ABSTRACT
The result was a traveling “missionary ethnographic exhibition” that started to roll in 1924 and toured the nation for over a decade and brought visual images and about one thousand artifacts from the missionary fi eld in lower Congo to small towns and rural outposts throughout Sweden.5 With this “Congo Bus” as the focus of my case study, I will devote the present chapter to missionary media strategies in a period of self-defi ned crisis. The analytical focus will be on conventions and techniques of exhibition that developed within the movement and which-as I will argue-differ signifi cantly from equivalents in contemporary museums of ethnography. How should the systematized and laborious circulation of concrete things and images from geographically distant places be understood? What constituted the affective and moral power of the traveling exhibition to its temporary audiences? Raising questions like these, I also wish to contribute more generally to an understanding of the relationship between concrete exhibition techniques and the enrolment of participants in social movements.
