one God. However, Schmidt was neither a philosopher nor a theologian, although he had developed a scholastic manner of reasoning which enabled a clear logical set of arguments and counterarguments to develop out of intellectual analysis. However, he did not return to any study of philosophy after his arrival at the SVD seminary at St. Gabriel’s in Mödling in 1895; rather, he turned his attention to linguistics and ethnology. Pope Leo XIII had published his encyclical, Aeterni Patris, in 1879, which underlined his intentions to promote the study of Thomistic philosophy, or Thomistic Scholasticism, in the Church and warned the Catholic community of the evils of new philosophies that contradicted the cornerstones of the Faith. By concentrating on linguistics and ethnology Schmidt gained a freedom of thought in scholarship that sanctioned new intellectual territory to explore that did not affect his beliefs. He accepted the teachings of Thomism without question (Brandewie, 1990: 94), and one can understand this attitude towards scholasticism, which had been Schmidt’s model of learning since he began seminary school at the age of 13; to question it might have undone a great deal of his learning and maybe his profession. (b) Schmidt applied his knowledge to the advancement of the Catholic missions. By developing a comprehensive argument against animism and the theory of degeneration from monotheistic beginnings weighted with ethnographic data, Schmidt won a small victory for the Church against Modernism. He thus managed to overcome potential suspicion from his fellow clergy and the Church hierarchy in Rome. The time was ripe to promote the use of his ethnological theories and thus collect extensive data for his own research. There was no better group to furnish him with ethnographic data than his fellow Catholic missionaries throughout the world. Schmidt began his lecture during Religious Ethnology Week in 1913 as a political orator would his cause; instead of rejecting science, discovery and free thinking, Schmidt attributed most of the discoveries of the modern world to the work of priests and missionaries. Modern thought and technology are part of ‘our heritage’, he stated, and went on to give examples by outlining the history of the science of ethnology. He discussed history from a Catholic perspective as a politician would review his contributions to society, by highlighting the positive aspects of his work and negating the failures. Always mindful of his censors, he was careful to disassociate scientific ethnology from other sciences. In addition, he used the present tense to bring the history alive and the message is clear; he associated progress and learning with the work of the Church. We see from Schmidt’s argument that he felt that the French Revolution had produced a detrimental effect on the missions and the development of ethnographic collecting and research. By the late nineteenth century, various pontiffs had written against a liberal rationalism, something they associated with the Revolution, since Rousseau and Descartes were linked with the rebellions of the eighteenth century. Taking an extract from Leo XIII’s Aeternis Patris, reflecting on the restoration of

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Christian philosophy, we can see how Schmidt might have seen ethnology as the science capable of filling the expectations of the encyclical. Pope Leo states: You know how often among some truths they taught false and incongruous things; what vague and doubtful opinions they held concerning the nature of Divinity, the first origin of things, the government of the world, the divine knowledge of the future, the cause and principle of evil, the ultimate end of man, eternal beatitude, concerning virtue and vice, and other matters, a true and certain knowledge of which is most necessary to the human race; while on the other hand, the early Fathers and Doctors of the Church, who well understood that, according to the divine plan, the restorer of human science is Christ, who is the power and wisdom of God [I Corinthians 1.24], and in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge [Colossians 2.3], took up and investigated the books of the ancient philosophers, and compared their teachings with the doctrines of revelation, and, carefully sifting them, they cherished what was true and wise in them and rejected all else. (Aeternis Patris 1879; original emphasis)

Schmidt’s (1927) lecture is a repetition in many ways of the one he delivered in 1913 and would give in 1931. This extract conveys the distinctions he makes, not only within ethnology and its related disciplines, but the aspects he chose to sift out or reject. We also see how he marketed ethnology to the Church. Schmidt lectured on the relationship between ethnology and the Church and appealed to his audience’s sense of pride and duty as members of the Catholic Church. He also appealed to their sense of Christian tradition and heritage, claiming that ethnology is part of that same history. The people represented the same end objective for ethnology, as a science, and the missionaries: Ethnology seeks to know and make known the people and the missions seek to make the Word of Christ known to the people. […] But the relationship between ethnology and the missions is still more intimate. Ethnology seeks to know how the peoples exist, in their own environment and history; with all their beliefs and indigenous customs; in such a way as they were before the predication of the word of God. Ethnology therefore presents to the missions its objects with all its qualities and notable characteristics; being offered to the missions all they need to know about the nature of the people when they set out to work. (Schmidt, 1927: 258) [Author’s translation from original Italian]

Schmidt used the language of scholastic learning, a vocabulary with which every missionary and seminary student would have been very familiar. He used analogies one might parallel with Aquinas’s explanation of the metaphysical theory of substance, change and causality. Therefore, to understand the philosophical implications of Schmidt’s arguments it is necessary to take a glimpse at Aquinas’s explanation of the world. For Aquinas the world as it really is, consists of a great deal more than the world as it appears to our senses. Sensible experience is the material form from where we begin. Substance, change and causality are concepts forced upon us by everyday experience. It is an Aristotelian view of how we see the world. Relating in the first place to the concept of substance, the qualities and relations cannot exist in their own right; they can exist only as modifications of a substance. Within the concept of change are states of potentiality and actuality that define the existence of change. Change is the progress from potency to act. An act is the potency fulfilled and is perfection, something that only God has achieved and can do so. Potency is always imperfect as it is always in a state of potentiality.

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Although there is much more to say about Aquinas’ distinction between substantial form and first matter, the concept of causality is directly relevant to Schmidt’s analysis of ethnology and the human soul. In accordance with Aristotelian doctrine, Aquinas recognises four aspects under which we must view the movement from potency to act. There are four necessary conditions for the existence of a thing: material, efficient, formal and final. This process has been often explained in a diagrammatic way: the material is a lump of bronze, the efficient is a human sculpting the bronze, the formal is the sculpted shape of a man, and the final is the finished result. The change and the potentiality of the bronze is complete. Aquinas maintains that final causes operate in processes that are not controlled by conscious purposes of men or higher animals: Now the first of all causes is the final cause. The reason of which is that matter does not receive form save in so far as it is moved by an agent, for nothing reduces itself from its potentiality to act. But an agent does not move except out of intention for an end. For if the agent were not determinate to some effect, it would not do one thing rather than another: consequently, in order that it may produce a determinate effect, it must of necessity be determined to some certain one, which has the nature of an end. And just as this determination is affected in the rational nature, by rational appetite, which is called the will, so in other things, it is caused by their natural inclination, which is called the natural appetite. (Aquinas 2a2ae, 4.8; original emphasis)

The concept of a finality at work in natural processes as in human actions is central to Aquinas’s ethics and was a language recognised by missionaries who often saw themselves as ‘agents’ in a position between ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ beings. Indigenous people were often referred to as children or ‘noble savages’, who were ignorant but not devoid of rational expression. It made sense for the missions to do so; however, if the ‘heathens’ were not considered human beings capable of rational understanding, they would not have a soul to save. We see how Schmidt parallels the diagrammatic image of the steps of Aquinas’ causality and turns the tangible concept of bronze to that of the soul of indigenous peoples. In alluding to an image familiar to his audience, Schmidt easily substituted the picture of a block of bronze with that of the souls of indigenous people. This would have appealed to an audience convinced of the metaphysical nature of their missionary work. (c) Schmidt promoted the idea for the PME and the MEML Schmidt’s participation in the creation of the PME in 1925 and the subsequent MEML in 1927, including the Lateran Journals, and his own journal, Anthropos, gave him an ideal platform to obtain ethnographic data and test his ethnological theories. The time he spent in Rome in the 1920s proved pivotal as it gave him access to the highest ecclesiastical circles, including a unique confidence with Pope Pius XI. The seeds of this unique relationship had been sown years earlier when Schmidt put forward an idea to set up a museum in the Vatican, having already organised a small museum at St. Gabriel’s in 1899. SVD missionaries were sending objects to him from numerous sites around the globe, but especially from New Guinea, China, and Togoland. In 1900, a Cologne newspaper described the museum as being small, but carefully laid out and especially appropriate for the ethnological study of young missionaries.

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Schmidt was well acquainted with the technological layout of a museum (Bornemann, 1982: 52). Over the years Schmidt had been a regular museum visitor, and his experiences and foresight set the stage for the PME. It was expected that ethnologists, at least in Germany and Austria, would visit museums during their studies, as they were still a major source of data. Schmidt was active in the intellectual circles in Vienna and urged the city to build its own ethnological museum, with most of the ethnological materials at the time being held in the Museum of Natural History. In 1910, when Schmidt was still in Vienna, he referenced the obscure, little-known museum in the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, established in the sixteenth century to oversee the missions. He felt that the objects held inside should be made accessible to more people. This information got back to the Vatican, and the director of the Biblical Institute happened to agree with Schmidt. However, the place and time were not right for such a project; higher political factions within the Church were shrewd in understanding the possible reaction to a missionary or ethnological museum being set up by the Vatican and the Pope was still a Captivus Vaticani. One reason was the dislike felt by non-Catholic intellectuals towards the Anti-Modernist Oath. Schmidt, a man very much in tune with political movements, agreed that the time was not right for such an undertaking. During the First World War and the ensuing years, the Catholic Church turned to more immediate concerns, such as aid and charity to surviving soldiers and impoverished families, and thus the concept of an ethnographic exhibition remained in the background for over a decade. European politicians addressed wartime realities, and under Benedict XV, the Anti-Modernist mode thawed. Some have even argued that the pontifical condemnation of Modernism was so unequivocal, and disciplinary measures taken so drastically, that the concept of Modernism as a peril to the Church may be said to have perished at the hands of Pius X (Catholic Encyclopaedia: 598). When Pius XI was elected in 1922, the scene was set for drastic changes. He took a great interest in the arts and sciences, and as an ex-librarian, he believed in conservation and preservation of material culture in a way that might benefit future generations, in particular the missions for whom he wanted to provide a useful archive. During the same period Schmidt sent a letter to his Generalate at St. Gabriel’s, recognising that he also saw this as a time in which he could put his matured plan into action. Although his first request for a museum was rejected, Schmidt arrived in Rome through other channels that led to his success. The Pope’s new secretary for the Propaganda Fide, Archbishop Marchetti Selvaggiani (1871–1951), had formerly been papal nuncio in Vienna, where he had known St. Gabriel’s SVD house and Schmidt in connection with Anthropos. On the Archbishop’s suggestion, the Pope invited Schmidt to Rome, where both men had their own agendas to pursue with the other. The Pope had a keen interest in the Anthropos journal, and he wanted Schmidt’s assistance with the establishment of a missionary museum in Rome. Pius XI had the future of the missions at the top of his agenda and published a great deal of encyclicals of his visions for their work. Schmidt wanted to see the pope primarily out of his ambitions to set up a museum of ethnology for the missions,

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but with a side agenda of asking the pontiff for funds to aid his struggling journal, crippled since World War I. It was a happy meeting as both agendas fuelled the other’s imagination, and for all intents and purposes pope and priest aimed at the same goals. Schmidt’s ethnological training encouraged the pope that the Church had a role to play in modern science, while still bringing ‘the gospel closer to the spirit and thinking of the people’ (Brandewie, 1990: 179). With this agenda in mind, the pope announced that 1925 would be a Holy Jubilee Year, and for the occasion he was planning the PME; Schmidt, perhaps remembering the grand nineteenth-century exhibitions he witnessed or maybe considering this the first step towards establishing a museum in Rome, graciously offered his help as it ‘would attract pilgrims from all over the world and would be a good time to have a great mission exhibition’ (170). The task fell upon Schmidt to go forth and call on all the congregations of the globe to donate artefacts for the great Exhibition. He had less than three years to complete his task, with more potential disruption from the world of secular politics. When in 1923, the papal decree was sent to the Catholic congregations throughout the world to donate or lend a piece of the material culture exemplifying their work as missionaries to the Vatican, the Italian state was in the throes of political confusion as Mussolini’s Fascist Party was taking steps towards seizing control. During the three-year preparation for the PME, 1922 to 1925, Mussolini took effective military control and purged Italy of the so-called red threat that had been a latent fear in the monarchy, the bourgeoisie and the Church since the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the first time since Italian unification that the Church had a genuine chance of regaining its papal sovereignty and its claims to previously confiscated lands and titles, and the Pope could perhaps see a way to walk out of the gates of his prison. 1922 marked a shift in politics within the Church which sought to redefine its position under a fascist government, a government it was willing to work with as long as the Catholic agenda could be fulfilled. The papal decision to call upon its congregations to work together for a missionary exhibition in celebration and confirmation of the Church’s continuing strength and influence throughout the world was a political decision in two major ways. It would appeal to the fascist agenda of imperialist Italian glory, and secondly it would reorganise the Church from within. We will see later how the displays of the 1925 exhibition emphasised the geographical expansion in terms of ‘conquests’, something that politicians of the regime could easily understand. In Vienna, before Schmidt was called to the Vatican, he had devoted much of his time to liturgical documents, sermons and hymns. During his time in Vienna, Schmidt established the two main criteria for which he would gain international acclaim: his theoretical knowledge of the newly emerging discipline of ethnology and his aptitude for engagement with people on many levels in society. Primarily, Schmidt was a good teacher, and his training as a clergyman gave grounding for his future role as educator of the missionaries. He was popular in his diocese and gained fame through his sermons before being made a professor at the University of Vienna. The political advantage of Schmidt’s ethnological theory was that it allowed the Catholic Church to step modestly back into the intellectual and philosophical

References

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climate of its day without giving up too much ground to the non-believers and the Protestants. The uniqueness of Schmidt is that he always had two agendas and his political shrewdness allowed him to keep hold of both. In this chapter, we see Schmidt’s promotion of ethnology as a tool for the Church. His definition of the work of the ethnologist is paralleled in many ways with the role of the missionary. Schmidt knew he had to win over the Propaganda Fide if he were to attain access to their museum and the missionaries, a task that combined the evangelical objectives with a ‘scientific’ agenda was an ideal way for recruiting an army for collecting ethnographic data. It would be useful for the Church and for his personal pursuit of proving beyond doubt his theory of Primeval Monotheism. I have outlined some of the theological and philosophical issues as a backdrop to understanding how and why Schmidt’s ethnology achieved such status in the Vatican. We also needed to know the roots of ethnology in its own field before understanding it as a tool for the Church. If we consider Schmidt’s roots of ethnological learning, it could be argued that his greatest achievement was his success in dressing up ethnology from a German-Austrian tradition, that had clearly incorporated elements of Modernist philosophy in the theological coat of Aquinas. In this way he literally brought Modernist thinking, a new dynasty of knowledge, in through the front door of the Vatican in the form of the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition.

References Arndt, P. (1929). Die Religion der Nad’a (West: Flores, Kleine Sunda-Inseln). Anthropos XXIV, Nos., 5(6), 817–861. Arndt, P. (1932). Mythologie, religion und magie im Sikagebiet (östl. Mittelflores). ArnoldusDruckerei. Arndt, P. (1937). Deva, das Hochste Wesen der Ngadha. Anthropos, XXXII(1/2), 195–209; (3/4), 347–77 (continuation of Arndt 1936). Bornemann, F. (1982). P. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD. 1868–1954. Apud Collegium Verbi Divini. Brandewie, E. (1990). When giants walked the earth: The life and times of Wilhelm Schmidt SVD. UP Freiberg. Dietrich, S. (1992). Mission, local culture and the “Catholic Ethnology” of Wilhelm Schmidt. Jaso, 23(2), 111–125. Gusinde, M. (1958). Die volkerkundliche Ausrustung des Missionars. Steyler Missionsschriftenreihe No. 1. Huber, M. T. (1988). The Bishop’s progress: A historical ethnography of catholic missionary experience on the Sepik frontier. Smithsonian Institution Press. Makkreel, R. A. (1975). Dilthey: Philospher of the human studies. Princeton UP. Rahmann, R. (1975). The Philippine Negritos in the context of research on food-gatherers during this century. Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 3(4), 204–236. Schebesta, P. (1954). ‘Das Problem des Urmonotheismus. Kritik Einer Kritik’, Anthropos, 49, 689–697. Schmidt, W. (1927). L’etnologia e la sua importanza per il metodo dell’attivita missionaria. Scuola tipografica Pio X. Zimon, H. (1986). Wilhelm Schmidt’s theory of primitive monotheism and its critique within the Vienna school of ethnology. Anthropos, 81, 243–260.

Chapter 3

Old and New Dynastic Orders: German Anthropology in the Era of Bismarck

The culture of German anthropology in the latter half of the nineteenth century can be compared to the culture of Vatican anthropology in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the structural, cultural and ideological aspects of German anthropology from the 1860s to draw on similarities and differences with Wilhelm Schmidt’s Vatican policies a generation later. I argue that, although influenced by the methodology of Graebner and Ankermann, who made their mark in German anthropology in 1904, Schmidt’s attitude was more akin to that of the older generation, such as Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) and Felix von Luschan (1854–1924). By the early twentieth century, Darwinism dominated, or at least influenced, much of modern science and philosophy, but another more dubious strand of thinking had emerged from physical anthropology that would mark a change of direction in studies from museum-based ethnology to racial classification. However, Virchow and his followers were from an older sceptical and fiercely religious group. Schmidt devoted much of his life to maintaining the attitude towards religion and science that was dominant in Germany between 1860 and 1890. While the academic and political climate shifted in Germany, Schmidt embodied a former age of progressive humanitarianism and unchallenged Christianity. Virchow and his followers were still unravelling dimensions of the material world in terms of geographical and climatic influences on human behaviour. This chapter outlines the main tenets of German anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century and their influence in Rome and discusses aspects of anthropology that were prominent in the decisions behind the creation of the Great Exhibition and Vienna’s ethnographic museums. This is another type of dynasty that combined the wealth-power and knowledge-power bases to create the legacy of Bismarck; his influence, gained through military victories spread into the collecting practices and the development of anthropology as a discipline in Germany. I explore the methods and approaches of three German anthropologists with reference to ethnographic museum collecting and curating: Virchow, Bastian and Luschan. We see how German anthropologists of the mid-to-late nineteenth century grappled with ideas of fixed natural © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_3

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time and Darwinian evolutionism. Furthermore, their concentration on collections and archive fieldwork engendered a cultural-historical school in Vienna, which was influential in early nineteenth-century continental anthropology.1

Photographic portrait of Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) a 19th-century polymath. Dated 19th Century World History Archive

Otto Von Bismark (1815–98), Chancellor of the Germany Empire (1871–1890) World History Archive

1

Information in this chapter on German anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries comes primarily from Stocking (1996), Massin (1996), Zimmerman (2001) and research in the archives of the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum.

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3.1 The Structure and Culture of German Anthropology German anthropologists between 1860 and 1900 had a clear idea of authority and rank within their own institution. The national German Anthropological Society (GAS) contained a hierarchy with a supreme council called Die Commission as the ultimate decision-making body. It held science to be the justification for action, however controversial that action might be, and it was done in the name of a ‘truth’ that stood as more than the total of its parts. Some German anthropologists held positions of power within the civil service, and others, like Virchow, achieved both political and intellectual status. Virchow served as professor and director of the Pathology Institute at the University of Berlin from 1856 and was instrumental in the establishment of the Berlin Institute of Pathology and Museum. He is remembered for his Cellular Theory as outlined in his major work, Cellular Pathologie (1858). He founded the German Progressive Party (GPP) and led the GAS and its most important sub-group, the Berlin Anthropological Society (BAS), which meant that his politics were intricately linked with his aspirations for anthropology. The intellectual pursuit of a liberal humanist tradition in the human sciences in Germany influenced the establishment of ethnographic museums. Bastian, who was the director of Berlin’s ethnographic museum from 1873 to 1905, also became one of the leading ethnologists of his day and was the first to propose the idea that myths from all over the world seem to be built from the same elementary ideas. The GAS, as was common among most late nineteenth-century anthropological methods, wanted to classify the cultural and natural world, and German anthropologists took advantage of their unique social positions as gentlemen ‘amateurs’ and renowned academics to study the physiques of non-Westerners, their habits and material culture. There was a cultural penchant for ‘freak shows’, and businessmen brought in ‘guests’ from ‘exotic’ lands for the purposes of entertaining and appeasing the curiosity of the German public. This phenomenon was not just specific to the German peoples, as throughout Europe shows and exhibitions of the ‘curious’ and ‘exotic’ appealed to the popular imagination; side-shows became a lucrative business. By the early 1870s German anthropologists felt the need to separate ‘entertainment’ from ‘science’ and successfully appealed to the government to build a separate museum to house collections from a growing empire for purposes of research. However, even in the 1890s it was still difficult to distinguish popular entertainment from the objects of science as often the subject matter was one and the same. One of the best-known German exhibitions was the 1896 Berlin Colonial Exhibition when the German Imperial Office brought over more than one hundred African and Pacific peoples to Germany to live and perform in Treptow Park. This was an attempt to recruit elite indigenous performers to boost the ideological concept of colonial domination, as it was hoped they would return home talking of the German cities with their impressive museums, theatres, and zoos. The colonial exhibition, therefore, had a double purpose: firstly, to display the new subjects of the German Empire to European Germans, and secondly, to prove the cultural superiority of the imperial masters to the colonised natives. It was also hoped that the ‘visitors’ would

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offer themselves to the physical anthropologists at the Berlin Museum to be studied for the purpose of science (see Steinmetz, 2017). However, the relatively high status of some of the visiting subjects from the empire made it difficult to carry out anthropological investigation, such as measuring and taking photographs of them in traditional clothing. Many refused to be pigeon-holed into a time and place that would have been more appropriately held by their grandfathers. Colonial visitors from European empires often held high status in their native lands and found the requests from the anthropologists both demeaning and impertinent. The colonial anthropologist often found it difficult to distinguish between the hierarchies of the indigenous societies, seeing only the physical difference being of importance to their own ethnocentric study. The colonial visitors had no intention of seeing Europeans as their colonial masters. One example of the refusal by some colonial subjects to be used as symbols of something they did not want to represent was Bismarck (Kwelle Ndumbe) Bell, a Duala dignitary from Cameroon, ‘who refused to be photographed in “native” costume’. He appears in the photographic archives in Berlin in a tuxedo and bow tie, a style he felt was more appropriate to his social standing (Zimmerman, 2001: 32). Notwithstanding individual reactions to the German political and anthropological agendas of the late nineteenth century, the GAS still found some success with anthropometric methods, measuring body parts, recording height, and interviewing the ‘subjects’ involved. Within the safe boundaries of the Berlin popular exhibitions of ‘exotic’ and ‘curious’ peoples, experts felt that it was ‘methodologically more sound for anthropologists to study “representatives of foreign nations” in Germany, where one had, and could use comfortably, all the instruments that one might need’ (36). By the end of the century the German museum had set an example for the rest of the world. O. M. Dalton, who was a curator at the British Museum, jealously complained in 1898 that in contrast to the British, ‘Germans of all classes find ethnography of great interest’, and he estimated that the collections in the Berlin Museum alone were ‘six or seven times as extensive’ as those in London (Penny, 2002, 1). Penny also notes that Northcote W. Thomas, the editor of a series on the native races of the British Empire, went so far as to maintain that in the previous ‘twenty-five years the Berlin Museum has accumulated ethnographical collections more than ten times as large as those of the British Museum’. In Germany, he wrote, ‘the work of collection goes on incessantly’, but in England, ‘with the greatest colonial empire which the world has ever seen, lags far behind’ (1). Both German historians and anthropologists saw nature, including ‘natural peoples’, as fundamentally separate from their own historical narrative. The term Naturvölker was attributed to peoples of the world classified as ‘of nature’ who were outside ‘civilised’ time of the ‘cultured’ peoples of the world. The classification of groups of people was arbitrary, but the point is that German anthropologists saw ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as separate entities. The German term Naturvölker is a rough equivalent to the English ‘primitive’, but the terms had fundamentally different meanings. For the British, ‘primitives’ were the earliest condition of man on an evolutionary scale that included Europeans; Naturvölker,

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according to German anthropologists, excluded their part in the evolutionary process (23). ‘Conceptually connected to cultural peoples but simultaneously part of nature, natural peoples provided what German anthropologists hoped would be a position outside the historicity in which traditional humanists had trapped themselves. While temporality divided nature and culture, the idea of natural peoples allowed anthropologists, like no other German human scientists, to scuttle back and forth across the divide, bringing knowledge about nature to bear on all humans’ (Zimmerman, 2001: 51–2). Overall, German’s self-image of superiority was strongly supported by their views of the natural inferiority of non-white, non-European people. ‘The developing academic discipline of ethnology often became an expression of cultural imperialism, and racism was ingrained in the university’. Thus ‘the theoretical pattern of diffusionism remained highly political because of its close connections in structure and content to political ideologies’ (Smith, 1991: 160). Penny provides a detailed description of the Grassi-Museum in Leipzig, designed on Bastian’s principles, including the vast number of objects on display, the geographical organisation, and the vibrant colours and wondrous artefacts on display (3). The Germans were vastly ahead of their European counterparts in their vision for the ethnographic museum. They had already realised the need for referencing the displays that were culturally alien to their victors. The curators drew upon the visitor’s need to connect the displays to their own knowledge of their world but used an empirically based exhibition teaching of human culture with historical references and visual texts that helped orient the visitor towards contextualisation. Penny argues ‘These museums were created in conscious opposition to the Wunderkammers of an earlier age, and they represented a determined attempt to move beyond curiosity and towards an empirically based science of human culture and history’. (Penny, 2002: 6). As an assertion of their independence and as a measure of security and purpose for their mission to classify in the name of science, the BAS declared itself a ‘juristic person’ in the 1880s, meaning that it would enjoy a legal existence that was separate from its members and associates as individuals. The knock-on effect of this was that the Society took legal ownership of the objects and collections it held, relinquishing the property rights of the people who created them (Zimmerman, 2001: 130–131): ‘The state affords in its institutions a permanent guarantee for the kind that could not be offered in fluctuating societies with changing leadership’ (Bastian quoted by Zimmerman, 2001: 131).2 The legal restrictions normally imposed on the estate of a society were not applied to the BAS because science was considered ‘an authority independent of and having precedence over the will of individual members’ (131). German anthropology would soon need to adapt as the focus of research shifted from the written accounts of expeditions and people to the objects themselves. With this shift, there arose the need to gather information from amateurs and trained anthropologists alike who travelled the world; those analysing the data soon came to rely on the questionnaire for a more encompassing narrative. Felix von 2

Message from Adolf Bastian to the General Administration of the Royal Museums, 5 April 1888, in the Archiv des Musuems für Völkerkunde, Berlin, IV, 144a/85.

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Luschan3 used questionnaires extensively, reaching Germans living in Africa and the Pacific. He directed the expatriates from a subjective narration to observe religion carefully: Questions about religion posed particular problems, for it would be nearly impossible to present religious beliefs without resorting to interpretation and narrative. Luschan particularly emphasized the need to collect religious objects and cautioned that ‘ambiguous words such as fetish, doll, etc. are best avoided completely’. (Luschan, 1904: 3; quoted in Zimmerman, 2001: 55)

Thus, ethnographic writing was reduced to an accompaniment of ethnographic collecting and was itself modelled on the collection of objects. To many, Bastian’s writings were a modernist experiment in the non-narrative modes of perception sought by anthropologists: The rejection of language as a source of truth prevented anthropologists from expounding their own knowledge in a way that was comprehensible and interesting to non-specialists. Anthropologists may have escaped the problems of narrative, but they did so at the expense of their ability to communicate with a broad audience. (56–57)

Ironically, to categorise Naturvölker, it was to be the anthropologists who would designate themselves a perspective outside the linear narrative. Virchow guided his anthropologist colleagues to redefine culture under a progressive modern Kaisereich. He called the movement Kulturkamp (Struggle for Culture), and one of its fundamental characteristics was its intolerance of Catholicism in Germany. Virchow said that ‘the modern (Catholic) orders, since the time they became subservient to the Jesuit spirit, are absolutely incompatible with the Kultur whose bearers we believe ourselves to be’ (Virchow, 1875; quoted in Zimmerman, 2001: 58). He challenged the Catholic attitude to modern Europe, using examples from history: Thence came that system, which later poisoned the political development of all Roman peoples and in part that of the Teutonic peoples too. There is where the Inquisition begins, there begins censorship. There begins scholastic philosophy with its opposition to natural science, with its formalism and its oppression of every free direction of the spirit. There, gentlemen, begins the opposition of papism in the modern world. (58)

To strengthen the nation of Germany and its new sense of self-determination, Virchow declared the need for material culture of the peoples of the world, and for this they turned to the navy. The GAS used Bismarck’s nationalistic policies to further their cause. These policies pushed for an imperialistic discourse, and one of its embodiments was the national museum to create a German identity. The GAS was called upon along with other scientific bodies to fill the museums with evidence of military conquest and scientific rationale to mark the superiority of the German people. One of the most predominant roles the GAS played in the proliferation of Bismarck’s policies was their organisation of a national survey to assess the physical characteristics of German children. Ultimately, based on children’s eye and hair colour, 3

Felix von Luschan published as an anthropologist, ethnologist, and archaeologist in connection with Benin between 1898 and 1919. Luschan’s publication, Die Altertümer von Benin (1919), even today is an important source for any person engaged in Benin art and history.

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anthropometric tests were sent to all the teachers in Germany for the assessment and identification of the ‘true German race’. Luschan spoke of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum in the 1870s as ‘the greatest monument to our colonial troops’ (154). In 1872, a pamphlet written by the BAS made suggestions for anthropologists to accompany naval expeditions as they saw the collaboration as an ideal cultural-historical task. The German anthropologist believed that a colonial collaboration between the anthropologist and the military would contribute to Kultur and the stature of the German Empire in the eyes of the world. Anthropologists felt it better to steal ethnographic objects than to buy them: ‘By forcibly taking the property of indigenous societies, rather than purchasing it, the navy could deliver what anthropologists considered as being more authentic goods’ (156). Objects of colonial warfare were not deemed authentic since they were not part of ‘traditional’ African society, but then again, as Zimmerman points out, nor was colonial warfare. This ‘purist’ idea of pre-contact authenticity was played out in the museum context back in Germany, where anthropologists sought to acquire African objects dispossessed by their dead owners: ‘There was a self-consciously utopian aspect to the museum construction as anthropologists hoped to spread their own understanding of their discipline through visual technology’ (156). The mass production of spears and arrows was the result of resistance of the African native peoples to German intervention and forced labour. In fact, so many spears made for colonial warfare were sent back to Germany that the curators of the Berlin Museum gained permission to bury them as they were useless for the museum enterprise.

