The Gospel of Freedom and Power: Protestant Missionaries in American Culture after World War II

Chapter three. Anthropology

91 chapter three ANTHROPOLOGY 1 1 1 In 1988 Jonathan Benthall could not explain why missionaries were at the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual meeting. Benthall, the editor of Anthropology Today, had “dropped into” an informal session titled “Christian Anthropologists ” expecting to hear about scholarship at Catholic universities. Instead he found Protestant evangelical “missionaries and missiologists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics [SIL] and similar groups.”1 Benthall was surprised by the parochial character of the conversation—he surmised by their absence that Catholics “were not considered a subset of Christian” by the attendees. While he conceded that SIL had produced one significant name in anthropology, linguist Kenneth Pike, on the whole he believed that the session demonstrated anthropology’s tolerance: “Presumably [SIL] is allowed space and time at the AAA meeting as a minority interest within anthropology, and that is to the AAA’s credit.”2 Benthall thought it good of anthropologists to let missionaries join the conversation. At the AAA’s 1994 meeting, missionaries helped plan a session. Benthall began his review of the AAA with a report on a “Missionaries and Human Rights,” a session organized by SIL member and ecological anthropologist Thomas Headland. The discussion between anthropologists and evangelists proved “more serious and mature than at other such events.”3 The session explored the contributions of evangelists to human rights and Benthall looked forward to cooperation. He thought that “this admirably organized AAA session advanced the debate between anthropologists and missionaries.”4 He did, however, offer a caveat. Those missionaries who persisted in absolutist views—and he knew both Catho- 92 Anthropology lics and Protestants who fit the description—would not enhance dialogue. Not all missionaries were welcome. Both Benthall’s changed appraisal of missionaries and his caveat warrant examination. First, the change. It might appear that between 1988 and 1994, anthropologists suddenly realized that they could make common cause with missionaries to fight human rights abuses. Appearances, however, are famously deceiving . Beneath an apparently sudden change lay a long, complicated history. Missionaries did not appear on the anthropological horizon in 1988. Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the fathers of modern fieldwork, had distrusted missionaries as early as 1914. His diaries, published posthumously in 1967, revealed his contempt for the British evangelists (and his patronization of native peoples) in the Trobriand Islands: “Mentally I collect arguments against missions and ponder a really effective anti-mission campaign .The arguments: these people destroy the natives’ joy in life; they destroy their psychological raison d’être. And what they give in return is completely beyond the savages. They struggle consistently and ruthlessly against everything old and create new needs, both material and moral. No question but that they do harm.”5 In the 1950s, Isaac Schapera, a prominent British anthropologist, derided evangelists, although not so acrimoniously in public as had Malinowski in private. In a 1956 lecture (reprinted in 1958 and in 1960), he noted that although the Tswana people of South Africa remembered some evangelists “with gratitude and affection ,”6 he believed Christian changes to Tswana life “fundamental ” and “widespread” and destructive: “I doubt if ‘creative’ is a . . . suitable term for a process that, however much of a blessing it may have been to some individuals, has left the great majority of the people either indifferent to religion of any kind or insincere about the one they profess.”7 Benthall’s early antagonism, then, had roots in his guild’s many criticisms of missionaries, criticisms that for much of the twentieth century largely occurred behind the scenes. His eventual willingness to make common cause with some missionaries was also rooted in criticism. In this chapter, I argue that in the last three decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists’ critiques of Anthropology 93 missionary, and their own, complicity with colonialism and neocolonialism opened the guild to conversation with evangelists. Anthropologists who criticized evangelists for their involvement in the spread of Western (particularly U.S.) power abroad came, in some cases, to engage missionaries who themselves had qualms about their role in the world. Moreover, as scholars acknowledged their field’s own compromised past and objectifying practices, they ceded some of the moral high ground and began to describe missionaries as subjects of study rather than objects of criticism, as parts of communities rather than interlopers, as possible allies rather than absolute enemies. Still, Benthall’s caveat mattered. Even as some anthropologists became willing to talk with and...