Barmen, July 1832
Opening the letter which accompanied a parcel, recently arrived from London, Wilhelm Leipoldt found news of Barmen’s Missionary training college had found its way to William Ellis, recently appointed Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society.1 Leipoldt was his opposite number as Secretary of the Rhenish Missionary Society, established in 1828 through an amalgamation of missionary societies at Elberfeld, Barmen and Köln (Cologne).
Ellis was keen to support these ‘fellow-workers’, suggesting that ‘a few curiosities from different parts of the world would be acceptable for your new Institution’. These would, he proposed, be useful ‘in conveying a more lively impression of the actual degradation of the heathen and the polluting character of idol worship; and also of shewing what Missionaries had been able to effect in promoting the knowledge of the True God and the Only Saviour’.2
Ellis referred Leipoldt to the list at the end of his letter, itemising ‘the accompanying specimens’, as well as books ‘prepared by our Missionaries in different parts of the World’.3
With items from the Pacific, South Asia, China and southern Africa, the list covers the main areas in which the LMS had been most active over the previous thirty-five years. Half the ‘specimens’ appear to have been religious ‘idols’, from Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Myanmar, India and possibly China, with a similar number of seemingly everyday items from Africa – a ladle, a knife, a necklace and two rings.
While not obviously demonstrating ‘the degradation of the heathen’, these would have been of considerable interest in Barmen, since the Rhenish Missionary Society sent its first four recruits to South Africa under the guidance of John Philip, the Scottish superintendent of LMS missions there. Philip had travelled to London in 1826 to lobby for the rights of indigenous people at the Cape (more on this below), returning to South Africa in 1829 with recruits from the LMS, the Rhenish Missionary Society, as well as the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (a Protestant organisation established in 1822).4
There follows a listing of religious and missionary translations, tracts and other texts – grammars, spelling books and memoirs. The way their descriptions are laid out, however, asserts a categorical distinction between printed texts and the ‘specimens’ listed separately above, including a catechism from Madras, handwritten on leaves.
The numbering of these twinned lists suggests that twelve printed books were sent to Barmen but only eleven ‘specimens’, including the palm leaf catechism. At the bottom of the page, however, a single line adds ‘All wrapped up in a Piece of Tahitian Cloth’, suggesting there were equal numbers of printed books and other artefacts, if we count the Tahitian cloth as a ‘specimen’ in its own right.
Why Ellis chose to wrap the other items in Tahitian barkcloth is unclear, but he certainly knew that tapa was used for wrapping valuable items in Polynesia, such as the recently arrived ancestral pole from Rarotonga (Chapter 12).
'List of Curiosities', presented by the London Missionary Society to the New Mission College at Barmen
From the end of a letter, dated 13 July 1832, sent by William Ellis to Wilhelm Leipoldt, Rhenish Missionary Society
In Polynesian Researches, published three years earlier, Ellis noted that images of gods were generally ‘clothed’ with native cloth, but also that that when he gave copies of the newly printed Gospel of Luke to five men from Tahiti, ‘each wrapped his book up in a piece of white native cloth’.5 Barkcloth was used to wrap the bodies of the deceased, but was increasingly also used to cover the bodies of living Christian converts, especially women. Can we regard Ellis’ decision to wrap these items in Tahitian cloth as an indicator of their value, or does it simply indicate the ready availability of such cloth at his office in London?
The letter from Ellis to Leipoldt, together with the artefacts which accompanied it, illustrates not only the existence of cooperative relationships between Protestant missionary societies in different parts of northern Europe (the LMS had also worked closely with the Netherlands Missionary Society since the late 18th century, as well as sending a number of earlier Berlin-trained German-speaking missionaries to South Africa – Chapter 2), but importantly also the way in which the circulation and display of artefacts contributed to these.
While the division of this list, between handmade ‘specimens’ and printed ‘books’, is suggestive of Webb Keane’s semiotic ideologies and the Protestant prioritisation of printed vernacular texts,6 I’d like to suggest that the inclusion of equal numbers of ‘specimens’, ‘all wrapped up in a piece of Tahitian cloth’, tells us something important about the development of what I would like to call the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex.
The Exhibitionary Complex is a phrase originally coined by Tony Bennett in a well-known journal paper, published in Spring 1988.7 Grappling with the implications of Michel Foucault’s work on the reforming institutions of the ‘carcerial archipelago’: the prison, the asylum, and the clinic. Bennet took up Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical projects in relation to the Birth of the Museum, suggesting that public museums should be considered in relation to other forms of display, such as international expositions, arcades and department stores, as well as other contemporary technologies of vision.8
Bennett ultimately argued that museums were institutions, ‘not of confinement but of exhibition, forming a complex of disciplinary and power relations whose development might more fruitfully be juxtaposed to, rather than aligned with, the formation of Foucault’s ‘carcerial archipelago’.9 He suggested that reforming institutions of incarceration saw the bodies of the condemned, previously a focus for very public periodic displays of power on the scaffold, increasingly subjected to surveillance and regulation. By contrast, he argued the ‘exhibitionary complex’ transferred objects and bodies:
from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed (but to a restricted public) into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power (but of a different type) throughout society.10
In pushing back against the idea that museums could be considered institutions of confinement, Bennet suggested:
It seems to imply that works of art had previously wandered through the streets of Europe like the Ships of Fools in Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation; or that geological and natural history specimens had been displayed before the world, like the condemned on the scaffold, rather than being withheld from public gaze, secreted in the studiolo of princes, or made accessible only to the limited gaze of high society in the cabinets des curious of the aristocracy.11
The terms of Bennet’s objection to considering museums as part of a ‘carcerial archipelago’ are significant – his focus on ‘the streets of Europe’ and the ‘studiolo of princes’ locates the Exhibitionary Complex in relation to an almost exclusively European genealogy. Arguably it also positions this in Europe’s South, seemingly insulated from the most significant impacts of the Protestant reformation.
