The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa

Abstract

The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa; edited by Patrick Harries and David Maxwell. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. xvi + 341pp. ISBN 978-0-8028-6634-9. $45.00.The series 'Studies in the History of Christian Missions', edited by R.E. Frykenberg and Brian Stanley, is developing into a major collection of scholarly books. All historians of missions in colonial (and other) settings throughout the world owe a considerable debt to its growing list of remarkable works. This one is a notable addition, offering eleven papers which analyse the manner in which missionaries in Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries became, almost by the very nature of their calling, field workers compiling information of all sorts which contributed to the development of scientific studies in various emergent disciplines. These include botany, entomology, meteorology, tropical medicine, linguistics, and ethnography. The principal concentration, understandably, is on ethnology, perhaps the major contribution of missionaries to the study of Africa.But the use of the words ethnology or ethnography is significant. While anthropologists drew on much missionary work in the twentieth century, they themselves soon became field workers developing theoretical positions with which most missionaries failed to keep pace. Missionary ethnography came to be seen as old-fashioned, amateur, failing to take full account of the work of the 'academy'. This theme runs through several of the essays, but generally the thrust here is to rescue missionary ethnographers from neglect. Their empirical work was local and extensive. Many of their publications have now become very useful sources for historians, offering a route into primary work that often drew on indigenous informants and oral information no longer available.And therein lies another important theme, indigenous knowledge and practices. Missionaries were pragmatic people whose first concern in their pursuit of conversions was to understand the contexts in which they worked. The first and highly necessary local skill they had to acquire was that of language, not only for the purposes of communication, but also to promote the translation of the Bible and other Christian texts. It was thus inevitable that they became linguists and some of them carried this forward into the academic study of languages and significant publications in the field. But language itself became a route into much else, into customs, indigenous religions and world views, combined with explanatory visions of the natural world, sexual and marriage practices, as well as medical therapies. …

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