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Collecting Cultures

Collectors' Lives: American colonizers in Nineteenth-century and Early Twentieth-century Burma

The politics of multiculturalism and globalization have forced us to heighten our sensitivities to the ongoing historicity of museum artifacts, those "selected lumps of the material world to which cultural status has been ascribed." (1) In particular, museums of all kinds demonstrate a greater awareness of the extent to which collections of non-Western artifacts are legacies of the political and socioeconomic inequities of colonialism and imperialism. These collections urge us to ask questions not only about the aesthetic or the historical and cultural value of objects, but also about "the relations of power by which one portion of humanity can select, value and collect the pure products of others." (2) The Denison Art Gallery's collection of Burmese art is no exception. This collection raises urgent questions about the history of its objects, about why some objects were included and others excluded, and about what kinds of meanings and values were attributed to the objects included. (3) This essay attempts to restore the historicity of these objects not by recreating the context in which they were originally created or used, as other essays in this catalogue do, but by asking questions about the people who brought them into the collection. In particular, I ask, what were the collectors doing in Burma and what kinds of desires, fears, or questions motivated them to purchase or obtain these objects and transport them many thousands of miles away from where they were made? I focus on two of the most famous pieces of the Denison Gallery's rightly celebrated collection of Burmese art: the Three-Elephant Throne Buddha in the Bixby collection and the Bronze Buddha in the Hensley collection.

The bringing together of these pieces, along with many others, owes a great deal to Helen Hunt. A Denison graduate, Hunt served as the Dean of Women at Judson College near Rangoon from 1919 to 1951, a college founded by American Baptist missionaries around 1910. Some years after returning to the United States, Hunt wrote to her friends and acquaintances from Burma urging them to donate to the fledgling art gallery at Denison the art and objects they collected during their tenures in the country. Befitting her location at the intersection of secular and religious colonial society, a wide range of people, including missionaries, teachers, Burmese Christians as well as businessmen and women, responded to her invitation. Thus, a large part of the collection comes from missionaries who were in the country to bring the teachings of Christianity to the people of Burma. Additionally, significant contributions were made by men and women who were in Burma to take advantage of the great economic opportunities presented by a relatively stable British colony that was rich in natural resources including tea, teak, minerals, and agricultural products. What all these collectors had in common was that the British colonial presence in Burma, which began, effectively, in 1826, and did not officially end until 1948, gave them a privileged position in Burmese society. (4)

The project of colonialism was multi-faceted, providing white colonialists with opportunities for personal, spiritual and economic expansion beyond their imaginations. A diverse array of projects and desires motivated Europeans, Australians, Canadians, English and Americans to venture to colonies such as Burma, from trade in goods and services to traffic in souls. The different motivations certainly created rifts between the different communities of white colonialists. For missionaries, multi-roomed teak churches raised on stilts provided the main centers of sociability while for civil servants, insurance agents, and other denizens of the commercial and governmental aspects of colonial rule, the breezy balconies of the Gymkhana and the parlors and dining rooms of the homes of the mercantile elite served this purpose. Yet, whether white colonists were in Burma for mercantile or missionary reasons, they generally enjoyed a higher standard of living in the colonies than they did in their home countries, especially after 1900. This itself was an important condition for the possibility of their becoming collectors in the first place. It is only with the increased purchasing power gained by virtue of being members of a colonizing nation that westerners in Burma were able to acquire and maintain the items brought together in this collection.

The energizing encounter with difference that accompanied travel to such "exotic" ports of call as Rangoon and Mandalay elicited a range of responses: bewilderment, shock, fascination, repulsion. Among other things, it motivated an impulse to collect. The lives of two collectors whose possessions have found their way into the Denison Art Gallery provide an opportunity to explore the range of responses to indigenous Burmese culture that led white colonists to acquire, save and transport objects, frequently at great inconvenience to themselves. I argue that while some colonists used these objects to distance themselves from Burmese culture, and regarded Buddhist images as condensed symbols of foreign barbarism, others used the objects as a way to get close to the local culture, as a way to enter into the world-view of the people among whom they lived and worked largely as strangers in a strange land. These two modes of approaching Buddhist objects correspond roughly to two periods of colonization, which could be characterized as conquest through civilization and conquest through conciliation.

The Three-Elephant Throne Buddha

Like many nineteenth-century American missionaries, Moses Homan Bixby (1827-1901) was the son of a New England farmer, the seventh of thirteen children, whose passion for Christianity began as a young boy. After paying off his filial duties on the family farm, Bixby pursued a career in teaching and the ministry. While leading a Baptist church in Johnson, Vermont, Bixby became acquainted with two missionaries stationed in Burma, who persuaded him and his new wife to join them. Initially, from 1853-1856, Bixby worked in Moulmein, a port city in British-controlled Lower Burma, with his wife Susan Dow Bixby. After complications arising from the delivery of their first daughter brought Mrs. Bixby very nearly to death's door, the small family returned to the United States. Mrs. Bixby survived the three-month long journey back to New England, but died shortly thereafter. Rev. Bixby met his second wife, a young schoolteacher with a keen interest in foreign missions, at the funeral of his first wife. (5) In 1861, they returned to Burma, where Bixby undertook the evangelization of one of Burma's many minority groups, the Shan. It was during this period of work that Bixby unearthed the Three-Elephant Throne Buddha from the ruins of a Buddhist temple, or pagoda, as temples were known in colonial parlance. Before discussing Bixby's discovery of the figure, and the meaning the object took on within the framework of nineteenth-century Protestant missionary rhetoric, it would be useful to give a brief overview of the political landscape into which Bixby entered when he began his tenure as a missionary in Burma.

