'Incidental' Ethnographers

Front matter

‘Incidental’

Ethnographers

French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880-1930

Chapter Five Early Contributors to the Ethnography of

Upper Tonkin 1.2 87 Publications by 19th Century Explorers, Diplomats and Miltary Observers: 2er cte e peg 99 Chapter Six Missionary Colonial Expansion and the Upper Tonkin Vicariate 1.2: 2). eater tee ts 111 PART FOUR

MISSIONARY AUTHORS AND THEIR TEXTS

Chapter Eight ‘The Works of Missionaries Liétard, Vial, and Savina «sunt ier PEOR ER 153 A Life-of Savina sister Ge dee det epo entre 168

On Savna s: Legacy 2221 tnter en 203 Conclusions... ipee ERU Ee TRUE 211

CONTENTS vil

FOREWORD

This book combines an interest in colonial history, French Catholic missions in and around northern Vietnam, and textual analysis. However, it is not the work of an historian, nor a missiologist, nor a literary specialist. In more ways than one, this study is a typical anthropology work. Arguably, anthropology can at times be described as a generalist discipline in the social sciences, never shy to mine neighbouring fields for their riches, from botany to philosophy. Anthropologists love to assemble multiple elements in eccentric Jigsaws transgressing disciplinary boundaries. This book does just that while studying production of missionary ethnography on the highland minorities of northern French Indochina and southern Yunnan.

This book is thus situated at the junction of a number of established fields. But to this day, the texts explored in the next pages have largely been left unaddressed. Why? Because the place (on the margins of colonial Indochina), the peoples (mountain minorities), and the texts (penned by ‘amateurs’) all pertain to a subsidiary universe that, some would argue, was and remains of little historical, political, economic, and intellectual consequence.

It is true that practically all of the men who will take the front stage in the nine chapters that follow have remained minor historical characters, and that the fruit of their intellectual work, had it known the good fortune to be published, was not judged worthy of much interest by the specialists of the era. If I chose to devote a book—and a few years of my life—to them, clearly, it is because I challenge that label of inconsequentiality. As do a growing number of historians, linguists, and anthropologists today. My hope is that this constitutes only a first step to stimulate colleagues in a number of fields to dig deeper into the rich and original textual legacy of the authors brought to light here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Financial support for the background research and the completion of this book was provided, over several years, by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, the British Academy of the United Kingdom, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. Academic institutions I have been linked to during the gestation of this book have all provided facilities, these are the University of Hull (UK), the University of Otago (New Zealand), and in Canada, Université de Montréal and Université Laval.

This book owes a lot to the intellectual contribution of many colleagues and friends. Though naming them all is an unrealistic task, a few ought not to remain anonymous: my partner and colleague Sarah Turner for decisive contributions at every stage of the book’s production, Desmond Manderson and Jackie Adcock for intellectual inspiration and constant encouragement, journal editors Bruce Lockhart and Colin McKerras for their important inputs to earlier versions of Chapters 5 and 6, Yves Goudineau and Bénédicte Brac de la Perriére for the chance to test my ideas with the participants to their graduate seminar at Evole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales in Paris, and Agathe Larcher-Gosha and Christopher Gosha for insightful suggestions. Especially, I would like to thank Brian Heenan, Margaret Swain and Frédéric Laugrand for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Father Gérard Moussay and Brigitte Appavou at the archives of Société des Missions étrangères de Paris, Lucette Vachier from Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, and staff of the documentation centre of École française d’Extréme-Orient in Paris have all earned my gratitude for their highly competent and dedicated assistance while searching archival material in France. Father Moussay’s gracious permission to include previously unpublished MEP photographs to this book is particularly appreciated.

Canadian graduate students François Fortin-Deschénes, Claire Tugault-Lafleur, Caroline Goulet, Marise Lachapelle and Priscilla Taché have all helped in skilfully preparing and putting together various parts of the manuscript. Laura Schoenberger has shown great patience and competence editing a final version of the text. Merci à toutes et tous!

xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

And finally, series editor Marc Spindler, and Brill staff Mattie Kuiper and Ingeborg van der Laan, have been unfailing supporters of this project from its early stages and their diligent efforts have made the burden of delivery almost painless.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

. Execution of MEP Bishop Pierre Borie (1808-1838) in Don-hoi (Tonkin), September 24, 1838. This colour painting is shown in the Martyr Room at the MEP Seminary in Paris, and is exemplary of the 19th century movement for the emulation of young recruits.

