NHESR online lecture series # 3: Missionary Ethnography and the Problem of the ‘Fetish’: Collecting Kongo Crucifixes in Late Colonial Northern Angola (Ana Rita Amaral)

In this talk, Ana Rita Amaral discusses the collecting practices of Dutch Catholic missionary Jan Vissers in northern Angola in the 1950s, focusing on the crucifixes he obtained from Kongo clan chiefs. Rather than treating these objects only as examples of Christian material culture, she approaches them as outcomes of missionary fieldwork: pastoral observation, photography, oral enquiry, classification, and museum documentation. She asks how ambiguous objects moved between categories such as Christian artefact, chiefly regalia, ethnographic specimen, and “fetish.” By tracing one case in which Vissers confiscated a crucifix he associated with “black magic,” it is possible to explore how missionary theology, empirical description, and colonial collecting shaped the production of museum knowledge.