When the Rev. Moses Bixby first arrived in Burma in 1853, the main organizational and discursive parameters of the mission had been set and the fierce resistance that the Burmese had shown in the face of British colonial dominance in the region was largely spent. The American Baptist Mission in Burma had been founded forty years earlier (1813) by a dynamic and colorful American named Adoniram Judson. Judson's imprisonment for twenty-two months during the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824) and the steadfast loyalty of his wife, Ann, became a cause celebre among missionaries. Supported by Protestants of many denominations in both England and America, the Judsons were quite successful at establishing a solid foundation for the mission. They and the hundreds of missionaries that came after them founded schools, built chapels, and raised up a number of native Christian congregations. (6) The war of 1824, in which Judson played an important role, ended in a humiliating defeat for the Burmese, who had formerly exercised considerable political, military and economic influence in the region. At the conclusion of the war, the Burmese king signed a treaty that indebted his country to the British to the tune of one million pounds sterling (the equivalent of ten million rupees, an extraordinary sum in those days), placing Burma in an extremely dependent relationship to the British. (7)

One year before Bixby arrived, in 1852, the Burmese fought a second war with the British and once again lost badly. As a result, the British, under the arch-imperialist Lord Dalhousie, assumed control of the Pegu province in Lower Burma. This gave them access to the main waterway that led through Burma to China, the Irrawady River, a highly prized "back door to China." (8) The force that Britain was able to exercise in the area is reflected in the threat that Dalhousie appended to the document declaring Pegu a province of British Burma. If the Burmese should seek to undermine or challenge British rule, he wrote, "it must of necessity lead to the total subversion of the Burmese state and to the ruin and exile of the king and his race." (9) Thus Burma entered into a thirty-three year period of being a protectorate of the British empire in everything but name. Despite its economic and military subordination, officially Burma remained a sovereign, independent kingdom, a status which the new ruler, King Mindon (who governed from 1853-1878) attempted to realize in part by reviving the traditions of southeast Asian Buddhist kingship. King Mindon sponsored the fifth Great Synod of Buddhism, an event drawing Buddhists from all over the world, built many new pagodas, and supported Buddhist schools and monasteries. One of his most celebrated acts was to endow and install a new golden spire on the most important Buddhist stupa in Burma, the Shwe-da-gon of Rangoon, in British controlled Lower Burma. The installation ceremony, which was filled with pageantry and high emotion, can be viewed as an effort to restore self-confidence and a sense of national unity on the basis of religion. (10)

Not coincidentally, this revival of Buddhism was taking place just as American Protestants were beginning to make inroads into the religious life of the country, with the hearty support of the British rulers in Lower Burma. The missionaries contributed significantly to the British colonial project by helping to legitimate colonial rule. They helped to generate a representation of the indigenous Burmese rulers as ruthless and barbaric by dwelling relentlessly on a series of themes: the oppression of women, the domination of the "docile, timorous" hill-tribes by the ethnic Burmese, and the prevalence of dacoits and other criminal elements. By representing indigenous women, tribals and peasants as victims, Americans and British could cast their presence in the country not as an unwelcome intrusion but as a global rescue mission.

Nevertheless, as the Bixbys' experience illustrates, living conditions for the American missionaries in Burma were difficult. Socially isolated and unaccustomed to the humid climate and the local cuisine and customs, missionaries faced innumerable crises in psychological and physical health. (11) These difficulties were compounded by the frustration missionaries experienced in the face of an extremely low rate of conversion, especially among the Theravada Buddhists, predominately ethnic Burmese and the Shans, who constituted the majority of the population in the coastal areas and the lowland plains of the country. The sociological complexity and ideological coherence of the pre-existing religious and social institutions among Shan and Burmese Buddhists presented a formidable obstacle to conversion to Christianity. Buddhist monks and villagers were bound together in networks of reciprocal exchange. Villagers earned prosperity in this life and merit towards a better rebirth by giving food and clothing to monks, and monks returned the favor by offering spiritually edifying talks on the Dharma (Buddhist teachings), the benefits of literacy and opportunities to earn merit through ritual prestation. Traditional Burmese political leaders were crucial patrons of Buddhism, donating huge amounts of wealth towards the construction of meritorious and prestige enhancing temples and monasteries. On the whole, they demonstrated very little interest in Christianity. The American Baptist Mission had much greater success gaining converts from among the so-called "tribal groups" who inhabited the hilly hinterland of the country-the Karens, the Kachins and the Chins. These groups certainly had their own pre-existing religious system, known by the general term, animism. As with Buddhism, its beliefs and practices were thoroughly integrated into the life of the community. But Kachin and Karen animism was ideologically and sociologically simpler, with beliefs and practices more open to change than those enshrined in the written doctrines of Buddhism. (12)

One of the reasons why Buddhism adapted so well to the Burmese cultural environment was its ability to co-exist with the indigenous spirituality of the region, which may be called, following the anthropologist Melford Spiro, "Burmese supernaturalism." This system of beliefs and practices centered on the ritual propitiation of morally ambivalent local spirits, nats. Regarded primarily as protective guardian spirits who preside over a limited territorial domain, these beings are ambivalent in that when treated well they provide protection to the human beings who live or work within the suzerainty, but when neglected or offended they afflict humans with pestilence, disease and accidents. A number of different kinds of supernatural beings fall into the category of nat. Spiro and other anthropologists have observed three different categories of beings recognized by local people as nats: first, the Burmese Buddhist counterparts of Brahmanical deities (devas) such as Indra, the lord of the gods; second, nature spirits associated with elements in the landscape, predominately trees, lakes, hills, and fields; and third, the ghosts of human beings who died a premature or unnaturally violent death. (13) These beings and the cults that grow up around their propitiation are frequently intermixed with Buddhism. For example, the forested hilltops that are paradigmatically home to at least one guardian nat are frequently the site of Buddhist pagodas as well. (14)