However, works of art had once moved through the streets of Europe, as part of spectacular processions of religious images (they still do in parts of southern Europe), but during the reformation and counter-reformation were increasingly confined within institutions (when they survived iconoclastic purges). We can arguably hear the echoes of these earlier image wars in recent calls to remove the statues of slave-owners and colonialists from our streets, in order to confine them safely within our museums.
This suggests we might consider the development of the Exhibitionary Complex beyond the immediate frame provided by the French Revolution of 1789, and the conversion of the Louvre into a museum of confiscated royal and church paintings in 1793. Indeed, it seems important in setting the scene for Foucault’s ‘modern episteme’ to account for the revolutionary dimensions of Britain’s seventeenth century, as well as the Protestant substrate which operated in France long after the revocation of Edict of Nantes in 1685.
Foucault suggested that what he called governmentality, the practices of power deployed by the modern state, were ultimately rooted in the individualising pastoral practices of the Christian Church.12
Commenting on Weber’s linking of the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism, the Dutch Philosopher Antoon Braeckman has recently argued that ‘the Protestant form of life has also proved to be the soil in which the governmental power of the modern state first took root.’13
Indeed, he suggested that the process by which:
many governmental initiatives that had arisen in the Protestant church communities were transferred to secular governments… provides a potentially fruitful path for further shaping Foucault’s unfinished genealogy of the modern state.14
A Dialogue between the Crosse in Cheap, and Charing Cross.
Comforting each other, as fearing their fall in these uncertaine times. By Ryhen Pameach (Henry Peacham). Published in London in 1641.
Can we regard the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex as an ‘unwritten chapter’ or ‘missing link’ in Foucault’s Genealogy of the Modern State, allowing us to chart a series of peculiarly Protestant developments in governmentality?15 Can it be regarded as part of the complex of pastoral techniques which “have nestled, multiplied, and spread with the laicised framework of the state apparatus”, according to Foucault??16
Bennet suggested that the Exhibitionary Complex was ‘a set of cultural technologies concerned to organise a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry’, as part of the ‘the ethical and educative function of the modern state’, ultimately feeding into the ‘development of the bourgeois democratic polity’.17 By necessity not simply a European project, the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex provides an alternative vantage point from which to consider a range of globally-connected practices of confinement and display.
Indeed, I intend to suggest that the dual dimensions of confinement and display form part of most carcerial institutions. While their precise configuration shifts in the movement from the scaffold to the prison, or the religious carnival to the art gallery (in part by moving indoors and becoming more permanent – a process of enclosure), power nevertheless continues to operate in spectacular ways.18
Nineteenth century prisons, hospitals and asylums often formed highly visible architectural statements within urban spaces, and many maintained public visiting hours no more or less restrictive than those of most nineteenth century museums. This suggests the ‘carcerial archipelago’ and the ‘exhibitionary complex’ are far more aligned than Bennet suggested.
Foucault’s clearest statement in relation to museums seems to come in an essay, Of Other Spaces, originally published in October 1984, shortly after he died. It begins:
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderence of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.19
This he contrasted with a twentieth century focus on space, characterised as the ‘epoch of simultaneity’, suggesting that many contemporary polemics ‘oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space’.20
The focus for Foucault’s piece of fairly oracular writing, however, is the socially constituted other places that he calls heterotopias, defined as ‘counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.21 These had their origins, he suggests, in ‘crisis heterotopias’, temporarily constituted sacred or privileged places, the liminal zones constituted by what Arnold Van Gennep called Rites de Passage.22
Foucault suggests these were gradually replaced by what he calls ‘heterotopias of deviation’, the institutions of his carcerial archipelago. He explores the ways in which existing heterotopias have been repurposed, using the example of the cemetery, which until the end of the eighteenth century was often situated at the heart of European cities. From the nineteenth century, however, these were increasingly relocated to their edges, where, according to Foucault ‘everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay’.23
The museum, like the library, according to Foucault, is a heterotopia ‘in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit’:
… the idea of accumulating everything, or establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to the western culture of the nineteenth century.24
'Idols' worshipped by the Inhabitants of the South Sea Islands
Item 7, at the bottom left edge of the image is a representation of a Tahitian Ti’i (that on the botton right appears to be from Rarotonga). According to Ellis (Volume 2, p.202):
The figures marked No.7, in the engraving of Idols, represent the images of two tiis or oromatuas; whose form and appeareance convent no inappropriate exhibition of their imaged malignity of disposition.
Printed to face the title page of Volume 2 of William Ellis (1829) Polynesian Researches (London: Fisher, Son & Jackson).
If we consider the Ti’i, described as an ‘Idol from Tahiti’ at the beginning of Ellis’ list, we can imagine its passage between a series of heterotopias, at which confinement was enacted as well as display.
It likely came from a marae, a ceremonial enclosure in Tahiti where, according to Ellis, Ti’i generally represented the spirits of departed ancestors ‘supposed to be exceedingly irritable and cruel’. They were confined to a house ten or twelve feet off the ground ’to keep them out of the way of men, as it was imagined they were constantly strangling, otherwise destroying the chiefs and people’. They had custodians:
appointed constantly to attend them, and to keep them wrapped in the choicest kinds of cloth, to take them out whenever there was a pae atua, or general exhibition of the gods; to anoint them frequently with fragrant oil; and to sleep in the house with them at night. All this was done, to keep them pacified.25
This suggests that the marae was itself a heterotopia at which both confinement and display were deployed as technologies in order to attempt to gain a degree of control over potentially dangerous and disruptive spirits.
The Ti’i must have escaped the spectacular iconoclastic displays at which similar items were publicly burned in the years after 1815 (Chapter 4), becoming a ‘prisoner’ of the missionaries – to use the term adopted by both John Williams and Lancelot Threlkeld (Chapter 12). It may have been displayed from chapel pulpits in Polynesia, in New South Wales, as well across the British Isles.
