[Religious missions and African heritage in ethnographic museums: the circulation of a missionary collection gathered in Angola between the colonial and post-colonial periods].

Abstract

This article addresses one layer of the history of a collection gathered by missionaries from the Congregação do Espirito Santo during the colonial period in Angola. This collection comprised a missionary museum in the 1950s and 1960s, and after the April 25 Revolution and Angola's independence was transferred to the Museum and Anthropology Laboratory at the University of Coimbra (now known as the Science Museum at the University of Coimbra). We reexamine research on this collection, considering some issues raised in recent projects dedicated to provenance studies on colonial collections, and discuss collections associated with religious missions as legacies where religion, colonialism and heritage intersect.