. The Pavie Mission team in Xieng-Hung, c. 1891. The picture includes Auguste Pavie himself in the center under the flag, his protégé Pierre Lefévre-Pontalis in a white shirt on the right, and White Thai leader Deo-van-tri, second left from Pavie. Source: Lefévre-Pontalis, 1902.

. Father Léon Girod (1854-1924) with Kinh converts, 1885. Photographer unknown. Source: MEP Archives.

. Missionaries of the West Tonkin vicariate at their annual retreat. Undated, c. 1885. 1. Paul-Marie Ramond (1855-1944), who will become the first Vicar Apostolic of Upper Tonkin in 1895; 2. Pierre Gendreau (1850-1935), who will take over the West Tonkin vicariate at the death of Bishop Puginier in 1892; and 3. Léon Girod. Source: MEP Archives.

. Paul Francois Puginier (1835-1892), Évéque de Mauricastre in partibus, Vicar Apostolic of West Tonkin from 1868 until his death. Undated, c. 1890, probably in Hanoi. Source: MEP Archives.

. 1895—P-M. Ramond photographed in Hanoi when he was ordained Évéque de Linoé in partibus. Vicar Apostolic of Upper Tonkin from 1895 to his resignation in 1938. Source: MEP Archives.

. “Etat des Missions du Tonkin Occidental et du Haut-Tonkin depuis le 15 juin 1894 jusqu'au 15 juin 1895°—Statistics on the state of the West and Upper Tonkin vicariates, dated October 27, 1895. These two vicariates are listed here as having respectively 2 Bishops for 43 missionaries, and 1 Bishop for 12 missionaries. This list was part of the first annual comptes-rendus from the newly established Upper Tonkin. Source: MEP Archives.

. “Compte-rendu de Vexercice 1896-1897.” Annual report from the Upper Tonkin vicariate written by Bishop Ramond, dated September 11, 1897. The Bishop reports for that year 18 missionaries and 11 native priests for a population of 2.9 million. Source: MEP Archives.

XIV

2];

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

. Paul-Marie Ramond (1881), Léon Girod (1879), Antoine Bourlet

(1898), Alfred Liétard (1896), and François-Marie Savina (1901) each photographed in Paris just prior to their departure to Asia. Source: MEP Archives.

Father Aloys Schotter (1857—1924), top centre in the back row, smoking a long pipe, in his boys' school of Lanlong, western Guizhou. This picture was taken the year of his death. Fung Yut Hin, photographer. Source: MEP archives.

Paul Vial (1855-1917) dressed as a Lolo, with two Lolo converts. This undated picture appeared on the cover of his 1905 book, Yun-Nan Nadokouseu grouping articles previously published in Annales de la Société des Missions-Etrangeres.

1895—Lou-mer-y eastern Yunnan. Residence of Father Paul Vial, possibly his ‘chateau’ of St-Paul-la- Iremblaye. Photograph (fragment) by Paul Vial. Source: MEP Archives.

Father André Kircher (1863-1922) in Chinese attire among Miao (Miaotse) converts in Yunnan, photographed by his friend Paul Vial, undated. Source: MEP Archives.

White Miao women in eastern Yunnan. Undated photograph by Paul Vial. Source: MEP Archives.

Paul Vial’s “Dictionnaire Français-Lolo”, 1909.

First page of an article on the Lolo of Yunnan by Paul Vial in Les Missions Catholiques, 21 September, 1888. The picture is also from China but is not connected with the article.

Peu-méo (Hmong) girls in upland Tonkin in the late 1910s, from Maurice Abadie’s Les races du Haut Tonkin de Phong Tho à Lang-Son, 1924. Photographer unknown.

