Early 19th century Protestant missionaries went to the South Pacific not only to save souls but also to document and portray the natural depravity of savage life, of life without the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The missionaries documented what they called idolatry, superstitions, cannibalism, promiscuity, sadistic violence, infanticide, the ritual killing of widows and aged parents, and many other “abominations” as evidence of the unbridled passions, lust, wickedness, sensual appetites, and evil tendencies that guided the lives of savages. However, even as the missionaries clung to their doctrines of man’s “sin nature,” they produced de facto cultural accounts of the wretched practices they witnessed, and, in the process, they discovered the cultural sources of their own practices. In the words of the missionary Thomas Williams, for example, the Fijians were “a people living, for many generations, under the uninterrupted power of influences different from any which we daily feel” and were “strangers to those motives and forces which have, more than anything else, modified the development of our own individual and social character.”
The early missionaries’ apprehension of culture included the relativizing recognition of oneself as well as the native as culturally formed. The recognition emerged from their having to learn savage languages virtually from scratch over an extended period of time in order to spread the gospel of Christ. The experience of firsthand language learning and analysis immersed the missionaries in everyday native lives and “almost inescapably” required them “to begin to conceive the society in all its bearings as a ‘culture’ of inseparably interlocked symbolic elements and to think of the language and the whole economy of extralinguistic cultural materials…as exact equivalents of one another.” All the missionaries stressed that their accounts were based on knowledge acquired experientially and to varying degrees articulated the de facto method of modern fieldwork based on long-term immersion in the everyday life of natives, linguistic competence, minute and comprehensive descriptions of all customs, and verbatim quotation of native statements.
So there is nothing inherently secularizing in this mix of what Clifford Geertz called “experience near” (immersion/participation) and “experience far” (observation/description) research practice. Early 19th century evangelical missionaries came to a de facto cultural understanding of the different ways of life they investigated but still condemned those ways of life as morally depraved. Their meticulous accounts, at times filled with admiration for native imagination and ingenuity, were no less bent on justifying the rapid dismantling of local rites, customs, and taboos by colonial authorities. The missionaries were re-enacting in their mission fields their own struggle with and victory over the human capacity for sin.
This “conflicted emotional structure,” which Herbert argues is “the distinctive sign of a characteristic religious sensibility,” is later reworked by anthropologists as they name and codify the practice of “fieldwork” and the concept of “culture” as a “complex whole” that emerges from fieldwork. Instead of condemning native ways, anthropologists insist on their validity, struggle to accept them while they are in the field, write accounts bent on describing, explaining, understanding them as testaments to human diversity and creativity, and direct their critical ire at persons and forces who would diminish that diversity and creativity in any way. The object and effect of disavowal changes, but disavowal remains at the heart of the practice. The mission ethnographer had to come to know native life firsthand and reject it as evil. For him, ethnography was a religious practice, and it produced him as an evangelical missionary. The anthropological ethnographer has to come to know native culture firsthand and accept it as “equally valid” but reject it as her point of view on native life. Going native, that is, adopting native modes of interpretative ascendancy, is taboo for both evangelical and anthropological ethnographers. But anthropologists have a second disavowal tucked away in their validation of native cultures, namely, a disavowal of the Victorian evangelical Protestantism and its presumption of moral superiority, and that is the disavowal that produces us as specifically secular anthropologists.
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