3.2 German Physical Anthropology 1860–1910 As the founder of the BAS and the GAS, Virchow wielded enviable political influence among the highest politicians of his day. He was a self-proclaimed pacifist and was outspoken about his opposition to Bismarck’s colonial policies. However, as Stocking points out, his speeches belied his sense of humanity as well as a callous scientific utilitarianism that was typical of its time: Now that we have become a nation of navigators and our imperial colonies have very quickly increased, we are prompted to take care of our new fellow countrymen, to establish spiritual relationships with them and to learn to value them, at least, as far as their heads and brains are concerned. As we can obtain very few skulls, we cannot saw in pieces all those we receive. Thanks to the precious help of the government and of some travellers, I have been able to obtain until now some dozen skulls from our Eastern and Western African colonies … Dr. Stuhlmann investigated on a spot where a fight took place between two tribes. One of his assistants collected a certain number of heads on the scene, packed them in a bag and had them carried on the back of a boy to Zanzibar. As one could expect, they banged and bumped against each other during the trip, and their condition, when they arrived in Berlin, left a lot to be desired. Such are the conditions with which one must reckon. (Virchow, 1891: 122, quoted in Stocking, 1996: 95)

Between 1860 and 1890, Virchow, like his followers Johannes Ranke (1836– 1916) and Luschan, upheld a positivist, non-Darwinian, monogenist Weltanschauung

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(world view) within academic physical anthropology. He relied on Bastian’s Museum ethnology for their resistance to German political attempts to dehumanise the ‘savage’. For his part, Bastian promoted ‘the equality and human dignity of all cultures, even for the “despised and neglected savages” one thought could be halfanimals’ (quoted in Massin, 1996: 96). However, Virchow’s theoretical grounds became somewhat murky when he argued that Naturvölker and Kulturvölker should both be seen as ‘wholly human’, whilst also believing in a physiological and racial hierarchy. Virchow said that his study of human skulls showed that inferior human races had brow ridges, which were generally missing among peoples from higher cultures (Virchow, 1876: 172, quoted in Massin, 1996: 96). However, by 1899 a new generation of Darwinians decided that Virchow’s static style of craniology should be replaced by a dynamic biological history of human beings. Thus, they began to arrange human races in genealogical succession. Diagrammatic representations of the human tree were drawn up as explorers and researchers searched for living fossils of prehistoric mankind. It is at this point that the term ‘primitive’ permeated ethnological accounts. Darwinian Evolutionism eclipsed the older generation’s theories, and anthropologists such as Kollman, who had once defended the humanity of the Australian Aborigines, professed other beliefs by 1911, saying that the ‘equality’ of ‘coloured races’ was ‘incompatible’ with the results of science. Thus, the progressive attitudes in German physical anthropology became absorbed into the wider cultural politics of the era with its own agenda for nation building and colonial expansion. Virchow and his colleagues had also believed in these patriotic, larger goals for the German people; their 1871 anthropometric survey of German children was a task they proudly organised for the ‘anthropology of the nation’. Versions of history were often personalised to each man’s sense of the past, and some looked back on their Teutonic ancestors with a sense of romantic nostalgia. Ranke, for example, proposed to build a new national parliament to symbolise the political unity of Germany, in which he would exhibit the development of the Teutonic tribes from the distant past to their recent merge with the German Reich ‘in order to instruct the public, to promote science and strengthen the love for the motherland’ (quoted in Massin, 1996: 100). However, Teutonic nationalism was manifest in German prehistoric archaeology and Völkerskunde, rather than physical anthropology. Anthropological studies had shown that racial types cut across linguistic and political units, and moreover, in their craniological studies Virchow and his colleagues had never asserted that European ‘types’ were superior.

3.3 The Failure of Virchow’s Craniology and Rise of Neo-Darwinism

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3.3 The Failure of Virchow’s Craniology and Rise of Neo-Darwinism Rather than ‘scientising’ national unity, physical anthropologists expressed their national pride through the achievements of German science. Virchow set the GAS up against their French counterparts and declared that although the French had more skulls and better ethnographic material, the Germans were making more progress in theoretical research. However, the tide was set to change, when in 1883, Virchow’s Liberal Party disappeared from the political scene and was usurped by the country’s new political force, the Marxist Socialist Democratic Party. German academics in turn swayed the other way towards a new type of German nationalism, which became increasingly imperialistic, militaristic, pessimistic and biologically orientated. By the end of the nineteenth century, museums and their storage spaces had been crammed full of objects, and it became increasingly difficult to catalogue and display them. The mood had also changed in the museum world from one of optimism and faith in the positivist rationale of its curators, to one of bewilderment of the limitations of space, and lack of ability to order humans and their material cultural productions into neat categories. A new generation of intellectuals in this space engendered a different type of investigation, breaking off into a ‘physical anthropology’ aligned with racial categorisation. These scholars and museum leaders were less democratic and decidedly Darwinian, and they made up a part of the new society that had emerged after the unification of Germany in 1871. In the search for biological evidence of race and type, Virchow’s craniology had brought few results to a science that was supposed to be progressive. Physical anthropology’s claim to scientific status was based on breakthroughs made by Virchow and colleagues, such as Swedish professor of anatomy, Ander Retzius (1796–1860) in the middle of the century. However, their intensive studies of the human skull and meticulous measurements of index categories to decide which racial types might fall into the dolichocephelic or the brachycephaicl category had eventually led to an impasse. In short, by 1880, many felt that this method of inquiry had run its course, and various attempts to reform the discipline failed when the whole system was found to be fundamentally flawed (Torok, 1906: 233–34, quoted in Massin, 1996: 109). In response, physical anthropologists turned to ethnology and biology, deeming craniology as a ‘complete fiasco’ (Ehrenreich, 1897: 59). The failure of craniology had a negative impact on the aim of late nineteenth-century physical anthropology, and Ranke remarked in 1887: ‘in the present state of our knowledge, all attempts to separate mankind in clear-cut groups races and varieties, each having bodily properties not found in others can have only a provisional value’ (Ranke, 1887 II: 236, quoted in Massin, 1996: 112). Others such as Otto Schoehensack and Paul Ehrenreich saw the unsatisfactory result of the enterprise, but still assumed the superficial tri-racial divider of race: ‘blacks, whites and peoples of yellow colour’. The new generation of German Darwinists were critical of their forefathers, but even in 1910, more than a decade after Virchow effectively lost power over the GAS, they were still in a quandary. German anatomist Gustav Fritch (1838–1927) lamented the ‘total misery

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of our present racial classification’ (1910: 580). Pointedly, after Fritch’s attempts to establish a new ‘closed’ static system, Luschan, Virchow’s successor, announced that ‘in the current state of our research [racial classification belonged] rather to the realm of faith than that of knowledge’ (1910: 927, quoted in Massin, 1996: 113). With the deaths of Virchow in 1902 and Bastian in 1905, Klaatsch and Schwalbe led the way for the ‘neo-Darwinians’ who eased biological evolutionism into the practice of anthropology in Germany. They concentrated on biological concepts; methods and laws that were much more specialised than the broader view of the human sciences that had grown up over the previous half century. In the age of positivism, modernity was synonymous with science, a science that held questions about the origin of man through biological investigation. At the turn of the century biology stood at the pinnacle of the natural sciences that included a plethora of concerns such as organicism, social Darwinism, social Lamarckism, hereditarism, criminal anthropology and eugenics. In Germany this ‘biologism’ had been advocated by materialist radicals and liberals who opposed the conservative Christian cosmology (Gregory, 1977). Science was used as a political tool to refute the biblical conceptions of traditional society, and as a result, biology was banned from some schools between 1882 and 1908 (Massin, 1996, 121). However, biology remained at the forefront of university debates and infiltrated all the human sciences such as sociology, psychology, history of science and even economics (Mann, 1969: 23). Even those who would have preferred it otherwise, like the rector of Berlin University, Adolf von Harneck, admitted that biology was the central science because it ranged from the ‘most elementary observations’ of animal life right on through the ‘so-called human sciences’ (Massin, 1996, 121). Thus by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, there was still much to debate in German anthropological societies as to what extent a group of peoples were defined by culture and nature.

3.4 Comparisons of the GAS and Schmidt’s Vatican Ethnology There are some obvious similarities between Virchow and Schmidt. Both were autodidactic with strong personal beliefs, and both were Christians with an energetic commitment to the organisations they represented. Schmidt, like Virchow in German politics, edged his way up the political ladder of the Catholic Church. Schmidt worked feverishly on his own ethnological theories and gained recognition as an intellectual in Vienna before being invited to Rome by Pius XI. Schmidt also had a very clear understanding of authority, and like Virchow and his fellow anthropologists, he too was accountable to his superiors. However, Schmidt had a different set of politics to play. He believed in the advancement of science, but as a Catholic priest he also had to answer to Rome. He had to understand not only the political zeitgeist of his Austrian home, but also the climate of the Vatican. However, once there, his eminent protector, needed by all lesser-titled clergy within the confines of the Vatican, entitled

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Schmidt to use papal authority to propel the work force of Catholic missionaries in the name of Pius XI. Virchow had set up Die Commission in 1879 as a direct response to the ‘Prehistoric Bones Case’, which challenged his views on Darwinian evolution: ‘this esoteric group had a kind of authority that no member speaking in the first person in a public meeting ever had’ (Zimmerman, 2001: 132). Pope Pius IX made the idea of papal infallibility canon law in the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870, with ultimately the same objective: if the head of an organisation is disconnected from the normal laws and customs of a group, then he or it is above judgement. For the GAS, faceless decisions were made in the name of ‘science’, and in the Vatican, the papal word came directly from God. Both were therefore incontestable. Aware of the limitations of his stance as an individual in the Church, Schmidt used his intellectual skills to defend the Faith against criticism for being backwardthinking and distanced from the people existing in a ‘separate religious, intellectual, artistic subculture [Sonderwelt]’ (Mair, 1948 in Rivinius, 1981: 18, quoted in Dietrich, 1992: 113). However, just as the GAS’s work was part of a larger political sphere, so Schmidt’s ethnology was part of a wider attempt within the Church to raise standards of scientific knowledge. Schmidt was outspoken in his defence of his contribution to it, speaking of Anthropos as ‘a brilliant refutation of the change of benignedness [Geistesfinsternis] and suppression of science, which is often raised against the Church and Her servants’ (Schmidt, 1905: 11). His was also a defence against ‘naturalistic’ theories of religion. From the Vatican’s standpoint, the ‘natural sciences’ of the nineteenth century had produced ‘heretical theories’ on the origin of Man and society in the form of Darwinism, which explained the origins of religion without mention of ‘Divine’ intervention. In a letter to his Superior General, Schmidt proposed that a thorough study of comparative religion would reveal the truth of ‘our Holy religion’ (Schmidt to Janssen, 5 March 1895). This commitment would be a life-long endeavour and result in his magnus opus, The Origin of the Idea of God. Schmidt’s Catholic ethnology combined theology with metaphysics. His personal belief was his strength and his weakness, since the faith that spurred him on to organise and analyse masses of ethnographic material also thwarted his attempts for a scientific conclusion, as often one contradicted the other (Bernardi Interview, 2002). He was not alone in his dilemma, since even in the 1880s, when he was one of the leading members of the GAS, Virchow considered forbidding the teaching of Darwinism in secondary schools in Germany as he felt it was too broad a use of freedom; in some cases, this actually happened. Darwinism, he said, was not only ‘an unscientific hypothesis, but it also encouraged socialism. Virchow viewed science in this case as a check on the freedom of opinion and as a defender of the political status quo’ (Zimmerman, 2001: 131). In the same way, the papacy of the latter half of the nineteenth century censored many notions of science and philosophy as expressed in their encyclicals which culminated in the Anti-Modernist Oath. Both Virchow and Schmidt needed a workforce to collect ethnographic data and both used their ‘civil service’ to do so; for Virchow it was the military and other colonial connections, and for Schmidt it was the missionaries. Schmidt required ‘religious

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reverence for the facts’, not because of a notion of empiricism, but because he wanted to promote his idea of unity of the empirical. Thus, he was ‘filled with a conviction that nature and revelation can never really contradict each other, the missionary will never describe a fact with less accuracy, or indeed suppress it, out of religious apologetic considerations’ (Schmidt, 1905: 17). Schmidt used questionnaires to direct the knowledge that the amateur missionary ethnologists could provide. His lengthy explanations resembled Virchow’s questionnaires sent out to the German colonies. Like the GAS, he requested information to accompany the objects that they would be sending to Rome, and like his German colleagues, he also argued for a separate museum to house this unique type of object. Schmidt’s interest in material culture was influenced by Bastian. Indeed, the description of the displays in the Berlin Museum seems to foreshadow the exhibition and museum Schmidt would create in the 1920s with its eclectic collections of ‘colourful pieces of clothing, jewellery, embroidery, decorations for lanterns, amulets, drawings, lacquer ware, bows, arrows, powder horns and cartridge cases’. They would be organised in geographical areas where ‘one could look across from China and Korea and see the similarly constructed reflex bows and the variations in religious icons and begin to contemplate the interrelated nature of these cultures as well as identify their particularities’ (Penny, 2002: 3). In the early twentieth century Schmidt argued for a pontifical museum to display the Vatican’s ethnographic collections. His distinction within the Vatican came about because of his involvement with the University of Vienna, where he was a revered scholar of linguistics and ethnology, and like Virchow and Bastian, he had come to symbolise a school of thought. In the days of Schmidt, Anthropos and the historicalcultural school of Vienna overlapped considerably. His influences from both the GAS and Bastian’s ethnology led him to seize the opportunity to collect ethnographic data to use, like the GAS had for the new German nation, as symbols of expansion and superiority. However, in contrast to the German ethnographic museums which were to house the material culture and bodies of their colonised subjects to boost national pride and classify race, Schmidt wanted ethnographic artefacts to chart ‘Catholic pride’ and classify religion. The content of Schmidt’s collections replicated those found in many Germany cities like Berlin, Leipzig, and Cologne. The eclectic assortment of objects was displayed in fixed categories that were intended to lead to the classification of humanity rather than the foundation of the discipline of the museum: ‘Anthropologists were not always sure what they were looking at and never found categories they trusted. … Their immense collection, anthropologists hoped, would give order when it was seen simultaneously, in the total impression’ (Zimmerman, 2001: 186). Like Bastian, Schmidt intended to frame his museum displays ‘to situate anthropology in relation to other human sciences, please their political patrons, and accommodate even those parts of their collection that did not fit into their schema, especially the “cultural peoples” of Asia and ancient America’ (187). Schmidt’s vision for the ‘ethnological room’ in the MEML was a project to obtain a greater understanding of the artefacts in his museum, a laboratory in which further study could be undertaken. Just as Bastian’s Museum was a medium designated into areas that

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represented a space where real processes took place, Schmidt’s museum was similar in that it was an attempt to classify universal attributes of human nature. In many ways Ratzel summed up the methods of Bastian and Schmidt in an 1888 review written by Virchow: ‘The analytical method can work well with the synthetic method of culture history only when the latter [that is culture history itself] first begins, after ethnology has created a secular basis for observations’ (Virchow, 1888: 248; quoted in Zimmerman, 2001: 205). Schmidt shared the anti-Darwinian approach of Virchow and Bastian who disapproved of evolutionist anthropological museums like the Pitt Rivers, seeing them as merely creations of enthusiastic persons. Narrative has always been a challenge where objects are present, and their creators and collectors absent. It is contrary to the foregrounding of visual above all other forms of representation, available in the museum space, and has often been the cause of mis representation of cultures where context is key; often the visitor is left with no more than a glimpse of an object whose origins and creators remained disconnected with chronological time and remote in place. The politics of nineteenth century German anthropology consisted not just of the ideologies they inhered in the discipline, but also more importantly, of its construction of new sources of legitimate authority specific to the context of imperial Germany (Zimmerman, 2001: 207, 112). It was a specifically German empiricism that characterised the practice of anthropology in Germany; in this rarefied atmosphere, socially produced facts were collected and contributed to a common pool, and anthropologists’ collective knowledge made sense only in terms of its socially embodied entirety: If German anthropology was a republic of science, then it was a peculiarly German science whose inhabitants appeared neither as autonomous individuals nor as political parties representing individual interests but rather as mass associations that coordinated individuals in a common project. The republic of science for anthropology was based not on the equality of humans before the truth of nature, but rather on the coordination of humans with the goal of producing truth. (Zimmerman, 2001: 125–6)

In the same way, the clerical members of the Catholic Church were not recognised as individuals with individual possessions. They worked as a collective force for a God who was also an authority independent of and having precedence over the will of individual members. This God was represented on Earth by the pope, and thus, if he requested individuals’ collections, the missionaries would offer their possessions to him. Pius XI used the historical moment of the 1925 Jubilee to celebrate missionaries, and Schmidt took full advantage of Pius’s commitment to raise the public’s awareness of the Catholic evangelical empire to obtain collections for the Vatican. Schmidt’s work also included some of Virchow’s approaches and his ‘Notes and Queries’, which he attached to Anthropos in 1906 and the PME; both contained a section aimed at identifying racial and tribal distinctions. He also included guidelines for skull measuring and colour charts. This was not to identify a ‘true’ racial type, but as a personal reference as much as anything to look for cultural migration and contact for the benefit of his own work on the origin of God. These guidelines for collecting information for Anthropos and the 1925 PME fed from and into the Western cultural fashion for the collection and display of the ethnographic objects, but the idea of ‘truth’ was double layered as both a scientific and a spiritual truth.

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This truth was also a paternalistic truth within an order of male hierarchies for a man-made order of society and religion for the Western world. Whereas women played non-power-related roles in the collecting and organising of data in German anthropology, for the Catholic Church the collecting of ethnographic data and objects was a task issued only to the male section of the clergy. There is no evidence that female members of religious orders participated in the exercise at all. The reasons for which women have never been allowed to hold any mentionable rank in the Catholic Church are many and have theological implications beyond the scope of this book. However, it is noteworthy that the female members of the clergy were not asked to participate in the preparation for the PME or the MEML, nor were they sent the Anthropos or Exhibition and Museum guidelines for collecting and researching ethnographic data. Even when Pius XI hailed the opening of the MEML as a laboratory of ideas and a training ground for missionaries in 1927, it was understood that it would be the priests’ seminaries and male missionaries who would be visiting the museum, and not the holy sisters of the Church. There is no mention of any research or managerial contribution by clerical women to the PME or MEML in the Lateran Annals or the MEMV archives, nor are there any collections sent from convents. In the 1920s, the Catholic Church, like the GAS still saw their work and social life as essentially a male activity. It is true that women did play central roles as missionaries abroad and in many respects held autonomous power in their own institutions, but they were considered as servants and not called upon for their academic capabilities, nor were they promoted within the Catholic hierarchy inside the Vatican. We also find a similarity between the textual information given to the visitors to the Berlin Museum and that of the Pontifical museums. The Guidebooks to the Berlin Museum contained only general information about the geographic origins of the objects they exhibited. One explanation was that the guidebook was not the place to convey specific information about the objects, but even in the displays there was little to learn. Zimmerman remarks that ‘these labels … were themselves extraordinarily spare, consisting of the type and geographical region of an object with the occasional name of its collector or donor’ (Zimmerman, 2001: 182). Relying on the visual, these textless objects were transformed into artefacts of ‘natural’ humanity. The pontifical displays were exhibited in the same manner, and as Schmidt’s Lateran Guidebook shows, it was more of a vehicle to explain the relationship between Christianity and other cultures than an explanation of the actual objects in the glass cases. Both Bastian and Schmidt had an urgent need to collect ethnographic objects, and they were not averse to using the colonial links available to them in order to obtain the much-needed data. Bastian influenced the rise of diffusionism by providing the institutional basis for it to develop, even though his immediate successors became critical of his theoretical contributions. The same can be said of Schmidt, as he provided the groundwork for debate about the connections between missionary work and ethnology. Both Bastian and Schmidt’s understanding came directly from studying material culture, and not from undertaking long-term fieldwork of their own. Schmidt also founded the MEML journal, the Lateran Annals, which published around 500 copies annually, half of which went to the archives of the museum. Like Anthropos,

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the Lateran Annals were founded with the intention of providing an introduction of ethnological science and religiology4 into the Vatican. In the years when Schmidt organised his missiological-religious seminar weeks on behalf of the Vatican, there were many reservations within the clergy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, if a priest wanted to organise a conference, he had to send his proposal to the Holy Office (Santa Uffizio) in Rome, because the study of religiology was deemed eresiam sapit, as good as heresy. The main problem was that religiology had been founded by Protestants, and there was still great suspicion, not entirely unfounded, of any influence from Protestant theology. Although Schmidt was influenced by and replicated much of the German methodology from the late nineteenth century in Anthropos and for the pontifical museums, his objectives were not nationalistic, but spiritual. Part of Schmidt’s achievement was to use the tools of German Kulturkamp against Kulturkamp. We must remember that Kulturkamp was emphatically anti-Catholic, and Schmidt’s struggle was not one of searching for a German identity within its new physical geographical context. Rather it was a struggle to regain the Church’s identity within a new physical geographic context, and in many ways he succeeded. Schmidt’s ethnology arose out of the turn-of-the-century debates that sounded the bell for the end of liberal physical anthropology in Germany and marked the move towards a Nordic racial biology. He had much more in common with the older generation embodied by Virchow and Bastian. Like them, his ethnology was full of ambiguities and contradictions. On one hand, he was a racial liberationist like Virchow and his colleagues, Ranke and Luschan; on the other hand, he concentrated on material culture to develop his theories much in the vein of Bastian. The emergence of new theories of human origins leaned towards genetics, but the study of such an area study was beyond the scope of his ideology. They struck at the root of Christianity and sought to pursue an argument based on biological premises that was far too much of a risk at a time when ‘science’ as a concept was still deeply mistrusted by the Church. Schmidt found a way through the quagmire of political, intellectual, and ideological constraints to capitalise on his strengths. He acknowledged his allegiance to the Church by using the theoretical tools of his German contemporaries to convince the Church of their implicit role within ethnology. He suggested ways in which they might use ethnology, rather than physical anthropology, as a science of the Church, searching not for the identification of race but for the origin of God through the examination of ethnographic material. Since artefacts could not speak for themselves, it was Schmidt who decided what they ‘said’ once the objects arrived in the Vatican. If German physical anthropologists could admit that classification of race was still a matter of ‘faith’, so too could the Church take a stance in the debate since neither side was disprovable. Schmidt, like the German anthropologists, rewrote portions of history to support his theories. If Virchow could invent Die Commission to act as an omnipotent power over anthropological theory, then Schmidt could edit a journal and hold conferences, 4

Religiology is a social science developed in the nineteenth century by German Protestant theologians and philosophers.

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since he too was a learned man with personal convictions. His political manoeuvring made him, like Virchow, a man with whom to be reckoned. Intellectually speaking, if the reasoning behind the study of craniology, which had become a dominant science in Germany for half a century, was of a circular logic, why could he not use his Thomistic logic for his ethnological theory. It was widely accepted by most Germans that imperialism was an expression of natural dominance over their colonial subjects, and by using colonial links, as the missionaries had been doing for centuries, collecting their artefacts was also a way in which the Christian missions could help the ‘pagans’ convert back to the ‘true’ God. Schmidt’s hypothesis was a reaction to nineteenthcentury disputes on the origin of Man and his Creator, and although he would deny that he was an ambitious man, his spiritual aspirations were rather partial to politics and academic recognition; he was not averse to his students calling him the ‘Supreme One’. Once within the Vatican circles, Schmidt wielded the power of the papacy, infiltrating rather than presiding and advising rather than deciding. Thus, he worked his way into controlling the collecting and curating of ethnographic objects for the Vatican, a position he enjoyed until the tides changed again in 1939. It was said in the 1920s, when the Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Lateran was being built, that while Pius XI was in charge, the enterprise would survive: coincidently Pius XI died a few months before the start World War II just as Schmidt was sliding into obscurity, and as for the ethnographic collections in the Vatican, they have never since received such recognition from the papacy.

References Alt, J. (2001). Letters from St. Arnold Janssen to new guinea. Steyler Verlag. Dietrich, S. (1992). Mission, local culture and the “Catholic Ethnology” of Wilhelm Schmidt. Jaso, 23(2), 111–125. Ehrenreich, P. (1897). Anthropologische studien über die urbewohner Brasiliens vornehmlich der staaten Matto Grosso, Goyaz und Amazonas (Purus-gebeit): Nach eigenen aufnahmen und beobachtungen in den jahren 1887 bis 1889. F. Vieweg und sohn. Fritsch, G. (1910). Die Entwicklung und Verbreitung der Menschenrassen. ZiE, 42, 580–586. Gregory, F. (1977). Scientific materialism in nineteenth century Germany. D.Reidel. Mair, L. P. (1948). Australia in new guinea. Melbourne UP. Mann, G. (1969). Medizinische-biologische Ideen und Modelle in der Gesellschaftslehre des 19. Jahrhunderts. Medizinhistorische Journal, 4, 1–23. Massin, B. (1996). From virchow to fischer: physical anthropology and “modern race theories” in Whilhelmine Germany’. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), Volksgeist as method and ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition (pp. 79–154). University of Wisconsin Press. Penny, H. G. (2002). Objects of culture: Ethnography and ethnographic museums in imperial Germany. University of North Carolina Press. Ranke, J. (1887). Der Mensch (2 vols.). Leipzig. Rivinius, K. J. (1981). Die Anfiinge des ‘Anthropos’ (Veroffentlichungen des Missionspriesterseminars, St. Augustin bei Bonn, 32). Steyler.

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Schmidt, W. (1905) (3.7) Einladung zur Mitarbeit und Abonnement aul ‘Anthropos’. Internationale ZeitschriJt flir Volker- und Sprachenkunde. Jos. Kosel’schen (reprinted in Rivinius 1981, pp. 175–215). Smith, W. (1991). Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany (1840–1920). Oxford UP. Steinmetz, G. (2017). Empire in three keys: Forging the imperial imaginary at the 1896 Berlin trade exhibition. Thesis Eleven, 139(1), 46–68. Stocking, G. (Ed.). (1996). Volksgeist as method and ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition. University of Wisconsin Press. Virchow, R. (1875) Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Abgeordneten Haus (Vol. 64, pp. 1797–1801). Sitzung, Bd. 3. Virchow, R. (1876). Die Ziele und Mittel der modernen Anthropologie. Sud Hoff, 1922, 170–182. Virchow, R. (1888). Review of Völkerkunde (Vol. 3). Kulturvölker der Alten und Neuen Welt, by Friedrich Ratzel. ZfE, 20, 248–49. Virchow, R. (1891). Zur Frankfurter Verstandigung. CoB, 22, 121–124. von Luschan, F. (1904). Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, Anleitung für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen in Afrika und Oceanien, (3rd edn.). Gebr. Unger von Luschan, F. (1919). Die Altertümer von Benin. Berl. & Co. von Torok, A. (1906). Neue Untersuchungen über die Dolichocephalie: Ein Beitrag zur nächsten Aufgabe der Rassenforschung. ZMA, 9, 215–238. Zimmerman, A. (2001). Anthropology and antihumanism in imperial Germany. University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 4

Dynastic Networks: The Collision of Christianity and Colonialism in New Guinea

With his authoritative control over collecting objects and information sanctioned by the Holy Father himself, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt relied on his own order, the Society of the Divine Word (SVD), to fulfil the goals he had set for the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition. The SVD would play a similar role in the establishment of the PME to that of the Royal Society of Arts prior to Britain’s 1851 Great Exhibition. It was within the SVD’s St. Gabriel’s seminary house, just outside Vienna, that Schmidt, an avid collector, and curator of the seminary’s own private museums of missionary collections, first conceived of the idea of a pontifical exhibition around 1896. The SVD remained Trustees of the Vatican’s ethnographic objects, providing curators for the exhibition and museum until 1997; effectively ruling as a dynasty over the museum long after Schmidt’s practices held ethnological influence in the collecting or curating of the objects. The Catholic evangelical empire spread across the globe in a network of missionary orders that left their imprint on the people and cultures they contacted. Their presence followed the colonial footprint, and the missionaries and colonial administrators were often entangled in the same networks of transportation, food and settlements. Missionaries who arrived from the various Catholic orders staked claims on different territories. The SVD set about their business primarily in the Pacific and were the first to establish a comprehensive presence in New Guinea. When Schmidt’s request for objects and data spread throughout the world, the largest single collection resulting from his call came from Fr. Franz Kirschbaum SVD, who would spend the final thirty-three years of his life in New Guinea. The first SVD missionaries to New Guinea arrived in 1896, and by World War II they had established a formidable physical and spiritual hold over the land and its peoples. During these years the SVD missionary priests, brothers and sisters were the backbone of the colonial administrations and arguably more influential in everyday village life. In many ways, it was the golden age of missionary activity as conversions and baptisms spread from village to village.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_4

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This chapter maps the SVD’s early years in New Guinea and outlines missionary initiatives and contributions to its infrastructure in the form of plantations, schools, railway and ship building. To parallel this, I examine the inter-relationship between the SVD and the colonial German and subsequent Australian governments in northeast New Guinea as the missionaries endeavoured to remain in the country when they were considered ‘alien enemies’ before and during the two World Wars.

