Encountering Colonial Worlds Through Missionary Maps in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Grand Duchy of Finland

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Finnish Missionary Society utilized mass-produced maps and related reading materials to fuel geographical imaginations that concerned non-European populations and lands to gain support for the missionary cause between 1859 and the mid-1890s. The chapter shows how the maps and texts entangled the Finnish audiences with the processes of colonization in complex ways: they reproduced discussions concerning human difference, generated geographies of cannibalism, and entwined Finnish missionary work with discourse of colonial philanthropy. Once the FMS started its own mission in Owambo, the maps were utilized to bridge the geographical distance and make the colonial space of “Ovamboland” their own.

From Everyday Map-Things to Oblivion? The Social Lives of Finnish Missionary World Maps

“…Scholars writing the history of the FMS have often referred to the arguments concerning the significance of the Finnish map and detailed their status as one of the bestsellers of the FMS's publications (Paunu 1909, 14;Väkeväinen 1988;Remes 1993, 33, 35, 252;Löytty 2006, 42;Merivirta, Koivunen, and Särkkä 2021, 10;Skurnik 2021). However, the social relationships that the maps entered into remain unexplored.…”