Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe [electronic resource] : Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture / by Alison L. Kahn.

The Ethnographic Exhibit as a Showcase of Liberal Humanism in Nineteenth-Century Europe -- The Making of the Vatican's 'Modern' Museum Dynasty: The Ethnology of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt SVD -- Old and New Dynastic Orders: German Anthropology in the era of Bismarck -- Dynastic Networks: The Collision of Christianity and Colonialism in New Guinea -- Fr. Franz Kirschbaum's Contribution to Collecting in New Guinea -- Material Culture Crossing Empires: Notes, Queries and Letters -- The Pontifical Missionary Exhibition (1925): The Last Great Nineteenth-Century Exhibition -- Empires End and Ominous Beginnings-: The Missionary and Ethnological Museum (1927) and the Lateran Treaty (1929).

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 objects from 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.