French soldier interacting with a Hoa-méo (Hmong) woman, Pa- Kha (today Bac Ha), northern Tonkin, late 1910s. Photographer unknown. Source: Abadie 1924.

Le bateau de 1901—The 1901 ship. Representative group photograph taken in the gardens of the MEP Seminary in Paris, with the 45 recruits (a very successful year) about to board a ship to Asia. In circle is François-Marie Savina (1876-1941), the future author of Histoire des Miao (1924). Source: MEP Archives.

Father E-M. Savina among the Miao (Méo, Hmong) in Tonkin. Undated, c. 1920. Source: Savina 1924.

1920—E-M. Savina at age 44 in Xieng-Khouang (Tranninh), northeast Laos, during the two years he was detached to the colonial troops sent to tame a Méo rebellion. Savina stands with his Nung

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XV personal assistant (centre) and a Miao leader (left). Source: Savina 1924.

The missionaries of Upper ‘Tonkin meeting in Hung Hoa on June 30, 1924, for their yearly retreat. 1. Bishop Ramond; 2. Léon Girod (who fell ill the night this picture was taken and died 9 days later); 3. E-M. Savina (age 48) the same year he published Histoire des Miao; 4. G. Vandaéle, who would succeed Ramond in 1938 as Vicar Apostolic of Upper Tonkin. Source: Bulletin de la Société des Missions-Étrangères de Paris, 1924.

E-M. Savina (top left), at age 58, with colleagues in Hong Kong, 1934 (fragment). Just back from a year in France, Savina was starting a 5 year stay in Hong Kong to put together his Guide linguistique de lIndochine française (1939). Source: MEP Archives.

1938—E.M. Savina (circled) still at the MEP house in Hong Kong writing his multilingual dictionary. Source: MEP Archives.

North face of the MEP St-Joseph Minor Seminary in Ha-thach, Upper ‘Tonkin vicariate. The seminary was destroyed, along with the buildings of the vicariate’s see in Hung Hoa, during the First Indochina War (1945-1954). Undated. Source: MEP Archives.

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. General area of interest

Map 2. Principal locations today

Map 3. Northern Vietnam—Provinces and topography, 2006

Map 4. Tonkin: Military Territories (1903) and Vicariates (1896)

Map 5. Mission du Tong-King occidental, by Adrien Launay, 1889

Map 6. Carte schématique pour l'Histoire des Miao, E-M. Savina, 1924

Chapter One

We submit that, in order to follow up on [Talal] Asad’s admonition to study the location of anthropology in the colonial encounter it is necessary to free the study of colonial ethnographies of disciplinary bias and to treat them sui generis, not in thrall to an academic idea.'

Introduction

The purpose of this book is twofold. From the very start of its planning stages it was to introduce an English speaking audience to a particular body of ethnographic literature produced by Catholic missionaries at the time of French Indochina. This body of literature is still largely unknown to non-French speakers—and to a majority of French speaking anthropologists alike. From this initial and relatively modest aim, I also wanted to pursue a complementary, more critical objective, that is to weigh up these ethnographic writings by assessing the intellectual context of their creation and the methods by which they were produced. This objective is important so that we can discuss their potential validity today in the turmoil of ongoing debates regarding ethnography as text.

Over the last few decades, the number of anthropologists examining missionary contributions to ethnography has grown, evident in mounting numbers of publications. In the broader Asian context, these published works take many forms, from James Clifford's Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World, published in 1982 in which Clifford discussed the contribution the French Protestant missionary made to New Caledonia’s ethnography as well as to anthropology in general, to Albert Schrauwers’ analysis of the work of Dutch pastor Albert C. Kruyt among the To Pamona of Indonesia in his Colonial ‘Reformation’ in the Highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, 1892-1995 published in 2000.

! Pels, Peter and Oscar Salemink (eds). Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, 7.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

One should also note the many scholarly dissertations, articles and book chapters taking a similar path, an excellent example being Margaret Byrne Swain's *Pére Vial and the Gni-p’a. Orientalist Scholarship and the Christian Project" published in 1995.