The ritual propitiation of nats can be a relatively simple affair, consisting of an individual or a group offering fruit, flowers, coconuts, or other items desired by the nat (different nats have individual tastes, e.g. for strong cigars or perfume) to a nat who is enshrined in a simple wooden shrine. It also has a more elaborate aspect too, in raucous festivals and fairs, where musicians play music to induce trance in shamans, who become possessed by their tutelary nat and enact dance-dramas based on their mythology. (15) In spite of the apparent contradiction between the view of the afterlife implied by Burmese supernaturalism (that the spirit may have a separate existence after the death of the body) and that of Buddhism (based on reincarnation), Buddhist monks regularly play an important role in these ceremonies, for example by chanting Buddhist scriptures to help pacify a troublesome nat.

The Bixbys, along with the majority of missionaries of the mid-nineteenth century, came to Burma with a particular set of preconceptions through which they viewed the indigenous people. Preeminent among these convictions were ideas about progress and civilization. They believed unquestioningly in the superiority of Western ways of life and thought in everything from religion, to the construction of houses and the adornment of the body. A eulogy to Rev. Moses Homan Bixby given in the preface to his biography reflects well a strong tendency in missionary rhetoric to conflate Christianity, progress and modernity,

Dr. Bixby was a Christian optimist!...He believed that all the agencies of human progress and prosperity are hastening toward the perfect day. He longed to see the press, the railroad, the steamship, the telephone, and the telegraph, and all the means and facilities of commerce, and the powers of human government, as well as the wealth of individuals and of nations, administered for the welfare of humanity and for the glory of God. As a pioneer missionary, he saw the riches of the ruby mines of Upper Burmah; and he appreciated and pointed out to others their wealth, but he coveted not the rubies for himself. He rather longed and labored for the transformation of the Karens and the Shan into purified, peace-loving children of God. (16)

As Bixby's eulogizer illustrates, the civilizational project that undergirded the colonial and missionary enterprise was permeated with the logic of evolutionism. (17) Non-western nations were considered to be temporally prior and culturally inferior to Western, Christian, English-speaking nations, and the task of Christian missionaries was to guide these backward people into more civilized ways of life. The Rev. Bixby's daughter, Olive Jennie Bixby, gives an idea of this in her memoir, My Child-life in Burma. The following paragraph is taken from a chapter on the flora and fauna of her childhood home, which ends with a meditation on the larger goal the family had for being in the country.

Monkeys grinned and chattered in the trees, sometimes following us along the banks, making what seem, with a little stretch of the imagination on the Darwin side, frantic efforts for the recognition of their cousins in the boat. Indeed, as I recall the scene, the monkeys, the natives, and the missionaries, I am half inclined to ask, Are we evolved? But there is this fact for answer: the monkeys are monkeys still; they grin no more gracefully, they chatter no more grammatically, than they did ages ago. The natives, some of them, are changed. Instead of wallowing stolid and half-nude in the mud, they are sitting clothed and in their right minds. They have been evolved from the depths and darkness of heathenism into the light of the knowledge of God. (18)

Note that, in Jennie Bixby's account, the Burmese Christians did not "evolve" by themselves. Rather, her use of the passive tense subtly evokes the active interventions of the missionaries, who are credited for their acceleration of the process of evolutionary development.

Yet, we should keep in mind that it is not the case that missionaries like the Bixbys denied the Burmese all intelligence. In her memoirs, Jennie Bixby frequently admires the ingenuity displayed by the indigenous people she encounters. In one striking moment, she describes in careful detail the Karen method for cooking rice when travelling through the jungle. She writes,

For utensils they turned to their never-failing friend, the bamboo. Selecting one about six inches in diameter, they divided it just below each joint, thus obtaining a vessel two or three feet in length, open at the top, perfectly tight, and possessing in itself a sweet, delicate flavor, which is no detriment to the food. Filling this one-third full of rice, with a little water, they placed it in the fire, resting it in an inclined position on a horizontal pole. The bamboo, being green, does not burn. When the rice is cooked, they cut the bamboo open lengthwise, and, laying open the two parts, had their rice all ready. It was a breakfast which cannot be equaled in this country. (19)

Perhaps the admiration missionaries like Miss Bixby expresses here stemmed in part from the difficulties that they had in adjusting to the environmental conditions of Burma. It is not often noted, but the very physical survival of missionaries frequently depended on the support and assistance they gained from indigenous people, whether converts, unconverted school teachers, employers, or strangers. Yet, even as Jennie Bixby expresses positive regard for the Burmese in paragraphs like this, such moments of admiration are ultimately embedded in a teleological understanding of history that regards humanity as marching resolutely towards a single pinnacle of development. Not surprisingly this perspective identifies the pinnacle with Christianity and the way of life of the modern west, reducing the accomplishments of Burmese civilization to quaint curiosities on the edge of extinction.

