Exhibiting the Mission: Display Lives of the Utrecht Missionary Society Collection

Abstract

As early as the 1860s, the Protestant missionaries of the Utrecht Missionary Society (Utrechtse Zendingsvereniging—UZV) acquired thousands of items from their mission fields, in particular on the northern coast of western New Guinea. These missionary collections of cultural items, but also of natural specimens and human/ancestral remains, have been gathered for different purposes, including display. This article proposes to investigate their mobilization in the different museum and exhibition settings through which they were (re)framed. Three modes through which cultural items collected by the UZV were mobilized will be addressed: museum displays, touring missionary exhibitions, and finally colonial and universal exhibitions. It will unpack the discourses and regimes of value through which some collected items were conceptualized while being displayed between the 1880s and the late 1910s. The exhibition histories of the UZV collection have had lasting consequences on how these items were and still are epistemologically comprehended, as tokens of conversion, ethnographic artifacts, testimonies of colonial endeavors and Papuan heritage. By exposing these different meanings and values, this article will bring to light the complexity of the UZV missionary collection and its entanglement with exhibitionary, colonial and heritage agendas, and how through its collecting and exhibiting practices the UZV contributed to colonial knowledge production in the Netherlands and beyond.