However, in comparison to the vast majority of these earlier publications, this book takes a distinct stance. It does not concentrate on a particular individual's life and work. Its focus, instead, is at a broader scale, concerning a group of missionaries brought together by chance, geography and time. Will this mean that disparities between such an eclectic assembly of authors and their texts may exceed potential similarities? Possibly, but this does not overly worry me. My point is that these single men—and they were all men—were actors in the same play, the plot of which was the expansion of France's grandeur to the Orient. In the minds of these actors, the playwright was God Himself. Not surprisingly however, in the minds of the French colonial administrators in Indochina, the script was instead in the hands of the conquering Third Republic, dictated by its economic interests and craves for prestige. The primary, and perhaps the most ubiquitous tension underlying the actions and the writings of missionaries in Tonkin, was thus triggered by the differing agendas of the religious and republican institutions. At times in relative harmony with each other, sometimes paying no attention to the other's actions, and more than occasionally outright conflicting, this marked stress between religious and republican ideals and desires in Tonkin will constitute the backdrop, the trope of this book. We will see the effects rippling down the power hierarchies to influence even the hesitant prose of the humblest messenger of the Lord labouring in His fields.

Yet, merely presenting these early works would hardly be satisfactory as a scholarly undertaking. Discussing and analysing them is another objective of this book. The intellectual context of the production of colonial ethnographies at the turn of the 20th century has to be scrutinised if one hopes to assess these works for what they actually meant, and why they were completed. What is colonial ethnography? Who performed it? In what frame of mind? What methods did the early ‘researchers’ use? How did all these questions materialise in French Indochina? To answer these questions, I have decided to focus on the earliest embodiment ethnographical research took in Indochina, namely, that performed by individuals ingrained in segments of the colonial apparatus (as opposed to research that was later to be conducted by trained ethnographers under the auspices of the Ecole francaise d’Extréme-

Orient). The early ethnographers who will be presented and discussed in this book were either missionaries, administrators or military officers, all belonging to the spearhead of a colonial system in the process of taking over an ancient civilisation and its frontiers.

It has been observed in various contexts of European colonial expansion that explorers, administrators, the military and missionaries constituted, in practical terms, the first Western ethnographers.

In 1953, Meyer Fortes wrote that it is characteristic and important that anthropological studies owe a great deal to enthusiasts from outside the academic world, to officers of the Crown, to missionaries, traders and travellers. In France, Maurice Leenhardt was an important missionary presence among anthropologists, while in Austria and Germany, Father Wilhelm Schmidt and his journal Anthropos, started in 1906, made an important impact on behalf of his congregation, the Missionary Society of the Divine Word. Yet, histories of anthropology do not usually consider missionary anthropologists and when they do, their missionary background is thought to be of no importance. The importance of the administrative background is illustrated by the fact that in Britain, Cambridge anthropology owed a lot to the Orientalist and administrator Sir Richard Temple, and that as late as 1953 Meyer Fortes succeeded to a Gambridge professorship which was handed down by two former members of the Indian Colonial Service, TC. Hodson and J.H. Hutton. Malinowskian functionalism could not have established itself without the support of missionaries like J.H. Oldham or administrators like Lord Lugard. [...] These cases indicate the importance of non-academic influences on the establishment of academic anthropology.’

‘Two categories in particular, the missionaries and the military officers, probably due to their relatively long residence in contact with local populations, as opposed to the generally shorter visits paid by explorers and colonial administrators, have undoubtedly produced a durable legacy of empirical and methodological approaches to the Other which is still of value today. In many cases, and despite definite biases dictated by the epochs and the ideologies with which these early observers were associated, their legacies are highly valuable as first hand observations of populations, some of which have since disappeared. Not only because of the importance and the relevance of these legacies, but also because they are highly relevant to the French Upper-Tonkin case, it is the publications and correspondence of missionaries that form the bulk of the

? Pels, Peter and Oscar Salemink. “Introduction: Five Theses on Ethnography as Colonial Practice.” History and Anthropology, vol. 8, nos. 1—4, pp. 1-34, 1994, 4.

ethnographic works presented and analysed in this book. Hundreds of documents, indeed thousands of pages, exist and wait to be analysed while perhaps an even larger number has not yet been made available to the research community. Nevertheless, enough is obtainable to fully justify attempting to understand, analyse and interpret it.