4.1 The SVD and Its Founder, St. Arnold Janssen Fr. Robert F. McNamara SJ (1910–2009) observes in an account of the founder of the SVD, Fr. Arnold Janssen (1837–1909) and the early years of the order, that it is not surprising that the Society of the Divine Word bore a Germanic imprint. Janssen was born in the German Rhineland, the son of a hard-working, devout farming couple. Upon graduating from seminary, he was offered a teaching position in Berlin but went back to the seminary and was ordained a diocesan priest in 1861. From 1867 he became increasingly interested in the foreign missions. Resigning his teaching position, he accepted a chaplaincy, and in 1874 began to issue a mission-oriented publication, The Little Messenger of the Sacred Heart. In its columns he reported news on home and foreign missions and gave expression to his own developing ideas about missionary needs and methods (McNamara, 2004: n.p.). At that time, Germany had no missionary seminary, so Fr. Janssen took the initiative to establish one, although anti-Catholic laws in Germany in the 1870s forbade such religious schools. He therefore crossed the border and established his first seminary in 1875 at an old inn in Steyl in the Netherlands naming it Societas Verbi Divini. Fr. Janssen assigned the SVD a double aim: train missionaries and cultivate the Christian sciences. These objectives reflected his own zeal and scholarship. He expanded his Little Messenger and launched the popular magazine Stadt Gottes (City of God), which remains the largest illustrated Catholic family magazine in Germany. He likewise enlarged the scope of the order to include lay brothers, who soon outnumbered the priest members. In 1892, he established a women’s order, the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters, and in 1896 formed a contemplative branch of the same community. The mission objective of the SVD, as stated in 1886, was to work particularly among non-Christians in the Far East. Janssen sent his first two missionaries to Hong Kong in 1879. Others soon left for China, Togo, Papua New Guinea and Japan, and thereafter to Ecuador, Brazil and Chile. In Europe he eventually inaugurated missionary seminaries in Germany, Poland and Austria. Just before his death in 1909, he set up an American SVD seminary in Techny, Illinois, and in 1920 the American SVD opened a seminary at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, to train black candidates for the priesthood. Many black American priests were trained in this revolutionary school, including, by 1995, six bishops. Fr. McNamara states: As a result of the founder’s insistence that his seminarians cultivate the natural sciences, the Society has become noted particularly for anthropological studies of populations it has

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served. This is enlightened missiology. It pays proper respect to the cultures of even the most ‘primitive’ human societies. (McNamara, 2004: n.p.)

In 1975, Pope St. Paul VI (1963–1978) beatified Fr. Janssen, and in 2003, Pope St. John Paul II (1978–2005) canonised him and his first missionary to China, Fr. Joseph Freinademetz SVD (1852–1908).

4.2 The SVD in New Guinea From the arrival of the SVD in New Guinea in 1896 until post World War II, the administrative and colonial development of this region remained sparse. The Catholic mission was to be the most permanent presence of European contact with the indigenous tribes of New Guinea, and the only European form of settlement west of the mouth of the Sepik River before the outbreak of World War II. Almost as important as the government administrations, and in many instances more influential, Christian missionaries to the island of New Guinea brought about massive changes among the indigenous population of New Guinea.

The first SVD missionaries (left) were sent to New Guinea in 1896 under the leadership of Fr. Eberhard Limbrock (right)

The SVD missionaries in New Guinea were part of a German government initiative, whereby their cooperation had been actively sought, along with the Lutheran Church, to help develop its colonies. The first SVD missionaries, under the leadership of Fr. Eberhard Limbrock (1859–1931) arrived on the 13 August 1896, in Madang,

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the capital of German New Guinea, formerly known as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, where they wanted to begin their work. However, when they landed in Madang the six original brothers and priests found that their plans to buy land for a coconut plantation were thwarted by the powerful German New Guinea Company (NGK). Therefore, Fr. Limbrock negotiated with Kurt von Hagen (1859–1897), after whom Mt. Hagen is named and who had become the commissary four days after they arrived. Von Hagen had already committed to the Rhenish Lutheran missionaries, so Limbrock decided to accept an offer from Ludwig Kaerbach to go to Berlinhafen near Aitape, 275 nautical miles up the coast. Their first mission was founded six weeks later on Tumleo Island. They had brought with them a prefabricated house made in Steyl and flat packed in the fifty-ton-cargo ship that had accompanied them from Europe. Transport was achieved in a skiff with a sail, and living conditions were sparse. They depended on the German shipping line for food and communication. Their purpose was not evident to the natives of Tumleo Island, and Fr. Joseph Edwerg started a school to explain how they differed from government officials, traders and shopkeepers. Comments from missionaries in the early years in New Guinea were not encouraging: Along with the notorious tropical climate, the multiplicity of languages presents us with our greatest problem. In our central school on Tumleo Island we have children belonging to eleven different language groups, which are at least as different from one another as German and Dutch. It is not so seldom that in our churches and chapels we say our usual morning and night prayers in three or four, and sometimes in six or more languages, with various groups taking their turns. (Limbrock’s Prefect Apostolic Report to Janssen from 1907, quoted in Alt, 2001: XL)

When Fr. Janssen asked about the mission’s progress Limbrock replied that they had gained a few Christians and explained that he preferred a slower process of evangelisation to obtain a true knowledge of Christ: When the hour of grace comes, then the good God through his gracious blessings will take care of the statistics, and the more so because we have worked, cared and prayed for His honor and the salvation of souls. (Letter from Limbrock to Janssen from 1899, quoted in Alt, 2001: 14)

In 1905, the SVD moved their headquarters to Alexishaffen, twenty kilometres northwest of Madang. Before the outbreak of World War I, Limbrock and his missionaries had an economic battle with the dominant NGK over land access and settlement in the German territory, as well as personal battles for survival against the ailments that living in the tropics inevitably involved; some missionaries did not survive the first year.

4.3 Colonial and Missionary Interests New Guinea lies off the northern shores of Australia, a few degrees south of the Equator. The western half of the island was a Dutch territory until 1962 and consisted of swamplands, jungle and mountains. The south-eastern quarter was annexed

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by Queensland in 1883, and later came under the jurisdiction of the Australian Commonwealth. The third part of New Guinea, including New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville and some smaller islands, was a German colony from 1884 until 1914 and became an Australian Mandated Territory under the League of Nations. Temporarily occupied by Japanese military forces during the Second World War, it then became a Trust Territory of the United Nations under Australian administration. The two territories that made up Papua and the Mandated Territory gained independence from Australia in 1975. The Dutch side is still a disputed area but has now come under the political control of Indonesia. The Sepik and Ramu Rivers flow north from the Highlands that cut the west from the east, the Markham, and Fly Rivers flow east and west respectively. A heavy rainfall makes for lush vegetation, and a high degree of humidity and provides an ideal tropical climate for thousands of species of birds and plants. When the Europeans arrived in New Guinea in the second half of the nineteenth century, they found much of the land inaccessible, but saw the trading potential of the island. New Guinea is strategically situated between Asia and the Indonesian islands to the West, and Australia and the Pacific islands south and south eastwards. Under German control, the north-eastern territory, known as Kaiser-Wilhemsland from 1884 to 1914, was officially administered by the German government from Madang. Railways had played a vital role in the development of Germany’s southwestern African of Togo, Cameroon and German East Africa (Tanganyika), and in 1906 they began constructing railways, a policy that found significant success and drew trade and commercial interest from Europe to New Guinea. The NGK had been set up in 1884 with the objective of bringing white settlers to New Guinea, a scheme that proved unsuccessful, so the NGK turned to establishment of plantations.

4.4 Plantations The NGK was formed from a consortium of Berlin financiers and had several highprofile investors. It was headed by the private bank tycoon, Adolph von Hansemann of Disconto-Gellschaft, who spent large amounts of money in the hope of generating a new agricultural industry, but by 1898, eleven million marks had brought no return. The harsh environment, pests, disease, and hostility from the indigenous population, combined with a colonial arrogance, contributed to failure all round. The only sustainable crop from New Guinea seemed to come from the coconut plantations. Between 1900 and 1914 plantations expanded, and a demand for a native crop, copra, encouraged investors and planters to establish links. McKillop and Pearson point out that in this area of commerce ‘the NGK faced competition from other German trading companies, individual traders, and entrepreneurial missionaries’ (McKillop & Pearson, 1997: 7). The SVD were one of their competitors, and one cannot help but think that the slicing up of New Guinea was a rather underhanded affair. Fr. Limbrock was caught up in one such struggle.

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He had been trying to purchase more land for plantations, but it became apparent that the NGK was blocking his attempts. In a letter found in the SVD archives to a German Government official on 5 February 1909, his frustration is evident: ‘What is supposed to happen if a depression comes in Europe or if a war breaks out?’. In August 1900, Fr. Limbrock had been allowed to purchase 500 hectares of land along the North coast of New Guinea between Ulingan and Potsdamhafen. By 1901, five mission stations had been set up in New Guinea in five different language districts. Although Malayan was the widespread lingua franca in the Dutch East Indies, he made German the official language as he felt that teaching the native peoples Malayan would be an avenue for ‘Mohamedism’ to enter German New Guinea (Matbob, 2001: 4). In July 1903, looking to expand further inland, another SVD missionary, Br. Edward Irlenbusch, started to cut down the virgin forests at St. Anna near Aitape to begin a large plantation, but he died two years later from blackwater fever. In 1904 the SVD moved back to the area of Madang to set up a mission where the Lutherans had failed. Fifteen kilometres north of Madang Limbrock had discovered a piece of land with four freshwater ponds and three small rivers. This area became the post of his second mission and the headquarters for the SVD in New Guinea and developed into the town of Alexishaffen. The SVD invested in a sawmill and set about teaching the locals how to use it. By 1908 the SVD at Alexishafen had acquired 284 ha, planted 28,650 coconut palms and sixty-seven hectares with 28,550 rubber trees. They also had herds of cattle and twenty horses. Due to Limbrock’s foresight and Westphalian farming background, the SVD were sturdy competitors of their colonial neighbours in the region (Matbob, 2001: 5). They also explored the potential of cotton growing and swamp rice, and Limbrock sent priests to the USA and Indonesia to research growing techniques. All this commercial activity had a direct missionary purpose. The SVD needed plantations to attain self-sufficiency in a hostile environment where they could depend on no one else but themselves for survival. They understood their commercial enterprises, plantations, ships, and railways would rival those of the NGK, but in a land where the rule of law concerning boundaries and authority was constantly shifting, the colonial and missionary enterprises had to act on their own instincts. Mary Taylor Huber writes of the blurred geographical and political boundaries of the early twentieth-century colonial and missionary initiatives: ‘the ambiguity with which the mission was subsequently regarded stems partly from its very success in becoming an important presence in the Sepik’ (Huber, 1988: 72).

4.5 Schools The central school was transferred from Tumleo to Alexishafen in 1904, where they continued to build workshops, a clinic, a chapel near the sawmill and plantations. The missionaries involved the local community in the laborious duties of farming, carpentry and planting as well as the Holy Scriptures: ‘a practice, which began at

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Tumleo, soon became widespread: workmen, apprentices and plantation laborers and their families were continually catechised’ (Matbob, 2001: 5). Responsibility for the education of the natives passed to the Sisters of the Holy Spirit, first sent to New Guinea in 1899, and by 1913 the German Government were asking the missionaries for advice on such matters as a syllabus for a secondary school system (5). However, later observers were not always impressed by the education standards in New Guinea. A report from the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in 1939 recounts an observation from an educational expert who ‘knew of no territory under mandate in which education progressed so slowly’ (PMC XXXVI, 1939: 145).1 Lucy Mair points out that, at the time of her account of the missions in 1948, they had never received any subsidies from the Australian Mandated Government since its establishment in 1922 (Mair, 1948: 22). During the inter-war period, education remained a high priority for the Catholic Church, and it formed an essential and integral part of the missionary programme. The educational development had stabilised around elementary, vocational and catechist training schools. There was an increasing need for the establishment of secondary education, especially with the development of teacher training and seminary formation programmes for future local priests. Several young men had already indicated a desire to become priests. And other examples from other Pacific Islands proved that indigenous Melanesians could pursue a celibate way of life (Tatamai, 2000: 2–4).

4.6 Railways, Ships and Agriculture McKillop and Pearson tell us that the German Government laid down light, narrowgauge railways to provide transport for their trading, plantation and industrial adventures using materials imported from Germany. One of the most important crops at the end of the nineteenth century, besides coconuts and copra, was tobacco. The materials were imported from Germany and the railway was in operation by 1893 (McKillop & Pearson, 1997: 4). They estimate that rail tracks through the tobacco fields by the Jori River at Erima ran for sixteen kilometres by 1895 and twentyfour kilometres by 1897 (4). They decided to use oxen rather than engines for the tracks for the following reasons stated in 1898: ‘the oxen are much cheaper and more easily managed than engines, and, on the whole, answer very well for a road with so little business, especially as all engines used in the tropics need great care and many repairs’ (5). Although tobacco sold well, the annual death rate for its production was staggeringly high due to malnutrition and disease; statistics of annual death rates of indentured labourers exploited by the Germans between 1887 and 1903 puts the figure at 28%. Tobacco growing declined and was replaced with coconuts, caoutchouc, gutta-percha and ficus runner by 1901. The railways continued to serve

1

The Permanent Mandates Commission was established by the League of Nations in 1920 for the purposes of managing and overseeing permanent mandates.

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the new productions, as they simplified transport and helped created a physical centre to the Mandated Territory at Madang. Much of the land that German entrepreneurs and officials ‘bought’ for plantations had been acquired in dubious transactions that the New Guineans could barely comprehend, if at all. The locals, who had been herded together on limited boundaries along the coast and small offshore islands, felt deep resentment. The air of discontent culminated in July 1904 when the villagers plotted to massacre the whites who had destroyed their way of life. Their attempt failed, and the leaders were rounded up and executed or exiled to far-off stations (7–9). This became known as the Baining Massacre of 1904. In contrast, the missionaries formed an integral part of the local society; they had influence but no military power and lived at their village posts for many years. This meant that they had time to get to know their parishioners; natives often sought out their village priest to explain their grievances of the administration. However, this often brought about a difficulty of balance in the missionaries’ relationship with the locals and the colonial administration. In 1909 Fr. Limbrock ordered that a steamship be built in Hong Kong so that travel and supplies could be undertaken more comfortably and efficiently. Steel tracks were also laid for trolleys to be pulled by water buffalo, and the first wharfs were established at Alexishafen by the SVD. The wave of railway building was part of the larger colonial scheme around the mission posts; the SVD took full advantage of being part of this new enterprise. Missionaries were a key force in the efforts of colonialists ‘to forge their subjective people into their own likeness’ (9). Although they focused on pastoral care, education and health, a commercial base from plantation development or exploitation served to fund God’s work. In the same way as their colonial counterparts, missionaries set up their own commercial ventures, investing in railways to carry produce from field and forest to stations. From 1901 through the Second World War, sawmilling in New Guinea was dominated by missionaries who were prepared to work for ‘higher goals than mere commercial profit’ (10), although any profit was graciously received.

4.7 World War I and the Inter-War Years The Australian colonial administration from 1914 showed a certain tolerance of foreign missions under their control. Initially, the SVD were under a great deal of pressure as the incoming government had called for the repatriation of all German missionaries by 1923. However, the SVD in New Guinea were not ousted when the Australians arrived as the Australian government needed their knowledge and understanding of their territory and its trading potential: The Australians who were taking over from the German Administration in Rabaul at just about the same time that Limbrock was resigning as leader of the mission, wished to establish themselves in control in the Sepik, and to make it clear to natives that the Germans were gone. For the first time … they needed the missionaries with their many stations, boats,

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horses, knowledge and influence, but for the latter aim, they would have preferred to have seen them gone. (Huber, 1988: 72)

World War I directly touched New Guinea, especially the German territory. Although there was no damage to the SVD mission stations (as there would be in World War II), the missionary work was seriously impaired by the War. Most of the SVD and Lutheran missionaries were Germans, and financial aid and fresh missionary personnel from Europe was restricted. Although the German missionaries managed as best as they could, the German colony previously known as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland was vanquished. Australian military forces occupied it in 1914, and in 1920 it was renamed a Mandated Territory following the agreements of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Most of its German traders had to give up their lands and businesses and were deported. However, the Apostolic Delegate and Australian Church authorities succeeded in having the policy changed; the German missionaries were allowed to remain until 1928, but by that date political circumstances had altered considerably. Germany had become a member of the League of Nations, and the missionaries remained. However, in the aftermath of the First World War, Germany was no longer able to offer much support to the far-off missions in the South Seas. Nor was there any more insistence on the part of the Propaganda Fide in Rome that missionaries be selected based on the nationality of the governing power. Therefore, the missions of Papua and New Guinea became more internationalised. Australia was not very involved in its new colonies and neither supported nor hampered the work of the missionaries. This meant that the main agents of social change and development, especially in the fields of education and health, continued to be the missionaries. This remained the general condition in the period between the two wars. By the time the Second World War came to New Guinea the Catholic Church was well established throughout the region, and the numbers of Catholics had grown considerably and rapidly. During the First World War the Australian authorities had closed all the mission schools in the northeast New Guinea mainland missions. After the War, the work of reopening began and was carried out despite the threat of expulsion which hung over the German SVD Missionaries and the Sisters of the Holy Spirit. In 1922, the new Vicariate of East New Guinea (Madang) was established with Fr. Franz Wolf SVD (1876–1944), as first Bishop of the area. Along with many of his fellow missionaries, he was later to perish under the Japanese occupation. By 1932, the expansion of the New Guinea Church necessitated the establishment of a second Vicariate, that of central New Guinea (centred on Wewak) under the leadership of Bishop Joseph Loerks SVD (1876–1943), who was also to be a victim of the Japanese occupation. The dividing line between the two Vicariates was the great Sepik River. The SVD planned to move inland, establishing new mission areas along the rivers and valleys, and thus soon obtained permission from the colonial authorities to enter this area. In 1933, after crossing the Bismarck Mountains, the first Catholic missionaries entered the Simbu and the Whagi Valley and began to establish the Church in the Highlands. The following year the first stations were established at Mingende and Mt. Hagen. From 1935, aeroplanes became the ordinary means

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of transportation and vastly assisted in the work in the Highlands, making remote mission stations less isolated. However, this work was soon to be interrupted by the Second World War and only began to flourish extensively at the end of that conflict.

References Alt, J. (2001). Letters from St. Arnold Janssen to New Guinea. Steyler Verlag. Huber, M. T. (1988). The bishop’s progress: A historical ethnography of catholic missionary experience on the Sepik frontier. Smithsonian Institution Press. Mair, L. P. (1948). Australia in new guinea. Melbourne UP. Matbob, P. (2001). ‘Fr. Eberhard Limbrock, leader of the first SVD mission in new guinea’, taken from the website of the religious television association of Papua New Guinea. McKillop, B., & Pearson, M. (1997). History of railways in Papua new guinea. University of Papua New Guinea Press. McNamara, R. F. (2004). ‘St. Arnold Janssen’ in saints alive from the website of the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle. http://mura.kateriirondequoit.org/resources/saints-alive/abercius-august ine-of-canterbury/st-arnold-janssen-svd/. Accessed June 24, 2020. Permanent Mandates Commission. (1939). Report and Minutes of Session XXXVI. Tatamai, R. (2000). History of the catholic church in New Guinea (citation taken from http://www. rtapng.com.pg/faith/history.html; this website is no longer accessible). Accessed June 28, 2020.

Chapter 5

Fr. Franz Kirschbaum’s Contribution to Collecting in New Guinea

Father Franz Kirschbaum (1882–1939)Missionary, linguist, and avid collector of ethnographic objects from the Sepik Region of New Guinea, where he lived between 1907 and 1939. SVD Archives, Rome Fr. Franz Kirschbaum SVD (1882–1939) lived and worked in New Guinea from 1907 until his death 1939, and it is difficult to over-emphasise his contribution to the success of exploratory and missionary expeditions on that island. Little is known about Kirschbaum’s early life, and very few studies have been conducted about his importance to the people of Papua New Guinea. Trained as a linguist and not as an ethnologist, Kirschbaum nevertheless collected many ethnographic objects from the people to whom he ministered, and he served as a missionary, guide, collector and explorer of the island. White colonists and missionaries of various denominations considered him as one of the great pioneers of the Sepik River Valley, and by all accounts he was loved and respected by the indigenous population. His knowledge of and influence in the Sepik region spread through the people with whom he came in contact over a thirty-two-year period and through the numerous scholars and foreign expeditions he accompanied as guide and mentor. He crops up time and time again in accounts of the first European expeditions up the Sepik River but can also easily © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_5

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be missed as his presence is always a side line to the main narratives. He appears in the accounts of Robert L. Welsch, Mary Taylor Huber, Fr. Bruno Hagspiel SVD and E. W. Brandes, and in a letter from Gregory Bateson. His voice materialises in the audio recordings of the Crane-Peabody Expedition of 1937, now housed in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. It is important to gain some insight into Kirschbaum’s character and role in New Guinea during the time he was collecting to understand the exact circumstances in which the objects were found. The random and chaotic way in which he gathered them might explain why the labelling and notes in the present archives are so inconsistent. There were at least two collections sent from New Guinea, and other evidence in the MEMV archives proves that Kirschbaum took great trouble to photograph and annotate pictures and diagrams of the objects. When he amassed the objects for the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition of 1925 and those from the ‘Christian Awakening’ of 1932, he was already familiar with their function and use, even if the people who created them had cast them off after conversion to Christianity. Although he suffered a tragic and premature death, his appreciation and recognition of the value of knowledge, specifically the customs and religious objects of New Guineans that were supplanted by Christianity, has its legacy still today in the 800-piece Kirschbaum Collection in the Vatican Museums, and in other important ethnographic collections at the Peabody, Harvard University, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, UK, and the Smithsonian ethnographic collections in Washington D.C. This chapter will explore Kirschbaum the collector, the missionary and the explorer, as he played a crucial role in expeditions up the Sepik River as guide and interpreter; furthermore, the trust he gained from the local population potentially shielded other intrepid travellers from aggression. He was dedicated to the success of the missions and the souls of the people, and this dedication ultimately resulted in his death.

5.1 Kirschbaum, the Collector Kirschbaum was a collector of ethnographic objects long before the Vatican announced the PME in 1923. So active was his interest in the material culture of New Guinea that he founded a private mission museum at the SVD post in Rabaul. He helped shape many of the collections that were made by adventurers and anthropologists during his time in New Guinea. The roots of the collection attributed to him in the Vatican have long been a source of mystery with archival notes having gone adrift, along with the details Kirschbaum sent from New Guinea to Rome. In fact, the 800-piece Kirschbaum collection is the amalgamation of at least two collections he sent from New Guinea: one for the PME and the second for the MEML in 1932. There has been some argument as to how much of the collection should be attributed to Kirschbaum and how much to another collector, Fr. George Höltker SVD (1895– 1976). However, it appears that Höltker sent an archaeological collection from New

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Guinea to the MEML in 1939–1940, along with several ethnographic objects, and his ethnographic material has now been included in the Kirschbaum collection.1 Housed in the archives of the current museum, ‘Fruits of New Guinea’ is an anonymous document written after Kirschbaum’s final visit to Rome in 1935 and sheds light on the circumstances of the 1932 collection. It begins by referring to Kirschbaum’s oral account of the collection’s origins and gives an in-depth account of the ‘Christian Awakening’ that sprang from an intensive moment of cargo cult activity in many villages along the Sepik River in 1932. Although Huber mentions Kirschbaum collecting many indigenous objects thrown into the river she does not provide much detail. This anonymous piece, however, tells us that when the missionaries arrived in the region of Moagendo, ‘the indigenous peoples spontaneously cast aside a quantity of objects taken from their spirit houses (called Tambaran) and burnt them in honour of their guests’ (Anonymous c.1935: 1). The writer recounts Kirschbaum’s role in the prevention of the destruction of the villagers’ sacred objects: On Kirschbaum’s arrival, he told these indigenous peoples not to destroy their objects of pagan memory in this way, and different deputies of the villages near by to Moagendo came to him and also other inhabitants along the river called ‘the saucepan gods’, asking him what they should do with the other objects of the Tambaran, for they no longer used them. The missionary convinced them to give him their objects if they were really inclined to distance themselves from them and that he would take them to Europe. (1)2

On hearing of the extent of the villagers’ activities, Kirschbaum organised the missionaries’ steamship, the Stella, to collect the ethnographic items en masse, transforming the ship into a ‘veritable house of spirits’ (1). They travelled great distances up the river to many villages in which the inhabitants sought to rid themselves of their formerly sacred objects upon conversion. Huber’s portrayal of the episode contains a sense of the dramatic as the indigenous people became impatient to begin their Catholic lives. Huber comments that the writer of this document uses the episode to evoke optimism among readers about the enthusiasm in which the New Guineans were turning to God. It is as if the writer is rallying the troops for the final push and clearly credits Kirschbaum as being the most prominent missionary responsible for such a climate of change. The final part of the letter refers precisely to the objects brought personally by Kirschbaum as gifts to Pius XI. This letter is one of the only existing documents in the archives that points to the temporal distinction between Kirschbaum’s PME collection and the 1932 collection: A part of the objects of the pagan cult collected by Fr Kirschbaum has been brought by himself to Europe and given to His Holiness the Pope, for which he has been thanked and 1

Kirschbaum collected the objects in 1932 and sent many of them by ship to the Vatican shortly after. He accompanied many more when he visited the Vatican in 1935. These two shipments will be referred to as the 1932 Collection at the MEML. All New Guinea ethnographic objects, bar a few objects, are seen as ‘The Kirschbaum Collection’: there is no distinction in the MEML between the 1932 shipment and Kirschbaum’s ethnographic collection from 1923 sent for the PME, or indeed objects from other sources before World War II. 2 Document translated from Italian by the author.

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5 Fr. Franz Kirschbaum’s Contribution to Collecting in New Guinea homage given to the missionaries and their progress in the evangelisation of the indigenous peoples of New Guinea. The most characteristic objects of the collection will be sent to Pontifical Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Lateran and archived in the Oceanic sections in particular that of New Guinea. (2)

Other correspondence with the MEML shows Kirschbaum’s loyalty and commitment to it. Before looking more closely at Kirschbaum’s ties with the MEML and Schmidt we need to obtain a better picture of Kirschbaum as he was in New Guinea. There has never been a biography or extensive research dedicated to Kirschbaum’s time in New Guinea,3 but we can piece together elements of his life in character and his approaches to collecting and curating through the writings of anthropologists and adventurers in the Sepik between 1906 and World War II.

5.2 Kirschbaum in New Guinea: Missionary and Explorer Welsch (1998) writes a summary of Kirschbaum’s life in Volume II of his study on the South Pacific Expedition of 1909 to 1913. He states that, as a Catholic missionary for the SVD, Kirschbaum served for thirty-three years in the colony of New Guinea, which was under the German administration until 1914 and the Australian Protectorate from then onwards. His account reveals that Kirschbaum was the first European settler on the Sepik River, residing for more than twenty-four years at Marienberg, and that he had an active interest in the customs and languages of the Sepik region. On his arrival in New Guinea, he travelled to Tumleo and began to undertake journeys inland to Berlinhafen, establishing a mission station at Malol in early 1909. For many years the Marienberg station, founded by Kirschbaum in 1913, was the most remote SVD mission station in New Guinea. He was the first significant European contact with the peoples of the lower Sepik and its villages upriver to and beyond Marienberg. During the interwar period his knowledge of the Sepik peoples and areas was unequalled among Europeans, and he helped the Australian administration develop the area: [Kirschbaum] probably assisted more scientists and researchers than any other individual in the region. In 1909, for example, he assisted Frederici (q.v.), Lewis, Neuhauss (q.v.), Schlaginhaufen (q.v.) and Schlechter (q.v.) during their various researches around Eitape. He helped Behrmann and Thurnwald (q.v.) during their expeditions up the Sepik, and, as the only European resident on the Sepik in 1914; he was questioned by the Australian military about Thurnwald’s whereabouts soon after the outbreak of the First World War. About 1921 Kirschbaum assisted Dr. S. M. Lambert with his hookworm campaign; in 1929 he assisted another Field Museum expedition, the Crane South Seas Expedition, during their ascent of the Sepik River. (Welsch, 1998, Vol. II: 93)

Welsch talks of the unanimous respect the villagers had for his sensitivity and appreciation of their customs. 3

Please see Piepke, J.G., 2012. The Kirschbaum Collection of the Missionary Ethnological Museum in the Vatican. Anthropos 107, 560–564 for further information on his collection.

