Processual Decay Paradigm WP1: Data and Analysis

These documents compile the archival data I collected at the Museo d'Arte Cinese ed Etnografico of the Xaverian missionaries in Parma, Italy, on which I based the research for WP1 "Material Decay as a Historical Process" of my MSCA-CZ project "Processual Decay Paradigm: Problematizing Museums and Asian Religions". This research was connected to my attempt to reconstruct the collecting circumstances of one folk religious statue collected by the missionaries in the Henan region (China) in 1912 by monsignor Luigi Calza. First, with the document "List and Analysis of Archival Material at the Xaverian Museum in Parma", I provide a list of all the sources consulted and their location (either at the Xaverian Institute's Library, the museum's library, Palatina Library, or as online resources digitalised by the Centre of Xaverian Documentation in Rome and publicly accessible). I primarily scanned the documents or had them scanned by the librarian for a fee. The sources consulted included missionary novels, theatrical pieces, apologetic texts, essays, and complete newspaper issues published between 1903 and 1949 (the year when Xaverian missionaries were expelled from China by the Maoist regime), for a total of 640 documents. The document uploaded here examines 83 documents that I selected as the most relevant to my research. Regarding missionary novels, I also include an abstract of the plot as narrated and its relevance to my project. Of these 83 documents, I coded 33 sources based on their relevance using the qualitative data analysis software Dedoose. This method enabled me to assess the pervasiveness of certain dynamics and key concepts among Xaverian missionaries during their activity in the Henan region. The documents "Codes applied to Media Charts" and "Packed Code Cloud" demonstrate how these codes appear in each selected publication and visualise their weight using a buzzword automatically generated by Dedoose. This data set was used for the publication of the OA article "Reading Through Traces: Xaverian Strategies of including Chinese Folk Deities' Statues in Museum Displays and Fictions in Parma" for the journal Museum Anthropology. Future OA publications and research projects will derive from this dataset. This is the second version of the dataset to update the museum entries consulted.