The anthropologist as historian and liberal: H‐A. Junod and the Thonga

Abstract

Like so many of his contemporary anthropologists, Henri-Alexandre Junod was a convert to the discipline. The person who brought about his conversion from entomology was James Bryce, the historian, politician and friend of Sir James Frazer. Bryce made Junod aware of his capacity, as a 'man on the spot', to contribute to the young and growing study of anthropology, which at that stage was controlled by men like Frazer in the metropole whose 'survey work' synthesised and interpreted ethnographic data gathered by 'men on the spot' in the peripheries of the expanding capitalist world. Before meeting Bryce, Junod had published a Baronga grammar and a number of folktales and 'some curious customs of the tribe'. I But it was Bryce who gave him 'the generating idea, the decisive impulse' to undertake 'a systematic and thorough investigation' of the peoples amongst whom he worked as a missionary and whom he called the Thonga. 2 Junod's conversion to anthropology was also determined by his early adulthood in Switzerland.3 He grew up at a time when European regional cultures were rapidly disintegrating in the face of the new industrial infrastructures linking the peripheries of the nation states with their industrial centres. Local dialects were reduced to patois under the strain of national languages and literatures, which were based upon the common grammars and dictionaries produced in the universities. Junod noticed the same

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