The relationship of missionaries to the cultural artifacts around them was deeply informed by this evolutionist point of view. For example, consider the Buddhist Pali scriptures painstakingly etched on narrow strips of palmyra leaves, their curly letters scratched onto the surface of the dried leaves with an iron quill, which Moses Bixby included in his collection [link to digital photo]. The script, the dimensions, even the materials of these "books" would be entirely unfamiliar to someone accustomed to the books of the Western religious tradition. Emptied of their original significance, their presence in the context of the Bixby collection takes on new meanings. When one places them next to the American Baptist Hymnal translated into Burmese, printed on paper, and bound with glue and cloth, the palm-leaf Buddhist scriptures establish the basis for a powerful "before and after" narrative [link to digital photo]. This story of progress, the displacement of the old with the new, is enhanced by the note attached to the palm-leaf scriptures, which indicates that they were given to the missionaries by converts as tokens of the genuineness of their conversion. (20)

The story of the triumph of Christianity over the barbaric religions of Burma could be told in innumerable ways. The notion of the supersedability of non-Protestant religion sometimes took on a geological metaphor, enacted in a widespread missionary ritual, which was to build their chapels, shrines and churches on top of the ruins of abandoned or neglected Buddhist shrines [link to digital photo]. The new sacred structure was thus erected on the ruins of the old, testifying to the irrelevance of the old, traditional ways of life and spirituality in the context of modernity. Such an event was probably the context for the discovery of the Three-Elephant Buddha obtained by Moses Bixby in 1861, during his first foray in Shan territory. A handwritten note inserted in the margins of an edition of Rev. Bixby's biography, written by Bixby's daughter and passed down through the family, indicates that the figure was discovered in the process of the construction of a Christian chapel on the site of a ruined Buddhist temple. Next to the passage describing the travails that Rev. Bixby had to overcome in the course of this project the note reads in neat block letters, "Where elephant idol was found: over 300 years old." (21)

The land in which the figure was discovered had been granted to the Mission by the English Deputy Commissioner. It is not clear whether or not he knew or cared that the land was the site of an old Buddhist temple that had fallen out of use. According to Jennie Bixby Johnson, "There were many such places in the neighborhood, the disturbance of which always aroused the indignation of priests." (22) In this instance, local resistance to the construction of a Christian chapel initially took the form of a claim that a great deal of silver was buried at the base of the old pagoda. Rev. Bixby countered with an invitation to the locals to dig. The search was unsuccessful - no silver was found. But next the residents objected that they wanted to rebuild the pagoda, arguing that it would be "an awful sin for you to build on a sacred spot." (23)

Such a contest over the control of sacred space could be read as yet another instance of a recurrent manifestation of racial and communal conflict. The forceful takeover of sacred space in colonial situations has frequently functioned as a sort of symbolic violence, serving to humiliate the community by exposing its inability to retain control over a site which had been used for the very rituals and symbols through which it reproduced its own identity. Certainly, the impotence of the Burmese in the face of this encroachment must have been clear to everyone involved. But the residents' resistance to the construction of the chapel on the site of their old shrine should also be viewed in the context of colonial policy towards religion.

One of the notable features of British colonial rule of south and southeast Asia was the effort on the part of the state to rule in such a manner that they did not interfere with the customs and religious beliefs of the natives. This was formally acknowledged in Queen Victoria's declaration of 1858 which marked the transfer of the rulership of British empire in south and southeast Asia from the East India Company to the British crown, but it had been a governing principle since early times. The policy of religious neutrality was controversial and frequently difficult to maintain, particularly when it came to issues regarding Christian missionaries. If colonial officials actively supported the evangelizing work of missionaries, they opened themselves to the charge that they were trying to subvert the native's religious beliefs, practices and institutions. At the same time, if they discouraged the missionaries' efforts, they were vulnerable to the complaint that they were, in the first place, not good Christians and, secondly, not supporting the civilizing mission of the colonial state. When the state found it necessary to intervene in support or defense of local religious institutions or practices, they generally did so by emphasizing the risk involved in offending the religious sensibilities of the locals. Particularly after the Indian Rebellion of 1858, colonial policy makers portrayed the subject populations of Asia as religious fanatics, whose passionate defense of their religious customs and beliefs was a veritable powder-keg, the explosion of which could disrupt the smooth functioning of the state. As a result, one of the few arguments that natives in British-controlled south and southeast Asia could effectively put forward in the defense of their land, property, or way of life was to claim that the contested land or practice was either sacred or a time-honored custom. Depending on the sensibilities and philosophy of the district officer in charge, such an argument would be scorned, ignored or honored. According to this perspective, the ruined pagoda may or may not have been as important to the local residents as Jennie Bixby contends; what was important was the strategic use of the argument that the site still had sacred value to them, as a bid to resist further encroachment by Westerners.

In Jennie Bixby's account, the first and most important precondition for the missionary's ability to overcome the resistance of the locals, namely, the governmental authority of the British official who granted the land to the mission, goes un-remarked upon. What Miss Bixby concentrates her attention on is a timely intervention made by one of the Shan Christian converts, a schoolteacher presumably employed by the mission. His speech evidently also played an important role in silencing the people's objections to the construction of the chapel. It is not clear that Jennie Bixby, the author of this account and Rev. Bixby's daughter, is the most reliable source for what actually transpired during this encounter, since even if she had been physically present, she would have been no more than eight years old. Nevertheless, the speech that Miss Bixby places in the mouth of the Shan schoolteacher is significant for the way that it illustrates both the missionaries' somewhat distorted views of indigenous Burmese religious beliefs and practices and the way they deployed religious arguments to legitimate the colonization of Burma.