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In Chap. 2 of the first volume, Welsch recounts the A. B. Lewis expedition to the South Pacific in 1908 and explains how Lewis, the novice fieldworker, transformed from traveller to field researcher. His diaries reveal that this transformation took place under the guidance of Fr. Kirschbaum. Lewis’s account tells that on his arrival in Humboldt Bay on Sunday, 29 August 1909, he met Governor Albert Hahl, as had been arranged by his superiors back in Chicago. However, his diary notes insinuate that he was not greatly enamoured of the company there and preferred to take in his new surroundings alone, setting off to Tumleo Island and Malol. This written account of his experience with the German missionaries on the island and his first trip inland show a more positive portrayal. He actively sought Kirschbaum’s company, in which it appears he felt much more comfortable. Lewis noted Kirschbaum’s arrival back in Tumleo on 16 September 1909, and over the next few days, Kirschbaum seems to have taken Lewis under his wing. He remembers the first few days in the priest’s company: Friday, 17 September: Pater Kirschbaum took me round the island in forenoon, and I took a number of photos, esp. of pottery making […] The first photos I took of the pot making were made up by Pater Kirschbaum getting a couple of women to represent the various stages. (86)

Within a week, Lewis saw that Kirschbaum’s friendly disposition and local knowledge could be helpful to his fieldwork. Lewis’s diaries inform us of how Kirschbaum had arrived in Malol to spend six months there, and Professor Neuhauss, a German anthropologist, joined them. Lewis notes that while he himself was laid up with his first bouts of fever, ‘Kirschbaum spent the day in the bush with the boys, studying the language and learning what he could, visiting the sago workings, etc.’ (90). He wrote of Kirschbaum’s efficiency in building his own house and how he took time to learn the language and culture of the local people. Lewis observed a sparsity of collectable objects in the area, taking the time to write in his diary, ‘Tuesday, 28 September: There did not seem to be much of the older things left in Malol’ (91). On his trip to Sissano Lagoon in November 1909, he again sought the company and assistance of Kirschbaum. It is evident from Lewis’s diaries that Kirschbaum assisted him in the explanations of objects he was to collect for the Field Museum in Chicago: Thursday, November 11: Left about 11 a.m. for Malol with my boys and 3 other carriers. As P. Kirschbaum was going the same way, I waited somewhat to go with him, so as to have company. It was an interesting trip […] Along the shore and at the mouth of the river were a great number of women and children (from Malol) fishing with nets and baskets […] P. Kirschbaum said that this particular small fish was caught only one day a year, depending on the moon, and that the natives could tell beforehand exactly what day it was to be […] but how much further along the coast he did not know. (148)

Lewis stuck close to his ‘informant’ who assisted the logistical aspects of his travels as well as furnishing him with studied answers to his questions as we see in his diary entries of Friday, November 12: ‘Stayed in Malol overnight […] visited village with P. Kirschbaum […] Pater Kirschbaum arranged 3 carriers to Arop’ (126), and Friday, 26 November:

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5 Fr. Franz Kirschbaum’s Contribution to Collecting in New Guinea Left about 10 for Eitape, with 2 men and 2 boys as carriers. P. Kirschbaum had spoken the night before with 3 men, who promised to go with me as carriers, but they did not come in the morning, and we found that they had gone into the bush to make sago. He finally succeeded in getting some (2) others and 2 boys. (148)

They seem to have parted company after this date, and Kirschbaum’s gift to Lewis of a shell adze made in Sissano was sent back to the Field Museum as part of his New Guinea Collection.4 Huber refers to Kirschbaum several times in her study of the Catholic missionary experience on the Sepik frontier. Her first mention is of his published material on the linguistic systems of New Guinea tribes. The table of languages from the Sepik region circa 1922 is informative in that it gives us a comparison to the categories used by Kirschbaum in his earliest studies of linguistic importance in the Sepik. While Kirschbaum’s studies on the linguistic varieties in the Sepik are not immediately relevant to this study, it does give grounds for wider research on his ethnographic fieldwork in the area and demonstrate his general knowledge of the region; and his contributions to other major ethnographic collections in important institutions around the world, including his own in the Vatican. In May and June of 1922, for the first time in the history of the New Guinea SVD mission, the order’s Superior General visited personally; Fr. Wilhelm Gier SVD (1867–1951) was the Society’s third Superior General. Fr. Bruno Hagspiel SVD (1880–1952) accompanied him through the mission territories in the Pacific as chronicler and wrote an account of the trip in 1926. The timing of the visit was by no means coincidental. Back in Europe, Pius XI had expressed his wish to put the missions at the top of his agenda. The PME of 1925 served as a good opportunity to catch up on their progress, the MEML had recently been set up in Rome and the Propaganda Fide had been called back to Rome from Paris. These were political moves to gain control over the missions once more. The Superior General’s visit to New Guinea was therefore an exercise in accountability both within the ranks of the SVD and within the Church itself. Huber draws on Hagspiel’s account of his experiences in New Guinea in her examination of the Catholics there. It is an important account as it is a rare document from that period written from the point of view of an SVD member. Hagspiel details many of the missions’ plantations and industries in New Guinea that had been founded by Bishop Limbrock in the first decade of the twentieth century, features he felt distinguished them from other missions in the world (Hagspiel, 1926: 125). He also discussed the SVD ship, the Gabriel, a 93-foot steamer obtained by the mission in 1909. For Hagspiel, the ship is a symbolic representation of missionary progress in New Guinea: In contrast to Limbrock whose frontier had been economic and to whom the mission fleet represented a great deal of trouble and expense, Hagspiel’s frontier is political, and his ship undergoes a subtle transformation as his passage proceeds. Initially it is very physical copra – and cargo-carrying workhorse, the Gabriel is transformed into a vehicle of communication and ministry and finally emerges as a metaphor for the mission itself. (Huber, 1988: 76) 4

See photo of the gift Kirschbaum gave to A.B. Lewis in Welsch (1998), Vol. I: 147.

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It is significant that Hagspiel, a representative of central authority of the SVD, should choose to emphasise the integrative capacity of the Gabriel and praise all aspects of the mission that contained the diversity of the various regions (Huber, 1988: 77). One may also wonder if he was fulfilling an agenda set back in Rome. Each congregation had been given specific instructions by Pius XI to oversee their distant mission stations and set standards to unify them. Hagspiel remarked that each station had become ‘a mission to itself’ (1926: 69, quoted in Huber, 1988: 84), noting the independent agendas of each mission: one set of missionaries set out to induce villagers to abandon ‘their methods of birth control’ (Huber presumes infanticide), while Fr. Kirschbaum on the Sepik River was preoccupied with headhunting. The missionaries on Tumleo Island had apparently taken a particular virulent form of sorcery as a major focus of their concern (1926: 189, 38–45, 177–182; Puff, 1912/ 1913, quoted in Huber, 1988: 84). Despite Hagspiel’s comments on the individual flavour of certain mission stations, their independence would not have been an unexpected find by the Superior General of the SVD, given the force of character needed by the individual missionary for pioneering work in uncharted and dangerous territory. Huber’s remarks on Hagspiel’s attempts to rationalise the new order that the missionaries were attempting to impose shows the European expectation of missionary cultural diversity abroad. The papal vision of the spiritual benefits that Catholicism could bring to the natives of New Guinea was one that viewed salvation as a state to be mediated through inclusion in a hierarchical whole (Huber, 1988: 76–77). Thus, we can see the philosophical and sociological ‘whole’ being undermined by the missionaries’ apparent dislocation from the greater body of the Church. Like many visitors in foreign lands, Hagspiel took comfort in the things he could understand. He wrote well of the mission stations, which had been set up along with mission schools, plantations and industries that contributed to their quota of influence to bring the local indigenous population into a common relationship with each other under the Church. He appreciated the mission station at Boiken as a ‘perfect model of all that a station among uncivilized people should be. Coconut [sic] groves abounded, and there were sheep, geese, ducks, chickens, etc.’ (88). Kirschbaum occupied a very different type of station; a letter Huber cites paints the Sepik as such a dangerous and bloodthirsty environment, and one wonders if Kirschbaum was trying to put Hagspiel off the journey. Hagspiel tried to grasp the complexities of the indidenous’ belief systems and was thoroughly impressed by Kirschbaum’s account of headhunting in the Sepik: It is, Father Kirschbaum explained, part of their religion; they simply have to do it according to their belief, in order to escape the evil spirit’s revenge, which would [otherwise] be exercised in the ruin of their own village. Poor people! Their lord, Satan, keeps a tight hold on them – a very tight hold indeed! (Hagspiel, 1926: 40, quoted in Huber, 1988: 89)

Huber’s final mention of Kirschbaum in her book is about the memory of Kirschbaum and his significance in the later debate in 1943, when the German missionaries were forced out of New Guinea. She discusses Reed’s work (1943) on the missionarynative experience:

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5 Fr. Franz Kirschbaum’s Contribution to Collecting in New Guinea Although Reed admits to knowing little about the individual styles of the Catholic missionaries in the area in the mid-1930s, having never worked with ‘strongly missionized natives’, he offers the example of Father Kirschbaum of Marienberg, whose ‘fame in the Sepik District spread far beyond the area of white contact’ as evidence that ‘a tolerant and understanding missionary may gain the …respect and love of the natives.’ (Reed, 1943: 215, quoted in Huber, 1988: 189)

The Sepik region remained one of the final frontiers of Western exploration until after World War II.

5.3 Kirschbaum and the US Agricultural Exhibition to New Guinea There were other enthusiasts who sought possibilities within the region. In 1929 the US Agricultural department sent a team of scientists to New Guinea to investigate the sugar cane plant, and the Chicago Museum funded Crane’s botanical research there in the same year. Both came home with collections of artefacts as well as new data. Dr. E. W. Brandes’s team set off on 24 August 1929, for the Highlands of New Guinea. His extended article in the National Geographic issue of September 1929 drew attention to the Sepik region of New Guinea for several reasons. Firstly, from an explorer’s point of view, Brandes’s team had just survived dozens of journeys into the relatively unknown regions of the Upper Sepik River and New Guinea Highlands. Secondly, they established contact with peoples and plants beyond the knowledge of most Western scientists and intellectuals, and thirdly, they brought back a collection of artefacts and plants with a rich description of the circumstances of their craft and provenance. This article is an important source of evidence for the foundation of an ethnographic collection; it also mentions Kirschbaum’s role as their guide into the Sepik. They began their journey by plane on 24 August, crossing the mountains between Port Moresby and Buna, with Lae, in the former German territory as their destination. After a night in Lae, they both headed for the Sepik River, stopping at Madang, the largest port in north-east German New Guinea where they left mail brought from Port Moresby. He resumes the tale: Ashore, we were taken in by Father Franz Josef Kirschbaum at the mission. With this German priest we were to ascend to the headwaters of the river, 650-700 miles from its mouth and only about 80 or 90 miles from the point we reached on the Ok-Tedi just a month before. (Brandes, 1929: 322)

Kirschbaum accompanied them first to Ambunti, another settlement on the Sepik, which was at that time the farthest inland police station of either territory, being about 260 miles from the mouth of the river. Brandes continues his account: ‘Flying up the Sepik we passed over many villages, all recognised by Father Kirschbaum, who had visited them’ (322). They were met at Ambunti by a patrol officer, but soon Brandes, Peck and Kirschbaum were back in their aircraft and flying over the frontier into

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Dutch territory near the source of the Mambaramo River, where they landed once more. Brandes’s party visited a few of the Sepik communities, many of which were already known to Kirschbaum, who was greeted as a great friend. A handful of government officials and a couple of priests were the only white men the locals had ever seen. Brandes said that they all searched for objects ‘of great curiosity here’ (329). His description of the tambaran House (or House of Spirits) is detailed, and it is probable that he was informed by Kirschbaum on this subject. Kirschbaum was very interested in the tambaran and requested a replica be built in the Lateran Palace in Rome when the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition became a permanent museum there in 1927, and was renamed as the Missionary and Ethnological Museum. Brandes provides a long description of the tambaran and its contents. He found solid drums, made of hollow logs eight to twelve feet long and three feet in diameter, which made a deafening sound when several were played in unison. He observed a richly carved tube, constricted at the middle and roughly resembling the spindleshaped drums. These instruments, when thrust into the river, and quickly withdrawn, make the sound of a crocodile’s call, attracting them to the hunters. He also noted very heavy shields used by spearmen, headrests for sleeping and carved stools. From the ceiling hung wooden figures of nude men and women from which ornaments dangled. These figures, he was told, represented the spirits who guarded the valuable objects from ‘defiling hands.’ At each end of the tambaran were small entrances: ‘The gable ends of the buildings were pierced with small openings, geometrically arranged, and having wooden spikes projecting upward from the lower sills. On each spike was a grinning human skull, facing outward – a warning perhaps’ (328). From Hagspiel’s report we know that Kirschbaum was extremely interested in the practice of headhunting. Brandes’s description of the material culture he found in the Sepik echoes Kirschbaum’s attention to the detail that had impressed Hagspiel’s imagination with images of the macabre. Brandes writes of the local practice of building up with clay the faces of enemies, and perhaps deceased relatives as well, on the original skulls. He says that ‘these curious objects were decorated with cowrie shells for eyes and natural hair. Then the faces painted to resemble a living man’ (329). Brandes also seems to be reiterating Kirschbaum’s description of the Sepik region when he writes: ‘Back now from exploring that dark Sepik River region of sorcery and cannibalism, our Cane collection achieved, we turned our sunburnt faces homeward’ (332). At Port Moresby, they prepared their collection of ethnographic objects from the Sepik, which were taken back to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. That same collection consisting of objects, photographs and the ‘motion picture’ taken in the Sepik by Brandes, Peck and Kirschbaum in 1928–1929 still resides in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. There were few experts in the Sepik region in 1928 and 1929. The only informant Brandes and Peck would have had was Kirschbaum, who accompanied them during their entire visit. They were agriculturists on a research trip to look for sugar cane in New Guinea, not anthropologists, or enthusiasts for knowledge of the Sepik culture and language. It is certain that Kirschbaum played a vital role in shaping the Brandes collection; Brandes would have needed him for any transaction with the villagers as he knew neither their customs of exchange, nor the language that described the

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objects. Kirschbaum’s own interest in ethnographic collections and language and his desire to acquaint the outside world with Sepik culture meant that he was an ideal travel companion and guide to any outsider during his time there.

5.4 A Retrospective Account of the SVD in New Guinea Writing in Rome in 1987, Fr. John Nilles SVD (1905–1993) recounts a personal narrative of his activities with the SVD in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea where he had worked as a missionary between 1933 and 1943. He explains in his introduction how Bishop Raymond Caesar SVD (1932–1987) of Goroka had asked him to make a short historical account of the work and activities of the first SVD missionaries in the New Guinea Highlands, mainly the regions that is are known as Mt. Hagen (Western Highlands Province), Simbu and Goroka (Eastern Highlands Province). He describes the undertakings of the officials involved in the pioneering years and explains that he arrived in the Highlands in May 1934. There he witnessed and contributed to the ‘main evangelization, as distinct from exploring’, which started from 1937 to 1938. His first chapter opens: ‘My sources are the writings of the pioneer missionaries, Father Kirschbaum, Schaefer and Ross. I also have oral recordings of Fathers Tropper, Aufenanger, Meiser and others. From 1937 I have my own recordings’ (Nilles, 1987: 9). He begins his account by describing the Sepik region and its surrounding highlands as found by Fr. Kirschbaum: European contact with the people of these areas dates from the year 1933. One of our great Sepik pioneers, Father Kirschbaum, on his travels up and down that great waterway and along its tributaries, saw in 1930 ‘a vast inland plain stretching from the south-east to the west’. This might have been the Jimi or the Baiyer or the Whagi; there are difficulties with all three. But Father Kirschbaum himself was to say later that it had been to the Whagi. (9)

Nilles outlines the beginning of further exploration and eventual evangelisation as the result of Kirschbaum’s adventure into that region in 1930: Whatever it was that Fr. Kirschbaum discovered, it moved him to report to Bishop Franz Wolf at Alexishaffen, suggesting that an expedition be formed to explore the inland country. The bishop applied to the government for a permit to do so. The administration, based then in Rabaul, refused on the ground that such an expedition was inadvisable at that stage. (9)

Nilles’s story of Kirschbaum’s adventures parallels his more famous contemporaries, the Leahy brothers. Mick and Danny Leahy were already known as pioneers and gold miners who had flown over the Eastern Highlands Province. They built an airstrip at Bena Bena and from there in early February 1933 flew over the Simbu and Whagi valleys as far as Mt. Hagen. As a result, Mick Leahy wrote the words that are now well known: ‘[He had] put to rest for all time the theory that the centre of New Guinea is a mass of uninhabitable mountains.’

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5.5 Kirschbaum’s Final Journey In early August of 1939, Kirschbaum and two fellow priests from the mission, Fr. Jacob Weyer and Fr. Otto Bader, were eager to transport supplies by airplane from Alexishafen to Salamaua, where a new mission station was to be established. Kirschbaum had already drawn up plans for a church, a school and other amenities, and the inclement weather delaying the journey only engendered enthusiasm for the project. On the morning of Sunday, 6 August 1939, the young pilot Willy Schaufhausen, satisfied that the plane was in perfect working order and that God had granted them clear skies, decided that they could finally travel. Among those to say farewell at the airstrip was Bishop Franz Wolf, watched with a group of priest, brothers and villagers who had come to see them off. The mission’s Fokker aeroplane, named Theresa, lifted off, but then tragedy soon struck. Whether it was mechanical failure, pilot error or, as is the most widely accepted theory, a heavily overloaded plane, the aircraft plummeted to the ground nose-first, killing the priests, a lay catechist and the pilot, aged just 28.

Fr. Kirschbaum with Fokker plane. SVD Archives, Rome Five consecutive days of mourning with Requiem masses were observed at St. Michaels school at the mission, and although each life was celebrated by the bishop and his parishioners, the loss of Kirschbaum so suddenly and so tragically, on his way to support the development of the new mission, affected the locals and missionaries alike, Protestants and Catholics. Sr. Immolata Reida, in her biography of Sr. Theophane, a witness to the events, says that that afternoon ‘St. Michael’s mourned as never before. The bishop, pale with grief but bravely tearless, officiated at the

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burial. God had taken from the mission three of its priceless priests, an irreplaceable pilot, and a young catechist’ (Reida, 2012: n.p.). A tribute to Kirschbaum by Wau Protestants published in the Pacific Islands Monthly (PIM), on the 15 September 1939, demonstrates the resonance of his death. The article explains that the Sunday service of 14 August in the English Protestant church had been dedicated to the memory of Fr. Kirschbaum, and the citizens of Wau, a town northwest of the sea town of Morobe, which lies on the northeast coast of New Guinea, had come to celebrate his memory: Many had not seen the inside of a church for years and they handled the hymn books as if they feared the things would bite; but they were sincerely glad to do homage to a man whom they all loved. […] [Kirshbaum] was a very great priest and a fine Christian gentleman […] He was the friend of everyone in this community. He was loved by all with him, there was no denominational barrier. His noble soul has passed on; but the memory of him remains to assist and enrich the lives of those who remain. (PIM, 1939: 60)

In the same article there is another dedication to his memory by another well-known resident of Wau, a man called Outis: The shock caused by the tragic death of Father Kirschbaum and his companions, was only equalled to the deep sorrow and sense of loss felt by all this community, and many who knew him on the Sepik. Father Kirschbaum’s intellectual attainments were harnessed to a great simplicity of mind and kindness of heart. Science, as well as the Church and community, has lost one of great value, and outstanding qualities. For over 20 years, Father Kirschbaum lived on the Sepik, and probably was one of the greatest authorities on the culture and linguistics of this area. His eager wish to go with an American party to the upper reaches of the Sepik, received a heavy blow when permission from the Administration was rescinded last year, after preparations had been made. Essentially of a studious nature, besides his accomplishments in the native sphere, Father Kirschbaum added a list of five modern languages to his repertoire, apart from Latin and knowledge of Hebrew. With the minds of so many people open to him, tolerances and broadmindedness characterized his attitude towards men and matters. His flock in particular, both native and white, mourns the loss of a noble-hearted priest and father in God. His kindness of manner, human sympathy, and keen sense of humour, has left an enduring impression of a very gallant, and charming Christian gentleman as well as a great priest. In some degree, the remarks of Tacitus concerning his father-in–law Agricola, may apply to Father Kirschbaum: ‘busts and statues like their originals are frail and perishable. The soul is formed of finer elements, and its inward form is not to be expressed by the hand of an artist with unconscious matter…All of Agricola that gained our love, and raised our admiration, still subsists, and will ever subsist, preserved in the minds of men, the register of ages, and the records of fame’. Auf wiedersehen! (60–61)

A photograph accompanies the article, taken by Mr. Ray Parer, showing Kirschbaum, the pilot, W. Schauflausen, and the Fokker monoplane in which they were killed. It also includes a photograph of the wrecked aircraft. Fr. Franz Kirschbaum died at the height of the SVD missionaries’ achievements in New Guinea. Had he lived another couple of years he would have witnessed the undoing of nearly half of century of work by the missionaries and indeed the colonial government to gain the trust of the indigenous people and order them into an existence

References

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that corresponded to the European rationale. In effect his collections amassed from 1907 to 1939 represent one of the only remaining physical missionary documents from New Guinea from that period. It is perhaps fitting that Kirschbaum did not live to see the destruction of the mission stations and the massacre of his fellow missionaries and colonial acquaintances during the Japanese occupation of New Guinea when the Pacific became a theatre of World War II from 1941 to 1945. However, it is indeed a tragedy that his unexpected death left few coherent explanations of the collections he had both in New Guinea and Rome. The objects he shipped out to the Vatican would survive long beyond the attitude that created them, albeit in a very different context in Rome.

References Brandes, E. W. (1929). Into primeval Papua by Seaplane. National Geographic, 56(3) (September). Hagspiel, B. (1926). Along the mission trail. Vol III: in New Guinea. Mission Press SVD. Huber, M. T. (1988). The bishop’s progress: A historical ethnography of catholic missionary experience on the Sepik frontier. Smithsonian Institution Press. Nilles, J. (1987). They went out to sow: The beginning of the work of the catholic mission in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (1933–1943). SVD. Pacific Islands Monthly (PIM). (1939). The Late Father Kirshbaum: a Tribute by Wau Protestants. PIM, X(2) (15 September), 60–61. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-310385031 Puff, A. (1912–13). Der Tapelzauber. Steyler Missionbote, 40, 186–188. Reed, S. W. (1943). The making of modern new guinea. The American Philosophical Society. Reida, I., Sr. (2012). Selfless: The story of Sr. Theophane’s missionary life in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Saint Benedict Press. Welsch, R. L. (ed.). (1998). An American anthropologist in Melanesia: A. B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific expedition 1909–1913 Vol. I and II. University of Hawaii Press.

Chapter 6

Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters

Schmidt’s first major contribution to the study of ethnology in the Catholic Church was arguably his compilation of a set of guidelines for collecting and presenting ethnographic data published in the first edition of Anthropos in 1905. These sets of questionnaires were extensive and resembled the ‘Notes and Queries’ established by both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Anthropological Society. In the early 1920s he departed from his initial requests for written data and entered the realm of collecting cultural objects. He had been nominated as head organiser and curator of the PME, tasked with celebrating the work of the missionaries through the display of cultural objects from the ‘evangelical empire’, all to be completed in time for the Pontifical Jubilee Year of 1925. In response to these requests for objects and information, a series of letters sheds some light on the relationship and varying agendas of archivists like Schmidt in Rome and those out in the field like Kirschbaum in New Guinea; in addition, the correspondence reveals Kirschbaum’s attitude towards the purpose of the PME and the MEML and how differently his priorities regarding the objects in his collections were to those organising the displays. One letter written in 1937 sent to Schmidt’s assistant at the MEML, Fr. Michele Schulien (1888–1968), reveals that the once obliging Kirschbaum had since become impatient with requests from Rome and was unwilling to sacrifice a lifetime of fieldwork to support the ethnological theories of his fraternal counterparts back in Europe. Further letters between Schulien, another SVD ethnologist Fr. Georg Höltker and Andreas Scheller of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Ethnographic Museum in Cologne reveal the entangled agendas of the collectors and curators and go some way towards explaining the state of the Kirschbaum collections in the Vatican museums today.1

1

Much of the information in this chapter comes from journals and unpublished letters and documents in the archives of the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_6

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6.1 Instructions and Ethological Observations Schmidt’s first guidelines did not concern the collection of objects, but rather the collection of data for written documentation. In the early twentieth century most missionaries in the field would never have heard of the discipline of ethnology, and those who had would not have had much training, if any at all. Schmidt’s initiative in founding Anthropos demonstrates how well he had interpreted Arnold Janssen’s aims for the SVD, as the journal combined the pursuit of scientific knowledge with the study of ethnology, all for the benefit of the education of the missionaries. The first edition of Anthropos was published in German and Italian and distributed as a pamphlet. Its first page was entitled ‘Invitation to the collaboration and membership of ANTHROPOS—International journal of ethnology and the science of language (linguistics)’. This pamphlet was circulated to all Catholic mission houses and institutes, and it provided guidelines on how to collect ethnographic data and write articles for the journal. Schmidt offered advice to the non-specialist who wanted to undertake field studies in areas of interest for the ethnologist. Kirschbaum would have followed these guidelines in collecting material for his articles on the Sepik languages and peoples. Schmidt’s tone was both pedagogical and encouraging as he explained to missionaries how they might contribute to science from the field: Many missionaries have already done some excellent ethnological work; these do not need to be informed. The missionaries that until now have not been concerned with working in this way, but have always wanted to apply themselves, do not often know how to direct their research, or how to classify their observation. The following instructions are directed towards these, to give them an idea of a great number of precious facts, real treasures that can easily be secured for science. A similar instruction about the physiological observations will be given in the first edition of the journal. (Schmidt, 1905: 23)

Schmidt set out his instructions as a distance learning course and assured readers that progress would be made if they followed the guidelines precisely; he was quick to define the kind of ethnographic data he sought. His questionnaire focused on criteria pertaining to the material culture of the indigenous population and then progressed to religious matters. Primitive peoples were identified primarily by their material culture, and he classed small-scale societies as nomadic, hunter-gatherers or subsistence agricultural farmers. Peoples of large-scale industrial societies were generally acknowledged as being ‘more civilised’, and separate guidelines were set out for studying them. Secondly, societies were identified by their religion and whether it was official or unofficial, written or oral. Again, different guidelines were sent out for large-scale societies with state-recognised religions. Other sections of the questionnaire included geography and statistics; Schmidt wanted to know the geographical coordinates of the indigenous population, or more specifically, the individual tribe, and the average number of men, women and children in each village. Questions read more like a population survey that a government official might undertake. In fact, some missionaries would probably have filled in the questionnaire with the help of their colonial counterparts, although there is no direct evidence to support this assumption.

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By asking these kinds of questions, Schmidt was requesting an entire overview of the region in which his fellow missionaries worked. Since missionaries often carried out specific duties and many were uneducated, their answers could only be an approximation at best. The intention of asking the untrained observer to look from the general to the specific was a rational course of inquiry, but not a very effective one as most missionaries worked on a local level with little idea of their place in the politico-economic sphere on a regional or national level. Thus each missionary could only answer few sections with any authority. For example, those dealing in medical aid would be privy to certain information dealing with health and disease; others in education would know about learning skills. Although Schmidt stated at the beginning of the pamphlet that the instructions were for those missionaries interested in writing for the journal, it was an imposition on his part (and an insight into his personal agenda) to ask the non-specialist wanting to write an article on linguistic systems, for example, about every other aspect of that same society. Although Schmidt felt that anthropometric examination should be left to the specialist, he informed his reader of the kind of process the specialist would undertake, encouraging a ‘do-it-yourself’ version by the missionary who had the necessary apparatus to photograph the subject. He began with a statement that sums up the futility of the exercise: ‘It would be useless to undertake anthropological measurements without having benefited from special instruction in this area’ (28) and then goes on to explain the job of a physical anthropologist: The plain middle of the head must be exactly vertical and the middle line from the top of the ear to the bottom most point of the eye cavity must be horizontal. Observations by looking at these photos and especially the answers to the following questions must be taken as the object, not only of individuals but many men, women and children. 1) What is the position of the ear; diagonal or horizontal? What is the colour of the eyes? the form of the nose? Are the nostrils large? Is the root of the nose broken? (29)

Schmidt based his scholarship on his own training as an ethnologist in museums, so he also encouraged his readers to be observant of cultural forms and to study indigenous tools, buildings, cooking and eating habits in everyday life. His questions were often ambiguous and thoroughly ethnocentric and may have caused some embarrassment to the conscientious missionary who might be asking questions that he felt he had no business pursuing. One can get an idea of his line of inquiry from a few of the following questions: 1) What is the shape of a normal house? (Huts, tents). If possible, draw a level of the house from the front, back and side. Techniques of construction? 2) Does each family have their own (tent), each woman? 3) Are there different types of houses? Are there houses for young men or girls? A house for the chief of the tribe? A house for meetings? Other houses for visitors, strangers, religious meetings, or dances? Others for women during their menstruation, for the time before or after its occurrence? Stalls for the animals? Toilets? (28–29)

It would have been very difficult for the untrained ethnologist missionary to discern the importance of such questions and be able to translate explanations that fell outside the Western perspective. The pamphlet is not always clear as to how much analysis

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of such data was required to write an article. It has been suggested that Schmidt used Anthropos to obtain ethnographic data to support his own theories. His The Origin of the Idea of God is proof of this; a great deal of the ethnographic data sent by the missionaries re-appeared under titles and categories made up entirely by Schmidt.

6.2 Guidelines for Collecting Material Culture for the PME Schmidt’s guidance for the collecting of ethnographic data by missionaries for the PME was sent out in 1923 with the approval of Pius XI. This time, however, Schmidt was looking for material objects and not scholarly articles for his journal. Much in the same vein as his Anthropos guidelines, Schmidt asked the missionaries for information he may well have considered obtaining from the Foreign Office. He required ‘physical and political maps, land and sea, old and recent; manuscripts or printed, with annotations showing or completing the information already given’ (PME Guidelines, 1923: 1). In the same approach to his 1905 Anthropos guidelines, Schmidt wanted a general account of every aspect of society, followed by specific examples of art, craft, iconography and everyday items fit for a museum display. Schmidt’s own agenda, to classify the indigenous peoples of the world regarding their material culture and religion, clouded his initial task which was to exhibit a coherent museum display in honour of missionary work. The non-specialist could only furnish him with non-specialist answers, such as the kind of food the people ate, what they wore and their local industry. Schmidt’s list for material culture was thorough and extensive, but his request for objects such as ‘bongos’, ‘sacred stones’, ‘amulets’ and ‘talismans’ would have been difficult for the ethnographically uneducated missionary to understand. Many would not have known how to identify the objects, let alone translate their use and significance in any great depth, and with their many other duties, most would not have had the time. In the end, a plethora of miscellaneous and vaguely described objects arrived in the store houses of the Vatican from the far ends of the Earth. Schmidt, as head curator and overall specialist, put them into ‘appropriate’ display cases often marked only by the country of origin with no reference to the tribe or the name of the object. In many ways, in requesting above and beyond the material required for the PME, Schmidt took advantage of his ‘pupils’ not being trained in ethnology. He could manipulate simple answers to his complex theories, just like an economist might play with statistical data. Instead of these extensive guidelines for the collection of ethnographic objects, Schmidt might have been better served if he had requested one single object from the missionaries and the indigenous peoples of regions, asking only that they describe its function and use. Although Schmidt might have profited from his unique position by requesting data that fulfilled his own agenda, he did have a vision for the PME in that he hoped a three-dimensional display would be of use in training future missionaries before

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they left for the field. This view is supported by some of his own written requirements for the exhibition: 1. Statistics and ladders comparing the work of the Catholic mission with the work of the dissident sects; much of their methods and actions as for the results required. 2. History of the Missions: works printed or manuscripts, biographies of missionaries or martyrs; works of art (photos, paintings, carvings, sculptures); representing the most notable scenes in the history of the mission – the most merited missionaries, the most illustrious men; the martyrs (European or Indigenous); the tools that served their devotion or the remarkable relics, to be placed in the ‘Chapel of Martyrs’, which will make up part of the Exhibition. 3. Indigenous collaboration: indigenous clergy, large or small seminaries and preparatory schools, catechists, their formation, organizations, action. Schoolmasters, baptizers, medics, and chemists. Indigenous sisters, (personnel, staff). (PME Letter to Bishops 1, 1923: 4)2

Schmidt had little specific training in museum ethnology, and his own curiosity had led him to intellectualise the connection between objects and peoples and their societies. However, in his quest to categorise everything, he ignored the relationship between the collector and the collected, which left him with little explanation for a museum display. The scale of the exhibition was enormous, and walls and galleries were demolished, and new ones created to accommodate the objects in the Great Halls of the Vatican. The space dedicated to the display cabinets, though, was not equalled by descriptions or explanations of the objects they contained. Yet, one must not lose sight of the purpose of the PME, which was to celebrate the work of the missions and not to glorify the indigenous peoples they were evangelising, nor the objects they had made from pagan inspiration.

