During the visit, the objects on the table were ones included in my friends Sida and Nancy’s curatorial tutorial project, Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911. Wendi had left the objects out to show our class and their tutorial group. I immediately recognized a bib and a pair of baby shoes that some people in the class thought belonged on adult ears as ear muffs or decorations. The fun of speculating and the awe of my fellow students left me with many questions. How had my peers been so removed from the history of their institution? I live with a history major who is always discussing past and present methods of historiography. For instance, how to keep alive the interactive ways the Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (or simply the Wesleyan Museum) established in 1871, made storytelling into a spectacle.
Sida and Nancy’s project used the objects our class saw to interrogate the university’s way of collecting objects. Wendi had told our class that the university was a part of an artifact subscription service. The museum would send objects, and the subscription fee would fund missionaries. The relationship between objects and teaching institutions is now in Wendi’s hands, affecting future knowledge production.
Before visiting the collections, I really thought university collections and museums were relatively neutral educational spaces. I was in awe of the Met and the Natural History Museum. Learning that Wesleyan missionaries collected and shipped thousands of objects back from China during the nineteenth century was one of many eye-opening moments Wesleyan’s collection has provided me. These objects were not simply souvenirs or artifacts, but a part of a project in which missionaries and Western institutions attempted to define, interpret, and represent China for American audiences. Many of these missionaries entered China following unequal treaties connected to the Opium Wars. Ordinary objects such as chopsticks, shoes, herbal specimens or a brick from the Great Wall were transformed into tools for constructing a “knowable” version of China for people in the United States. Archives shape cultural understanding through selection, often with an agenda. In true GEM fashion, I became more aware of how cross-cultural encounters are often mediated through systems of power and representation. This was discussed in our 305 Capstone class through the Basso article, Humor and Power on Indigenous Land as Basso provides portraits of Appalachian people and their interactions with outsiders.
The exhibition also pushed me toward greater critical self-awareness by making me reflect on my own relationship to museums and institutional history. As a Wesleyan student, it was unsettling to recognize that the university’s global engagement has historical connections to missionary activity and unequal colonial relationships. At the same time, I appreciated that the exhibition itself critically addressed these histories rather than celebrating them uncritically. The curators did not present the collection simply as evidence of cultural exchange, but as part of a larger history of western intervention, religious expansion, and archival power. I care about how cultures are interpreted and remembered. Below is an artifact from an email exchange I had with Wendi while writing an essay freshmen fall.
Email to Wendi, November 19th, 2022:
Good evening!
It was so nice seeing you in my East Asian Archeology class last week! Earlier in the semester, my Intro to the History of Biodiversity class had the opportunity to visit you in the Archaeology and Anthropology Collections. For a paper, we have each chosen an object to gather Information on. I have selected the Wesleyan Mummy and was wondering if I could ask you some questions in person or via email about it’s history in relation to Wesleyan and what the mummy’s future entails.
Thank you so much!
Lilly