The principal idol of Pomare’s family was conveyed around the Independent Chapel in Falmouth, Cornwall, during a Missionary Festival in August 1819 (Chapter 4). The following year, ‘the abandoned idols which had lately been imported from the islands of the South Seas were exhibited on a platform in front of the pulpit’ during a Missionary meeting at the newly built Carr’s Lane chapel in Birmingham.26
The Missionary Museum, established in London in 1815, provided a seemingly permanent place of custody for the majority of ‘idols’ sent from the Pacific, where they could be displayed to visitors, especially when supporters from around the country came to London for the annual ‘missionary week’ meetings in May. The availability of these artefacts at the Missionary Museum allowed them to become the sources for the production of imagery, achieving even wider circulation through missionary publications, books as well as periodicals.
The Missionary Museum seems to have been a location from which these items continued to circulate for display at missionary meetings elsewhere. It was a central institutional node within a much larger complex, constituted by a shifting network of missionaries and supporters, coordinating the circulation of artefacts between a range of heterotopias. In this, it mirrored the adjacent LMS administrative offices, which oversaw the circulation of funds and information between Mission stations and supporting churches.
The Missionary Museum confined but also displayed a artefacts originally made for display, as what Victor Turner called ‘objects of reflection’, during particular ceremonies, but these were increasingly redeployed as part of what Carol Duncan memorably called Civilizing Rituals.27
The despatch of specimens from the Missionary Museum in London to the new training institution at Barmen, part of Rhenish Prussia since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, extended the range of the developing Missionary Exhibitionary Complex, seeding a collection that grew into a substantial Missionary Museum that continues to operate in the twenty-first century. 28
Similar items were given to missionary institutions in other parts of the world – Tyerman and Bennet presented Polynesian ‘idols’ to the collection of the Baptist Missionary William Carey at Serampore College during their global journey of inspection, which, like the Anglo-Chinese College established at Malacca in 1818 (Chapter 9), maintained its own museum.29
But the missionary exhibitionary complex was not confined to spaces of display with official missionary associations. As early as May 1799, Captain Wilson of the Duff presented items to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, established just six years earlier (Chapter 1).
There seems to have been considerable overlap between misionary supporters and the membership of such societies – the fruits of Britain’s burgeoning ‘civic culture’.30 In December 1821, John Campbell presented African items to the Royal Dublin Society following his second journey to South Africa.31 In addition, George Bennet presented further material to the collections of Literary and Philosophical Societies in Leeds, Sheffield and Saffron Walden.32
William Ellis’ letter, suggesting the items he sent to Barmen would convey ‘a more lively impression’ suggests that they needed to be seen to be believed. The fact that they could be displayed at all, however, reinforced the second part of his statement, ‘shewing what Missionaries had been able to effect’. Such exhibitions allowed the re-formation of society by missionaries to be presented as not only necessary, but possible.
The Family Idols of Pomare
Image from the cover of Missionary Sketches no. 3, October 1818.
Item 10, shown here, appears to be the same Tii as that in the image above (bottom left). In Missionary Sketches it is described as follows:
No. 10. This is an ugly wooden image, and called a TII. There are several Tiis, of which the eight following are reckoned the principal. viz. Tepiri, Temau, Tuvaipo, Tuvaiao, Tupuai, Aoaopeapea, Atheeoe, Nauara; which of them this image represents we don’t know. The Tiis are said to be powerful beings dwelling in the Po, or night, and to them the conjurors or sorcerors direct their prayers when they want to injure a person.
Male Ti'i
Collected by George Bennet and presented to the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society (presented to the British Museum on 12 April 1871). On its back is inscribed in ink:
Ti Tana Orofena toion. No nia te moua Orofena. the high mountain in Tahiti
Exterior view of the Great Exhibition of 1851
With crowd of people and carriages in foreground of the Crystal Palace.
Colour print published by George Baxter in 1851.
Tony Bennet positioned the Great Exhibition of 1851, alongside the opening of the new prisons at Mettray in 1840 and Pentonville in 1842, as examples of institutions that brought together disciplines and techniques in ways that guided future institutions. In the case of the Great Exhibition, he suggested these emerged from ‘the previous histories of museums, panoramas, Mechanics’ Institute exhibitions, art galleries and arcades’, and were translated ‘into exhibitionary forms which, in simultaneously ordering objects for public inspection and ordering the public that was inspected’ had a profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of museums, art galleries, expositions, and department stores’.33
Martin J. Wiener, by contrast, positioned the 1851 Great Exhibition as ‘an end and not a beginning’ that ‘would see the high-water mark of educated opinion’s enthusiasm for industrial capitalism’.34 By 1832 we can already find many of the essential techniques deployed at the Great Exhibition operating within the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex. This suggests that we should treat missionary display practices as a significant ancestor within the genealogy of public museums.
One might counter that the British Museum had been open to the public since 1759, asserting an essentially Enlightenment genealogy for the public museum.35 I have pointed out elsewhere that the British Museum was significantly transformed during the second half of the nineteenth century, and between 1823 to 1846 was effectively a building site.36 A visitor to the British Museum’s ‘Ethnographical room’, a single room displaying British antiquities alongside ‘clubs from the South Seas and trifling objects from China and elsewhere’, after it reopened in 1848 declared:
Never was such a disgraceful jumble of things seen, even in a local museum supported by voluntary contributions and regulated by a batch of half- educated provincial antiquaries . . . All our early collectors, Tradescant, and Ashmole, and Thoresby aimed at something like arrangement; but here, in the nineteenth century and in a national museum, we have a collection confounding all the unities of time and place and only worthy of a retired dealer in marine stores. And yet, this is one of the first rooms a foreigner is obliged to see on entering the British Museum.37
Following its reoperning, on the eve of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the British Museum remained a long way from leading the development of display techniques that came to define the Exhibitionary Complex as it developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to what became known as ‘ethnographic collections’, from other parts of the world.