While it has often been argued that missionary writing is of disputable scientific interest, this literature nonetheless forms a body of direct observations that should not be shunned, especially in view of the paucity of ethnographic information available on isolated ethnic groups at the time of European colonization. I argue that studies of Peninsular Southeast Asian highland ethnicity today cannot afford to ignore this rich, though disparate assortment of views from the past.

It is not possible here to review all of the archival material on hand regarding upland northern Indochina and Yunnan and as a consequence, a selection of texts will be addressed. I have selected these texts based on four key criteria: their qualitative and quantitative importance, the competence of their authors, the conditions under which they were produced, and their value in supplying material for a discussion on ethnography in the French colonial context. I give particularly prominent authors more space with additional biographical data, providing details regarding their intellectual formation, a major factor in the performance of their ethnographic work. For each of these figures, a major piece of work will receive extra attention.

Tue New DraALoGuE BETWEEN MISSIONARIES AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS

Are academic anthropologists today ready to approach colonial missionary ethnography with an open mind? Certainly more than they ever were in the past. Along with a growing number of authors making a case in favour of acknowledging the contributions of non-academic ethnographers to anthropology, I am of the opinion that studying the texts of "incidental ethnographers such as missionaries 1s of great value for the discipline. As Guiart succinctly put it: "There 1s still, in missionary archives, a wealth of material waiting to be analysed, if the anthropologist had been trained to make use of it instead of brushing it aside as tainted with bigotry."? Pels and Salemink also clearly voice

? Guiart, Jean. “Comments on Stipe.” Current Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 170-1, 1980, 171.

their support for this option, arguing that “an essential methodological move in the study of the history of anthropology needs to be made: the dialectical one of accounting for the extra-academic and extradisciplinary influences on the constitution of the discipline".* Studying missionary writings in the context of colonial northern Vietnam constitutes a step in that direction.

Over colonial times, professional anthropologists and missionaries were able to largely ignore one another or keep out of each other’s way for as long as the colonial enterprise provided a logical division between their respective roles. It is a telling symptom that open and frank debates between Western anthropologists and Christian missionaries only took place on a significant scale from the late 1970s onwards, after the colonial era was over. Facing superb indifference, even hostility as shown by a number of British academic anthropologists,’ the missionaries long considered the academic ethnographers as intruders and unconcerned intellectuals whom, they believed, spent just enough time with their subjects to produce a report or a thesis, giving locals little in return. Academics on the other hand, saw in the missionaries incompetent and moralistic hordes focused on normalizing the natives, causing their cultural and, often, material demise.^

Precursors to a dialogue could be found on both sides of the fence, ranging from Rivers in 1920, Smith in 1924, Westermann in 1931, and Junod in 1935, to Nida in 1959 and 1966, Luzbetak in 1961, and Miller in 1970.’ All have indeed questioned the perceptions of anthropologists

* Pels and Salemink. “Introduction”, 3.

? Cf. Delfendahl, Bernard. “On Anthropologists versus Missionaries.” Current Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 89-90, 1981; Abbink, Jan. “Anthropology and the Missions: A Critical Epistemological Perspective.” Methodology and Science, vol. 18, pp. 254—70, 1985.

5 On occasions in this book, the word ‘natives’ with inverted commas, sometimes without, will be used in consistency with the colonial terminology. The same applies to ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal’, ‘savages,’ and a few additional terms associated with the colonial era. This should by no means be interpreted as a promotion of those terms.