According to Bixby, the schoolteacher began his defense of the missionary's actions by reproaching his fellow villagers for their carelessness with their own gods in the first place. He said, "This little god has been so neglected that trees and grass have grown all over him and they had become so heavy that the god complained bitterly of weariness." In a bold rhetorical move, he went on to represent Rev. Bixby as an ally and friend to the local deity, declaring that, "Teacher Bixby has had compassion on him and has cut away the bushes." (24) Following this he returned to a different argument, one which represents the divine figure enshrined in the pagoda more as a spirit, a nat or a demi-god, than as the Buddha. "Furthermore," he argued, "for a long time you have not visited him; you have given him no rice, no offerings, but have bestowed your attentions on the great pagoda; therefore this little god has become jealous and gone over to a better teacher. You thought it would be a great sin for Teacher Bixby to build even by the side of this little god, but you could dig into his side in your greed for gold, without sin." The Three-Elephant Throne Buddha discovered in the course of this contested excavation certainly has enough of the iconographic features of Burmese Buddhist statuary to conclude that it is a representation of a Buddha, not a nat [insert link to photo]. Therefore, while the description of worship that Ms. Bixby puts in the mouth of the Shan schoolteacher may suggest an instance of complete overlap between Buddhist and nat worship, more likely it represents the difficulty that missionaries had in accurately understanding the nature of local religious practice.

One thing the Shan schoolteacher's speech does convey very clearly is the way that missionaries and their indigenous associates used religious rhetoric to justify their actions. The reasons given for the razing of the old pagoda and the erection of the chapel, whether they came from the Shan teacher himself or from Miss Bixby's imagination, sought to legitimate Rev. Bixby's iconoclastic actions on the basis of the claim that the "old gods" were too weak to defend themselves or were no longer active in the defense of their own territory or the people under their protection. The schoolteacher's criticism also implied that the people themselves were too weak, lazy or preoccupied with petty pursuit of wealth to defend themselves or their gods and thus deserved their fate. In a sense, it was a version of the argument used on a larger scale to legitimate the whole colonial project: the old gods are dead, the occupation of the sacred site/country by a stronger force is thus both just and inevitable.

At the end of his lecture, writes Miss Bixby, the Shan teacher grew serious and concluded with an appeal to the reality of the Christian God, ending his discourse with the words, "Brethren, grass does not grow upon God." (25) In the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century Protestant missions, locating the sacred in objects was a privileged sign of the backwardness of non-Christian (specifically Protestant Christianity) religions. Certainly, Protestants invested objects with wide range of values, monetary, utilitarian, nostalgic, nationalistic and so forth. But the long-standing prohibition on the use of images of gods in Christian worship (based on an assumption shared by all three Abrahamic religions, that the sacred could not be circumscribed by material things) gained renewed importance in the early modern explosion of missionary activity, when it became a prime signifier of the difference between Protestant Christians and all other religious groups (including, significantly, Roman Catholics). Where non-Christians, like Buddhists, worshipped weak, dying or dead gods, whose impotence was reflected in the passivity and uselessness of the wooden, plaster or metal icons made in their image, Protestants worshipped a "living god," who could be praised and described with words, but not represented or contained by material objects. Neither space nor time allow for a discussion here of the complex history of the use and meaning of images and icons in Buddhism in general, and in Burmese and Shan Theravada Buddhism in particular. Suffice to say that the Burmese and Shan attitude towards images of the Buddha was by no means as simplistic as Bixby and other missionaries represented it to be. What is important to note is the way in which "idols," or figures of Buddhist supernatural beings, Buddhas or boddhisattvas, functioned as particularly effective symbols within missionary rhetoric of the vulnerability of "primitive" religion to be being superceded. The idea that the divine was thought to be contained somehow by the object meant that the other divine beings could be captured and denatured by taking possession of the idol, becoming, in essence, a trophy for the conqueror. As trophies, pieces of religious art lost their original sacred quality and became symbols of the triumph of Christianity and Western culture over the "barbaric" Burmese culture.

Secular Excursions: The Hensley Buddha

The encounter between Burma and America did not always result in religious intolerance or cultural chauvinism. A very different attitude towards Buddhist objects is seen in the memoirs of Muriel Sue De Gaa Upfill (1893-1985), whose bronze Burmese Buddha is one of the finest pieces of the collection. Sue Upfill was raised in Willows, California, as the daughter of a printer. In a somewhat unusual move for a young woman of her generation, she traveled quite far afield to pursue her career, working as a secretary for American law firms in Honolulu and Shanghai. It was in Shanghai that she met her husband to be, Lindsay Upfill, a New Zealander in the employment of the New Zealand Insurance Company. Around 1930, Lindsay Upfill's firm brought the young married couple to Burma. One does not normally associate insurance adjusters with the swashbuckling frontiers of the nineteenth-century British colonies, yet the enormous traffic in raw materials and commodities that was a crucial raison d'être of colonialism required the expertise and financial backing of companies with large stores of capital and a global reach, such as the company for which Upfill worked.

When Lindsay and Sue Upfill arrived, the conditions they faced in Burma were very different from those faced by the Bixby's. British colonialism was well established by the 1930s. Rather than having to invent a life for themselves as the missionary pioneers of the early nineteenth-century had to, the Upfill's could step into--or choose to transgress--the well-worn roles and expectations set for the small expatriate community in Burma. Upfill's memoirs are filled with suggestions that she regularly transgressed the usual convention and protocol of proper colonial society. Writing of her first days in Burma, Upfill reports, "Two glorious days of sightseeing followed. It was against the wishes of our British friends that we removed our shoes and went into the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Everywhere one saw the sign "Footwearing Prohibited," but we were permitted to make sandals of adhesive tape for our feet, and we entered the building." (26)

Even though the British were well-entrenched as the de facto and de jure rulers of the country by 1930, British rule by no means went uncontested. In neighboring India, nationalists of all stripes had begun agitating for political independence. Many freedom fighters expelled from India ended up in Burma where they inspired the locals to follow their example. The smooth surface of daily life was frequently upset by social unrest, whether stemming from communal violence between native Burmese and Indian immigrant workers or student strikes spurred by the example of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement. Mrs. Upfill's account illustrates vividly the value colonists placed on being able to maintain the rituals and customs of colonial life, such as full-dress dinner parties and excursions to the hills, even under the most unstable political circumstances. Some of the most beautiful silver objects in the Hensley collection, for example the Burmese Christian David Hla's engraved cigarette case and golf trophy, suggest the importance of the rituals and institutions that supported the ideology of cultural superiority on which British colonialism depended [insert link to digital photo]. Though these institutions tended to be racially and religiously segregated, serving to ratify the superiority of white colonists by setting them apart from the colonial subjects, they functioned because of the cooperation, willing or not, of the Burmese, who comprised their staff.

