Dr.Polit. Hilde Nielssen: “Norwegian missionaries’ representation of religion and beliefs, and
the influence on Norwegian perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’.” (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 and Bergen.