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Material traces of religious change in africa, asia and latin america

The international missionary organizations that emerged in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America established outposts in some of the remotest regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Missionaries were among the first to recognize the communications potential of the new medium of photography, in some cases as early as the 1840s. Photographs were useful for record keeping and reports and for the edification of supporting publics at home. But missionaries were curious beyond practicality; as they became more proficient with cameras they took pictures of everything around them. As a result, their collections provide invaluable evidence of cultural encounters and social change in non-Western cultures. Until recently, the usefulness of these collections was limited by their unorganized state and dispersion across many sites. Few investigators are able to move from one archive to another in search of visual documentation for a scholarly argument and thematically driven comparative visual research that spans regions, cultures and time periods has been especially difficult. It was with those limitations in mind that an international team of scholars and archivists created the Internet Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) at the University of Southern California (http://www.usc.edu/impa). IMPA is an open, searchable repository of digitized and cataloged pictures from the collections of several important missionary organizations, assembled and maintained by a partnership involving USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) and the Digital Archive of the USC Libraries. When the photographs are brought together in a single place, they become a resource for scholarship across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, including not only religious studies but also history, art history, economics, political science, area studies, anthropology, international relations and comparative sociology. This project has gone through three phases to date.