‘Anthropology was born of the marriage of foreign missions and modern science,’ wrote W. C. Willoughby confidently in 1913. Edwin Smith, another leading missionary anthropologist, repeated this assertion eleven years later. ‘Social anthropology might almost be claimed as a missionary science,’ he declared, ‘first, on account of its great utility to missionaries, and second, because the material upon which it is built has so largely been gathered by them.’ When Smith wrote these lines, missionaries’ sturdy tribal monographs lined the shelves of the new university departments of social anthropology, their articles filled a range of journals, and they were about to play a leading role in the funding and organization of the new discipline. Yet within ten years the age of the missionary anthropologist was in decline and his, rather than her, contribution to the discipline quickly faded. This chapter explores the emergence and decline of missionary contributions to anthropology.
Missionaries contributed some of the earliest works of anthropology, ranging from Jean de Lery’s Histoire d’un voyage en terre du Bresil (1578), which Claude Levi-Strauss described as the first work of ethnography, to the classics of Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix and Jean-Marie Lafitau, Jesuit missionaries in early eighteenth-century Canada. European philosophers turned to such missionary texts to find evidence in support of their explanations for such phenomena as the origins of language or the development of private property. Missionaries were obliged to become skilled propagandists to raise funds for their costly evangelical endeavours and gladly supplied metropolitan thinkers with the data on the place and evolution of humanity in the world.
In the early nineteenth century this genre of literature, focusing on travel and description, grew appreciably in size, introducing tens of thousands of readers to the diverse habits and customs of a wide range of peoples. Missionary bulletins, journals, magazines, religious tracts, and Sunday school literature carried a good deal of information on the customs of people in need of evangelical attention. Photographs were used from an early date to raise the awareness of supporters at home and to solicit funds. Owing to the predominant missionary concern to propagate the gospel, there was a tendency to portray the customs of native peoples as an obstacle to civilization and, hence, as a worthy target for the ministrations of metropolitan Christians. Alternatively, indigenous people were portrayed as victims of the despotism of their rulers, slave traders, or, merely, the weight of custom and community. However, some missionaries developed an expose literature aimed at denouncing the injustices to which their congregants, real and potential, were subjected by colonial rule. As missionaries became familiar with local customs, governments increasingly called on them to provide information on the people among whom they lived. When colonial governments tried to impress the rule of law in frontier areas, this information grew to include descriptions of local customs, evidence on how best to supply the labour market, or simply suggestions on how to solve ‘the native problem’.
By the third quarter of the nineteenth century many missionaries were eager to display their observations of native peoples before a more scholarly readership. The large and growing number of geographical society journals and the first anthropological journals provided a natural home for articles on ethnographic subjects. Missionaries also began to publish books on customs and beliefs of various peoples. Books such as Fritz Ramseyer’s Quatre ans chez les Achanties (1876) painted a vivid picture of the dark forces faced by evangelical Christians in Africa and remained a key text in missionary propaganda for the next hundred years. During this ‘heroic age’ of evangelical expansion, many other missionaries contributed to the view that ‘heathen’ customs were of diabolical inspiration. In an age of growing racism, these texts buttressed the view that non-European peoples were fixed at lower levels of evolution and that only missionary supervision could bring about their spiritual and secular salvation.
Other work presented a more favourable picture of indigenous societies. Les Bassoutos (1859) by Eugene Casalis, a French Protestant missionary in South Africa, provided an enlightened description of the ‘habits and customs’ of the Basotho. Henry Callaway and John Colenso, both bishops in the Anglican Church, produced pioneering work in the fields of Zulu religion and folklore. Jeff Guy has drawn attention to the importance of William Ngidi, Colenso’s assistant, in delineating features of Zulu religion and persuading the bishop to accept some African beliefs and practices that were unacceptable to his Church. David Chidester, on the other hand, holds that Callaway and Colenso ‘invented’ African religion through a discursive strategy built on analogies drawn between modern African beliefs and those of the Old Testament and ancient Europe. For Guy, and Colenso himself, the bishop’s Christianity was strongly influenced by the authentic religiosity of the Zulu people; for Chidester, that religiosity was constructed by Europeans who, confronted by new concepts of deep time and biblical criticism, were eager to extend their knowledge of history beyond the 6,000 years contained in the Bible. Educated churchmen in the outposts of Empire sought—and found—reflections of their own morality and belief systems, and a universality of religion in the behaviour and practices of primitive people. However, in the process they created (‘invented’ or ‘imagined’) rather than ‘found’ many non-European religions. Missionaries certainly spent a good deal of time looking for a Supreme Being in the languages of the communities they encountered. Yet frequently they ended up finding only vestiges of this figure in their searches and, in the process, convinced themselves that local religious beliefs had degenerated from the monotheistic stage recounted in the Bible. Other missionaries believed they could find vernacular terms for a Supreme Being in native languages, and with these terms, proof of an evolved, almost natural, religious consciousness in primitive societies.
But many of their colleagues, often in the same missionary society, believed they had merely invented a name for God by infusing local words with their own, Christian meanings. (See pp. 206-11.)