6.3 Kirschbaum’s Response At the time of the announcement of the PME, Franz Kirschbaum had already been an established missionary in New Guinea for nearly a decade and a half. Schmidt and Kirschbaum crossed paths, physically and in correspondence, mainly because of Pius XI’s decision to set up the PME, although Kirschbaum had written articles published in Anthropos. They remained in contact when the MEML was founded at the Lateran Palace next to the Basilica of St. Giovanni in Rome. Kirschbaum’s letters of correspondence from New Guinea and Australia to Schmidt and his assistant, Fr. Schulien, remain a vital source of information, revealing not only the Vatican’s agenda for collecting and curating, but also Kirschbaum’s response to it. He wrote to Schmidt from Sydney on 8 December 1923, explaining that the political situation for Germans in New Guinea under the Australian Mandated Territory had become precarious and outlining the difficulties in sending objects: 2

Translated from Italian by the author.

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6 Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters For two years now, it has not been permitted to export ethnologica without having shown them to the government in Rabaul beforehand. If the government wants them for their own museum, they have the right of pre-emption. There’s the rub. They know our museum and they want it for themselves. (Kirschbaum Letter to Schmidt, 1923: 1)3

Kirschbaum referred to the policies of the newly formed Mandated Territory that had been put into place when the former German colony of New Guinea had become a protectorate of Australia in 1920. The German missionaries had been asked to leave, but many resisted and remained in New Guinea; it was not until 1928 that they were officially allowed to stay. The museum Kirschbaum mentioned in his letter was the SVD museum in their missionary house at St. Michael’s in Rabaul, to which he was essentially the sole contributor of collections. He stated his reasons in thinking that the Australians wanted the museum: When I was staying in Rabaul during my recent journey the director of the government’s museum wanted to talk to me and exchange information. Although the whole museum in St. Michael consists almost completely of my collections and contains almost exclusively collections from the Sepik, I had to refer Major Newprot, the director of the museum, to the Bishop. (1)

There is a tone of apprehension in Kirschbaum’s letter as he revealed the instability of the political situation in the former German territory: However, I think that for diplomatic reasons we should not offend this man in this transaction, even if you, due to your connections, you were able to do so. Of course, the government in New Guinea is very free-handed, and Major Newport is supposed to be the head, and he could thus be very harmful to the mission. (2)

Kirschbaum also mentioned the collections of Dr. Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954) that he viewed at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Thurnwald, an Austrian anthropologist and sociologist, had been collecting in New Guinea at the outbreak of World War I, and his collections had been confiscated and sent to Australia. It is evident that Kirschbaum was aware of the vulnerability of his collections and appears to have felt that his objects in New Guinea would find a safer home in the Vatican when he asked Schmidt if he desired the entire collection. He also asked Schmidt for further instructions about sending the material. An important detail in this letter reveals that Kirschbaum intended his collection to be transferred to St. Gabriel’s directly after the close of the PME: Adopting my proposition, the Bishop wishes that after finishing the exhibition, the museum should go to your museum in St. Gabriel, where it is supposed to stay as property of our local mission. The Bishop demanded the latter condition for possible future times, and it will thus probably be irrelevant. (2)

Kirschbaum used the weight of the Bishop’s office to support his request for the final destination of his collection, which he refers to as ‘the museum’ in the letter; the collection was largely his own, and presumably, he wanted to retain some control over it. It is symbolic how Kirschbaum, the man of objects and field experience, 3

All the letters henceforth were translated from German to English by Nadine Bechman.

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offered his oeuvre to Schmidt, the man of words and theoretical analysis. Kirschbaum was aware of his own lack of scholarship, and although he took every advantage to educate himself on language systems and culture of the people with whom he lived and worked, at this point in his life he realised that his collection would better serve an expert like Schmidt.

6.4 Preparations for the MEML As the Jubilee year of 1925 drew to a close, a plan for a permanent museum began to concretise, and a conference convened to discuss the objectives and logistics for a Missionary and Ethnographic Museum in the Lateran Palace. Members of the MEML Committee made presentations and notes from this conference reveal the museum decision-making process. Unfortunately, the precise dates of the meetings and a full list of attendees do not form part of the archive. Prof. Schilling confronted the question of representation in the new museum. He suggested ways in which the missionary enterprise might be visually displayed in a museum format: The missionary method in the museum: The difficulties – The missionary method in its own systematic elements and differences in time and place (India, China, Japan, Oceania, Africa, America). How can one be representative? 1. Graphically through numbered statistics or figures; with the help of maps and through photographic and artistic images. 2. With objects that make up part or the results of direct missionary action (first communion, preaching, etc.) and indirect (school, literary activities, economic = characteristics) and also pastoral activities and the Christian way of life. 3. In practice they must be collected or created through the use of bulletins, expeditions, etc. The use of this part of missiology in the museum is for the practical instruction of the general public and for the science of the missions (related projects). (Report of Prof. Schilling MEML Committee)4

One of the criticisms of the PME was that it had not revealed the mission process in much detail. We see Schilling addressing this problem by proposing photographic images and displaying objects to demonstrate the ‘direct missionary act’, such as baptism and communion. However, he did not offer a strategy to enable the translation of the ‘mission method’ from written text to museum space. Fr. Gubbels also attempted to translate the idea of mission into a three-dimensional structure, but instead of offering concrete solutions, he chose to retreat into the Latin text he knew so much better: Ways of expression for the mission methods. Quibus Auxiliis? Theme; space and essential space. After the fundamental presentation of Prof. Schmidlin about the quid and especially the quomodo of the missionary methods and activities to be presented in the museum. One would like some remarks on the quibus auxiliis; meaning to say the indispensable ways to 4

All of the reports for the MEML Committee of 1926 were translated by the author from the original Italian.

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6 Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters realize the quid and the quomodo in the best way. (Report of Fr. Gubbels for the MEML Committee)

However, Gubbels was aware of the conceptual difficulties in the undertaking of such a task and listed his concerns and vague answers that probably functioned as text prompts for his own verbal arguments which, unfortunately, do not form part of the record: 1) Inherent difficulties in the search of these ways. 2) (a) determination, (b) elimination, (c) condensation Who will encumber this work? 1) The ways a) Natural objects b) The imitation or reproduction of 3 dimensional scale models real or reduced size; dummies, sculptures, plastics c) Painting, drawing, photography, use of collide scope giving the illusion of sculpture d) Projected image still or moving (films) – advantages and inconveniences. e) Statistical synthesis (absolute and comparative) – diagrams, etc. 2) Where to find objects a) Objects inherited from the exhibition, their number, and their importance. b) Objects to obtain from the missions, mission congregations or individuals. The ways to interest a museum context. c) (C) Objects to create d) (D) Use of ethnographic objects. Intimate union between the ethnological and missiological part of the museum; one at the service of the other. (Report of Fr. Gubbels)

Fr. Henri Dubois SJ had been the chronicler of the PME and was responsible for some catchphrases that helped shape the image of the both the exhibition and the MEML. There were chapter headings in his account of the exhibition such as ‘Charitable and Civilising Work of the Missions’ and ‘A Laboratory of Ideas’, and these concepts were high on his list for the MEML: ‘The charitable and civilizing work of the missions. Preamble; the museum; an exhibition of missionary things to instruct and to move. It is also a laboratory of ideas to perfect the apostolate. The apostolate understands the direct ministry and auxiliary works. Auxiliary works of the apostolate – the ways of charity that lead one to three genres. (1) Care of sick people: dispensaries, hospitals, visit, etc. Assistance of the weak: orphans, insane, refugees, mixed work for the abnormal; handicapped, blind, deaf, dumb, leprosy (2) The works of civilization, that is to say

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(3) schools and professional organizations for both sexes superior instruction and scientific establishment printing and publication Importance of this work in the apostolate; they are not the apostolate but: (1) They open up the way for it (2) They help sustain it and perfect it by the formation of Man, child and the elites (3) They are the necessary practice of charity; an important role that is right to insist upon because: (a) less apparent it is sometimes insufficiently appreciated; (b) one must render justice to the unknown ‘apostles’, our brothers and sisters. (Report of Fr. Dubois for the MEML Committee)’

As an expert on missionary activity and the PME, Dubois had some insight into the practicality of museum display. However, his suggestions read more like a syllabus for a seminary than a plan for visual display, as we see in his ‘Solution to the Problems’: Presentation of auxiliary works in each part of the museum (1) Distribution of chosen types in different rooms in a fashion depending what happens, finally in review (2) Centralization in a particular area: presentation in each part of the museum (a) Two paintings together: charity, civilization; these paintings being in different rooms; however, place and disposition is the same to help and impress the visitor (b) Each specimen well chosen from the charitable institution (3) Distribution of studies in different rooms. Here regarding a large leprosy institute; general studies of leprosy (4) Great room (in scale) one can divide it- back wall/paintings/, maps and statistics to the right, works of charity on five boards. To the left, works of civilizations on five boards. The last wall: the mission and their contribution to science. Missionary initiators in the studies of linguistics, ethnology, natural science, instruction Some principle for execution 1) For the picture, to use the range of graphics, maps 2) For concrete representations, drawings, models, etc, so that all are representative of ideas. (Report of Fr. Dubois for the MEML Committee)

In the endeavour to encompass the whole missionary enterprise, Dubois, like Schmidt, overestimated their own pedagogical powers beyond the written text. Fr. Karl Streit SVD (1874–1935) had a visual understanding for the needs of the exhibition in the MEML, but his representations were all numerical. He proposed general statistics and case studies drawn on graphs and presented in lines and tables. Although this had been done to some effect in the PME it is evident that Streit too retreated into his specialist area, which was, unfortunately for the museum, a two-dimensional representation and analysis of missionary methods.

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6 Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters Illustrative ways for Statistics To illustrate the numbers and measures arranged in three ways; tables, diagrams and maps. I Tables: Is the absolute representation of arithmetical figures and we will be able to distinguish between: 1) A purely arithmetic table that is the representation of arithmetical numbers in their entirety. 2) The curved table that is the representation of arithmetic figures in their development 3) The comparative table that is the representation of arithmetic numbers in their values 4) The diagram is the proportional representation of arithmetical figures; we can also distinguish between: 5) The representational diagram that shows statistical figures in a form or shape that corresponds to the object represented. 6) The proportional diagram that shows statistical figures in a form or shape that corresponds to a represented value. 7) A symbolic diagram that shows statistical figures in a shape or form corresponds to the significance it represents. (Fr. Streit for the MEML Committee)

Fr. Considne continued along the lines of Fr. Streit and spoke in mathematical terms, going as far as to propose a ‘statistics committee’ for the museum. This idea, like the graphs and the Latin, went beyond the realms of the museum space. Each committee member spoke from a very confined standpoint, one that surrounded and protected his own intellectual strength: Unification of Statistics In the opinion of the writer the theme of this paper asks the question not so much about the unification of statistics and missions as the method to use because the museum could provide unifying statistics for the mission. In such a case one could propose the formation of a statistics committee of the Lateran Museum composed of 3 or 5 statistics professors having the 3 following functions: 1) To gather the requested data for the museum. The basis for such data would be a) a new editor of the ‘Catholic Missions’, until now the role of the Propaganda b) reports from the mission institutes c) reports from non-Catholic entities, like the Protestants for example d) private study groups like those from the religious Oriental or Islam churches e) non-religious studies having the value for the missionaries like reports from the colonial government about population 2) Elaborate statistical data available from the order and used by the directors of the museum, to ensure the unity of this work one must observe 3 rules of procedure: a) always adopt the same variables b) each variable always maintains the same significance each time it is adopted c) to look for the contemporary nature of the data under each variable 3) To study deficiency of present Catholic missionary statistics in the view of a possible progress for the future. This ultimate function will have the intent to render the committee

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useful, not only for the needs of the museum, but in general for the progress and precision of the organizations of the statistics of the Catholic missions. In this matter however, their work will be by nature in strictest confidence. (Fr. Considne for the MEML Committee)

It seems that among the whole committee only one member had any sense of what museum representation really meant. Fr. Schulien spoke in terms of space, light and objects. Although the points he listed were brief they went much further into addressing the issues of representation of concrete objects in a real museum space. It is not surprising that Schulien became Schmidt’s assistant director of the MEML and then the director of the museum from 1938 to 1963: The Technicalities of the Pontifical Museum Introduction: The scope of the Pontifical Museum and the representation of the life and work of the missions regarding: (1) objects (2) methods (3) successes and failures regarding missionary works Body: The principle difficulties that we have had in representing their work and how we have overcome them. I. Regarding Space 1) The space given to the museum is not as large as that of the Missionary Exhibition in the Vatican 2) The surface of the walls is not all usable because of the different types of constructions 3) Some rooms are large and short but not useful for a specific exhibition. II About the Light 1) The light is good in the 4 angular rooms 2) The light is sufficient in the corridor and on the 2nd floor 3) The other rooms receive light from only one side; some of these rooms have only 1 window 4) In conclusion we have identified the following defects: a) the walls that have one window will always remain dark b) the glass with shelves opposite the windows will give a reflection and therefore a blind spot III About the Objects 1) We have place for large objects as far as possible in the center of the room 2) We have grouped the small objects at the bottom of the case so they can be viewed better.

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Once the committee had discussed the strategy for setting up the museum, the secretary of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, Archbishop Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani, sent a letter to all the Catholic congregations of the world. It requested that the missionaries send more objects of ethnological interest and outlined the types of objects required for the museum. In contrast to the circular for the PME, emphasis was made on the quality of the object; it had to be able to hold its own in a palace that included two other museums, both of which held priceless sculptures and paintings from the classical era: the Gregorian Museum, depicting the classical heritage of the Church, and the Pio Christian Museum dedicated to the history of the Catholic Church in Europe. This time the ethnographic object had an economic value as well as a symbolic one. An additional condition from the Vatican required objects that emphasised the role of the missions in the process of evangelisation and that depicted the conversion of the ‘heathen’ to Christianity. Examples were given to the missionaries in the second part of the letter: These are the most desired in the museum as they show the work and contributions of the missions. I will number underneath the four categories of objects of this nature. 1) All of which in whatever way serves to illustrate the history of the apostolate and Christianity in this country. 2) The works of Christian indigenous art since the first arrival until now. 3) Cult objects or instruments employed at the service of religion which (without being artistic fall into the previous category) present however some detail or interesting character 4) Objects of intuition for religious education of the people, first communion of the children. (Letter from Selvaggiani, 1928)

6.5 Letters Concerning the Kirschbaum Collection Sadly, there remains little comprehensive evidence about the Kirschbaum collections in the archives of the current museum. However, we can glean some information about the personalities and intentions of some of the leading characters involved in the collecting and curating of the ethnographic collections from New Guinea in the archives from the correspondence between Kirschbaum, Schulien, Höltker and Scheller. Writing to Schulien in 1937, Kirschbaum did not hide his frustration with the theoretical stance. The letter underlines the differences between a missionary living and learning alone in New Guinea for more than thirty years and the armchair theorist

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back in Europe. After years of submission to the guidelines from Rome concerning the collection of ethnographic data, Kirschbaum finally rebelled: In the meantime, here in Marienberg I am completing my former works; I know now where the problems lie. I have found that out by working on my material at St. Gabriel. And I thank God that I hadn’t published any of it, as it would have been poor work though I forfeited Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt’s goodwill because of this. I cannot do anything about it: in return, what I get now is a proper piece of work […] I only try to determine the facts with the local myths: I don’t care if it helps Winhuis or Schmidt, I don’t stick by anybody, I stick by the truth. (Kirschbaum to Schulien 1937)

The tone of this letter was one of self-acclaimed independence from Rome and a determination to find his own truths from his collections. Kirschbaum mentioned having noted information about the fetishes of protected spirits and ancestor figures he had previously sent to the MEML. He spoke specifically of an article he was preparing on the Danoa figurines he had sent to Rome, and he asked for photographs of the ‘ladies and gentlemen Danoas’ to illustrate his notes. Other letters give us some indirect insight into Kirschbaum’s hidden agenda after 1936. Höltker was a Verbite and one of the few ethnologically trained anthropologists who undertook fieldwork in New Guinea. He had been sent to New Guinea on a research field trip from 1936 to 1939, and from his letters to Schulien, he had an agenda to fulfil for the MEML, as well as a personal ambition to make his name in the disciplines of ethnology and archaeology. He collected and sent many objects to the MEML, most of which were of archaeological interest, but there were also ethnographic objects. The lack of detailed descriptions of the New Guinea collections has meant that the collectors of objects from the same region have been confused. Thus, Kirschbaum and Höltker’s New Guinea collections have suffered an overlap of identity. Höltker is best known for his extended 1941 article about the ‘Mambu’ cargo cult movement that he witnessed on his arrival in New Guinea in 1936. However, he also had some correspondence with Schulien while still in the field. These letters reveal his intense frustration with Kirschbaum’s behaviour, where he seems to have met some resistance: I am finally able to send you the pictures together with the information by Father Kirschbaum. These short details he could have written within two hours, but he took six months for it, from 28 August ’38 to 30 January ’39! The specifications are quite meager, (sic) but other Fathers are out of the question for [a description of] these objects, except for the two Fathers in Kambot at the Pottery River. Therefore, I have asked Fathers Schwab and Hansen in Kambot for additional information on the Kambot objects today. (Höltker to Schulien 1 February 1939)

The letter Höltker enclosed to Frs. Schwab and Hansen included language that was disrespectful to Kirschbaum. He opened the letter by explaining how there were objects from New Guinea in Rome without any description, thus inferring that

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Kirschbaum had not detailed the objects correctly in the first place. He then continues with ill-concealed contempt for his ‘confrere’: I have written down the comments Fr. Kirschbaum made on these photos on the pink slip of paper. Please have a look at them. I now ask: Could you complement this meagre information with your knowledge? Firstly, are the comments correct? Secondly, what else can we say about these objects, that would be desired for a scientific publication, as for example name, usage, religious views, myths, distribution, meaning of the paintings. (Höltker to Schwab and Hansen 1 February 1939)

Höltker gives details of his own archaeological collection, although there are details and lists of other ethnographic objects sent to the MEML in 1939. Schulien and Höltker continued their correspondence about the specifics of Höltker’s artefacts. In a letter to Schulien three months after Kirschbaum’s death, Höltker again mentions him in an unfavourable light: Thank you very much for your friendly letter from 8.11 [8th November]. I will keep an eye out for the publication of the stones. Fr. Kirschbaum told me repeatedly in New Guinea that he would not give his collected materials to anybody; this was his most personal property. He will have probably told similar things to other people. According to his intention I will therefore not at all try for the property of his materials, if only to avoid making an awkward impression in the mission. But I must suggest to His Excellency [Bishop Franz] Wolf after the accident that he should arrange for the materials from other missionaries found in Fr. Kirschbaum’s heritage to be sent back to the relevant authors, so that they may have them at their disposal. (Höltker to Schulien 13 November 1939)

Here, Höltker pays no attention to any personal request Kirschbaum might have had for his collections, and we know from Kirschbaum’s 1923 letter to Schmidt that he wanted to keep his collection together at St. Gabriel’s after the PME closed. In fact, Höltker set out to dismantle the collections by suggesting that pieces given to Kirschbaum by other missionaries in the field be sent back to them. Höltker had no idea if these objects had been gifts or the result of years of searching to gain a complete set of objects from the peoples of the Sepik: If I rightly interpret the specifications of Fr. Schebasta of St. Gabriel, the things Fr. Kirschbaum left behind in St. Gabriel are going to be sent here [Posieux-Froideville]. So if I get anything on the Danoa wooden sculptures from St. Gabriel or from the mission I will forward it to you. (Höltker to Schulien 13 November 1939)

By 18 July 1940, the objects from New Guinea referred to by Kirschbaum in 1923 as ‘his museum’ in Rabaul had come to be known, at least in Höltker’s eyes, as the ‘Bishop Wolf Collection’. It is obvious that Höltker could not bring himself to give Kirschbaum credit for the collections. Some light may be shed on Höltker’s comments by examining another correspondence between Schulien and Dr. Scheller from the Museum of Ethnography in Cologne. In his first letter to Schulien of 29 November 1939, Scheller introduced himself as a friend of Höltker and explained that he was working on a catalogue about the New Guinea Mid-Sepik region. However, it is Scheller’s second letter that provides a possible explanation of Kirschbaum’s

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behaviour towards Höltker in New Guinea from 1936 to 1939. Scheller revealed a correspondence between himself and Kirschbaum during the same period. P. Kirschbaum and myself – based on our museum’s collections – were going to publish an account of the so-called material culture of the Sepik area, in which I was going to record objects that are located in Europe and in which he should have contributed his experiences. (Scheller to Schulien 20 January 1940: 2)

The letter details Scheller’s study of the Sepik material in the museums of Europe where, he explained, he had been expecting Kirschbaum’s collaboration on a project that had been many months in preparation. Scheller lamented the inopportune moment of Kirschbaum’s demise: Meanwhile I have travelled for months to the museums in Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia, Holland, France, and Switzerland, and have collected thousands of pictures, and then P. Kirschbaum passes away without having clarified the many controversial questions he was going to study in situ, which was mainly due to the fact that he could not work in the Sepik anymore. The material must be published even without our friend’s immediate support, because the considerable costs of my travels have to eventually pay off scientifically. (2)

If Scheller’s letter reveals evidence of a work in progress that never came to fruition, it also gives us a date of the last attempt at an analysis of Kirschbaum’s collections from that period. Scheller asked Schulien if he would like to incorporate Kirschbaum’s Sepik material within his larger study of all the Sepik material in Europe. He was sensitive to the unique set of circumstances in which the objects were collected, although it seems he had no idea of the 1932 drama of the ‘Christian Awakening’. However, he notes: Kirschbaum made the natives themselves explain everything to him, but these elucidations don’t exactly grasp the essence of the matter. These sources have to be scrutinized and criticized, because some phenomena – although they might be so and so for different reasons – are finally interpreted on the basis of commonplace perspective. I am bringing this up so that you get to know why I will only casually address these explanations, out of which issues of importance will still have to be elicited, and because the one or the other person working with Kirschbaum’s material might possibly take them at face value. (4)

Scheller pointed out Kirschbaum’s limitations as a collector of ethnographic data of the Sepik tribes. He wanted to analyse the collections and place them in the context of wider ethnological scholarship. As an expert in the region, Scheller implored Schulien for permission to assess the collection himself. He underlined the necessity of getting to the roots of Kirschbaum’s collections for the museum world: As there is probably no other place in the world which has such extensive archival material on the Sepik cultures as our institute, and as I was able to work on the main German and foreign collections intensively – even those of which the scientific world did not know very much about – it suggests itself to incorporate your (their) stocks. Maybe your Sepik collection should be published separately, and I would of course allocate my data, but if possible, it would be very good if I could at least get to know, which objects from the Sepik area your museum holds at all. (2-3)

Scheller concluded the letter by offering payment for access to the Vatican Sepik collections, a fact that underlines the importance he attributed to Kirschbaum’s collection:

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6 Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters Could you give me a full or part access to the records on the masks or other carvings? I know that it would be a lot of work again, but it would serve me very much. If we cannot settle matters via barter, and then a cash remittance would be possible at any time. It just means a lot to me now, that the work doesn’t fail because of the circumstances. (4)

Just as Scheller’s letter is revealing about the scholastic relationship between Kirschbaum and Scheller, while implying Höltker’s influence in the margins, so Schulien’s reply is of equal value to the understanding of the collection from the curator’s point of view. In his letter in reply to Scheller he explained the difficulties of the itinerary and catalogue of Kirschbaum’s collection in 1940: P. Kirschbaum’s mailings arrived here at different times; some even before I was present. Not all of the mailings included a catalogue. A part of the whole collection did not go to the museum but was sent to Mödling and Steyl in 1926 after the exhibition finished, in fact at Kirschbaum’s request. I do not know which objects are concerned because I was not here at that time and do not have any lists about them. The numberings that Kirschbaum already applied in New Guinea are not visible on the objects; they must already have been lost over there, and that is probably the principal cause of all the troubles. My attempt to consult Kirschbaum for a definite indexing while he was staying in Rome failed because of his poor health, which is not surprising after almost 30 years in the tropics. When the objects were taken over from the exhibition, they were given a new number; these are the larger numbers with ‘Au’ in the front. Kirschbaum’s catalogue does not form the basis of this. Also, the new numbers were not entered in the catalogue, so it is very difficult to find the objects using these numbers in Kirschbaum’s catalogue. The larger numbers without ‘Au’ were applied during my absence, also without taking Kirschbaum’s catalogue into account. (Schulien to Scheller 5 May 1940: 1)

Scheller’s determination to include Kirschbaum’s collections within European ethnographic scholarship resulted in him exposing the weaknesses at the core of the Vatican’s policies for collecting and curating ethnographic artefacts. Schulien’s last letter on the subject reveals his own impotence and a sense of resignation to the fate of Kirschbaum’s collections. We also see how there an incompetence at the curatorial level since the arrival of the first artefacts to the Vatican after had been 1923. At the outset, the Vatican had promised its contributors that it would take care of their artefacts and to send them on to indicated addresses after the PME. However, Schulien’s explanation shows that they clearly did not honour this promise, as Kirschbaum’s collections were randomly dismantled leaving no inventory as to which objects were sent to Mödling and Steyl. Lists that Kirschbaum had drawn up were evidently lost by 1935 when he visited the Vatican, even though his last set of objects, those from the ‘Christian Awakening’, had only been sent to Rome in 1932. Just fifteen years after the opening of the PME and not ten years after the high-profile inauguration of the MEML, many objects, even those from its largest ethnographic collection, were untraceable. In their final correspondence in 1941, an offer was made to Scheller by Schulien to travel to Rome to investigate the collection. However, the state of war in Europe made this an impossible venture. Simultaneously, on the other side of the world, the Pacific War devastated the SVD in New Guinea, and the mission houses, schools and ‘Kirschbaum’s’ museum were burned to such an extent that little remained of

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the SVD’s existence in northeast New Guinea. After World War II, the MEML faced problems from within its own management, which left Kirschbaum’s collection as a relic of an unwritten history, as well as a permanent reminder of the early Catholic mission contact with the peoples of New Guinea.

Chapter 7

The Pontifical Missionary Exhibition (1925): The Last Great Nineteenth-Century Exhibition

The papal decision to call upon the congregations of the Roman Catholic Church to work together for a missionary exhibition in celebration and confirmation of the Church’s continuing growth and influence throughout the world represented the next step in cementing the foundations of a museum dynasty. Placed at the helm of the enterprise that Pius XI intended to address the science-religion debate that had long been an issue for the Church and its place in the new century, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt distributed his global request to Catholic missions for artefacts to put on display, and as these objects, documents and information began flooding the Holy See, it was Schmidt’s responsibility to organise them into a coherent exhibition. This chapter delves into Schmidt’s ideology behind the displays of the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition of 1925, particularly his theories of Primeval Monotheism and his quest for ethnology to serve the missions and the faith. I will address the question of how successful the exhibition was, in terms of fulfilling its goals and establishing a legacy, or dynasty, of the Church’s presence and influence.1

1

See Wates (2005) for a comprehensive history of the PME and subsequent museums. This work served as a significant source of information for Sánchez Gómez (2013), who includes the PME among a study of missionary and colonial exhibitions in the era of European imperialism.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_7

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Photographic portrait of Pope Pius XI (1857–1939) head of the Catholic Church. World History Archive Schmidt’s ultimate purpose was to establish a museum for comparative religion, while also celebrating the missions. When Pius XI allowed him to commence the process in 1923, in a very short period they had amassed many objects and data. Schmidt and Pius met on several occasions, and the pope supported his requests for money and space. Committees of various kinds were formed to deal with the missionary aspect as well as the ethnographic issues, although Schmidt was consulted as the overall advisor and curator of the exhibition. He used his highly developed organisational skills to select and display objects in the limited space and time available: For months we’ve been at it. The work is strenuous and taxing, such as I’ve never experienced before in my whole life. We work without a break from 8 in the morning until 6 at night. And after we get home, we must get things ready for the next day. We have no break on Sundays or Feast days. Not only did the Holy Father give us dispensation [to work on Sundays], he demanded that we do so. We were all sick in the end. (Brandewie, 1990: 181)

Even though some sections were not finished, the Pontifical Mission and Ethnological Exhibition opened on schedule on 21 December 1924.