Tony Bennet is of course right that ‘the Exhibitionary Complex’ contributed in no small part to the formation of particular kinds of political ‘subjects’, but it did this, at least partly, through the confinement and display of certain kinds of material ‘objects’.
‘Subject’ and the ‘object’ can fruitfully be regarded as mutually constituting categories, products of what Bruno Latour called the ‘work of purification’ – categorisation and classification being an essential part of the institutional work of museums – life beyond their walls, by contrast, involves an endless proliferation of hybrids.38
1832 is a key moment from which to consider the relationship between heterotopias and society because of significant transformations in the nature of political subjecthood in Britain (paralleled in many ways by the July Revolution in France, of 1830).39 According to E.P. Thompson:
In the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and against their rulers and employers.40
Contemporary observers seem to have been acutely aware of this profound sense of transition – George Eliot famously set her novel Middlemarch between 1829 and 1832, exploring the political reform movement alongside Dr Tertius Lydgate’s attempts to reform a country hospital, with a backdrop provided by the coming of the railways.
The young John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a contemporary of Eliot’s fictional Will Ladislaw, declared in a series of essays on The Spirit of the Age, published in 1831 :
The conviction is already not far from being universal, that the times are pregnant with change; and that the nineteenth century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance, in the human mind, and in the whole constitution of human society. Even the religious world teems with new interpretations of the Prophecies, foreboding mighty changes near at hand. It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriers; for the ancient bonds will no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine.41
By 1832, William Ellis, approaching the age of 40, understood the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex better than anyone else. As a young gardener, he had been inspired to become a missionary by letters sent by John Campbell from South Africa (Chapter 3), and would have seen many of the items collected on that journey at the Missionary museum in London after it opened in April 1815. In October 1816, on his way to the Pacific, Ellis encountered ‘the Idols Gods of Tahiti’, sent by Pomare II, at the Parramatta home of Samuel Marsden, on their way to London (Chapter 4).
After overseeing the printing of the Tahitian spelling book at Mo’orea in 1817, Ellis relocated to Huahine to establish his mission there. Five years later he visited Hawai’i, returning there between February 1823 and September 1824 to assist the work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. During the first half of 1825, Ellis spent five months speaking to American congregations from a base at Boston, returning to Britain where he worked on the publication of his Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii, published in early 1826 (Chapter 7).
Three years later, Ellis published Polynesian Researches, including the detailed descriptions of a range of Polynesian practices cited above, as well as depictions of artefacts at the LMS museum, including a plate depicting ‘idols’ which formed the frontispiece to Volume 2, shown above. Alongside preparing his books for publication, Ellis spent much of the five years following his return travelling around the British Isles promoting the work of the London Missionary Society.
An illustrative episode took place on 23 May 1829 when Ellis and a number of other LMS representatives arrived at Enniskerry, a village outside Dublin. They were greeted by the evangelical rector, Robert Daly, who declared that although it was supposed to be the quarterly meeting of (Anglican) Church Missionary Society (CMS), the day’s collection would be given to the LMS. Having spoken about the work of the society’s work in Africa, China and the South Seas to around 250 people, Ellis was presented with £13 collected from those present.
He was then invited to tea at Powerscourt House by the widowed “good Lady Powerscourt” (Theodosia Anne Wingfield, née Howard), who subsequently sponsored and hosted several conferences on biblical prophecy between 1831 and 1833 (possibly those alluded to by Mill). These were attended by John Nelson Darby and Edward Irving, whose views on the coming end of the world led to the establishment of the Plymouth Brethren.42 Over tea, Ellis met Elizabeth Tighe, wife of the evangelical hymn writer and a contributor to the Evangelical Magazine, Thomas Kelly, together with their daughters (one of whom was my Gt. Gt. Gt. Grandmother).43
It was only in 1831 that Ellis adopted a less itinerant lifestyle, first as Assistant and then as Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society, when he also seems to have become responsible for the society’s museum and its collection.44 In the same year, John Stuart Mill suggested that one could ‘learn in a morning’s walk through London more of the history of England during the nineteenth century, than all the professed English histories in existence will tell him concerning the other eighteen’ and Ellis had, in the course of his missionary journeys, seemingly been everywhere and met everyone.45
Ellis must have recognised, like Mill, that ‘the old order of things has become unsuited to the state of society and of the human mind’. Mill suggested Britain was in the process of proclaiming ‘almost with one voice’ that the old institutions ‘are vicious both in the outline and in the details, and they shall be renovated, and purified, and made fit for civilised man’.46 At least part of what he was referring to was the campaign for political reform, culminating in Britain’s Representation of the People Act of 1832, known as the Great Reform Act.
This saw the removal of pocket and rotten boroughs, controlled by corporate interests, and the granting of parliamentary seats to industrial cities such as Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield, which had all grown significantly over the previous three decades. Also newly represented was Manchester, a centre for the industrial manufacture of cotton cloth, where the Peterloo Massacre saw many lives lost at a demonstration demanding parliamentary representation in 1819.
When Sir Robert Peel, son of a wealthy Lancashire textile manufacturer, became Home Secretary in 1822, he began the development of Britain’s professional police force, intended to govern by consent and regulation, rather than the brutal impositions of state military power, as at Peterloo. The Peterloo massacre also led to the establishment in 1821 of The Manchester Guardian (continuing as The Guardian), founded to:
Zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious liberty… warmly advocate the cause of Reform… endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy… and support… whatever measures may… tend to promote the moral advantage, or the political welfare, of the Community.47
The 1832 extension of the franchise was significant, in part because it demonstrated that constitutional reform was possible, though what it enacted remained a long way from what we might now regard as universal suffrage. It has been estimated that the effect of the bill was to extend the voting franchise in England from around 1 per cent of the population to around 7 per cent, in effect providing a stake in the constitution for the rapidly expanding middle classes.