7 Rivers, W.H. “Anthropology and the Missionary.” Church Missionary Review, vol. 71, pp. 208-15, 1920; Smith, E.W. “Social Anthropology and Missionary Work.” International Review of Missions, vol. 13, pp. 518-31, 1924; Westermann, Diedrich. “The Missionary as an Anthropological Fieldworker." Africa, vol. 4, pp. 164-77, 1931; Junod, H.P. "Anthropology and Missionary Education." International Review of Missions, vol. 24, pp. 213-28, 1935; Nida, Eugene A. “The Role of Cultural Anthropology in Christian Missions.” In Readings in Missionary Anthropology II, ed. Smalley, W.A., South Pasadena: W. Carey Library, 1978 [1959]; Nida, Eugene A. *Missionaries and Anthropologists." Practical Anthropology, vol. 13, pp. 273—7, 287, 1966; Luzbetak, L.J. “Towards an Applied Missionary Anthropology.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 34, pp. 165-76, 1961; Miller, regarding missionary work and thus have made attempts to breach the unity of an overall and all-powerful condemnation of missionary ‘ignorance’ and ‘ethnocentrism’ by senior scholars in academia.* Such a dominant anti-clerical front had prevailed to the point of profoundly negatively influencing the curriculum in universities, as Trouwborst recalled in the Leiden of the late 1940s.°

In the meantime, over the 20th century, without needing in any way to wait for an elusive seal of approval from academia for their work in the field, missionaries took the initiative to publish their ethnographic observations in an array of forms including novels, diaries, children’s books, religious journals, annual reports, travelogues and articles in various kinds of magazines, many of them aimed at members of the public at large. A more formal branch of the missionary world also officially entered the select field of academic anthropology through the creation of the academic journal Anthropos in 1906. For a century, this successful journal has promoted the ethnographic work of Christian missionaries by offering them a serious venue for publication, as well as a medium that has contributed to sharpening their intellect and acquainting them with the current debates they could measure their own reflections against. Anthropos has earned a right to sit on university library shelves next to academic anthropology journals. Elsewhere, some missionaries have entered the academic field to the point of playing influential roles within higher education institutions. Frenchman Maurice Leenhardt, who started his career as a Protestant missionary in New Caledonia where he spent two decades, was offered upon his return to France the Marcel Mauss chair at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. When Leenhardt died in 1954, that chair was then passed on to the young Claude Levi-Strauss.

As was just mentioned, the post-colonial rapprochement between the two dedicated groups of lay and religious modern ethnographic

E.S. “The Christian Missionary: Agent of Secularization.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 14-22, 1970.

* Such a statement is necessarily sweeping, only aiming at indicating what was the general state of mind among professional anthropologists of the colonial period. Exceptions, or at least moments of exception, also existed, for instance when Lowie spoke in defence of Father Wilhelm Schmidt, whom he assessed was unfairly criticised. Fittingly, Lowie declared “...let him that is without bias cast the first stone.” Lowie, Robert H. The History of. Ethnological Theory. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1937, 193.

? Trouwborst, A.A. “Missionaries and Ethnography.” In The Ambiguity of. Rapprochement. Reflections of Anthropologists on their Controversial Relationship with Missionaries, eds. Bonsen, R., H. Marks and J. Miedema, Nijmegen: Focaal, pp. 32-44, 1990, 33.

fieldworkers took place 30 years ago.'? Following several seminal individual contributions, the landmark was an article published in 1980 by anthropologist Claude Stipe in the academic journal Current Anthropology, starting a three-year debate that had just been waiting to happen, an exchange of views that helped, as one commentator put it, “to bring an important issue out of the anthropological closet.” That debate was then quickly followed by substantial works by Clifford in 1982, Whiteman and Salamone in 1983, and Abbink in 1985, and the road to a mature discussion was resolutely opened.'! This involved multiple voices, as was illustrated by the remarkable book The Ambiguity of Rapprochement. Reflections of Anthropologists on their Relationship with Missionaries, edited in 1990 by Bonsen, Marks and Miedema, in which authors assessed the legacy of decades of reciprocal suspicion and investigated with intellectual honesty the common grounds where the two sides, vividly aware of their primary differences, could nevertheless safely discuss issues of mutual interest.'”

Peter Pels wrote in 1990 that a systematic study of the historical relations between missionaries and anthropologists had yet to be produced, and I personally do not know of any having been published since this statement was made over 15 years ago. Such lack is symptomatic.'? Pels also explained in a concise way why, in his view, anthropologists and missionaries were both professionals ‘on a mission’, although the exact meaning of these words proved to be more complex than expected. Limits between these two universes are more blurred than one would like, with considerable overlap:

During the professionalization of anthropology, anthropologists’ missions have often been directed, not at the mission areas of the Christian

10 Cf. Salamone, EA. “Anthropologists and Missionaries: Competition or Reciprocity?” Human Organisation, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 407-12, 1977.