At the height of colonial rule of Burma, foreigners like Mrs. Upfill could employ a wide variety of artisans and servants adept at providing the goods and services suitable for Western tastes. This relationship of cooperation between local artisans and their new patrons (the colonizers) enabled a kind of hybrid Oriental-Western aesthetic to develop, in which Western utilitarian objects were constructed out of indigenous materials by local artisans. These highly skilled laborers could create pieces that were entirely modeled on Western objects-such as the set of rosewood furniture that Upfill was lucky to acquire "for a mere song" from a couple departing Burma for Madras. Each piece of furniture of this set was a replica of a piece from the collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., reflecting with great exactitude the style and design of a particular period in American furniture-making. (27)

Local artisans also created Western utilitarian objects employing indigenous styles and design motifs. A marvelous example of this kind of hybridization is the silver tea set which was presented to Mrs. Zelda Graham, another important donor to the Denison gallery and a contemporary of both Helen Hunt and Sue Upfill, by her staff of servants [insert link to digital photo]. While the overall shape and dimensions of the tea pot, milk jug, sugar jar and tray are determined by the conventions of the classic English tea set, the surface of the pieces has been worked in traditional Burmese silver-working fashion, with scenes from the great South and Southeast Asian epic story, the Ramayana, embossed on the sides. Such hybridization suggests changing tastes. Whereas earlier colonizers may have tended to recoil at the aesthetic differences between their own styles and those of the indigenous Burmese, after nearly one hundred years of coexistence, Westerners in Burma developed a taste for local flavor.

What had made this possible? For one thing, in the seventy years between the Bixby's departure from Burma and the Upfill's arrival, colonial ethnographers, botanists, folklorists, and other assorted experts had produced a great deal of knowledge about the culture and people of the area. This knowledge helped to transform Burma in the colonial imagination from a dark and mysterious land full of danger into a "known" place to be toured, explored and enjoyed for Westerners. Mrs. Upfill contributed to the army of amateur and professional scientists who made Burma a known place. She made dozens of films of local people, including efforts at ethnographic film, which, regrettably, were destroyed during WWII. The increased knowledge about Burma made a more refined form of collecting possible, which in turn generated a market for oriental antiquities governed by established rules of taste and value. As James Clifford notes, collecting serves a very important social function by transforming "an excessive, sometimes even rapacious need to have … into rule-governed, meaningful desire. Thus the self that must possess but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies-to make 'good' collections." (28) This change in the nature of collecting mirrors a change in the nature of colonialism, reflecting in some senses the triumph of the view that the purpose of British colonialism was not naked greed and unbridled extraction, but the tutoring of a "primitive" East by a more refined, civilized West.

The bronze Buddha came into the possession of Sue Upfill because of the operation of the emerging market in oriental antiquities. Sue and a friend were shopping in Mandalay, the former seat of the royal Burmese government, when they came across a small antique store run by an elderly French dealer, who had been attached to the royal court of King Thibaw, the last Burmese ruler before the annexation of the country by the British. In response to the women's questions, he informed them of the Buddha's history. The seventeenth-century figure came from the monastery of the Tee Hlinke Paya Pagoda, itself an important center of Buddhism since 1085 C.E. [insert link to digital image]. Later, Mrs. Upfill learned that the distinctive female figure at the base of the Buddha, who holds in each of her upheld hands a lock of her parted hair, was the earth goddess, known in Burma as Ma-thon-da-yea. Ma-thon-da-yea's role in the story of Gautama Buddha's enlightenment is behind one of the most common and recognizable mudras (hand-positions) in Buddhist iconography, in which the Buddha is shown touching the earth with one finger. The classic narrative is that after the fourth watch of the night, after withstanding the temptations of Mara (a Buddhist figure similar to the Christian figure of Satan) and realizing the source of suffering and way to end suffering, Buddha touched the ground with his finger and asked the goddess of the earth to witness his victory. The informed and sympathetic interest that Upfill showed in the bronze figure, like her interest in Burmese culture in general, is reflected in her poetic rendering of the culmination of this traditional Buddhist narrative: "As she [Ma-thon-da-yea] wrung her heavy tresses, raindrops fell to earth in recognition of the Buddha's act of charity when he sprinkled water on his followers. The perfume of flowers pervaded the air, the heavens glowed with a rosy light, the earth quaked, and the Buddha passed into the ecstasy of Enlightenment." (29) Mrs. Upfill and her friend eventually left the shop without the statue, feeling that 150 rupees, the equivalent at the time of fifty U.S. dollars, was more than they could afford. The next day Sue Upfill found out that her husband had gone back to the dealer and purchased the bronze Buddha for her as a birthday present.

Mrs. Upfill's nonjudgmental attitude to Burmese culture was unusual, even for this time period. In her memoirs, she paints a largely sympathetic portrait of the indigenous peoples of Burma, which contrasts sharply with that produced by Jennie Bixby. One key difference between the two women's views of Burma is the way that religion serves Upfill as a bridge between her own sensibilities and those of her servants, employees and neighbors, rather than a sign of impassable difference. While Upfill's sympathies with the philosophy and mythology of Buddhism are notable, it is her interest in Burmese folk religion centered on the worship and propitiation of local guardian spirits, the nats, that brings her closest to the world-view of the people who work and live with her in Burma.