In doing so it opened the way for demands for working class representation which played out in the Chartist Movement as the century went on. Further extensions of the franchise followed in 1867 and 1884, also important dates in the history of public museums, suggesting that at least part of the function of the Exhibitionary Complex was to educate, or possibly ‘civilize’ newly enfranchised voters.48
Portrait of William Ellis
Published as frontispiece in William Ellis’ 1827 Narrative of a Tour Through Hawaii
Various Tools and Utensils
Individually labelled, some with page references in the text. When an elarged and improved version of the text was printed in four volune in 1831, images of these items were re-used but interspersed in different groupings within the text.
Printed before p. 181 of Volume 2 of William Ellis (1829) Polynesian Researches (London: Fisher, Son & Jackson).
Plaque Depicting the Manchester Massacre (Peterloo)
A mounted horseman tramples a women clutching and infant, alongside a fallen flag inscribed ‘JUSTICE’. The Peterloo Massacre as it became known, became a rallying cry for the cause of reform.
Staffordshire produced Earthenware
It might be tempting to regard this as an insular British political history, with few wider implications, but it sheds important light on the establishment of the Tahitian Legislative Assembly, overseen by London Missionary Society representatives in 1824. This gave ordinary Tahitians political representation eight years before similar rights were granted in Britain (Chapter 10).
It is also illuminating to consider John Philip’s campaign for the Cape’s indigenous people, pursued when he returned to London in 1826. Before repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 made it possible for Dissenters to hold public office in Britain (similar Emancipation for Catholics followed in 1829, prompting some of the eschatological anxieties of succeeding years), Philip persuaded Thomas Fowell Buxton (leader of Britain’s parliamentary anti-slavery lobby after William Wilberforce retired in 1825) that racial restrictions on the Cape’s indigenous people amounted to slavery by another name.
Philip’s 1828 book Researches in South Africa assembled a range of evidence in support of his case, but its preface frames his argument in relation to a universalist conception of natural rights, rooted in a particular understanding of divine creation as well as the British constitution:
Independent of printed statutes, there are certain rights which human beings possess, and of which they cannot be deprived but by manifest injustice. The wanderer in the desert has a right to his life, to his liberty, his wife, his children and his property. The Hottentot has a right to a fair price for his labour; to an exemption from cruelty and oppression; to choose the place of his abode, and to enjoy the society of his children; and no one can deprive him of those rights without violating the laws of nature and of nations… The Hottentots, in addition to the unalienable rights conferred upon them by their Creator, have prescriptive rights in their favour; they are regarded by the British government as a free people; and the colonial law says, that they are to be treated in their persons, in their properties and in their possessions, the same as other free people.49
When asked by William Huskisson, Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, a man who in 1830 became the first railway fatality in history, to describe what he wanted in one sentence, Philip replied:
I require nothing for the Hottentots, but the power of bringing their labour to a fair market.50
If Napoleon really did call the English “a nation of shopkeepers”, then central to their commercial self-conception was a right to freely exchange their labour for payment – an individual right increasingly asserted by the British Middle and Working classes both for themselves as well as for others.
Village of Betheldorp
The only image to feature in John Philip’s two volume, Researches in South Africa, published in 1828. Marked details include A. Old Church, B. New Chruch (lately founded), C. Alms-Houses, E. Bridge, F. School, G, H, I. Houses of the Missionaries.
See Chapter 3, for a description of Lichtenstein’s unflattering descriptions of the settlement, and an image of the settlement published alongside Campbell’s description in 1815.
Published by James Duncan, Paternoster Row.
The extension of the franchise in 1832 represented a concession to what Martin Wiener called ‘the English Industrial Spirit’, rooted in the urban areas where evangelical and dissenting churches made up the bulk of supporters of the London Missionary Society. But this local political concession also had significant global consequences. It was the overwhelmingly Whig parliament, elected in 1833, which voted for the Slavery Abolition Act, setting a course that would, in time, make the purchase and ownership of slaves illegal across the British Empire.
In recent years, Eric Williams’ slightly grumpy comment that ‘The British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it’ has been cited frequently in order to diminish the centrality of white abolitionists within contemporary stories told about slavery and it abolition.51 While aspects of Williams’ criticism are certainly valid, and are a version of criticisms applied to Whig history in general,52 any decision to abolish slavery is ultimately a decision about the kinds of people we imagine ourselves to be and the society we would like to live in – a point made David Graeber and David Wengrow in making the case for multiple abolitions of slavery in the course of human history in their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything.53
In a 1920 essay on ‘The Nation’, Marcel Mauss suggested that ‘Societies live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance’.54 The British abolition of slavery was arguably just such a refusal, providing a defining moment for the newly enfranchised British middle classes, who, at least initially, defined themselves largely in opposition to the aristocratic and plutocratic 1% who had previously governed them, and who had been the major beneficiaries of the economic system established to enable the Trans-Atlantic trade.55
Boyd Hilton has characterised Britain’s Age of Atonement between 1785 and 1865 in relation to a theology of Grace, centred on the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.56 It also involved a project of national atonement, at least partly in relation to Britain’s earlier enthusiastic participation in slave trading. Just as the script of conversion required a recognition of earlier sinfulness and redemption through acceptance of divine Grace, so conversion of the nation entailed the recognition of sin – what John Newton, an active participant in the slave trade before becoming a powerful voice in the early abolition movement called ‘this stain on our National character’.57
Although slavery and its legacies remain largely offstage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, apart from Will Ladislaw’s declaration that he intends to take up Wilberforce’s cause of ‘Negro Emancipation’, it is surely significant that money and its sources recurs as a theme throughout the novel, exemplified in the ‘ill-gotten’ fortune of the country financier Bulstrode. While this ultimately derived from a pawnbroking business, which profited from stolen goods and the distress of ‘lost souls’, many fortunes in contemporary British society were built on foundations of slavery.
