Reading Through Traces: Xaverian Strategies of Including Chinese Folk Deities’ Statues in Museum Displays and Fictions in Parma, Italy

ABSTRACT This work reflects on the presence of a desacralized Buddha statue in the Museum of Chinese Art and Ethnography, established in Parma, Italy, in 1901 by Xaverian missionaries. The Buddha's hollowed back is a potent trace of the transnational interactions between these Roman Catholic missionaries and folk believers from the Henan region (mainland China) in the early 20th century. As a trace, it is a multitemporal artifact accounting for missionary and local ambivalence toward statues of folk deities. Whilst missionaries saw the latter as a tool for their preaching practice and the target of iconoclasm, local folk believers—regardless of their religious affiliation—feared the residual spiritual potency of folk deities' statues discarded after religious conversions and iconoclasm. Traces of both approaches toward folk deities' statues emerge from missionary literary accounts and are partly retraceable in curatorial practice. Analyzing traces in missionary fiction suggests direction in provenance research blocked by inaccessible and fragmented archives.