One day, she reports, she witnessed a groups of villagers and local Buddhist monks filing past to erect a nat shrine in an enormous spreading pepul tree that grew outside the gate of her bungalow. As a proper Western woman and responsible householder, Upfill's first response was to demand that it be removed. "I won't have a nat tree outside our gate!" she objected and ordered her servant, Tun Shein, to dispose of it. The description she gives of her servant's reaction to her request is reminiscent of Rev. Bixby's conflict with the Shan Buddhists, which we examined earlier. Mrs. Upfill writes,

As a dark cloud swiftly veils the brightness of the sun, so all expression vanished from his face. Silently he stood and contemplated the scene before him. "No, Thakin Ma," he answered gently, "the soothsayers have told the phoongyi [Buddhist monks] that a nat [spirit] has come to live in this tree. The shrine must be placed here. The nat prefers to live in a pepul tree….It is the sacred tree under which the Buddha sat and meditated."

As we saw, when Rev. Bixby and his associates were confronted with a similar argument in defense of space regarded as sacred by the Burmese they firmly rejected it. In this case, however, Upfill capitulates: "It was the custom and religion of the country, so I had no choice in the matter." (30) Mrs. Upfill's verbal shrug here speaks volumes about her willingness to credit Burmese supernatural beliefs with value, and thus her readiness to accept the claim of "custom" or "religion" as authoritative. Her detailed description of the shrine and the careful maintenance the villagers give to the nat further attests to her appreciation for the local religion:

The shrine was made of teakwood, about two feet square, with a high pointed roof. Its overhanging eaves were beautifully and intricately carved, the design being outlined in red and gold leaf...For nine long years, the little shrine remained on the pepul tree at our front gate, and was tended with loving care. Always there were fresh flowers, and never was the candle allowed to flicker and die; and never was I to discover who did these kindly acts, or, indeed, even who left an offering at the shrine. Beside the tree was placed a wooden bench and an earthenware jar for water. I did know that the water came from our well, but not once did I see our servants fill it. (31)

Mrs. Upfill's quick capitulation may also be interpreted, more tentatively, as a sign that by the beginning of the twentieth-century, a new balance had been struck in Burma between the authoritative weight given to local religious beliefs and practices and the claims of Western cultural superiority and the "inevitable" encroachment of Western lifeways such claims supported.

The nat shrine recurs throughout Upfill's memoir as a symbol of her increasing sympathy with and, eventually, immersion in the world-view of the Burmese. For example, when Mr. Upfill's car continually breaks down on the rough roads of the region delaying their arrival at a planned meeting or party, Mrs. Upfill will comment, casually, in a probably tongue-in-cheek manner, that they would have arrived at their destination in a timely fashion, but "the nat willed otherwise." (32) Her tongue-in-cheek adoption of the folk Burmese world-view, whose standard explanation for random misfortune lays blame at the feet on one of the many easily offended nats, stemmed from her growing identification with the country and the people. In the course of her years in Burma, Upfill aligned her interests with the Burmese first by adopting a Burmese child and then by working as a nursing assistant for the St. John's Ambulance Brigade Overseas, from 1938-1942. Towards the end of her narrative, the shrine becomes, I would argue, a sign of her conversion to an ecumenical, pluralistic view of culture and religion.

In 1940 and 1941, the Japanese began making air raids on Rangoon and social unrest became a fact of everyday life. Yet, while many other foreign nationals began making arrangements to leave Burma for India, the Upfill's determined to stay. On Christmas day, 1940, their house was badly damaged by bombing, rendering it unlivable. Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Upfill and their servants prepared to leave, pulling together what was left of their furniture, dishware and personal items as plaster rained down on them from above. In this moment of panic and grief, which Mrs. Upfill renders with characteristic clarity and economy, the nat shrine is the last thing to which she attends. She writes,

Soon our car was packed and I called to Tun Shein to hurry. "Yes, Thakin Ma, in a moment." He stopped to pick a branch of red frangipani and, walking quickly through the gate, he stopped before the nat sein [the nat shrine]. Reverently, he arranged the spray in a little container in the shrine, a tribute to the guardian spirit of our household. I gathered a few orchids and, following him, placed the blossoms beside his offering and breathed a silent prayer to my God. Who shall say whether it was the Buddhist Spirit or the Christian God, or both, who had spared the lives of our household that day?" (33)

As Mrs. Upfill's case indicates, objects given sacred status by the Burmese did not always serve as symbols of Burmese inferiority within colonial rhetoric, but could equally serve as bridges of understanding between colonizer and colonized. Particularly when the Burmese and the British found themselves facing a common enemy in the Japanese, such objects and the rituals that surrounded them could form the basis of solidarity, rather than antagonism.

Conclusion

The different attitudes towards Burmese culture and society articulated by the Bixbys and the Upfills through their relationships to the objects described in this paper reveal the wide range of responses available to Western colonizers. At first glance, one can certainly attribute the stark contrast between the Bixby's and Sue Upfill's responses to Burmese culture to the different worlds they occupied within the social landscape of colonial Burma-the missionary vs. the secular, commercial. Indeed, one would expect a person with an explicitly religious vocation to be more critical of the religious lives of the people to whom he or she had come to preach. But I would argue that the differences in attitudes to the objects that I've discussed not only stems from differences in social location, but also from the fact that the two collectors represent two different "moments," as it were, in the colonial process.