While the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex’ involved a great deal of ‘othering’ in relation to what Ellis called ‘the actual degradation of the heathen’, the point was surely to demonstrate the possibility of reform and ultimately of redemption.
If heterotopias are, in Foucault’s terms, ‘counter-sites’, then the places of display constituted by the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex provided a kind of fulcrum around which a re-formation of the self could be attempted. In seeking to rescue the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, it becomes necessary to demonstrate the multiple ways in which it was implicated within projects of societal reform and improvement, the consequences of which continue to have global implications.58
Stained Glass Image of John Newton
From St. Peter and Paul Church, Olney, Buckinghanshire
2016 Photograph by Adam Jones
In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, just as other European Jews were being denied their political personhood and associated rights, the great French Anthropologist Marcel Mauss gave the Huxley Memorial Lecture in London.59 He attempted to lay out developing constructions of political citizenship, what he called the Category of the Person, ‘from the simple masquerade to the mask, from a ‘role’ (personnage) to a ‘person’ (personne), to a name, to an individual’ – taking in Roman legal distinctions between citizens and slaves, as well as a recognition of the conscious moral person among the Stoics and early Christians.
In the context of understanding an equation made in in recent times between political personhood and consciousness, he suggested:
We cannot exaggerate the importance of sectarian movements throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the formation of political and philosophical thought. There it was that were posed the questions regarding individual liberty, regarding the individual conscience and the right to communicate directly with God, to be one’s own priest, to have an inner God. The ideas of the Moravian Brothers, the Puritans, the Wesleyans and the Pietists are those which form the basis on which is established the notion: the ‘person’ (personne) equals the ‘self’ (moi); the ‘self; (moi) equals consciousness (conscience), and is its primordial category.60
In concluding his lecture, Mauss asked whether ‘the sacred character of the human ‘person’ (personne)’ would continue to be recognised, suggesting its moral force was questioned throughout Asia, as well as in the countries where the principle was discovered (a reference to contemporary Germany). He then commented ‘We have great possessions to defend, with us the idea could disappear’ before resuming a more scientific attitude, ‘Let’s not moralise’.61
To be socially recognised as a person is to be literally enfranchised – granted a role in the political and judicial decisions of one’s society. Britain’s 1832 expansion of the political franchise was a watershed moment in the process of renegotiating what it meant to be a political and legal person – a literal re-constitution of society. It is significant that political reform ‘at home’ essentially coincided with the granting of equivalent rights to free colonised people at the Cape, as well as the abolition of slavery across the British colonies, all achievements in which newly powerful evangelical networks were significantly implicated.
What 1832 allows us to see is nothing less than the beginnings of an institutional re-formation of society around a new conception of the person – the self conscious rights-bearing individual – who would also acquire, in Foucault’s terms, the ‘right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay’. If the municipal cemetery, relocated to the outskirts of town, is one type of heterotopia reflecting this transformation, then the centrally located public museum, confining and displaying singular labelled objects within glass boxes, is another.
Within the Missionary Exhibitionary Complex, however, it was the converted Polynesians of Tahiti, the Cook Islands and Hawai’i, rather than the contemporary British or French, who were initially framed as exemplary ‘moderns’. They had freed themselves from the demands of troublesome ancestors and ‘false gods’, now consigned to the Missionary Museum, in order to re-construct their societies around a Christian conception of God. Contemporary evangelicals presumably recognised that in 1832, this project remained a work in progress within Europe itself.
On 5 May 1834, Wilhelm Richter, a tutor at the Rhenish Mission College in Barmen wrote to tell William Ellis in London that:
The valuable presents you maid [sic] to our Society have contributed very much indeed to awaken the missionary spirit among us; even people who formerly did not a all care about missionary cares, came to see the Idols etc., and have a good deal of money, being very much struck with the blindness of the poor Heathen.62
In October of the same year, Leipoldt himself ended a letter to Ellis by asking for ‘more curiosities out of the heathen world, as our people take a very great interest in shares idols and other curiosities which you kindly have sent to us some years ago’.63
Among the congregations supporting the Rhenish Missionary Society at the time was a young teenage boy, whose father owned a textile factory. Published when he was nineteen, his Letters from Wuppertal described the consequences of industrialisation in the Wupper valley around Barmen, as well as the contradictions of the bourgeois hypocrisy in which he had been raised:
For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of denying them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.64
In his subsequent description of the Condition of the Working Class in England, first published in 1845, Friedrich Engels told his German-speaking readers that:
The Industrial Revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and the difference between England in 1760 and in 1844 is at least as great as that between France under the ancient régime and during the revolution of July. But the mightiest result of the industrial transformation is the English proletariat.65
Subsequently collaborating with and supporting another Rhenish boy, Karl Marx, Engels seems to have imbibed the missionary message that fetishes and idols were a bad thing, but increasingly directed this critique at European industrial society itself.
Title page for 'Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England' by Friedrich Engels
Published by Otto Wigand, Leipzig in 1845
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Rachel Hand for drawing my attention to donation of missionary material to the Royal Dublin Society, as well as to Christoph Schwab, Curator at the Archiv- und Museumsstiftung der VEM in Wuppertal, for sharing a scanned copy of the letter from Ellis, together with the list with which this chapter begins. It was such unanticipated connections that demonstrated some of the ways in which an ‘imagined community’ of evangelicals and their Missionary Exhibitionary Complex transcended political borders.
I am also grateful to David Wengrow for a long friendship, extending back to an excavation in Lesotho in 1998. His 2021 book with David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, has stimulated me to reflect in this chapter on the peculiarity of British configurations of political subjecthood, as well as their global implications.
Comments
This is an experiment in writing – that is intended to stretch the idea of the academic monograph.
