Dr.Polit. Hilde Nielssen: (post-doctoral project)

The aim of this project is to examine the historical constitution of Norwegian perceptions of self and otherness, through a focus on Norwegian missionaries’ representations of religious practices and beliefs of the local societies where they worked. Norwegian missionaries were not only modernizing agents aiming to transform the societies where they worked; as in elsewhere in the world, the missionaries were among the first ethnographers, collecting information and transmitting their knowledge about other cultures to their home society. In Norway in particular, their representations reached a large audience, through books, magazines, expositions and films, and through their travelling around the country giving oral accounts during the meetings of the mission movements. In Norway, missionaries also became among the most important contributors to the ethnographic collections of the museums, thereby setting the premises for the types of artefacts to be collected and exposed. Interestingly, objects associated with religion, sorcery and magical practice are quite dominant in these collections, as is the case for instance for the Madagascar collections at the Historical Museum in Bergen, and the Cultural History Museum in Oslo. The missionaries’ engagement in collection of ethnography and ethnographical objects ties the missionary activity directly to the role of ethnography and museums in the larger process of the constitution of the European self. In Europe, the collection of “primitive” artefacts signalled the distinction of a bourgeois home, and museum collections preserving and ordering cultural artefacts of “primitive peoples” became an important part of the European public sphere. More than anything, the museums reveal how Europeans reinvented themselves through the colonial encounter.
          Within Western thought, magical beliefs were early conceived of as the converse of modernity. Modernization was seen as a process of rationalization, in Weberian terms, a disenchantment of the world. Magical thinking should be overcome through education and science - the most powerful symbols of progress and modernity. The dichotomy between magical thinking and rationality as a core of the process of modernization emerged during the post-Enlightenment, simultaneously, and in close relation to, the process of colonization. Magic and the occult soon became defining features of European conceptions of Africa – Africa’s “heart of darkness” - associated with primitivism and backwardness, and the anti-thesis of a civilized Europe (Apter 1999, Meyer & Pels 2003). The association African religious practices with the European history of witchcraft and mysticism contributed to the constitution of African religious and magical practice as not only the other to, but also a threat to civilization. These conceptions of Africa fuelled the colonial enterprise and functioned as “a way to contain African phenomena within the parameters of imperial, colonial, and neo-colonial power and ideology” (Pels 1998:194). In the context of Christian missionaries such dichotomies became translated and transposed into dichotomies of Christianity and heathendom, typically expressed trough the idioms of light and darkness (Hestad Skeie 2005, Mikaelsson 2002).
          Norwegian missionaries’ representation of other cultural practices is scarcely researched, and so far there has been no extensive work on the representation of religion and magical beliefs. In analysing Missionary representations, this project will use the following as main empirical focus of study: 1) Two expositions “To the Ends of the World” (Til jordens ender) and “Africa Calls” (Afrika kaller), launched by the Norwegian Missionary society, touring in Norway between 1948 and 1966. The expositions were seen by 1332000 people in total, 2) The permanent exposition at the Mission Museum in Stavanger 3) Missionary ethnographies (a selection of scientific and popular books) from Madagascar. Through close analysis of pictures, artefacts and texts, Nielssen aims at focussing on the way religious and magical practices and beliefs (including healing practices and conceptions of health and illness – which are highly interconnected with religion and magic) are represented. In doing this, Nielssen aims to shed light, not only on how missionaries came to influence on the way Norwegian conceptualize other peoples and how this is related to the way Norwegians came to understand themselves, but how the missionaries as providers and mediators of ethnographic knowledge became implicated in the formation of the Norwegian nation. In this work she will draw on her doctoral research on Malagasy religion, as well as her knowledge of the Madagascar collections in Oslo (visit to the archive autumn 2004) and Bergen (she is engaged for a three months work with the Madagascar collection autumn 2005).