Ordering Religion: Museum Classification & Cultural Evolution

I visited the Smithsonian Institution for a workshop in 2019. One afternoon, as I approached a museum information desk, a volunteer asked if they could offer recommendations. I mentioned that I study religion and wanted to view relevant exhibits. “Sorry,” the volunteer replied, “but we don’t have anything like that at the Smithsonian!” Given that a curator of religion was appointed at the National Museum of American History (NMNH) in 2016, and that there was a major exhibit on the Buddha in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art that the volunteer could have directed me to—not to mention many more objects related to religion throughout the Smithsonian’s sprawling campus—this reply was inaccurate.

However, the response was interesting in that it reflected the sentiment that religion wouldn’t, couldn’t, or shouldn’t be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution, the US federal government’s national museum complex. Yet there are many objects related to religion at the Institution. In addition, Smithsonian researchers have played a role in the development of theories of religion via their collection, organization, and display of religious objects. This is not a recent development. While the religion curatorship at the NMNH, held by Peter Manseau, is a newer position, it is not actually the first of its kind. This presentation focuses on Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), the Smithsonian’s first curator of religion. Appointed in the 1890s, he was a well-respected archaeologist and scholar of biblical languages. (He also was responsible for locating and purchasing Thomas Jefferson’s personal bible, known as the “Jefferson Bible,” in which the founding father physically cut out all the verses that he didn’t agree with.)

This paper will focus on the methods of categorization that Adler and others at the Smithsonian used to sort religious objects from different communities and religious groups. Adler was charged with conserving objects that had some sort of religious significance. He specifically focused on monotheistic traditions, while objects relating to Indigenous traditions of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere were not under his purview. These objects were held separately, in anthropological collections. I will be exploring the rationale for this method of classification, and the implications of museum categorization for understandings of religious hierarchies. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, museums like the Smithsonian often distinguished between Indigenous and “world” religions based on a racialized system of cultural evolution. This led to uneven treatment of Indigenous and non-Native religious objects.

This presentation draws on published sources by Adler and his contemporaries about the role of religion in the museum at that time, as well as manuscript materials from Smithsonian archives.