7.1 Official Accounts of the PME To provide an accurate description of the PME, I will refer to the extant photographs and three official first-hand accounts. Fr. Henri Dubois SJ composed a detailed report in French entitled L’Exhibition Misionaire (1926), which includes invaluable information on the ideology behind its organisation as well as its content and displays. The hand-bound book, written in French, is a unique artefact and is divided into chapters to discuss themes such as ‘Why should we talk about the exhibition?’, ‘A Review of the History of the Missions’ and ‘The Exhibition: A Laboratory of Ideas’. A second source, the Rivista Illustrata della Exposizione Missionaria Vaticana, was compiled from bi-weekly publications with background information on

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the history and contemporary situation of each Catholic order represented in the exhibition; it serves as the official catalogue of the PME and consists of articles and photographs of contemporary missionary activity taking place in the 1920s. The third official source concerning the exhibition is the official journal of the Jesuit order, the Civiltà Cattolica, which constitutes a wealth of insight into the activities of the Catholic Church, as it is the official archive of all papal edicts, speeches, activities and polemics concerning every papacy since 1850. It reveals Pope Pius XI’s stated intentions for the PME and the MEML. Schmidt’s vision for ethnology since his early career in Austria was to use ‘anthropology at the service of the faith’ (Luzbetak, 1988: Ch.8; quoted in Dietrich, 1992: 112). He explained afterwards that the missionary-ethnological idea was ‘the cooperation of ethnology with the mission is one of the most effective means used by divine providence’ (Schmidt, 1928: 118; original emphasis quoted in Dietrich, 1992: 112). It has been argued that as Schmidt’s ethnology developed in the 1920s, the Roman Catholic Church adopted the principle of accommodation, or adaptation (Dietrich, 1992: 112), and the missions were exhorted to respect the ‘inalienable right of the non-Christian peoples’ (Thauren, 1927: 23). This concept of accommodation represented the first stage of a more ‘respectful approach’ towards local cultures (Dietrich, 1992: 112). A distinction must be made, however, between the missionary attitude towards indigenous peoples and those of the colonial Europeans. The former believed the ‘other’ to be on equal standing in terms of the development of Man, and ‘primitive’ intellect and capacity were only seen as impoverished as they lacked the Christian God; material culture was a symptom of this poverty, not the cause. In contrast, the colonial reasoning and theoretical stance was to see the indigenous ‘other’ as retarded in evolutionary development and was compared to the West’s primitive ancestors, contemporaries of ‘stone-age’ humanity. It is important to acknowledge the scientific-Christian agenda of the Catholic Church in the 1920s to assess the uniqueness of the PME. Dubois, re-iterating the pope’s words as the PME was about to close in 1926, declared the exhibition a success and quoted the Holy Father’s intentions to ‘keep the book open’; that is, he aimed to transfer the exhibits to the Lateran Palace to join the two museums already residing therein. Dubois’s style of description is typical of the language of propaganda that surrounded the exhibition: It needed nothing less than the divine unity of the Church, an irresistible force, to which they give their principles and the authority of their lives, the fraternal charity that joins all their children, their brotherly affection towards the Pope, to realise, in such a short time, despite so many difficulties, the grandiose project, conceived by Pius XI, of a universal Exhibition of the Catholic missions. (Dubois, 1926: 68)2

Dubois’s analysis of the exhibition provides a better understanding of the political agendas of the project. He stated that it was ‘a way to turn attention to the missions and the anguishing problem of millions of human beings still living in ignorance of Jesus Christ, their Saviour’ (48). He described some of the political manoeuvring in the Vatican that enabled the PME to take place. In Dubois’s account, Pius XI called 2

All translations of Dubois’s work have been translated from French by the author.

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a meeting with Cardinal Willem Marinus van Rossum (1854–1932), Prefect of the Propaganda on 23 March 1923 and wrote an official letter announcing the project on 24 April of the same year asking the heads of the Catholic orders to appoint a delegate in charge of procuring objects from their overseas missions. The delegate would then report to a Central Committee under the supervision of Mgr. Marchetti Selvaggiani. Until the end of 1924, orders were sent to the mission posts throughout the world to send objects to Rome. The exhibition was to be missionary and ethnological, and it is largely this combined agenda that made the project unique. The papal orders for an exhibition about the missions were clear enough, but the added request that the missionary work should be linked with an ethnological agenda to ‘show the contribution of the missions to science’ (Pius XI: Motu Proprio: 1924) made the task a complicated one. Schmidt set out to reconstruct the history of the missions in the first galleries of the PME, dividing each historical phase, to show the development of their work in time and place. It was believed that this approach would prompt the discussion of missionary methods and results over time, whereby the needs and difficulties of the individual orders would be compared. In turn, it would grant the central body of the missions, the Propaganda Fide, an insight into their overall management, while also permitting them to better ‘train, instruct, follow, console and direct the missions throughout the world’ (Dubois, 1926: 49). Dubois claimed that the exhibition would prove the ‘universal miracle of the Catholic Church’ and a ‘unity manifest in the exhibition’ (50) by giving each order a chance to reveal its work and promote itself, but it also drew them into competition with each other, as their displays would be directly under the eyes of the pontiff. Dubois remarks: ‘No one can doubt that the Exhibition in the Vatican is and will become an instrument of perfection for missionary work’ (33). He boasted that it would not be just an assembly of people and things to satisfy our curiosities, but in fact, proof of the universality of the Catholic Church. It would express the unity of the Church and had the following underlying objectives: to centralise the missions; to improve communication between the mission orders and promote a more active cooperation between the faithful and the apostate of the missions. However, the attempt to centralise the missions was also an attempt to control them.

7.2 Centralisation of the Missions To understand the implications of ‘centralisation’ and ‘control’ one must trace the history of the missions back to the founding of the centralising body in the Vatican. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV (1621–1623) set up the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide as the official papal organ for the missions. According to Dubois, this body took charge of the rational and providential order of the missions to point them in a common direction for the benefit of the Church. However, by the 1920s the different missionary orders were independent from each other and the Vatican: ‘Isolation [had]

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left them to fend for themselves and the interests of one mission house conflicted more and more with the interests of all’ (36). As far back as the Middle Ages, Catholic universities were set up in Rome to educate potential candidates for the missionary service. The Pontifical Gregorian University was founded in 1551 by St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) and acknowledged as an academic institution by Pope Paul IV (1555–1559) in 1556. In 1583, Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585) gave it a new building and took the title of ‘Founder and Protector’. The second Catholic university, the Urbano College, established by Urban VIII (1623–1644) in 1627, became a significant part of the Propaganda Fide. It was raised to university status in 1886 with the intention of preparing missionary students through the study of history, religious behaviour and ethnology, and courses in languages (Aramaic, Armenian, Syrian and Haldic) and medicine were added. From 1918, the institutions offered students a course of study that would enable them to join the missionary efforts abroad. Other examples of centralisation can be found in the appointment by the Propaganda of ‘visitors’ and ‘delegates’ sent from Rome to mission houses throughout the world to investigate their teachings and practices. Dubois explained that mission posts were often far away from towns, and the lack of means of communication had left them to rely on their own initiatives, leaving missionaries isolated from each other and from Rome. One of the aims of the PME was to provide a link between different missions whereby each might gain through insight into the workings and achievements of the others. It also provided a unique chance for the separate congregations of the Catholic Church to communicate in the same space and compare their ideas through their displays of statistics, books and artefacts. Central and regional conferences were convened to unite the missionaries in their cause and to promote discussions on their individual and collective experiences in the field. Dubois explained that the missions needed prayers, men and money and insisted that if mission progress was to be sustained it was to be through the methods, they found to obtain financial support from their Catholic followers. Dubois appealed to the missionaries’ competitive side when he used the story of the success of a Protestant mission that, ‘in one single diocese in America, through simple organisation between themselves, managed to raise $800,000’ (Dubois, 1926: 43). The PME was used as a marketing and advertising convention to communicate and gain financial support for the missions, and it portrayed itself as a symbol of unity and cooperation among Catholics throughout the world. The missionaries’ own displays generated competition among Catholic orders as they strove to promote their own congregation in a display that would be observed by Pius XI himself. Dubois underlined the hierarchical nature of missions, referring to their role in the Church in military terms: ‘The chiefs had all their troops in hand; they provided them with agents of information who made the maps on to which the plans could be used. Stands, statistics, communications, paintings, diverse studies were the main source of information’ (37). Photographs of the PME reveal the military-style presentation of maps and statistics, and Dubois’s allusion to military semantics further enhanced this metaphor.

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7.3 The Scientific Agenda Pope Pius XI was keen to bring about a new era for the Catholic Church in Europe and set about creating new connections, both politically with the new Italian state and scientifically to associate Christianity with acceptable fields of study such as ethnology. The PME provided the perfect platform upon which to exhibit missionary work throughout the world. Dubois refers to the contradiction between religion and science, a subject that is still a major source of debate in intellectual circles. He summarised the argument between evolutionary theory and biblical sources concerning the origin of humanity, saying: It seems that some adversaries of Christianity have pointed their attacks at the idea of the origin of humanity. One discusses, perhaps less now, questions of biblical exegesis concerning the appearance of Man on earth, his descent or non-descent from animals, the first manifestations of religious thoughts in prehistoric times, the presence or total absence of a cult directed to one God, the developments of belief and rites. […] It is in answer to these problems that one has appealed to geology and other natural sciences as well as archaeological traditions, comparative linguistics and especially, ethnology. (Dubois, 1926: 59)

Dubois refers to Wilhelm Schmidt and his journal, Anthropos, and mentions the International Ethnology Conferences organised by Schmidt wherein the missions were called upon to provide a ‘universal document’, meaning the PME, to aid ‘Catholic Science’3 (54): No one is in the same position as you missionaries are to penetrate the lives, souls and even the secrets of the indigenous peoples; because you are not simple passers-by, you live in the midst of them, you know and understand the details of their existence; because they esteem you and have confidence in you, their wishes will decide what happens to you. (54)

Pius XI requested the ‘authentic documentation’ of indigenous lives found in the diverse regions of missionary activity. The list of objects desired included: old utensils, furniture, musical instruments, weapons, clothes, old sculptures, pottery, necklaces, amulets, fetishes, examples of local industry, insignias of hierarchy, examples of the fauna and flora of the region, specimens of nature in all its forms and studies of their native ways of life and cults. In brief, everything was required that might contribute to an exact reconstruction of the diverse states of indigenous communities vis-à-vis the missionary quest. In this way, it was thought that the exhibition would demonstrate how much modern science, in all its forms, owed to the work of the missions. Dubois expresses the notion that to miss the double intention behind the PME would be to seriously misunderstand what was achieved. The initial conception of the project by the Directive Committee included a special section for the ‘civilising and scientific work of the missions’, but this part of the exhibition could not be fully achieved in time for the official opening (403). There were several other attempts to manage displays dedicated specifically to the missions 3

‘Catholic Science’ refers to any science which does not see Catholic dogma as contradicting the objectivity used in modern science.

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in the world of science, but all were thwarted by serious organisational problems. These difficulties were material and temporal obstacles; the whole idea of demonstrating missionary involvement proved too ambitious. There was also unwillingness among the clergy to oversimplify the immense scholarly work of the diverse orders. Subsequently, organisers of the PME attempted to scale down the material representations into clear statistics, smaller collections and fewer paintings in the hope that the sections of evidence of missionary scientific knowledge would inspire others to continue the valuable work. The sections were eventually split up into different galleries, and the original idea to combine the ‘missionary’ objects with ‘ethnographic’ objects was abandoned. The link between the two became an implicit rather than explicit part of the PME. The lay visitor may not have been able to interpret the purpose of the displays, as Dubois remarks: ‘many ordinary visitors do not look either so far, or so high or around them’ (404). One source, however, did not miss the curatorial intention to demonstrate the scientific achievements of the Catholic Church. The author of an article on the PME which appeared in a newspaper in Paris in 1925 admitted he had grasped the theme of the exhibits in Rome but observed unhelpfully that ‘it would be inexact to say that the missions have done a great service to science, but, then again, incorrect to say they had done nothing’ (405). In direct reply to the Parisian journalist, Dubois quoted Chateaubriand’s Genie du Christianisme of 1802 to reinforce his view of the effectiveness of the missions’ scientific enterprise and his enthusiasm for the exhibition he had helped create: Here again we see another example of the great and novel ideas that belong only to the Christian religion. The idolatry cults have ignored the divine enthusiasm that animates the evangelist apostle. Even the ancient philosophers themselves never left the garden of the Academy and the enjoyments of Athens to carry out a sublime impulsion to humanise the savage, instruct the ignorant, clothe the poor and sow the seeds of peace amongst enemy nations: it’s what the Christians have done and still do today. (Dubois, 1926: 407)

Dubois covered many aspects of the exhibition, and in demonstrating the civilising work of the missions he drew attention to the displays on Africa and Oceania. He listed the objects: Scenes of anthropophagi, paintings of martyrs, photographs, barely dressed cannibals, hands armed with arrows or poisonous spears, bestial faces, deformed limbs born out of grotesque ornamentation, hideous masks of unimaginable travesties, collections of ridiculous amulets, grimacing idles, monstrous fetishes, witness of atrocious sacrifices, seats tainted in human blood. (406)

The visitor was asked to ‘listen’ to the guide who told of the ‘horror of slave massacres that took place until only a few years ago and to turn our attention to the present condition of the same community’ (406) where we find ‘portraits of Christians with metamorphosed faces, dressed in costumes’(406). The visitor was enticed to notice the happy faces of the children, who were laughing and holding their prayer books ready for mass. Their material culture had become embroidered and laced under the direction of the Sisters of the Church. In this way, Dubois demonstrated the link between material poverty and spiritual poverty. It is implied that once a culture

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embraced the word of God its material culture swiftly became more sophisticated, and its population became healthier and happier. This ‘before-after’ account, demonstrating a radical transformation from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised human being’, was a popular device in museum displays in the 1920s. Dubois cited different cases of the transformations of cultures, for example, a case in Chile where, after embracing Christianity, an indigenous family’s former existence in a hut was raised to a new ‘civilised’ state by living in a ‘Western-style’ maisonette (405). Dubois also comments on how in ‘non-savage’ countries the ‘mission-trained’ artists and sculptors had become ‘professional’ workmen: ‘The missions are said to be instrumental in all forms of education, especially setting up schools for young children to train them into new profession such as interpreters, officers, doctors, … engineers, governors of districts and provinces’ (408). He described the effects of missionary activity as ‘far-reaching’ since they influenced the ‘mentality’ of the ‘savage’, ‘forcing them to blush at their cruelty by contrasting their ways with admirable charity’ (410).

7.4 Structure of the PME Dubois’s account informs us of the physical dimensions of the PME. It consisted of two groups of pavilions: those in the Cour de la Pigna, or Pine Court, to which the Lapidary Gallery was attached and another set pavilions in the Vatican Gardens. The Pine Court pavilions were in the shape of a large horseshoe consisting of four rooms in each wing and four rooms ending in two small annexes. The first problem for the curatorial team was defining the space, as they had to exhibit mission work while relating it to the theoretical ethnological claims of Schmidt. In the end, the Ethnology Room was the only one at the exhibition dedicated to Schmidt’s theories. There were twenty-four rooms, four annexes and two long galleries, a total proliferation of stands extending almost two kilometres. The twenty-four rooms were divided by geo-cultural areas, mission congregations and for themes, such as medicine and ethnology. Dubois’s account conveys the underlying themes and preoccupations behind the scenes of the exhibition from the point of view of its curators. The papal agenda was clearly stated in Pius XI’s Motu Proprio in 1924, in which he explained that the missionary cause was high on his agenda and that he intended to assist its work. However, the PME was also to be a demonstration of the Church’s strength in terms of territory at a time when geographical expansionism was high on the Italian government’s agenda and can, therefore, be seen as a subtle political move on the part of Pius XI. The presence of artefacts in the Vatican was a demonstration of conquest and influence, serving its own image as an international powerhouse. However, it was not enough to put the objects into a display that proved possession; this material had to be explained. A large collection of missionary libraries on display represented a cross-section of intellectual disciplines such as the natural and social sciences and newly-founded

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areas such as psychology and ethnology. Schmidt’s amalgamation of ethnology and missionary work put his ‘science’ at the centre of the exhibition. Objects in the PME were used metaphorically and metonymically. The metaphor lay in the reasoning behind the sections of the museums. Once it had been established that the missionary story could only be defined in terms of space and time since the life of Christ, objects were placed in rooms that would tell the story of the process. This process was established by the didactic route through the exhibition that associated process with progress. A room attributed to medical science showed instruments and written documents of missionary observation while in the field. These areas covered natural science, botanic studies and accounts of the variation of the human form, similar to the anthropometric studies carried out by many European anthropologists at the end of the nineteenth century in Africa and Australia. In this way, objects in the rooms dedicated to the missionary story and their contribution to science metaphorically stood for progress in science, but metonymically conveyed a form of process. In other areas of the exhibition the mission orders of the 1920s presented their work in terms of spiritual success where photographs portrayed the progress of the missions in the form of statistics and graphs. The ‘pre-contact, heathen objects’ were presented en masse with the implicit message to the visitor that indigenous cultures were lost and in need of guidance. Conversion to Christianity was portrayed as simultaneous with an enriched material culture. Thus, objects and cases were placed further apart, and distinctions between objects could be made. The placement of objects in clearly defined sections and cases gave the impression that they stood for primitive material culture in their various states. The rooms dedicated to science could not be tied in to this museological formula and were, therefore, kept in another space.

7.5 The Collections For the PME, over 100,000 objects were sent to Pius XI as donations from the missions’ extended networks. The Jesuit writers of the Civiltà Cattolica give us valuable insight into progress of the collecting activity. Missionaries were given instructions to collect items from the region of their work. In many cases ‘experts’ among the clergy from the various mission houses carried out the collecting. However, one Jesuit author lamented, ‘despite their good will [they] did not supply any scientific documentation’ (Civiltà Cattolica, 1925: Vol. I: 53). The written guidebook encouraged the visitor to observe the diverse ways of constructing bows and arrows, the multiple ways of reinforcing and protecting the hand and the knives and harpoons associated with the Eskimos. But it proved difficult for the visitor to observe an object that was not actually on display, although one could find mantles, knives, baskets, plates, dishes and ornaments that showed diverse forms of providing for the basic of human needs. Labels next to garments in the display cases suggested to the visitor that some indigenous peoples did not wear clothes and referred to their nudity by using terms such as ‘absolute zero’.

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Regarding the religious artefacts, one could find some unique examples of idols and statues from the Buddhist and Jain religions. Rare idols of the god Zu from the Island of Gambier dating back to prehistoric times were donated to the exhibition from the museum in the Propaganda Fide. Amulets from Uganda, Madagascar and Togoland were exhibited along with fetishes from the Congo. In the stand of the mission in India, a crouched figure of a Lama clasping a prayer book sits alongside a crown made of human bones. There was also a small section containing syncretic objects consisting of statues made in China of the Virgin Mary wearing robes of the Empress (54–55). The lists of objects are numerous, but as we can see from the descriptions noted in the Civiltà Cattolica, it is not surprising that the present museum, the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum, still has difficulty tracing the provenance of many of the artefacts. In much of the exhibition there was little if any real ethnographic detail accompanying the objects in the first place. We understand that there was a massive selection of material culture sent from the mission houses, but the Civiltà Cattolica does not reveal the contexts in which these objects were made, or how old the artefacts were; nor are there any insights into the actual collectors and producers of the artefacts. We know the motives for them being sent to Rome from official papal documents and letters, but much of vital information was lost, misplaced or simply forgotten. We do still have a collection of the original accession books in which descriptions and numbers given to the objects were recorded as they arrived in the Vatican. However, they are handwritten, often in pencil and are, for the most part, illegible. The most tragic part of this itinerary is that after some of the objects for the exhibition were sent back, another list was not made for the subsequent museum. The accession numbers were then changed when Schulien took over as curator of the MEML in 1938. To make matters even more complicated, a third itinerary was begun and never completed by the curator of the MEMV, Fr. Josef Penkowski, who retired in 1996. Therefore, nearly a century on from the original exhibition, very little information is left in the present museum archives to trace the origins of its collections and individual artefacts. We can, however, gain some insight into the types of collections and their provenance from selected photographs of the exhibition that still exist in the Ethnological Museum archives. The names of the mission orders were posted up on large boards above the exhibited cases: ‘The Sacred Heart’,’The Divine Word’, ‘The Dominicans’, etc. However, the origin of the artefacts became more complicated to resolve once the exhibition was divided into geographical areas like ‘Abyssinia’, ‘Libya’ or ‘Sudan’, especially as many different orders often worked in the same region; moreover, there is no list of missionary museums around the world available, even in the Vatican. Other photographs from the exhibition reveal that there were full-scale exhibits of indigenous peoples surrounded by constructions of their houses. For example, a lifesize representation of a Sudanese family was exhibited sitting around a Bedouin tent, dressed in native costume, drinking tea. It was only in this part of the exhibition that objects were placed in a context of everyday life.

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Many of the artefacts had been commissioned by missionaries and made especially for the exhibition. These objects included model houses, temples and monuments, although the artists themselves remain anonymous (Dubois, 1926: 40). The collections were sometimes grouped typologically. We can see this in photographs of collections of different types of material: wood, grain, fibres, straw, essences and oils, herbs including indigenous medicine, fossils, ancient ceramics, pottery, coins, geological artefacts, animal specimens, fruits, shells, insects and butterflies. However, the classification of the objects was not made along the lines of evolutionary development of individual objects, such as we find in Victorian museums like the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, as they were used to mean something rather different to the evolutionary typology of a colonial museum.

7.6 The Ideology of the Displays The ideology behind the displays was fundamentally different as they were based on Schmidt’s assumptions that civilisation is divided up into two great periods: the prehistoric period that lay outside recorded time (età preistorica) and an historical period based on recorded knowledge (età storica). In the first era, there remain material elements left behind from undocumented cultures such as bone and metal ornaments, pictures and sculptures. The second period contains documents and historical data, written evidence in inscriptions, chronicles and testaments. This second period could be studied through two distinct types of science. The first is described as historical science, and the second is ethnology. Historical science was concerned with ‘barbarian’ peoples (inciviltà), whereas ethnology concentrated on ‘savage’ peoples (non-civilità), otherwise known as ‘primitive peoples’. Primitive peoples were those considered not to have reached the ‘barbarian’ way of life and were below them on a scale of progress in material terms. A group was classified as barbaric or primitive based on their form of ‘industry’ (grande-industria). Although there were twenty-four rooms dedicated to the PME, it was only in the Ethnology Room that Schmidt was able to label and write didactic boards explaining his categorisation of cultures. An account in the Civiltà Cattolica takes us through the Ethnology Room, which stood at the heart of the exhibition. It was seventeen metres in length and ten metres across, and the room was divided into three rows of glass cabinets reserved for ethnological documentation. At the end of the room was a space where a glass cabinet contained prehistoric materials. On the walls of the rooms were rows of different kinds of bows, harpoons, swords, shields, clubs and paddles. Large maps of geographical regions demarcating linguistic boundaries and ‘races’ hung on the walls, along with a collection of photographs showing various landscapes and temples from different religions. At the entrance and the exit of the Ethnology Room, a summary of the room’s subsections was posted in French, Italian, German and English, describing the criteria upon which the displays were arranged. In the PME there is less mention of Schmidt’s methodology regarding culture circles; in fact, there seems to be more attention to his idea of Primeval Monotheism:

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Material is arranged according to both its scientific and apologetic character. In one way, it is arranged in an appropriate rationalist order, according to which primitive people seem to be the most ferocious and savage, and then applying historical methods and objectivity, drawing divisions in their development along lines of intelligence (technical, industrial, artistic) and other specifically human forms (religious, ethical, moral). This last field is to demonstrate that the primitive is no longer savage, but simpler, and thus purer. (Civiltà Cattolica, 1925 Vol. IV: 79)

This idea of purity stems from Genesis 2 which provides a description of Man before the Biblical fall, and this concept was fundamental to Schmidt’s thesis on monotheism. He dedicated the Ethnology Room to three types of civilisations, which form a basis of his ethnological categorisation in his major work. His methodological approach was cultural-historical and decidedly antievolutionist (Brandewie, 1990: 60–110). However, as Dietrich points out, he had a concept of ‘our contemporary ancestors’. In the culture-circle methodology he calls these ‘ethnologically the oldest peoples’, as it was assumed they represented the earliest form of human culture and society. In Schmidt’s case, he saw the African Pygmies as an example of the oldest peoples. They did not represent the starting point of universal evolutionary development but the beginning of historically divergent developments. That is, from the earliest or primordial culture developed three so-called primary cultures: (1) the patriarchal totemistic hunters, (2) the matriarchal agriculturists and (3) the patriarchal nomadic cattle-breeders. Further developments of these prototype societies lead to the development of three secondary cultures through a simple one–one mixing of all three primary cultures (1 + 2, 2 + 3 and 1 + 3). From then on, the mixing of all three primary cultures brought about tertiary cultures and the rise of the state of civilisation (Dietrich, 1992: 115; Schmidt, 1931: 240–41). These three groupings of primary cultures may be translated as: ‘Primitive’, ‘Antique’ and ‘More Recent’, and it is under these headings that the ethnological section was organised in the Exhibition. The first of these categories represented in the exhibition was Primitive Civilisations, which displayed a subdivision of four different types. Type one included the Pygmies from the Southern Islands, Southeast Asia and Central Africa. In the case of the Pygmies, who became the specific group of study and the basis for Schmidt’s work on the origin of the idea of God, we find that they believed in a supreme being and called him ‘Father’. There was no polytheism among these people, nor divinities, temples and high priests. The social institution was a monogamous, stable family life in small groups with a headman in charge of each. There was evidence of non-secret initiation ceremonies, but none of bodily scarification or deformation to identify different tribes. Personal property was allowed for men and women as well as territory. Material culture was simple. There was no agriculture or herding. The Pygmies were a hunter-gatherer society and used utensils made of wood and bone. They used almost exclusively bows and arrows and lived in rudimentary cave-like shelters containing neither art nor musical instruments (Civiltà Cattolica ,1925 Vol XII: 57). This form of description fits into the ideal biblical scenario of a single and supreme creator reinforcing the Catholic apology of the beginnings of Mankind.

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Types two, three and four of the primitive peoples were arranged according to Schmidt’s theory that Mankind became more adept in material culture (still on a preagricultural level). He moved further away from the idea of a supreme God towards those who practised animism. His fourth type included peoples from the plains of Australia, South Africa, Southern Sudan, the Nile regions and the plains of North America. Schmidt explained that the idea of a supreme God had been ‘confounded’ with the head of the tribe. The headman could die and be resuscitated and identified himself with the moon. These are, in Schmidt’s understanding, the first ‘materialistic’ representations of the supreme being inherited from tribal life (58). The second row of display cases in the Ethnology Room fell into Schmidt’s second category entitled Ancient Civilisations formed of nomadic societies, all of whom had an idea of a supreme god but in different forms. One group of societies identified itself with a good spirit of the sky and a bad spirit of the earth. Under these great spirits lesser spirits of nature existed. Nomadic herders such as Indo-Europeans and Semito-Hamites exemplified this type of belief system, and Schmidt considered them as being further along the evolutionary scale towards modern civilisation as they were herders, not hunter-gatherers. The next section dealt with More Recent Civilisations and included the Aztecs and the Incas, as well as peoples from the geographical regions of Melanesia, New Guinea, Indonesia, India, the Kanto region in south-eastern Africa, North America and northeast South America. They followed doctrines of diverse gods, Sky-gods and Moon-gods who had married a female god of the Earth who was worshipped as a ‘Mother God’, considered as an intrinsic force of the ‘essence’ of divine masculinity. The religion practised in this type of group is described in the Civiltà Cattolica: ‘Head-hunter cults joined this group where skulls were used as part of fecundity rituals as was the blood of humans, animal hearts, liver and fresh blood. Prisoners of war were tortured in blood-thirsty ways during magical rituals’ (Civiltà Cattolica, 1926 Vol. II: 329). The social institutions and material culture of these societies were then described briefly as being of large families with examples of matriarchies as well as evidence of polyandry. The material culture was made up of fences for farm animals as well as agriculture. They used hunting equipment constructed from bamboo and defended themselves with round shield. From the perspective of material cultural, the textual layout of the description of the PME in Civiltà Cattolica clearly demonstrates how Schmidt divided and subdivided ‘primitive cultures’ and on which criteria they were selected for the display in the Ethnological Room. It is also evident that material culture was the first consideration, even though religion was the ultimate divider; to be considered a primitive, a culture had to show evidence of economic, industrial or mechanical backwardness. This was the basis on which most colonial exhibitions were founded. The three categories of Primitive, Ancient and More Recent Civilisations were therefore decided on material terms first and religious factors second, specifically Schmidt’s idea of Primeval Monotheism. A society’s distance from monotheism was the criteria on which the evolutionary ‘age’ of the culture was assessed; the nearer to monotheism the older the culture, since Man, according to Schmidt, began as a monotheistic worshipper. In this way the PME was fundamentally unlike colonial exhibitions

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as the secondary layer of ‘religion’ was separated from descriptions of the social institutions and considered a more important issue than other aspects of their social systems. Dubois’s insights into the organisation of the exhibition are mainly tied to the encompassing idea of celebrating the work of the missionaries. He states: ‘It’s the world, in fact, or rather, it’s a photograph of the whole world that one wanted to fix in time […] A general and authentic view of what they [the missions] were, are, and want to become’ (Dubois, 1926: 122). However, the semantics of photography and authenticity were very much combined to mean something near to truth and reality, which of course had far-reaching connotations for the Catholic Church at the time. In the 1920s, authenticity was connected to those objects of a culture that had been collected or made before colonialism, therefore placing the culture in a pure state of existence. In fact, this idea, also explicit in colonial exhibitions and examples of ethno-representation of non-Western peoples, served the Vatican as a firm background to the displays in the exhibition. The displays showed ‘authentic’ objects, to portray the simplicity of the peoples before their conversions to Christianity, but also showed that these cultures in transition were, according to Schmidt, ‘nearer to God’, since their primitivism exemplified the beginnings of humanity according to the Christian faith: peoples who had been thrown out of the garden of Eden, who had lost their way from the path to God. Authenticity of culture was therefore demonstrated in a way that went beyond the colonial idea of the backwardness of mechanical invention. For the PME, the artefacts served as proof for the necessity of conversion, to help these ‘poor souls’ back into heaven. There were examples of postcontact artefacts exhibited in various displays throughout the exhibition. However, these artefacts were displayed to demonstrate the ability of the natives to change their ‘savage’ ways once they embraced Christianity. In terms of Pius XI’s agenda, we can see how missionary work had been achieved in the great Gallery of Statistics containing maps, photographs and paintings on the different stands. The exhibition was at once a celebration of the Church and a public demonstration to the modern world of the contribution made by its missions in terms of science and technology. It expressed a Catholic scientific knowledge using ethnographic documentation and the continuing scientific contribution the missions were making to the world of modern science.

