Hoarding New Guinea provides a new cultural history of colonialism that pays close attention to the millions of Indigenous artifacts that serve as witnesses to Europe's colonial past in ethnographic museums. Rainer F. Buschmann investigates the roughly two hundred thousand artifacts extracted from the colony of German New Guinea from 1870 to 1920. Reversing the typical trajectories that place ethnographic museums at the center of the analysis, he concludes that museum interests in material culture alone cannot account for the large quantities of extracted artifacts. Buschmann moves beyond the easy definition of artifacts as trophies of colonial defeat or religious conversion, instead employing the term hoarding to describe the irrational amassing of Indigenous artifacts by European colonial residents. Buschmann also highlights Indigenous material culture as a bargaining chip for its producers to engage with the imposed colonial regime. In addition, by centering an area of collection rather than an institution, he opens new areas of investigation that include non-professional ethnographic collectors and a sustained rather than superficial consideration of Indigenous peoples as producers behind the material culture. Hoarding New Guinea answers the call for a more significant historical focus on colonial ethnographic collections in European museums.

Throughout the last two decades, the modern dialogue movement has gained worldwide significance. The knowledge about its origins is, however, still very limited. This book presents a wide range of insights from eleven case studies into the early history of several important international interreligious/interfaith dialogue organizations that have shaped the modern development of interreligious dialogue from the late nineteenth century up to the present. Based on new archival research, they describe, on the one hand, how these actors put their ideals into practice and, on the other, how they faced many challenges as pioneers in the establishment of new interreligious/interfaith organizational structures. This book concludes with a comparison of those case studies, bringing to light new and broader historico-sociological understanding of the beginnings of international and multi-religious interreligious/interfaith dialogue organizations over more than one century. The World’s Parliament of Religions / 1893 The Religiöser Menschheitsbund / 1921 The World Congress of Faiths / 1933-1950 The Committee on the Church and the Jewish People of the World Council of Churches / 1961 The Temple of Understanding / 1968 The International Association for Religious Freedom / 1969 The World Conference on Religion and Peace / 1970 The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions / 1989-1991 The Oxford International Interfaith Centre / 1993 The United Religions Initiative / 2000 The Universal Peace Federation / 2005 Based on these analyses, the authors identify three distinct groups with sometimes-conflicting interests that are shaping the movement: individual religious virtuosi, countercultural activists, and representatives of religious institutions. Published in cooperation with the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious & Intercultural Dialogue, Vienna.

Mixing elements of a classic whodunit with a very modern love story, "The Madonna of Las Vegas" is a truly original tale about an artist and the daughter of a local mob boss, who enter a world where meaning is often flipped, and where the fake and the real are interchangeable.

"Madonna of the Snows" represents the obsessions and dissatisfactions that result from the love relationship illustrated in the poem. "A Mass for Desdemona" deals with love, religious conflict, uncertainties of identity, and the difficulties of emotional needs that overpower personal standards.

This dissertation examines mission museums established by Catholic mission congregations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from the 1890s onwards. The aim is to provide the first extensive study on these museums in a way that contributes to current blind spots in mission history, and the history of anthropology and museology. In this study I use Angela Jannelli's concept of small-scale and amateurish museums to create a framework in order to characterise the museums. The dissertation focuses on the missionaries and their global networks, their "collecting" in the mission fields overseas, and the "collected" objects, by looking at primary sources from mission congregations' archives. In the middle section of the dissertation the findings of an analysis of the compiled list of thirty-one mission museums are presented. This presentation focuses on their characteristics (for example, the museum surroundings, the opening and closing dates, the role of the curators, and type of objects). From this list of thirty-one museums three case studies were selected for in-depth analysis: (1) three "Africa museums" of the Missionary Sisters of St. Peter Claver (SSPC) in Salzburg, Maria Sorg and Zug, (2) an ethnographically oriented mission museum of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) in the mission house St. Gabriel near Vienna, and (3) a mission museum of the Sacred Heart Missionaries (MSC) in Hiltrup-Münster. This study reveals the reasons for opening mission museums by presenting a list of ten intentions. Then I propose a conclusive definition of a European Catholic mission museum. Finally, short descriptions ("portraits") in the appendix present and analyse all thirty-one mission museums. In presenting the broad diversity of these museums, the thesis contributes to the understanding of missionary congregations' development in the late 19 th and 20 th century and their impact on the material and immaterial exchange between German-sp

The greatly revised and enlarged twelve-volume third edition (1911-15) of Sir James Frazer's controversial work on classical religion.