Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe: Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture

This book reveals the history of the Vatican’s ethnographic collections by exploring the imperial, scientific, technological, and religious agendas behind its collecting and curating practices in the early twentieth century. It focuses on two principal contributors: the academic, priest, and ‘Pope’s Curator’, Father Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, and the missionary and linguist, Father Franz Kirschbaum, SVD. Their narratives are embedded in a unique set of comparisons between the ‘liberal humanist ideals’ that underpinned the 1851 Great Exhibition, mid-nineteenth-century German museology, and the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition. It relates to the period of high colonialism and rampant missionary activity worldwide. It unravels the complicated political and ideological stance taken by the Catholic Church and its place within the science/religion debates of its time. Establishing an essential link between the secular and catholic practices of collecting and curating ethnographic objectsfrom non-Western traditions, the author proposes a broader framework for post-colonial approaches to scholarly studies of ethnographic collections, including those of the Catholic Church. This book appeals to students and scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history, art history, religion, politics, and cultural studies.

About the Author

Alison Kahn was trained as Anthropologist at the universities of London (M.A.) and Oxford (M.Phil., D.Phil.). She works in the dgtl archive management sector and in academia, lecturing on documentary filmmaking and museum anthropology. She integrates the use of audio-visual artifacts and dgtl 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 Dgtl 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, dgtl learning, and collaborative ethnographic film-making. Her current research investigates how children engage with multimedia activities, including: film, AI, and online learning platforms.