7.7 Beyond the PME If we are to consider the ‘successes’ of the exhibition we must return to the main criteria upon which it was formed: the political, scientific and personal agendas of Pope Pius XI. As a political tool it succeeded to a large extent as it gained international recognition for the work of the missionaries and the Church. It could be argued that the PME helped lay new grounds for the Concordat between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Italy signed on 11 February 1929, establishing the independent statehood of the Vatican. Pius XI’s tribute to the PME at the end of the Jubilee Year of 1925

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conveyed great personal satisfaction, and he described it as the magnificent ‘book that should remain open’. Its refinement was to be produced in the museum that was to be established in the Lateran Palace. However, if we compare the original idea as proclaimed in the papal encyclicals and Schmidt’s initial plans for a prominent ethnological presence in the exhibition with the final version, evidence suggests that the missionary and ethnographic elements were not coherently tied together in the exhibition. As a personal project of Pius XI, the PME could be seen as a success by the fact that it renegotiated the papal position vis-à-vis the Church and lay Catholic groups. Therefore, the fact of the exhibition’s survival into museum status must imply some form of success. However, it is important to examine what did survive to become the MEML. It certainly lost half its collections as a document of missionary work, but one could also argue that the MEML did not have the space to accommodate the 100,000 objects previously on display in the exhibition of 1925. The 1925 Exhibition was a document that reminded Dubois of a ‘photograph’, rather than the Pontiff’s ‘open book’. He may have been correct in his allusion as, certainly, the PME was a celebration of a ‘self’ fixed in space and time along with the graphs, objects and explanations relevant to the year of its inception. As a result, it quickly became outdated in a world where science, politics and even missionaries were rapidly moving on in new directions. For Schmidt, the success of the exhibition was the fact that it survived; although the original exhibition was dismantled and never again took on the same appearance, it gave Schmidt another opportunity to arrange his ethnological data and infinitely more time to consider it.

Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902) German pathologist and founder of cell pathology. In later life he turned to anthropology and archaeology and collaborated with Schliemann on the excavations at Troy. Engraving from ‘The Illustrated London News’ (London, 24 December 1887). Scientist, Medicine World History Archive

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Jesuit stand with statistical charts displaying the acquisition of souls at their mission stations with figures for baptisms, confessions and communions, at the Pontifical Exhibition 1925 Vatican Archives

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A Still Life Exhibit at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition Vatican Archives

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References

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Display cases at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition, showing the signs of the missionary orders and the geographical areas represented. Objects were placed in cases according to size and without labels. Vatican Archives

References Brandewie, E. (1990). When giants walked the earth: The life and times of Wilhelm Schmidt SVD. UP Freiberg. La Civiltà Cattolica. (1925). Anno 76. Vol I-XII.

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La Civiltà Cattolica. (1926). Anno 77. Vol II. Dietrich, S. (1992). Mission, local culture and the “Catholic Ethnology” of Wilhelm Schmidt. Jaso, 23(2), 111–125. Dubois, H. (1926). L’Exhibition missionaire. Unpublished. Luzbetak, L. (1988). The church and cultures: New perspectives in missiological anthropology. Orbis Books. Sánchez Gómez, L. Á. (2013). Dominación, fe y espectáculo: las exposiciones misionales y coloniales en la era del imperialismo moderno (1851–1958). CSIC. Schmidt, W. (1928). ‘Die Bedeutung der Ethnologie und Religionskunde für Missionstheorie und Missions praxis’, Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, Vol. XVIII, 117-131. Schmidt, W. (1931). The origin and growth religion: Facts and Theories. In: H. J. Rose (Trans.). Methuen. Thauren, J. (1927). Die Missionen der Gesellschaft des Göttlichen Wortes (Moedling). Wates, A. L. (2005). Mind over matter: A catholic ethnology for the Vatican’s ethnographic collections. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. University of Oxford.

Chapter 8

Empires End and Ominous Beginnings: The Missionary and Ethnological Museum (1927) and the Lateran Treaty (1929)

The inauguration of the Missionary and Ethnological Museum by Pope Piux XI on 21st December 1927. It existed in the same form until it was taken down on 1st February 1963 and transferred to St. Calisto, Trastevere, in another part of Rome. Vatican Archives As the PME closed its doors on 10 January 1926, Pope Pius XI and Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt had achieved their goal of celebrating Catholic missions throughout the world via ethnological means. However, with Pius’s plan to transfer the exhibition to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7_8

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a permanent Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Lateran Palace in Rome, the Golden Age of Western ethnographic museums was coming to an end. In Rome in the late 1920s, evangelical and imperial aspirations became aligned as the Roman Catholic Church sought to hail the success of its missions, and Mussolini’s Italy harked back to the days of Ancient Rome to establish his imperial vision of the country; at the same time, the Church appealed for more official recognition in the temporal world, and both parties looked to material culture to define themselves. The relationship between Church and State became concretised with the signing of the Lateran Treaty on 11 February 1929, a concordat that officially granted statehood to the Vatican City. When the MEML officially opened on 21 December 1927, it was clear that the objects would not be displayed upon the geographical classification or typological principles that had been used as a framing device for ethnological objects in other European museums. Instead, it followed a very particular didactic-scientific logic based on Schmidt’s ethnological theories, which, once translated into the museum space, he believed would best serve its predominantly missionary audience. When Schmidt organised the PME he initiated a demonstration of his theories from the historical-cultural school (Leone, 1980: 136) and maintained this standpoint for the organisation of the MEML. Pius XI had stated clearly in his Allocuzione of 10 January 1926 that he wanted the new museum to retain the structure of its predecessor (Civiltà Cattolica, 1926: Vol. II: 74–76), meaning that the museum inherited not only the material but also an ideology supported wholeheartedly by the pope himself. Schmidt was appointed director and curator, and his ethnological theory would be its weaving thread. This was followed by an encyclical letter from the pope entitled Rarum Ecclesiae and read aloud at St. Peter’s by Pius on 28 February 1926. In this letter, Pius informed his audience of the central purpose of the Church, which was ‘to make Mankind participate in the effects of his saving Redemption’ (Rarum Eccleasiae I). He reminded his brethren that they all needed to ‘do our utmost to pave the way for pagan peoples to find the only way to health by bringing the light of the Truth through the apostolic preachers’ (VI). He proclaimed that ‘all the officers in the mission army, and the privates too, if We may so speak, who shall visit this Museum, after having compared the conditions of their respective missions and their methods of work, will draw inspiration from it for even better and larger projects’ (IV). He saw the missionary museum as a place of learning and of training missionaries to ‘procure as many indigenous clerics as possible’ (XXV) once they were out in the field. The MEML was not only intended to be a place for missionaries to learn about other cultures, but it was also a place for them to learn methods of teaching indigenous priests how to spread the gospel themselves: It is very important that at the same time these students receive a good a profound scientific training, sacred and profane, clear, and methodical, and not with too accelerated and summary courses, but with the usual course of study. In fact, persuade yourself that if in seminaries you will be exemplary subjects…skilled in ministries and expert in teaching the Divine Law, you will prepare men who not only will attract the esteem of the authorities at home, but

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they will be able to one day be destined for the government of parishes and diocese, which will be erected at God’s will. (XXV)

The pope emphasised the importance of seeing indigenous peoples as equals and just as capable as European missionaries of spreading the word of God: ‘As a matter of fact, the native clergy will prove to be most useful, more useful than some people imagine in extending the Kingdom of Christ “for since the native priest,” to quote Our Predecessor, “by birth, temper, sentiment, and interests is in close touch with his own people, it is beyond all controversy how valuable he can be in instilling the Faith into the minds of his people”’ (XXI). A key point that Pius XI makes in his letter is to make it clear to the missionaries that the congregations did not own the land upon which their mission houses were built, whereas he, the Pope did: ‘The Orders and religious Congregations may well be proud of the missions given them among the heathen and of the conquests made up to the present hour for the Kingdom of Christ. Let them remember, however, that they do not possess the mission fields by a peculiar and perpetual right, but that they hold them solely at the discretion and pleasure of the Holy See’ (XXXII). This posturing of Pius was an extremely important point that would not have been missed by the Italian government, sensitive to his every word and aware of the enormous imperial power the Pontiff still held both in Italy and abroad through the work of the missions. The PME and MEML signified two major changes regarding the relationship between the Church and the museum space. When Pius XI decided to hold an exhibition within the core of its establishment, he not only broke with tradition of Vatican museology by exhibiting ‘heathen’ objects from small-scale societies, but for the first time, he used a scientific agenda to uphold Catholic theology. Objects in the PME were not examples of the Western European heritage as displayed by Greek and Roman artefacts. Even though they too were pagan, these artefacts had conventionally been used to represent the traditions of European classical heritage found in Christian works of art. Feelings were mixed among churchmen who saw the exotic objects sent by the missionaries to the Vatican as ‘god forsaken’ and ‘blasphemous’. Many of the more conservative clergy still felt uncomfortable at the prospect of witchcraft in the inner sanctum when the MEMV opened in 1973. Science was at the top of the agenda for the first time in a papal exhibition as opposed to the long reigning aesthetic approach to art and culture. However, this move can be interpreted as a defensive strategy on the part of the Catholic Church, which was forced to deal with the zeitgeist of modernism in all its forms. To understand this break with form and content one must again look at the history immediately prior to Pius XI’s decision to mount the PME. World War I had touched the depths of the European psyche leaving many doubting the faith. Many of the clergy had contributed to the war effort by way of hospital and pastoral care. Wilhelm Schmidt had worked on the front lines in Germany between 1915 and 1918 and had been responsible for building soldier’s rest homes and organising charity packages for war-afflicted families. The eruption of the war in Europe may have contributed to the thawing of antimodernist posturing in Church policy, as times required a new

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approach to defending the faith at home as well as abroad, but the Vatican was still at odds with the cultural climate in Europe. Pius XI was aware that in this new era of modern science and technology, tangible proof was necessary to re-assess its missionary effort abroad and to appeal to a new generation of priests and clergy. For him, the museum space was evidently becoming not just an ideological tool but also a political one, which went beyond the functions of access and public education promoted in the Victorian age of museums. Just as the Palais de Louvre symbolised the beginning of the new French Republic in 1793, so the PME and its subsequent museums symbolised a turning point in the Church’s relationship with modern Europe. It would use its collections to prove its vintage and contribution to modern science and convey a sense of religious tolerance by displaying collections of a non-Christian nature. The Catholic Church would also redefine itself through its adoption of displays and exhibits from its European counterparts. However, the ‘self’ that the Vatican promoted was an ideological one and not a cultural one.

8.1 The ‘Self’ of the Vatican: An Ideological ‘Self’ Versus a Cultural ‘Self’ and the Distinction Between Western Ethnographic Museums and Missionary and Ethnographic Museums As in most ethnographic museums in the first half of the twentieth century, there was an intention in these exhibitions, even if on superficial terms, of seeking a greater understanding of other cultures. This was intended to contrast the revelations of culture as found in other types of Western museums like the art gallery and the science museum, which were and still are more explicitly a celebration of the Western cultural self. In contrast, the PME and the MEML never stood for a culture but an ideology, an ideology embedded in a State within a State. The first examples of the display types we find in national museums in the late eighteenth century are those of battle gains, such as Napoleon’s battle exhibits in the Palais de Louvre. The museum space was also a place to exhibit high culture, becoming an aesthetic art deposit for the culturally aware. Both institutions were built on bourgeois principles that have long since been acknowledged as being a celebration of the cultural self rather than a celebration of traditions and custom of the cultural ‘other’. The foundation of Western ethnographic museums does not differ from this fundamental display of self. The PME and the subsequent MEML were also founded to celebrate the self; not of a colonial empire, but rather an evangelical empire, and the displays showed not military success, but spiritual success. The PME and the MEML also had scientific claims as part of their agenda. Ideology and culture are not synonymous terms although they are often used to describe the spirit of an age. Acknowledging that ethnographic museums shelter the evidence of the final stages of the process of civilisation and evangelisation of

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the pagan (Clifford, 1988; Coombes, 1994; Jonaitis, 1998), one can also argue that there are fundamental differences between the Western ethnographic museum and the MEML. Some have argued that the Vatican’s ethnographic collections were, and still are, physical proof of the pilfering and destruction of other cultures that has occurred over the last 500 years of European conquests of indigenous peoples by colonial powers and missionaries. This process began in the fifteenth century and brought about the disappearance of languages, religion and traditional ways of life. The colonial process has been historically linked with the process of evangelisation even though the Christian Missionaries began their work a long time before the colonisation of the modern world. However, after 1400 much of their work continued along the lines of the economic expansion of the West. In most cases both intruders shared similar dynamics, and it is difficult to extrapolate one from the other. A professor at the Missionary University in Rome, J. Shih, confirms profound links between the two: We recognise duplicity of enterprise between colonisation and the missionary cause of the [Catholic] Church [...] colonisation introduced a new method of production and a new economic system. By providing the indigenous peoples with an alternative lifestyle from their traditional way of life, it secured the way for conversion to Christianity. (Shih, 1993: 67–68, quoted in Mariani, 1998: 149)

There are written accounts confirming the transaction of traditional objects by both missionaries and Westerners during their voyages (Thomas, 1989, 1991). These objects were seen as marvels from exotic encounters, bought and sold in Europe. However, by the 1600s attitudes towards these objects changed from novelty to political and ideological justification (Hoskins, 1998). There was a need to qualify intervention and demonstrate the need to evangelise and civilise. Western colonial propaganda often dehumanised the ‘native’ in displays that emphasised indigenous ‘savagery’ and ‘primitiveness’. Church scholars argued that intervention was to save the souls of the ‘heathens’ who had unknowingly strayed from the ‘true’ path. In both cases, the missionaries and colonial intervention justified the intervention and, in some cases, destruction of whole cultures. Mariani (1998) explains that, in some ways, ethnographic museums institutionalise the West’s ‘bad conscience’. Her theory of in absenzia/in presenzia can be applied to most Western ethnographic museums. One could see ethnographic museums and exhibitions in the early twentieth century as celebrations of a self that stood for the modern Western world. The displays in a Western ethnographic museum demonstrated to itself its own history in a step-by-step account of ‘what used to be’ and ‘what is now’ and the process of this change in time. This was true for the Musée de L’Homme but could also be seen in other types of museums of the day. The Greenwich Observatory explains the progress of our knowledge of our planet by showing us instruments that had been used and developed over the centuries to enable us to correctly measure time and space on Earth. Curators at the Royal Academy contextualise paintings by situating artists and their works within an historical framework. The Imperial War Museum in London contains mounted displays of artefacts from war, historical figures and explanations of war strategies and the

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development of artillery over the ages. These institutions all existed in the 1920s and continue to demonstrate Western theories and achievements with reference to physical material and accepted historical knowledge. These examples can be seen as evidence in presenzia, where there is physical evidence of the progress from one state to another. Until recently, the perceived difference between a Western science and art museum and Western ethnographic museum is that the latter did not explain the process of change and a-historicised its displays of ‘other’. The objects on display in the Western ethnographic museum were, and in many cases still are, set in a time capsule and fixed in a some-time-before-now moment. Ethnographic displays often contain an implicit celebration of the ‘self’ of the institution that has created them; institutions that usually see themselves as Western and ‘civilised’. However, this ‘self’ of the institution is often in absentia, meaning not on display but incorporated subliminally in the structure and content of the museum. These contrast with the ‘inferior’ material culture of the other, usually non-European, culture that is on display. There is often a lack of historical and ideological evidence about the peoples who made the objects, their provenance and the social, geographic and economic context of the society represented in relation to the rest of the world. This void of information combined with the unusual appearance of the artefacts on display often leaves visitors with little more than a passing impression of a ‘tribe’ somewhere in Africa, India or another non-European place. Applying Mariani’s theory, one can see the MEML as different again from a Western ethnographic museum, as both elements, in presenzia and in absenzia, are on display. The MEML represented a crossway between two types of museology. In contrast to the Western ethnographic museum’s implied superiority, the MEML put its ideology of Christianity on display. The Christian motif was constantly referred to visually and textually in the PME and in the MEML guidebooks where Schmidt reminded visitors constantly of the Christian standpoint in relation to other religions. He gave a Christianised history of religions such as Islam and Hinduism and often seemed to chastise the stubbornness of those who refused to embrace Christianity. In the MEML, visitors could see the progress of the missionary cause in time and space, and ethnographic objects in the museum were presented through one ideological voice. The ethnographic other was displayed not to celebrate military, imperial or even scientific superiority within the Catholic Church, but spiritual superiority. The ‘primitiveness’ of the material culture of non-Western societies represented the absence of Christianity. However, the element in absentia in the MEML was not the ideology behind the displays, like the Western ethnographic museum, but the process of change from non-Christian to Christian. Furthermore, this ‘material poverty’ should not be confused with Schmidt’s view of ‘spiritual poverty’. Indeed, Schmidt’s own thesis of Primeval Monotheism sustains the notion that the primitive cultures with monotheistic beliefs were closer to God’s ‘original plan’, a truth upheld by the Catholic Church. The whole point of the displays was not to understand these ‘other’ cultures on their own terms, but to use their material evidence to celebrate the ‘self’ of Catholicism. It heralded the work of the Church and its power to redirect

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the ‘fallen tribes’ of the world back to their original beliefs that were monotheistic and that are now represented by the ‘true’ Church of Rome. In fact, visitors would have left the MEML with much more information about Christianity than anything else, even though they had entered a museum that advertised itself as ‘ethnographic’. Presumably, visitors would have originally been interested in finding out about other non-Western artefacts and cultures. Thus, the ideology behind the Pontifical Museum was explicit and in presenzia, constituted by the omnipresence of the dominant ideology, the Christian kerygma. Both Western ethnographic and missionary and ethnographic museums institutionalise an ideology, but only the latter is part of a wider culture. The Musée de L’Homme in Paris, for example, symbolised colonial dominance in territorial and intellectual terms over a large part of the world, and its displays illustrated accepted Western modern scientific theories. The MEML symbolised Catholic dominance in territorial and intellectual terms, and its displays illustrated accepted Catholic ‘scientific’ theories. Schmidt put Christianity at the centre of the display as all other religions were judged in relation to it. Thus, the MEML celebrated the self-perpetuating oligarchy that controlled it: Objects in museums are always subjected to a re-contextualising process in which they become ‘survivals’ of a number of pasts: that of the culture from which they are removed, that of any previous exhibitions in which they were displayed, and that of the past history of their current setting. (Jonaitis, 1998: 22)

Mariani’s theory of in absentia and in presenzia offers an insight into the reading of the MEML whose collections were used as a symbol of an historical Christian process; that process is concealed and implied through the exhibition of nonChristian artefacts, thus acting only as a prefix to celebrate the success of the Catholic missionaries.

8.2 An Outline of the Structure, Collections and Displays of the MEML At the closure of the PME, an organising body was formed for the new MEML with Schmidt as its curator, assisted by Fr. Michael Schulien, SVD and Fr. Pancrazio Marschaalkerweerd, OFM. Following Pius XI’s objectives, the MEML comprised three main sections. The first section would be dedicated the universality of the work of the missions in time. The second part was to demonstrate the universality of the work of the missions in space, and the third part of the museum was to show the contemporary work of the missions. Pius XI gave Schmidt from January 1926 until December 1927 to transfer, organise, assemble and exhibit 40,000 objects in the Lateran Palace. Schmidt curated the galleries according to his understanding of history, geography, theology and ethnology. All the material selected by Schmidt from the exhibition for the MEML was categorised in a new inventory, which consisted of short cards whereby an identifying

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number was given to the object, followed by a brief description and, in some cases, the congregation that had sent the item. An alpha-numeric inventory system was used in which the sequence of numbers was preceded by alphabetical codes relating to the four continents: ‘Af’ for Africa, ‘Am’ for America, ‘As’ for Asia, ‘Au’ for Oceania and ‘Eu’ for Europe. The first section contained displays giving a historical overview of the missions since the beginning of Christianity until the present time to show the historical development of the Christian Church using paintings, geographical maps, graphs, drawings and objects. The ‘Room of the Saints and Martyrs’ depicted the lives and honoured Catholic saints from many parts of the world. The second section included displays of the geographical areas covered by the missions and became the only fully completed part of the museum, furnished with all the ethnological material. The third section dealt with the state of the missions in the 1920s and projected a sense of a future purpose of the missions through its accounts of the work still to be done. The main emphasis of the MEML was to display material written and collected by the missions. It was to be a research centre at the service of the missions in the sense that students and lay members of the Catholic Church could consult documents and use the displays to assist them in understanding the peoples to whom they were being sent. They were to familiarise themselves with the material culture of various societies to understand their ways of life in an effort to evangelise them. Whereas the PME had been a flamboyant demonstration of the existence of the missions to the outside world, the permanent MEML was meant to serve as a practical tool for the long-term benefit of mission progress. However, the ethnographic material in the MEML needed some explanation. If one was to evangelise peoples of other cultures, it was important in Schmidt’s eyes to ‘grade’ their ‘primitiveness’. Schmidt’s The Lateran Guidebook (1928) was meant to take the student and the laic visitor on a didactic trail of the museum assisting the reading of the displays with information about the cultures and comments as to the correct way in which the exhibits were to be viewed.

8.3 An Outline and Tour of the Museum According to Wilhelm Schmidt’s Lateran Guidebook The first part dedicated to the history of the Catholic Church was subdivided into four historical periods. The first section was an account of mission work from the fourth century with the conversion of the Mediterranean Peoples and the Roman Empire. The exhibits included photographs of monuments, sarcophagi and paintings reminding the viewer of the first Christian missionary activities in the Mediterranean basin and throughout the Roman Empire. The trail took visitors to the gallery on the first floor where they could view Christian inscriptions from the first century. The second period took the visitor into the time span between the fifth and eighth centuries demonstrating the conversion of other European peoples represented by pictures of

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the most eminent apostles from influential monasteries and convents. These were printed on large maps along with documentation in written texts in glass cases. The third period took visitors to the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries with displays showing missionary activity in the Orient, Europe and Asia. The visitors were told of a new impulse of fresh energy in the Church demonstrated by the founding of new orders, such as the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustine monks who were instrumental in the conversion of the Scandinavians and making expeditions to the heart of Asia, the Orient and the Middle East. In the fourth period visitors were led from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth century. This section was portrayed as the era of the discovery of the New and Old Worlds of America, India, Oriental Asia and Oceania. It showed how discoveries of new land opened the world up to the missions who took full advantage of the new opportunities. Visitors witnessed displays of missionary work across the centuries and saw the success and growth of the missions over the course of time demonstrating the true Catholic nature of the mission. The second part of the museum was aimed at representing the universality of mission work in spatial terms based on geographical areas. This section contained ethnographic material in display cases against a backdrop of maps and statistical charts. The displays showed the vast missionary territory outside of Europe in the other four continents of the world: Asia, Oceania, Africa and America. The gallery on the first floor covered the missions of Asia, whereas the other geographical areas could be found in the Great Room and along the galleries on the second floor. At the end of the ‘temporal’ galleries on the first floor, a large map of Asia was used to introduce the visitor into a new section. This marked the end of the ‘historical’ section of the museum and the beginning of the spatial or geographical section of the museum. The geographical section began in Asia and covered the Balkans and Asia Minor. This group of countries was represented in four small rooms. It is said in the Lateran Guidebook that the Balkans and Asia Minor were the lands of the origin of the principles of Islam and where Islam exercised control. Schmidt’s lesson on Islam tells us that until recent times, Islam had acted with intransigent violence towards all missionary activity. Following the trail visitors found Indochina, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and Japan, all of which, according to the guide boards, had been influenced by the two great civilisations of India and China. Japan was the only country in exception to this expansion of India and China as ‘it conserve[d] a great part of its ancient culture and its pagan religion with its original characteristics’ (Schmidt, 1928: 6). In the section marked ‘India’, the central focus of the display was the statue of St. Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the ‘great apostle of India’, whom Pius XI had named as copatron saint of foreign missions in 1927 along with St. Therese of Lisieux (1873– 1897). A large map of India indicated the locations of the missions, and visitors were informed of the activities happening within these areas regarding charity and sanitation as well as educational programmes illustrated by photographs next to the maps found on the walls of the room. The ancient culture of India was exhibited in three large glass cases containing clothes, vases, armour and tools as well as a

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diagram of the caste system. A fourth glass case contained a three-dimensional lifesize representation of a typical Indian living room with a human-size figure clothed in local costume. Behind this figure a picture was hung showing the parable of ‘The Prodigal Son’, illustrating the predominance of Christian symbolism that permeated every section of the museum, regardless of whether there was any direct relevance to the main exhibits. In the same way boards of data with statistics and dates conveyed to the visitor missionary progress over time from their place between windows and under ledges. A special painting was erected in honour of the indigenous clergy who worked in the Orient where development of the missions was apparently ‘flowering’ in the 1920s. We are told from the Lateran Guidebook to remember the fact that Christianity had existed for many centuries in these countries, and many converts had been eradicated and persecuted in the name of Christ. This was given as an explanation for the indigenous and European forms of art and sculpture explained to the visitor by the fact that the Orient and Europe had a long history of contact between each other. These first two parts of the museum were meant to take visitors on a journey through time as well as having them witness the expansion of Christianity due to the Catholic missions across the globe. This was essentially meant to be the part of the museum dedicated to the missions. However, in the second geographical area, aimed at showing the expansion of the missions, we find all the ethnographic material on display to illustrate the diversity of cultures with whom the missionaries worked. The third part of the MEML was devoted to the active work of the missions and concentrated on their contemporary work in communities around the world. The display of photographs of mission schools and hospitals reinforced the strength and power of the missions collaborating on universal projects in the ‘present’ of the 1920s. The curators of the MEML aimed to reveal plans for the future of the missions on boards and labels. This part of the museum was never completed and varied in its content over time.

8.4 Collections The nucleus of the MEML’s collection was around 40,000 objects which came directly from the PME. The objects had been sent from the dioceses, parishes and apostolic prefectures across the globe, which included 176 different orders and missionary institutions that collected especially for the exhibition or sent objects from existing private and public collections maintained by the Church. A notable collection which joined the MEML in 1928 came from the museum of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, called the Borgiano Musuem. This museum had been established in 1883 at the Propaganda’s headquarters in Piazza di Spagna and contained objects forming the legacy of Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731–1804), along with other pieces that had been collected by missionaries since 1622. These constitute the oldest known artefacts in the Vatican’s ethnographic collections. Unfortunately, during the transfer of material to the new museum, documentation pertaining to the

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provenance of the objects was lost, and as the collection was dismantled and moved, individual artefacts were dispersed according to their geographical relevance. After its opening, objects continued to arrive at the MEML from all over the world from missionary and private sources, along with other objects originally sent as gifts to the pope from political and religious world leaders. The ‘scientific-technical’ ordering of the collections for display was directed by Schmidt and his two assistants, Fr. Schulien and Fr. Maarschalkerweerd. A selection of approximately 96% of the ethnographic material was put on display for the public in the hope that visitors would gain from the abundance of collections portraying indigenous ways of life in terms of economy, social institutions, artwork and religion. An important testimony to the acquisition policy promoted by Schmidt consists of a series of objects purchased by him in 1927 on behalf of the MEML from the Imperial Institute in London. This set of works includes, among other things, copies of ancient sculptures from India, a wooden display case from southern India and numerous small Rajasthani marble sculptures representing divine beings. These are objects of particular interest, not so much for their intrinsic value but for their connection with the period of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and nineteenth-century Universal Exhibitions that followed. This act of acquisition reveals that Schmidt aligned his own exhibition to the dynasty of exhibitions of the nineteenth century.

8.5 Pius and Schmidt’s Achievements and Failures in the MEML Despite the grand opening of the institution, Pope Pius XI’s initiative to create a missionary-ethnological museum at the service of the missions was never fully realised, as we know that two of the three sections were never completed. The heart of the exhibition was the second part, which held the ethnographic objects. This became not so much a demonstration of missionary expansion as a Catholic appraisal of the missionary work still left to do in the rest of the world. The Lateran Guidebook explained certain aspects of the other cultures’ customs and religions, but this was entirely from a Western Christian point of view. It may be questioned whether one can ever successfully transform a temporary exhibition into a permanent museum. The significance of the exhibition in 1925 was limited to its time. It was a political symbol of celebration of the freedom of the Vatican State within Italy and a demonstration of its power to unite its factions on a global scale. It was also an exercise in self-promotion where the Church publicised the role it had played in the accumulation of knowledge, most notably in science, linguistics and geography. The Church revalued its notion of progress and embraced the ‘modern’ era in a new determination to survive it. However, the missions themselves were and are a dynamic element of the Church, and the displays, so innovative and significant in 1925, were very soon outdated.

