The museum at the London Missionary Society headquarters has been studied largely by those with an interest in early Polynesian missionary encounters, and has become famous as a repository for pre-Christian religious ‘idols’ given up by converts to Christianity. However, the museum also contained material from Africa, China, India, Madagascar and the Americas. This paper demonstrates some of the ways in which collections from different areas of the world reflected particular histories of local missionary activity, but also came to influence missionary collecting practices in other regions of the globe. Rather than attempting to characterize missionary collecting as a single practice, this paper, through close attention to the collections of a single missionary museum, aims to suggest some of the ways in which motivations for collecting and the significance of collections for the London Missionary Society shifted over the course of the long nineteenth century.Underlying research was undertaken through a doctoral studentship at the University of Birmingham, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Award no. 126750). The resulting thesis is: C. Wingfield, ‘The Moving Objects of the London Missionary Society: An Experiment in Symmetrical Anthropology’ (University of Birmingham, 2012).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Oxford University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhw00
