Christianity has had such a profound impact on the Pacific region, that its effects are not only obvious, but inseparable from life in Oceania today. The study of Christianities in Oceania has thus far focused on doctrines and its relation with cultures, politics and colonial history. This session aims to focus on the social and material dimensions of missionary activity in Oceania. It is generally accepted that early missionaries, despite their civilising mission, played a crucial role in the understanding of Oceanic societies because they actively collected objects and produced texts, drawings or photographs. However, their work depended on the encounter with people in the Pacific who had their own intentionalities and strategies. Therefore, objects, photographs, missionary reports and museums with a missionary connection have the potential to become a focus for reflections on the multiple values and valuations and their associated complexities that can be attributed to them by a diverse range of individuals and communities. They provide evidence of histories of global exchange, Pacific people’s agency and testimony to pre-Christian cultural and religious practices in Oceania. We welcome papers that address following issues: • What does examining the process of collecting (or not collecting) tell us about the enmeshment of missionary interest and Pacific peoples’ agency? • Missionary museums and their link with Oceania. • The missionary object or photograph as evidence of idolatry, as witness to traditional practice, as ancestor, as art work, as relic, or object of suspicion for contemporary Christians in Oceania. • The role of missionary material and visual culture in processes of reconciliation and commemoration in Oceania. • The encounter between missionaries and Pacific Islanders as interaction and transformation: how did they establish common ground? Were specific practices developed to facilitate the evolving connections? Did cross-cultural relationships lead to more precise, more rigid social boundaries? And did these relationships incite both parties to reconsider their own cultures, or rethink their own identities?
Paper submissions are closed