I am keen to recognise and incorporate the input and expertise of others into the writing process, so I would welcome any comments or feedback.
Notes
1 Parts of a letter he had sent to the Rev. Andrew Reid, Minister of the Wycliffe Congregational Chapel in East London, had been seen by Ellis. Reference for Letter is Archives and Museum Foundation of UEM, File-no. RMG 207.
2 Archives and Museum Foundation of UEM, File-no. RMG 207, p.1.
3 Archives and Museum Foundation of UEM, File-no. RMG 207, p.3.
4 Keegan, T. (2016). Dr Philip’s Empire: One Man’s Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Cape Town, Zebra Press, p.123.
5 Ellis, W. (1829). Polynesian researches, during a residence of nearly six years in the South Sea Islands : including descriptions of the natural history and scenery of the islands, with remarks on the history, mythology, traditions, government, arts, manners, and customs of the inhabitants. London, Fisher, Son, & Jackson, Volume 2, p.204 & Volume 1, p.405.
6 Keane, W. (2007). Christian moderns : freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. Berkeley, Calif. ; London, University of California Press.
7 Bennett, T. (1988). “The Exhibitionary Complex.” new formations 4(1): 73-102.
8 Bennett, T. (1995). The birth of the museum : history, theory, politics. London, Routledge.
9 Bennett, T. (1988). “The Exhibitionary Complex.” new formations 4(1): 73-102, p. 73.
10 Bennett, T. (1988). “The Exhibitionary Complex.” new formations 4(1): 73-102, p. 74.
11 Bennett, T. (1988). “The Exhibitionary Complex.” new formations 4(1): 73-102, p. 73.
12 Goulder, B. (2007). “Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power.” Radical Philosophy Review 10(2): 157-176.
13 Braeckman, A. (2022). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Governmentality: An Unwritten Chapter in Foucault’s Genealogy of the Modern State.” Critical Horizons 23(2): 134-156: 136.
14 Braeckman, A. (2022). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Governmentality: An Unwritten Chapter in Foucault’s Genealogy of the Modern State.” Critical Horizons 23(2): 134-156: 148.
15 Braeckman, A. (2022). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Governmentality: An Unwritten Chapter in Foucault’s Genealogy of the Modern State.” Critical Horizons 23(2): 134-156.
16 Braeckman, A. (2022). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Governmentality: An Unwritten Chapter in Foucault’s Genealogy of the Modern State.” Critical Horizons 23(2): 134-156: 137 & fn 13, citing Foucault, M. (2001) “La philosophy analytique de la politique [The Analytical Philosophy of Politics}.” In Dits et écrits, vol. II: 1976-1988, edited by Daniel Desert and François Ewald, 534-551. Paris: Gallimard; 550.
17 Bennett, T. (1988). “The Exhibitionary Complex.” new formations 4(1): 73-102, p. 76.
18 Victor Turner made a distinction between more temporary liminal spaces and more perment ‘liminoid’ places in Turner, V. W. (1982). Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology. From ritual to theatre : the human seriousness of play. V. Turner. New York City, Performing Arts Journal Publications: 20-60. On the continuation of the spectacular, see Debord, G. (1967). La société du spectacle. Paris, Buchet-Chastel;
19 Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22-27.
20 Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22-27, p.22.
21 Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22-27, p.24.
22 van Gennep, A. (1909). Les rites de passage. Paris, É. Nourry.
23 Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22-27, p.25.
24 Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22-27, p.26.
25 Ellis, W. (1829). Polynesian researches, during a residence of nearly six years in the South Sea Islands : including descriptions of the natural history and scenery of the islands, with remarks on the history, mythology, traditions, government, arts, manners, and customs of the inhabitants. London, Fisher, Son, & Jackson, Volume 2, p.202.
26 According to the recollections of John Angell James, the chapel’s Minister who was trained alongside Robert Morrison at David Bogue’s Gosport Academy, so many people crowded into the clock gallery to see these items that the clapping of hands and stamping of feet caused the two middle of beams of the gallery to crack right though: James, J. A., et al. (1861). The life and letters of John Angell James: including an unfinished autobiography. London, James Nisbet and Co, p. 160.
27 Turner, V. W. (1967). The forest of symbols : aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, discussion of ‘objects of reflection’ between pp. 102-105; Duncan, C. (1995). Civilizing rituals : inside public art museums. London, Routledge.
28 Today, there is still a Missionary museum at Barmen, known named since 2014 Museum auf der Hardt, over a century after the LMS Missionary Museum in London closed.
29 King, D. S. (2015). Missionaries and Idols in Polynesia. San Francisco ; London, Beak Press in association with Holberton Publishing, p.70 – Item 1.43, a ‘Staff god’ from Mitiaro is recorded as having been presented to Carey’s museum at Serampore by Tyerman and Bennet on 3 May 1826; An account of Carey’s ‘choice collection both in specimens and pictured representations’ but not of a donation to this can be found at: Tyerman, D., et al. (1840). Voyages and travels round the world, Snow, p.230: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TW9CAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=Rev.%20Daniel%20Tyerman%20voyages%20volume%202&pg=PA230#v=onepage&q&f=false
30 Hilton, B. (2008). A mad, bad, and dangerous people?: England 1783-1846. Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. 162-174.
31 I am grateful to Rachel Hand for this reference: Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 58, p.43. Meeting 13 December 1821, Report from the Committee of Chemistry, Donations for the Museum and Mineral Cabinet: “From the Rev. Mr. Campbell, forwarded by Sir William Betham: Some specimens of magnetic sand from the Grieve mountains of South Africa, three varieties of asbestus, A knife, copper armlets and ear-rings from Latacoo.”
32 Jacobs, K. (2014). “Inscribing missionary impact in Central Polynesia: mapping the George Bennet collection (1821–1824).” Journal of the History of Collections 26(2): 263-276.