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Although the motives behind the setting up of the MEML were similar to those of the PME, I suggest that the function of the museum was different; that it was to be a permanent space for missionary and ethnographic material meant that its objectives were to be ongoing. The celebration of the missions had been achieved in 1925, and one of the central purposes of the MEML was to make the material collected from the missions available to them. The fact that Schmidt’s arrangement of the second section was the heart of the museum reflects the priorities of its organisers. Schmidt’s theoretical control over Catholic ethnology, institutionalised in the Viennese School of Ethnology and his journal Anthropos, meant that the principles upon which he worked could help maintain the Church’s position in the modern world of science. The missions could benefit in a practical sense from his categorisation of cultures, which would ultimately help the primary task of the missions: to spread the Gospels abroad and expand the evangelical empire. The geographical section gave the visitor some idea of certain aspects of social life and the belief system of various cultures. This was useful information for the missionary who gained from any insight he might obtain before he went into the field. For the first time ever, there was an archive of material culture and libraries that could be consulted before going abroad. The second section was, therefore, the most useful to the Church as it held practical answers for practical situations. It is no surprise that there was an attempt to build a room specifically detailing the methodological principles of culture circles, although this room was never actually completed. Therefore, although the MEML never really conveyed the intersection between missionary activity and ethnology in a visual, museological sense, it formed part of the ideological relationship each had with the other in the 1920s and 1930s. The Church needed ethnology, and Schmidt needed missionary material to illustrate his theories. Overall both Pius XI and Schmidt fulfilled their original intentions as they succeeded in communicating their agendas to a global audience, even though, as Dietrich argues, ‘Schmidt’s ethnology was irrelevant for mission work’ since it ‘ did not go any further than existing theological-missiological concepts’ (Dietrich, 1992: 112), but his ideas did contribute to the relative successes of the PME and the MEML; not so much as a tool for missiology, but as a ‘forward defence of Catholicism on the European front’ (112). However, Schmidt’s ethnological theories had been built on theological assumptions and could not add to what theology already provided. It is, perhaps, fair to say that the MEML was a museum for the missions furnished with ethnographic objects explained and organised into displays to best illustrate a Christian dogma. In this, the museum and exhibition signified a turning point for the church as it moved from an association of dogma with the aesthetics of art towards the realm of modern science.

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8.6 The Aesthetic and the Scientific With this museum and its collections, the Catholic Church broke with tradition by adopting a scientific means of representation, rather than an aesthetic one. The link between the classical inheritance and Cartesian rationalism fits in well with the more secular social structure of the times as Church and State began to become separate entities in Europe. The break from private to public also signified a break with past rationale in museum practice. We see the museum incorporate the values of its nationalistic, colonial and secular leaders. As nineteenth-century Europe became mechanised and industrialised, power centres shifted towards a capitalist social structure and political control moved away from the Church. The public museum housed scientific material, and the art gallery became the new shrine for the aesthete. The Roman Catholic Church still owned much of the Renaissance art in Italy, and its many basilicas were still temples for aesthetic pleasure as well as spiritual worship. However, in other European institutions the public began to have more access to the spaces previously privy only to wealthy elite (see Van Keuren, 1989). By the end of the nineteenth century significant differences became established between State and Vatican property as regards the use of museum space. The former became more public and politicised, and the latter became a closed private space, where art demonstrated an ideology and appreciation of the aesthetic for spiritual contemplation. Since the museum space split into the domains of the aesthetic and the scientific in the eighteenth century, the museum continued to celebrate the achievements of the ruling body, be they political or spiritual. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony says that ‘the dominant group uses cultural symbols to win the support and loyalty of those subservient peoples who embrace as the truth the ruling class’s values and attitudes’. He says social hegemony is: The spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group. This consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. (Gramsci, 1971:12)

This comment might be taken to understand the break between religious and secular dominance in the nineteenth century as well as how the museum adopted the symbolic and social values of the dominant group. Although by its very definition the Vatican stands for its own set of systems, one can trace the content of its collections and institutions as following the times as regards the rest of Europe. Its methods of redefining itself are like those used in other powerful European countries since the 1600s. We might consider that that even in the 1750s the Vatican was establishing its own museums: however, the Museum of the Propaganda Fide was established much earlier and began accumulating objects after its foundation in 1623. Since, the Ashmolean was established in Oxford in 1671 and generally accepted to be the first ethnographic museum in Europe; this puts Vatican museology somewhat in advance of what one might usually associate with its European counterparts. The museum in the Propaganda, however, has never been considered a public museum, and Vatican policy towards the creation of museums

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tended to follow European trends thereafter rather than precede them. For example, when Pope Gregory XVI founded the Museo Profano in the Lateran Palace in 1844, its collections consisted of Greek and Roman acquisitions also collected by the curators of the British Museum, which was founded in 1753. However, whereas travellers and geographers brought back Roman and Greek objects to the British Museum, the Vatican often simply preserved that which was found on its own territory. The Palais de Louvre was opened as a public art gallery in 1793, and there too the private gradually shifted into the public domain. However, the numerous Vatican collections remained private for much longer. When palaces and exhibitions were opened to the public displays were of either classical or biblical nature. These of course were the paintings and sculptures created by the great masters who had found patronage through the Church and noble families, such as the Medicis of Florence and the Pamphilis of Rome. Frescos on Church property and architectural works of art guaranteed the Church’s ownership of the masterpieces. During the preceding 500 years, in other parts of the world, missionaries were collecting other kinds of objects, then of little importance to the Church in Rome. While pagan objects were being destroyed to make way for Christianity, the missions played the role as ‘preserver’ as well as ‘destroyer’ of indigenous material culture. These non-European objects would not become useful to the Church’s political agenda until the latter half of the nineteenth century, but many artefacts, specimens and recordings were being preserved in each congregation’s private museums, often at their headquarters in Europe although the extent of these museums and collections is unknown. During the nineteenth century the papacy faced an exclusion from State European politics for the first time ever when it lost its territory in 1871 to the newly formed Italian State. The increasing secular power of Europe gradually decreased the role of the Church in political and educational matters, which the Italian leaders between 1871 and the 1920s were loath to concede. However, the Concordat signed between Pius XI and Mussolini in 1929 established recognition of the papacy within the Italian State and gave back a limited number of papal lands. Nevertheless, only the Papal Palace, mission houses, monasteries and convents were deemed private, and the papal collections were, for the most part, confiscated along with its buildings and territory. The Church and its collections were forced to go underground, and many of its collections remain out of sight of the public. From 10 November 1926, all new acquisitions for the MEML were listed in special entry registers noting the date of entry to the museum, the provenance and quantity of boxes containing objects, along with a brief description of the contents. This procedure remained in place until 6 June 1940. The registers, which are now preserved in the historical archives of the Vatican Museums, are divided into two periods: 10 November 1926 to 18 November 1931, containing 192 entries, and 5 January 1932 to 6 June 1940, containing 147 entries. Most of these notes refer to objects destined to the museum collections, while others are books for the museum library; these entries included the material that was intended for the MEML or for sale. Interestingly for this study, we find that the registers include 1,179 objects entered on one particular day: 10 February 1929; these objects were acquired from

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various shops in Rome, purchased for the occasion of the signing of the Lateran Treaty the following day. When Pius XI chose the Lateran Palace for the new museum celebrating the Catholic evangelical empire, this too was layered in symbolism. The Lateran Palace served as the papal residence for centuries, as it forms part of a complex that includes the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano. Containing the episcopal throne (cathedra in Latin) of the Diocese means that this is the cathedral of Rome and the second most important church in the city after St. Peter’s Basilica. Originally the site of an imperial palace, the Domus Laterani, Emperor Constantine bequeathed it to the popes to use in perpetuity, or so the legend states. Destroyed on numerous occasions, the Roman people rebuilt the palace time and time again and each time in a grander state than its previous incarnation. What better place to house a museum celebrating the global spread of Christianity than in a palace that links directly back to the ancient emperors, and no one less than Constantine the Great under whose reign Christianity became the state religion of the empire. After many decades of imprisonment within the Vatican walls, Pius XI was determined that he would be the final one who would endure this self-inflicted incarceration, and with the advent of the Mussolini dictatorship, Pius finally engaged an official of the Italian kingdom. The result was the great concordat between the papacy and Italy, signed on 11 February 1929, the seventh anniversary of Pius’s coronation. History remembers it as the Lateran Treaty, a name that will always remind people that it was signed in this auspicious place, in the Hall of Popes. To tie the papacy’s material place on earth in Rome with its evangelical empire that reached far beyond the borders of Europe, the MEML was emblematic of the Catholic Church proclaiming its evangelical message, dating back to St. Peter. The treaty not only recognised Vatican statehood, but it also ratified the pope’s very existence in legal terms. This metamorphosis of the pope from invisible to visible reflected his presence in the twentieth century; not only had he become once again visible to his evangelical flock around the world, but he had also become the head of a new state in Europe. It is essential to underline the importance of this presentation of the pope as both a spiritual and secular leader. In one political move, he had his territory recognised within the Italian state, as a state within a state, and he could officiate over a separate bureaucracy according to his own personal will. He could be part of an Italian agenda in any treaty he chose to ratify, but when he deemed appropriate, he could also choose to rise above the concerns of the state as a spiritual leader and disassociate the papacy with any wrong doings that Italy might commit. The position of the papacy in the lead up to World War II and during the Italian fascist era would prove controversial and is beyond the scope of this study. However, it is a known fact that Pius never liked Mussolini on a personal level, but he did recognise his ambitions. Both Pius and Mussolini understood the power of symbols, and they both needed their authority in secular and spiritual Italian society to be recognised by each other. Both men realised that the power of the Catholic Church went far beyond the boundaries of Rome, Italy and Europe, and Mussolini dreamt of creating an Italian empire.

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As part of this visible performance of recognition of the material form of the pope among his people for the first time in five decades, Pius theatrically manoeuvred the equally performative Mussolini through the great halls of the Lateran Palace, taking pains to point out the powerful influence that the Catholic Church still had across the world. The pope’s representatives on the day, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri and Monsignor Francesco Borgongini-Duca, led the Government’s party through the MEML to the meeting room: They walked slowly through what [Secretary of Foreign Affairs Dino] Grandi described as an ‘interminable’ number of ornate rooms of the museum dedicated to the Church’s missions around the world. The ebullient Gasparri waved his arms as he identified all the countries whose exhibits, they were passing, from New Guinea and the Fiji Islands to Mongolia, India and Nicaragua. ‘Names of strange and distant lands’ recalled Grandi, ‘that the Prince of the Church pronounced with a smile, as if wanting to emphasize for us how vast was the power and the reach of the Catholic Church in the world’. (Kertzer, 2014: 108)

Eminence Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Secretary of State of Pius XI. World History Archive Despite claims made by the British Empire and the Spanish Empire before them, the missionary reach of the Catholic faith represented a true empire on which the sun never set, and it is precisely this grandeur that Mussolini saw on the march towards the Hall of Popes, perhaps reluctantly granting the concessions requested by Pius. However, he understood the importance of collaboration with the Church for his own Fascist agenda. The Lateran Treaty marks the final chapter in this story of Pius’s Museum and his own personal mission that was to recentralise the missions in Rome, re-establish the Catholic Church at the centre of political and scientific discourse pertinent to the age and finally to establish himself as a visible leader of

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both Church and State. In the short term, the MEML had fulfilled all the agendas that Pius sought to achieve.

Benito Mussolini (1883–28 April 1945). World History Archive

The Lateran Palace photographed when the ethnographic collection was transferred to this site in 1927 to create a permanent exhibition as the new Missionary and Ethnological Museum Vatican Archives

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The Prehistoric Room, next to the Ethnological Room at the Missionary and Ethnological Museum, Lateran Palace Vatican Archives

Display cases with large photograph panels on the walls and relief map Vatican Archives

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Display Case of Artefacts from the Great Lakes Region of Canada at the Missionary and Ethnological Museum, Lateran Palace Vatican Archives

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Pius XI took Mussolini through these halls displaying the influence of the Catholic Church throughout the world at the Missionary and Ethnological Museum, on their way to sign the Lateran Treaty in 1929 in the same building. Vatican Archives

The first Fascist Congress, Rome, 1919. Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator, is in the centre behind the man carrying the banner. World History Archive

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Rome—February 11, 1929, The high Plenipotentiaries and the dignitaries who attended the signing of the Lateran Treaty. Mussolini sits centre right) and Gasparri is centre left. World History Archive

References Civiltà Cattolica (1926) (vol. II, pp. 74–76). Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: 20th century ethnography, literature and art. Harvard UP. Coombes, A. E. (1990). (1994). Reinventing Africa: Museums, material culture and popular imagination in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Yale UP. Dietrich, S. (1992). Mission, local culture and the “catholic ethnology” of Wilhelm Schmidt. Jaso, 23(2), 111–125. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selection from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, translated by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International Publishers. Hoskins, J. (1998). Biographical objects: How things tell the stories of people’s lives. Routledge. Jonaitis, A. (1998). Looking North: Art from the University of Alaska Museum. University of Alaska Press and University of Washington Press. Kertzer, D. (2014). The Pope and Mussolini: The secret history of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. OUP. Leone, A. R. (1980). La politica missionaria del Vaticano tra le due guerre. Studi Storici, 21(1), 123–156. Mariani, L. (1998). Missione e dialogue. Lithos Edititrice. Schmidt, W. (1928). The Lateran guide book. Vatican Press. Shih, J. (1993). La Catechetica missionaria. Pontificia Università Gregoriana. Thomas, N. (1989). The force of ethnology: Origins and significance of the Melanisia/Polynesia division. Current Anthropology, 30, 27–34. Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled objects: Exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard UP. Van Keuren, D. K. (1989). Cabinets of culture: Victorian anthropology and the museum context. Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 25, 26–39

Conclusion

Vertumnus reminds of us of the cycles of life. Painted by Arcimboldo it now resides in Skokloster Castle, Sweden, a material legacy of an indulgent pleasure of the monarch. The painting bookends this study to remind us of the long-lasting effects of dynastic orders, imperial rule and their material legacies in palaces, castles, cathedrals and national museums. The story of an object’s symbolic metamorphosis is comparable to the story of the ethnographic museum. After World War I, dynastic orders fragmented throughout Europe and the places and objects that embodied the old order were reinvented for new era. Vertumnus was re-appropriated by European artists as an icon of the disharmony of the times, the fracture of empire and an ideologue of a modern Europe. The fanfare and the parades of the nineteenth century and the appetite for a Liberal Humanist age of peace and harmony fuelled invention, trade opportunities and social reform expressed in the Universal Exhibitions, fell silent. By the 1920s a new kind of propaganda was being harnessed, and the forum of display moved away from public exhibitions and museum spaces and towards new media that emerging from its infancy in the form of silent movies, photojournalism and radio broadcasts. Thus, the ethnographic museum took its place alongside other national and university museums that continued to exist but served as depositories frequented by scholars, and the heyday of the first modern European museum age ended. However, during that auspicious year of 1922, one last great exhibition would be announced to celebrate the lesser feted participants of the modern era: the Catholic missionaries. Pope Pius XI’s extraordinary appeal to all the Catholic missions around the world formed a parenthesis of celebration of the missions between the two world wars, coinciding with the stalling of the Liberal Humanist agenda in Continental Europe and the decline of international relations. Here the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition of 1925 is signalled as the last nineteenth-century Great Exhibition. Using the same language as European national leaders, Pius XI proclaimed it a ‘Universal Exhibition’; the rooms and spaces allocated were called pavilions, the same terminology used by French curators who perfected the idea of allocating geographical areas to the exhibits in their illustrious © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7

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Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. Pius also adopted similar techniques to those of Prince Albert at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851; to achieve the highest standards, he created a competitive element into the exhibition. Each congregation of missionaries organised and curated their own display stands fully conscious that they would be under the personal inspection of the Pontiff and thus in competition with each other. The scientific contribution of the missionaries was of particular importance to the pope since one of the main criticisms of the Church at the time was that it was out of step with the progress of science. Pius wanted to highlight the important role the missions had played in research and development of the natural and pure sciences, and displays of missionary publications showed the public material proof of their contributions. But even with all this on display the PME was more than just a celebration of a Jubilee year declared by Pius, a decision that would bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to Rome and into the Vatican; it was also a first step into international waters, a trial run of a diplomatic agenda that would pave the way for the papacy to come out of its self-imposed captivity in the Vatican. The pope’s ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1925 encased a subtle political move which would be kindled under the nose of the Italian government and would end in the most significant agreement ever made between the papacy and the modern Italian State: the 1929 Lateran Treaty. The PME was to prove just a first step, the mere flexing of the muscle power of the Catholic Church. E. Evans-Pritchard used to say that the discipline of anthropology should never be taught to students as a first degree because students did not yet know enough about their own history and place in society to be able to attempt to understand anyone else’s. It has become perhaps too easy to criticise actions made by people long dead and who have no direct connection to one’s own personal story, but it is important not to over-simplify words, people or the purpose of institutions without understanding the nature of their origins. In many ways, this book is about origins. It is about the history of ideas and the mutual influence people have on each other when they share histories, spaces and goals. When we look back at the nineteenth century, we can easily brush-stroke the agendas of the colonial and nationalist powers as exploitative, arrogant, vindictive and without moral justice, but that would not be telling the whole story. This study represents only another fragment of that story but pursues an insight into the underlying factors behind the rise of the Universal Exhibition, colonial fairs and its permanent legacies in the museums that still exist today. Key to understanding the process that ended in the PME is an examination of the rise and fall of Liberal Humanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its disintegration into extreme nationalism in some parts of Europe, which was often embedded in the cultural discourses, which were dominant during the birth of the ethnographic museum. These institutions created the glorification of the national self in competition with national others. Once race became part of anthropology’s agenda, these national differences were further manipulated, demarcating tribal otherness in Europe. Schopenhaur once said ‘Europeans hate each other, and for good reason’. This is not a flippant statement since the tribes that were formed out of elitist policies were given authority and credence in the national museum,

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which in turn solidified difference among specific groups in Europe. Cultural prejudice is always the precursor of fascist agendas, and European nationalism was, in part, fuelled by the creation of ethnographic museums. The history of the national museum, in particular the ethnographic museum, is important because it is always a political statement to create buildings, monuments and statues in the name of a common identity, as they bear the mark of authority, and within them are embedded the values of the dominant discourse of society. The world fairs of the nineteenth century served as a physical manifestation of growing national self-awareness. They were a remarkable achievement in terms of logistical arrangement, collaboration between individuals, communities and societies, and one cannot help to feel envious of the middle-class white Europeans who basked in the delights of the fantastical displays created in the capitals of Europe. However, it is also important to reveal the darker side of the fanfare and look behind the ostentatious façade. We must also bear witness to and acknowledge the subjects of empire that were literally and figuratively objectified in these exhibits collected and curated by the European elite classes. Born during the nineteenth century and full of aspiration was a young German priest, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, a member of the missionary order the Society of the Divine Word. Schmidt was influenced by the ideas and polemics that dominated German anthropology under Adolf Bastian, and he reflected many of its ideas in the Vatican. I have examined the history of the German missionaries of the SVD, who were sent to New Guinea in 1896 and their contribution to Catholic ethnology. The internal workings of the hierarchies within the evangelical institutions that were part of the collecting process; as imperialism engendered colonial enterprise, so the ideologies at the core of Christian belief gave birth to an idealism that motivated people like Fr. Franz Kirschbaum to go to New Guinea. His ethnographic collections from the Sepik mark not only the link between Schmidt’s ethnology and the Catholic Church, but also represent histories between the Church and anthropology, and the SVD in New Guinea. Exploring the unique set of histories that contribute to the Vatican’s ethnographic collections broadens our understanding of collecting and curating of non-European artefacts. The ‘Catholicised’ ethnographic object is a reminder of the relationships between the Catholic Church, early twentieth-century anthropology, Pacific history, museology and material culture studies. Kirschbaum’s contribution of objects from the Sepik Valley comprises the largest single collection in the museum’s possession, and bringing his little-known story to the fore connects the missionaries practice with Schmidt’s theories. Kirschbaum’s presence in New Guinea as a missionary and his role in the preservation of indigenous material culture are integral cogs in the history of the PME, MEML, MEMV and the current incarnation of the museum: Anima Mundi. Investigating this process also sheds light on possible reasons behind the inconsistent information about the Sepik collections in the museum archives. I build upon this connection by studying the correspondence, the aims and the objectives of Schmidt, Kirschbaum and other major players in the PME’s manifestation, all of whom had their own often-conflicting agendas. Further studies of other ethnographic collections influenced by Kirschbaum,

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such as the ones in the Cologne Museum, Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and Chicago’s Field Museum, need further study. The PME and MEML were born in a period of political upheaval concerning the diplomatic relationship between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. They fulfilled the goals of both Pius XI and Schmidt by creating a legacy, a new dynasty that still exists today, although in a different form. Transferring the PME to the Lateran Palace, and providing a stage for the signing of the Concordat between the two entities, Pius navigated political agendas, and its success, as with the Catholic Church’s key mission, is that it still exists today. This study reveals a context in which anthropology and missiology converged between the years 1910 and 1939. Of the complex nodes in this network, one might see the omission of the present New Guinea context as a failure to properly contextualise Kirschbaum’s collections. It has been impossible to discover what the presentday Sepik people’s perspective of missionaries such as Kirschbaum is or what they think of the fact that their ancestors’ artefacts are in the Vatican museums. It is true that the collections discussed in this book and the people who produced them are silent, and the lack of information about the creators and specificities of the objects has made it nearly impossible to give voice to them at all. However, the omission of the present New Guinea context is a deliberate choice due to the circumstances and the nature of my fieldwork in the Vatican. Furthermore, this book focuses on the Vatican’s methodologies in collecting and displaying the fruits of its missions around the world in this specific historical period. However, it is high time that we reconnect these objects with the people and societies that created them, and further study would reveal Kirschbaum’s influence in object collections in many Western Museums, as well as other missionary entanglements with the colonial enterprise. Foremost is understanding that these collections are private with restricted access to the public, including researchers and specialists. I accepted from the outset that I might not be able to trace the photographs and objects in the Vatican’s ethnographic collections back to their place of origin in New Guinea. This lack of information about the present situation in New Guinea might leave the reader feeling that there is little information about the objects and the local Sepik societies. In answer, I would like to underline the following points: firstly, I was not granted permission by Vatican authorities to follow up this process of research, which is now common practice in other Western ethnographic museums; and secondly, the pursuit of alternative routes to understanding the Vatican’s collections has formed part of my archival fieldwork there. It supports my hypothesis that this museum falls outside the space– time limitations of Western European chronology. When I first stepped into the Vatican, I asked Msgr. Zagnoli, the museum’s director, when he would be opening the museum. His reply summed up much of what I would discover during my research: ‘Here, in the Vatican’, he said, ‘we only speak in terms of eternity’. Therefore, it cannot be judged on the same criteria as other Western ethnographic museums, because its dynastic heritage preserves the continuity of the message of Christ. If the objects in this book seem silent it is because they are, and it might be questioned whether they ever had a voice once they entered the Vatican. The objects are inert, and if one cannot get near the objects, it proves very difficult to describe and

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assess them. However, I suggest that rather than seeing the lack of ‘living voices’ of the objects as a failure, one should perhaps comment upon the elements that do come to life: stories that have previously been untold or overlooked such as the background of Kirchbaum’s collections; his connections to other major collectors and collections in the world’s museums; the story of Schmidt, the curator and his connection to Kirschbaum, German anthropology and the papacy. After all, the ‘tribes’ in question in this book are members of the Catholic clergy, not the inhabitants, past or present of New Guinea. Having defined an untapped area of ethnographic enquiry I have obtained better knowledge of other ethnographic collections in the Vatican and other Catholic institutions that hold ethnographic artefacts. While the PME and the first museum incarnation in the Lateran Palace lie firmly in the past, there is still much to ascertain. The next step is to open a wider avenue of investigation for material culture studies to make further comparisons between the ‘converted object’, the ‘Christian synchronised’ object, the ‘Catholic object’ and the ‘colonial object’ and thus create a stronger link between mission studies and anthropology to better understand the world’s ethnographic collections. Envisaging museum dynasties, we can open up a broader set of connections that contribute to the forum for the multiplicity of voices, past and present, as a constant reminder of the transformations and mutations an institution undergoes. Acknowledging these different sets of motivations that are encapsulated within the ethnographic museum we can look forward to exhibiting narratives rather than just objects and hope that the narratives chosen might highlight the mutual influence that cultures and faiths have had and still bear upon each other as testament to their common quest for survival.

Epilogue

By the start of World War II in September 1939, Pope Pius XI had died and was succeeded on the papal throne by Pius XII. Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt had left his post as Director of the Pontifical Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Lateran Palace, replaced by Fr. Michele Schulien SVD. The MEML and its collections would witness their own shifts and evolutions over the following decades as Europe was destroyed and then rebuilt. During his time in charge, Schulien oversaw two major initiatives: (1) the establishment of a new numerical classification system applied to the inventory, which would better serve students, missionaries and specialists researching at the museum, and (2) the introduction of the journal Annali Lateranensi in 1937, which was founded on the tenth anniversary of the museum’s inauguration and which ran until 1975. In 1963, Pope St. John XXIII (1958–1963) took the decision to close the three museums in the Lateran Palace to transform the building into the seat of the Diocese of Rome. After a photographic and topographical survey, the collections were packed up and deposited in the Palazzo di San Callisto in the Trastevere area of the city, where they remained until their final move to the Vatican. The directorship of the museum was passed on to Fr. Josef Penkowski SVD (1930– 2006) in 1967, who oversaw the completion of the new purpose-built Missionary and Ethnological Museum in the Vatican Museums (MEMV). The new museum was opened to the public on 19 April 1973 and was arranged according to geocultural categories. Two decades later, in 1993, the MEMV closed its doors to public viewing, and the library and archives were transferred to the fire-proof rooms in the new offices of the Vatican Museums. Three years after that, Penkowski, the last of the SVD dynasty to direct the museum, retired and was succeeded by Msgr. Roberto Zagnoli. During Zagnoli’s term as director of the missionary and ethnological museum, the director of the Vatican Museums approved a new programme of conservation of the objects led by the Head of Ethnological Collections, Ester Console. Many of the objects in the museum are made of wood with organic decorations and had been held for over fifty years in oxygenated display cases, which had hastened their decline. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 A. L. Kahn, Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe, People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3189-7

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The conservation effort began in 2000, and with many of the laboratories needing to be set up in the exhibition area, the doors to the public remained closed. I was present at many of the initial meetings and discussions with potential restorers and object specialists from Japan, South America and China. These temporary staff worked on short contracts and targeted dozens of artefacts in great need of attention. On 21 June 2006, on the five hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Vatican Museums by Pope Julius II (1503–1513), the MEMV opened its public galleries once again as part of the celebrations. In press releases to mark the opening of the museum, Zagnoli emphasised that ‘the Vatican has an important role in promoting a message of respect and tolerance for different cultures and religions. We want to highlight the richness in diversity, and that the role of the missionary is one of dialogue and not of conquest or proselytism’. The MEMV closed again in 2008, but when it re-opened on 15 October 2010, it had dropped any reference to the missionaries, the sole purpose for the collections existing to begin with. In response to the problematic legacy of Catholic mission work throughout the centuries, many missionary museums, particularly in Europe, either closed or addressed the issue outright. Fr. Nicola Mapelli, who took over the role of Director in 2009, presented objects in the museum’s collection as ‘cultural ambassadors’ and shifted the focus of the institution to celebrate all cultures and religions in the world. In 2012, a hefty volume was published entitled Ethnos: Vatican Museums Ethnological Collection. Its main content is of images from the Getty Images Archive, not connected to the Vatican’s collections. In its ‘Brief History’ of the museum, it is stated that Pius XI, ‘as a sign of the Catholic Church’s respect for the culture, arts and religious and spiritual traditions of the peoples throughout the world, wished to organise a major event: the 1925 Vatican Exhibition’ (2012: 21).1 In actuality, Pius XI’s clearly stated intention was to promote the missions and celebrate the success of conversions to Christianity, while also fulfilling Schmidt’s purpose of placing science at the forefront of the Church’s collecting methodology. Furthermore, the Vatican’s delicate political position in the ascendancy of Mussolini’s government placed the missions at the centre of the exhibition’s agenda, as recognition of their work by Pius XI had, after all, been its driving force. In 2019, under the auspices of Pope Francis (2013-present), the museum underwent yet another name change. The director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta, explains that the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum Anima Mundi, or soul of the world, assumed the name as ‘a wonderful expression declaring this as the place where the soul of the world is, according to Pope Francis’. While this new direction of focus is admirable, the new name for the present museum in the Vatican appears to wipe from its history the role of the missions. As a South American, Pope Francis is well versed in the dynamic colonial legacies left over from the time when the museum was first inaugurated. Building on the work of reconciliation initiated by Pope John Paul II, the Pope stated in his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium of 2013: The Bishops of Oceania asked that the Church ‘develop an understanding and a presentation of the truth of Christ working from the traditions and cultures of the region’ and invited ‘all 1

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missionaries to work in harmony with indigenous Christians so as to ensure that the faith and the life of the Church be expressed in legitimate forms appropriate for each culture’.2 We cannot demand that peoples of every continent, in expressing their Christian faith, imitate modes of expression which European nations developed at a particular moment of their history, because the faith cannot be constricted to the limits of understanding and expression of any one culture.3 It is an indisputable fact that no single culture can exhaust the mystery of our redemption in Christ. (Francis, 2013: paragraph 118)4

We see that there is a move on the part of the present Pontiff to address the complicit role of missionaries played in the European colonial enterprise, a history that, along with other European states, the Catholic Church must face.

References Francis, P. (2013). Apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudi (24 November 2013). Vatican Press. John Paul, P. II. (2000). Post-synodal apostolic exhortation. Ecclesia in Asia (6 November 1999), 20: AAS, 92, 478–474. John Paul, P. II. (2002). Post-synodal apostolic exhortation. Ecclesia in Oceania (22 November 2001), 17: AAS, 94, 385. Mapelli, N., Ainger, K., & Fiussello, N. (2012). Ethnos: Vatican museums ethnological collection. Ecizioni Musei Vaticani.

2

John Paul II (2002). John Paul II (2000). 4 Pope Francis’ full Apostolic Exhortation can be viewed online: https://www.vatican.va/content/ francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangeliigaudium.html#_ftn95. 3