Who Cares? The Material Heritage of British Missions in Africa and the Pacific, and its Future

This nine-month, AHRC-funded project investigated contemporary issues related to materials originating from historical British Christian missions in Africa and the Pacific.

While these regions are now predominantly Christian, church attendance in Britain continues to decline. This raises complex questions about who cares the most about materials deriving from missionary activities in the past and who cares for it in the present. A great deal of material in the ethnographic collections of British museums was originally gathered by missionaries. Recognising this, MEG became an enthusiastic project partner and hosted the project’s online presence.

Project Aims

• To consider the ongoing significance of missionary material heritage in Britain, as well as for people in countries that received missionaries, and the implications this has for the ways in which material is catalogued, conserved and displayed.
• To explore the implications that recent scholarly accounts of the material dimensions of missionary encounters have for the curation of missionary collections.
• To review the history of curatorial engagements with missionary collections, and the tensions that have arisen from these.
• To consider the possibilities of using new technology to make information about missionary material in Britain more widely accessible.
• To bring scholars and curators together with representatives of British missionary organisations, as well as heritage organisations in Africa and the Pacific, to explore the ways in which different stakeholders engage with and care about the material heritage of mission.
• To create a strong network among those who work with British missionary material, both within and beyond the UK, by bringing together senior scholars, early career researchers, those with responsibility for missionary material in British collections, but also representatives of stakeholder groups.
• To create the conditions out of which a number of future projects and collaborations can develop, including the development of a proposal for a major collaborative research project.

Workshops

Africa Focus, 26–27 November, 2012, National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh

The first workshop coincided with the opening of the exhibition “Dr Livingstone, I Presume?” in Edinburgh, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of David Livingstone, arguably the most renowned British missionary. The workshop was also attended by Tamanda Mthotha from National Museums of Malawi.

Keynote speakers included Sarah Worden, Curator of the Livingstone exhibition, National Museums Scotland, Friday Mufuzi, Curator at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, and Julie Adams.

UK/Collections Focus, 22–23 March, 2013, MAA/McDonald Institute, Cambridge

The second workshop took place in Cambridge and focused specifically on the importance and future of materials held in Britain that result from historical missionary encounters.

Speakers included David Maxwell, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, Rosemary Seton, Research Associate and former Head of Archives and Special Collections at SOAS, and Rev. Ben Wate, Anglican Church of Melanesia.

Pacific Focus, 10–11 June, 2013, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich

The final workshop drew on the project’s strong links with the Fijian Art Project at UEA.

Project Team

The project was led by Dr Karen Jacobs (Sainsbury Research Unit, UEA) and Dr Chris Wingfield, (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) with National Museums Scotland as a project partner alongside MEG.

The project was supported by an advisory group, including Dr Michael O’Hanlon (Pitt Rivers Museum) Prof Steven Hooper (Sainsbury Research Unit), Dr Lissant Bolton (British Museum), Dr Joshua Bell (Smithsonian Institution) and Chantal Knowles.