33 Bennett, T. (1988). “The Exhibitionary Complex.” new formations 4(1): 73-102, p. 74.
34 Wiener, M. J. (2004). English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit, 1850-1980. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.28.
35 Sloan, K. (2004). Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century. London, British Museum Press.
36 Wingfield, C. (2011). Placing Britain in the British Museum: Encompassing the Other. National Museums. P. Aronsson, A. B. Amundsen and S. Knell. London, Routledge: 123-137.
37 Altick, R. D. (1978). The shows of London. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, citing ‘The British Museum’ The Athenaeum (1848), 1061 (26 February): 216–17.
38 Latour, B. (1993 [1991]). We have never been modern. New York ; London, Harvester Wheatsheaf.
39 While my focus in what follows is on British constitutional arrangements, the French July Revolution of 1830 equally replaced a principle of hereditary right with that of popular sovereignty.
40 Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. London, Gollancz, p.12.
41 The Spirit of the Age (1831), Part 1, Examiner, 9 January, pp. 20-21: https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/mill-s-spirit-of-the-age#
42 Akenson, D. H. (2016). Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell. Montreal, McGill-Queens’ University Press.
43 In later years, Ellis made a donation of artefacts from Madagascar to the Royal Dublin Society (National Museum of Ireland 1881.2980 to 2986), specimens of Cloth made of the fibre of the Raffia Tree, from Madagascar. Ellis’ address is recorded as Hoddeston, Herts, where he lived from 1847-72. Thanks to Rachel Hand for this information.1881.2980 to 2986. Specimens of Cloth made of the fibre of the Raffia Tree, from Madagascar. Ellis’ address is recorded as Hoddeston, Herts, where he lived from 1847-72. Thanks to Rachel Hand for this information.
44 He held this position until 1841, when he resigned on health grounds; Lovett, R. (1899). The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895. London, Oxford University Press, Volume 2, p. 647.
45 The Spirit of the Age (1831), Part 1, Examiner, 9 January, pp. 20-21: https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/mill-s-spirit-of-the-age#
46 The Spirit of the Age (1831), Part 1, Examiner, 9 January, pp. 20-21: https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/mill-s-spirit-of-the-age#
47 Prospectus for The Manchester Guardian, a New Weekly Paper. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/from-the-archive-blog/2017/nov/15/manchester-guardian-prospectus-1821#
48 One interesting consequence of the 1832 legislation was to define voters as male for the first time, since previously voting rights in Britain had been determined only by property. It was not until 1918 that a further Representation of the People Act extended the franchise to all men over 21 and most women over 30, and in 1928 to women over 21, an age restriction only lowered to 18 for both genders in 1969.
49 Philip, J. (1828). Researches in South Africa; Illustrating the Civil, Moral, and Religious Condition of the Native Tribes. London, James Duncan, pp. xxvi-xxvii
50 Keegan, T. (2016). Dr Philip’s Empire: One Man’s Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Cape Town, Zebra Press, p.113.
51 Williams, E. (1966). British Historians and the West Indies. Trinidad, P.N.M. Publishing Co.
52 Butterfield, H. (1931). The Whig interpretation of history. London, G. Bell and sons.
53 Graeber, D. and D. Wengrow (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, Allen Lane.
54 Mauss, M. and N. Schlanger (2006). Techniques, technology and civilisation. New York ; Oxford, Durkheim Press/Berghahn. p.44.
55 Martin J. Wiener is revealing on the ways in which the Industrial Middle Classes were coopted into the British ruling class as the century wore on: Wiener, M. J. (2004). English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit, 1850-1980. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; According to George Orwell, ‘After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves’, in England Your England, first published in 1941 in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, GB, London. Available at: https://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye#google_vignette
56 Hilton, B. (1988). The age of atonement : the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795-1865. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
57 Newton, J. (1788). Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. London, J. Buckland, p.1.
58 E.P. Thompson suggested that he was ‘seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’. As the child of missionary parents, however, he reserved his condescension for the Methodist Church in which he was raised, referring to its considerable expansion between 1790 and 1830 as representing ‘the chilliasm of despair’. Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. London, Gollancz, 13, 427.
59 Pina-Cabral, J. (2021). “Person and relation as categories: Mauss’ legacy.” History and Anthropology 35(1): 170-188. Pina-Cabral provides contemporary context on p. 173, including this ppalication of Nuremberg laws in annexed Austria, result in the forcible renaming of Jewish citizens, which he describes as ‘an exercise of bureaucratic depersonalisation of unique proportions’.
60 Translation from Mauss, M. and t. b. W. D. Halls) (1985). A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self. The category of the person : anthropology, philosophy, history. M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.21; The original French reads: On ne saurait exagérer l’importance des mouvements sectaires pendant tout les XVIIeme et XVIIIeme siecles sur la formation de la pensée politique et philosophique. C’est Ia que se poserent les questions de la liberté individuelle, de la conscience individuelle, du droit de communiquer directement avec Dieu, d’être son prêtre a soi, d’avoir un Dieu intérieur. Les notions des Freres Moraves, des Puritains, des Wesleyens, des piétistes, sont celles qui forment la base sur laquelle s’établit la notion: la personne=le moi; le moi =la conscience-et en est la catégorie primordiale. See: Mauss, M. (1938). “Une Catégorie de L’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne Celle de “Moi”.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 68: 263-281.
61 My translation from Mauss, M. (1938). “Une Catégorie de L’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne Celle de “Moi”.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 68: 263-281, p.281.
62 Council for World Mission Archive, SOAS: CWM/LMS.Europe.Incoming correspondence. Box 2
63 Council for World Mission Archive, SOAS: CWM/LMS.Europe.Incoming correspondence. Box 2
64 Engels, F. (1839). Letters from Wuppertal, originally published in the Telegraph für Deutschland, No. 50, March 1839. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1839/03/telegraph.htm
65 Engels, F. (1969 [1845]). Condition of the Working Class in England. Introduction. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf