Anthropologists Versus Missionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions [and Comments and Reply

Abstract

Although a missionary once served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, anthropological enculturation commonly includes categorizing missionaries as enemies. The conditioning seems to be more covert than overt, since anthropology texbooks seldom deal specifically with missionary activity and few ethnographies contain condemnations of missionaries. Two presuppositions which may influence the antimissionary attitude are (1) that the culture of a primitive society is an "organic unity" and (2) that religious beliefs are essentially meaningless. The organic-unity position conceives of a society as being almost a work of art in the way in which facets of culture are counterbalanced and interrelated. Since the missionary is usually involved in directed culture change, he is seen as doing violence to that "delicate machine," "functioning organism," or "intricate symbolic system." Social anthropologists tend to consider religious beliefs as essentially meaningless and argue that the major importance of religion is in the social relations involved in the rituals. It is therefore not surprising that anthropologists have a negative attitude toward those whose lives are committed to teaching people that the acceptance of specific religious beliefs is important. We should be concerned with the bases of the negative attitudes which many of us manifest, for an unwillingness to deal with them candidly will make it difficult to control for bias in field research.