Virtually all missionaries adhered to a common belief in the biblical narrative of a single origin of humankind. This put them in the opposite camp to that of the polygenists, who held that humankind had many origins and that its races were the equivalent of zoological species. Monogenist missionaries gathered in the Aborigines Protection Society (founded 1837), which was concerned with human rights, and the Ethnological Society of London (founded 1843), which was concerned with science. In Africa they threw themselves into the moral crusade of the anti-slavery movement. This cocktail of humanitarian care and scientific curiosity underlay much of the missionaries’ interest in the workings of aboriginal societies. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century missionary texts grew in sophistication and scale. By this stage, too, the rise of evolutionist theory as the key to understanding led ‘scientific’ theorists to look more closely at the elements of humanity on the outskirts of Empire. Johan Bachofen in Basel, Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States, Edward Tylor and, later, James Frazer in Oxford turned to missionary writings to recover a picture of aboriginals who seemed to represent an unrecorded stage in Europe’s history. A relationship quickly developed between missionaries and metropolitan experts whereby the men in the field, like collectors in the natural sciences, supplied the professionals at home with the evidence needed to classify and compare cultures. By tracing the vestiges, or ‘survivals’, of previous cultures found in current practices, these early anthropologists believed they could detect the course of humanity as it progressed from one stage of evolution to another. Bachofen claimed to find evidence of an earlier, ‘matriarchal’ stage of development in missionaries’ reports on the special relationship in some African societies between a son and his mother’s brother and descriptions of female ‘Amazon’ warriors. Armchair anthropologists could piece together these remnants of earlier cultures and construct, in much the same way as palaeontologists with a few bones, an earlier stage of human existence. Bachofen remarked with some irony that he had undertaken all his fieldwork ‘in his slippers’, and Tylor and Frazer, famously for later generations, never crossed the Mediterranean. The missionaries’ role as fieldworkers in the pursuit of knowledge provided a new sense of purpose and a link with influential centres of knowledge and power at home. The rise of anthropology as a science also caused many missionaries to reconsider the culture of primitive peoples in new ways. As the beliefs and practices of aboriginal peoples became a focus of science, their culture was viewed increasingly as an object of legitimate interest rather than a product of diabolical agency or a sign of human decadence. Some missionaries shifted their attention away from the dark, gothic practices and unspeakable rites that called for Christian intervention, towards appreciation of the spiritual and spontaneous disposition of aboriginal peoples.
Most missionaries were content to play the junior partner in modern science by reporting on the customs of natives and to see their observations incorporated into the works of the experts at home. However, there were exceptions. Lorimer Fison, a Methodist missionary in Fiji, collected folklore in the 1860s and corresponded with Max Muller and Lewis Morgan. He went even further during a stay in Australia by classifying kinship terminology in such a way as to elaborate on Morgan’s evolutionary schema. He and his colleague A. W. Howitt showed that Australian Aborigines had their own marriage rules and gave their own meanings, filled with implicit rights and obligations, to different, classificatory members of the ‘family’ or group. Most importantly, Fison stressed the importance of the community in Aboriginal life. Individuals had no say in marriage strategies, which, he pointed out, were decided on by the tribe, or the class within the tribe, to which the individual belonged. Fison went on to show that one of the communities he described practised an extremely early form of marriage. In this community people formed promiscuous liaisons within their group while, in the second group he studied, people had ‘advanced’ from the stage of ‘group marriage’ to one in which marriages were entered into between partners. The next stage in the evolution of marriage practices was also manifested in this group by the existence of marriage by elopement. By choosing to enter into this form of marriage, women placed their individual interests above those of the community. This not only showed an ‘advance’ in the growth of individualism; it also indicated an evolution towards patriarchy as marital rights were transferred from the group to the husband. Fison’s work combined research in the field with theory. It seemed to unveil Aboriginal communities as remnants of a lost past that provided a living picture of the long evolution of humanity. By situating these groups on an evolutionary scale, he indicated how they should be governed. Experts in the metropole praised Fison’s contribution to the advancement of anthropology.
Fison encouraged other missionaries to gather ethnographic data, particularly the Oxford-educated Anglican missionary Robert Codrington, who arrived in Melanesia in 1863. (See p. 201.) Codrington was appalled by the ravages brought to isolated island communities by labour-recruiting, imported liquor, and other elements of European civilization. This led him to regard contemporary evolutionist theories with scepticism and, instead, to construct an ethnography based on careful personal observation. Codrington brought a critical eye to his ‘fieldwork’ by questioning the bias of his Christian and non-Christian informants, and by interrogating the deep importance of translation. He was particularly concerned to give the native point of view by transcribing verbatim accounts of their beliefs and practices. This led him to look behind the ‘superstitions’ of the natives for a system of religious belief that he described as ‘mana’, a supernatural power distinct from Tylor’s notion of animism. Codrington and Fison developed a critical ethnography that was not subservient to the theories of the experts with whom they communicated in England and America. But whereas Fison organized his work around the concept of evolution, Codrington wrote in a pre-evolutionist register that avoided explanation or that attributed change to the early migrations of population groups.