!! Clifford, Person and Myth; Whiteman D. and F. Salamone (eds). Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Cultural Change. Williamsburg: William and Mary College, Studies in Third World Societies nrs. 25 & 26, 2 volumes, 1983; Abbink, "Anthropology and the Missions."

? Bonsen et al, The Ambiguity of Rapprochement.

13 Pels, Peter. “Anthropology and Mission: Towards a Historical Analysis of Professional Identity.’ In The Ambiguity of Rapprochement. Reflections of Anthropologists on their Controversial Relationship with Missionaries, eds. Bonsen, R., H. Marks and J. Miedema, Nijmegen: Focaal, 1990, 81. This absence of course has not precluded individual anthropologists and missionaries from getting together and further reflecting on the issue from their particular vantage points, as illustrated in 2004 with the proceedings Anthropologie et missiologie: XIX-XX" siècles: entre connivence et rivalité, eds. Servais, Olivier & Gérard van 't Spyker, Paris: Karthala, collection Mémoire d'Eglises, 2004.

missionaries, but at the Christian missionaries themselves. In doing so it meant that these anthropologists had to endorse—be it passively—the civilizing mission in which the Christian missionaries participated.'*

One of the unquestionable consequences of the progress made during this recent debate, is that it is now not only possible, but also desirable for anthropologists to go back in time and re-assess the legacy of missionary ethnographers with a fresh eye. This, they must do devoid of emotional rejection and also without the resistance created by a long period of uncomfortable proximity. Academic anthropologists, as a group, have matured and as Petersen wisely put it, it has recently become possible to acknowledge that:

we all rely upon [the missionaries’] documents; we are all familiar with and lament the changes they have had a hand in; and we are all acquainted with one or another of wise and humane men and women who serve in the missions there today. Fools and charlatans are there as well, but most of my colleagues manage to discriminate among them."

The recognition of non-professional contributions to institutionalised anthropology has therefore occurred against the will of many, and this resistance has not always been with the best intentions. ‘To a large extent, the professionalization of fieldwork in British anthropology depended on the tactical disparagement of both missionary and administrative ethnographies.'^ Yet, at the same time, we now know that early modern anthropologists like Malinowski succeeded in their seminal fieldwork research because of major ground work having already been conducted on location by earlier explorers, traders, administrators, and Christian missionaries. As stated by Stocking,

Anthropology needed the missionaries. The shift from the amateur ethnographer to the professional fieldworker, embodied by people like Franz Boas, A.C. Haddon, W.H.R. Rivers and W.B. Spencer, was not possible without the help of the missionary ethnographers in the field."

14 Pels, “Anthropology and Mission,” 81.

5 Petersen, Glenn T. “Comments on Stipe.” Current Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 2, 1980, 173.

15 Pels and Salemink. “Introduction.”

U Stocking 1983:74—76, rephrased by Pels, Peter. “Anthropology and Mission: Towards a Historical Analysis of Professional Identity.’ In The Ambiguity of. Rapprochement. Reflections of Anthropologists on their Controversial Relationship with Missionaries, eds. Bonsen, R., H. Marks and J. Miedema, Nijmegen: Focaal, 1990, 83.

Indeed, in his preface to The Nuer, E.E. Evans-Pritchard made this connection explicit by thanking:

the staff of the American Mission at Nasser, of the Congregation of Verona at Yoahnyang, and the Church Missionary Society at Ler, [with] particular acknowledgement to the staff of the American Mission, [...] who unreservedly placed their home, their time, and their knowledge at my disposal.’

Acknowledging this debt may seem sensible and relatively harmless to younger generations of anthropologists today. But it was far from obvious early in the 20th century. Even when administrators or missionaries happened to also be trained ethnographers, the professional anthropologists of the time were reluctant to acknowledge their work, let alone give them credit.