ZBIORY MISYJNE
ZBIORY MISYJNE

Zmaterializowany wymiar spotkań w strefach kontaktu

Summary/Abstract: Missionary collections and museums, both contemporary and historical, represent a major challenge to a scholar interested in collecting practices and in museums. The hybrid character and mission of the latter, the variable ontology of objects assembled in them, their entanglement in the colonial past and in politics, their connections with anthropological and missiological discourse, as well as with different ideas concerning strangers, should be thoroughly investigated, both theoretically and idiographically. The article presents a proposal to interpret missionary collections and museums as material transcript of encounters in ‘contact zones’ (the concept was introduced by Mary L. Pratt) and suggests using certain categories useful in the study of missionary collections and museums, such as ‘materialized contact zones,’ ‘gifts,’ ‘souvenirs,’ ‘commodities,’ ‘loot,’ ‘renamed things,’ and ‘things as components of the missionary narrative of anticonquest,’ including ‘trophies.’ The author identifi es the basic problems related to such an interpretation of missionary collections and formulates questions relevant to adopting the proposed perspective in further studies.

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