Missionaries in many parts of the Empire shared Fison’s interest in folklore. Their work in the fields of translation and transcription necessarily drew them into the oral literature of these communities. Following the lead of philological experts in Europe, many missionaries believed that linguistics and folklore could indicate the level of development of the natives just as effectively as the structure of kinship. There was no consensus on these issues. Some missionaries thought the languages and oral literatures of aboriginal communities rich and creative expressions of an original mindset, while others regarded them as degenerate remnants of a former, higher stage of evolution—or as childlike products infused with sin and immorality. Those influenced by romanticism saw in native languages and folklore a reflection of primitive, pre-Christian purity, the soul of a people, and a creative genius and morality that had a specific contribution to make to the evolution of humanity. Missionaries played a vital role in capturing on paper languages and folklores that were threatened with extinction by the rising tide of modernity.
There were differences of opinion over the plasticity of folklore. Was it, as the romantics believed, a true reflection of the soul of a people, or merely a creative product shaped and formed by the changing context in which those people lived. There was debate over whether folklore needed to be copied verbatim from elderly representatives of the tribe or whether it could be collected by students and Christian converts. Despite these differences of opinion, virtually all missionaries saw folklore as a window to the beliefs, values, and morality of native communities. It thus served to provide a linguistic group with beliefs and practices that distinguished its culture from that of its neighbours. In this way, the missionaries in the field distinguished tribes, nations, and peoples as clearly defined groups on which they reported to the philological experts at home. These professionals then compared the different languages and grouped them into linguistic families in much the same way as natural scientists gathered related species of animals and plants into a common genus. This was a way of filling space with manageable units; but it was also a powerful new means of explanation. As the borders of Empire expanded, the State’s concern with native peoples shifted from frontier policing to administration and control of newly subject peoples.
Unfortunately, many scholars came to treat the names of linguistic categories not just as terms applied to specific facts they had grouped together, but as facts themselves. The same process occurred in the natural sciences when collectors ‘uncovered’ relationships between species they saw as either God’s handiwork or the product of the laws of nature. This way of looking at the composition of the animate (and inanimate) world obscured the degree of human invention and imagination required to assemble languages and related folklores, or, for that matter, species of butterflies or beetles. However, this approach had the great advantage of providing the world with a regular order by placing individuals in groups that could be situated in both time and space. The reification of an idea (a linguistic category invented by human beings) into a social group (a natural tribe or race) had important political consequences.
At the turn of the twentieth century peripatetic missionaries were driven by their intellectual background, and by the nature of their work, to lump tribal peoples together in generic groups such as ‘the Kaffirs’ or ‘the Bantu’. Books on these subjects, with their sweeping claims about the natives, initially enjoyed a wide popular appeal. But it was the splitters, concentrating on narrow tribal groups, who came to dominate the emerging discipline of anthropology. Missionaries gradually covered the Empire with a patchwork of tribal studies; through their published works and museum exhibitions, they popularized this perception of the tribe as the natural social unit for ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ peoples. In the metropole this work gradually won the support of both professional anthropologists and missionary societies. Progressive missionaries moderated their condemnatory approach to aboriginal cultures and, instead, sought to select and understand certain practices as a legitimate basis on which to build new and authentic forms of Christianity, education, and politics.
The conquests that accompanied the spread of Empire also required a thorough knowledge of aboriginal cultures. In some areas, like the Gold Coast, the colonial government was willing to invest time and money in this task; but in other areas, such as South Africa in the years after the Anglo-Boer War, missionaries initially shouldered this role, particularly through their participation in the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1907 this association called on the South African states to preserve the observations made by missionaries and others before ‘the advance of civilization began to obscure and even obliterate all true traditions, customs and habits of the South African peoples’. These would soon be ‘irrevocably lost’ as the missionaries died out or became frail, the committee warned in its annual report, which mooted the establishment of a Central Ethnographical Bureau for the British colonies of South Africa and stressed that success depended on the willingness of missionaries to participate in the collection of artefacts and data.
Calls for evangelical enthusiasm to be reinforced by anthropological understanding culminated in 1910 when Commission IV of the World Missionary Conference debated this point in Edinburgh. The issue was of vital importance for the many young practitioners, who were calling for Christianity to be built on the positive aspects of indigenous culture. This perspective won the day at Edinburgh when the Conference called on each mission society to embark on a scientific study of the population inhabiting its field of operation. J. H. Oldham, an Oxford graduate and former missionary in India, was a leading force in propelling the missionary movement towards greater concern with social and political issues. He had played a major role at Edinburgh, served as Secretary to the Conference Continuation Committee and, in 1912, founded the International Review of Missions. At a time when missionaries were still destroying shrines and killing sacred pythons in Tanganyika, and burning protective charms on the Witwatersrand, this journal saw anthropology as a tool that would enable missionaries to understand the cultures, and come to love the people to whom they had been assigned by their calling. It would soon develop into a leading review attracting articles and book reviews, from both amateurs and professionals, on the theory, methodology, and experience of anthropology.