The Bixby's branding of the Three-Elephant Throne Buddha as an "idol" was part and parcel of a powerful ideology that helped to legitimate British colonialism in the years after the Anglo-Burmese wars, when the British were consolidating their power in the country. Similarly, the ease with which Lindsay Upfill purchased the Hensely Buddha was made possible by the fact that by the turn of the century, the British rule of Burma was largely taken for granted, and the political, technical, and economic apparatuses for both subduing resistance and extracting wealth from the colony had been well-refined. Moreover, in the second "moment" of colonialism, the security of British rule depended, in part, on the consent of the colonized, consent that was won in part by the kinds of concessions one sees in the confrontation between Muriel and her servant over the nat sein. It is easy to criticize the suppression of Burmese resistance in the first moment of colonialism, when the colonizers needed the potent stridency of an ideology of cultural and religious superiority to justify their unwelcome presence in the country. Yet an honest appraisal of the whole process of colonialism in Burma would have to recognize that both phases ultimately benefited the colonizers at the great expense of the colonized.

Eliza F. Kent
Central Washington University
September 30, 2000

Footnotes

  1. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 4.
  2. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern" in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 213.
  3. These questions are influenced by James Clifford's well-known essay, "On Collecting Art and Culture," in The Predicament of Culture, 215-289.
  4. Several historians have provided compelling accounts of the internecine struggles, bloody battles, political intrigue, betrayals and compromises that accompanied the transition of Burma from being an independent kingdom with a long history of influence in southeast Asia to becoming a province of British India (officially, in 1886). Yet, the definitive account of Burma's complicated and tragic history, which would be a key instrument in understanding its equally complicated and tragic present, remains to be written. For a passionate account highly critical of Western colonialism, see the history by Maung Htin Aung's, himself an important leader in the struggle for Independence, A History of Burma (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), chapters IX-XII. For a version that privileges the point of view of British imperialists and American missionaries, see John F. Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1958).
  5. Jennie Bixby Johnson, The Life and Work of Moses Homan Bixby (New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1904), 13.
  6. Helen G. Trager, Burma Through Alien Eyes (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 20-80.
  7. Aung, 214; Cady, 67.
  8. Aung, 229, Cady 86-89.
  9. Aung, 229.
  10. Aung, 240-243; Cady, 103.
  11. Trager, 31-44.
  12. Since neither of the two images that I am examining in this paper relate significantly to the people of highland Burma, I will not go into depth with respect to their distinctive beliefs and practices. The interested reader should consult, Charles F. Keyes, ed., Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: the Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979); Edmund Roland Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (London: Athlone Press, 1964); and F.K. Lehman, The Structure of Chin Society: A Tribal People of Burma adapted to a non-Western Civilization (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963).
  13. Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of Suffering (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 42; Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 32.
  14. Spiro, 48.
  15. Spiro, 108-125.
  16. Bixby Johnson, The Life and Work of Moses Homan Bixby, xvii.
  17. Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
  18. Olive Jennie Bixby, My Child-Life in Burmah; or, Recollections and Incidents (Providence, R.I.: H.M. Bixby, M.D., 1880), 21-22.
  19. Ibid., 145.
  20. Such a stark "before and after" contrast belies the inevitably hybridic and syncretic nature of conversion. The Burmese Hymnal, if it is like the innumerable other translations of Christian scriptures into Asian languages, probably borrowed heavily from the religious and liturgical language of Buddhism in order to convey its own theological concepts. The Burmese or Pali words that missionaries used to translate words like "grace," "heaven," and especially, "god," inevitably came laden with their own connotations and histories of usage. The alterations of both Buddhist and Christian ideas that accompany the process of translation of texts like the Baptist Hymnal into Burmese blur the boundaries between the different religious teachings. Yet it is just these kinds of confusions of boundaries that the stark juxtaposition of the Burmese Hymnal and the Pali palm-leaf scriptures are designed to efface. For excellent analyses of the issues raised by translation in the modern expansion of Christianity, see Richard M. Eaton, "Conversion to Christianity among the Nagas, 1876-1971" The Indian Economic and Social History Review. 21 (1984): 1-44; Vincente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
  21. Jennie Bixby Johnson, The Life and Work of Moses Homan Bixby (New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1904), 18. The marginalia, brief though it is, offers a tantalizing glimpse of how the meanings and values attached to objects change over the course of generations. Rev. Bixby's descendents give considerable importance to the object, explicitly because of its age, but perhaps also because of the value given it by the art market in "Oriental art," especially of an antique nature. In spite of recognizing and noting its value in secular contexts, they continue the practice of disparaging its religious value by referring to it as "the elephant idol."
  22. Ibid., 17.
  23. Ibid., 18.
  24. Ibid., 18.
  25. Ibid., 18.
  26. Muriel Sue DeGaa Upfill, An American in Burma, 1930 to 1942 (Tempe, Ariz.: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1999), 3.
  27. Ibid., 31.
  28. Clifford, "On Collecting Art and Culture," 218-219.
  29. Upfill, 61. In Melford Spiro's classic ethnography of Burmese religion, Burmese Supernaturalism, the anthropologist gives the goddess an even more active role in the Buddha's enlightenment in his rendering of her central myth: "When the embryo Buddha was about to be ousted from his place under the Bo tree by Mara, the Buddhist Satan, Withoudaya, the earth goddess, put the Evil One and his hosts to flight in the flood of water which she wrung from her hair, wet with libations commemorating the meritorious deeds performed by the future Buddha" (46).
  30. Ibid., 46.
  31. Ibid., 46-47.
  32. Ibid., 84.
  33. Ibid., 193.