Missionary Expertise, Social Science, and the uses of Ethnographic Knowledge in Colonial Gabon

Abstract

Missionary ethnographers provided expert knowledge during the formative years of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropology, but are generally relegated to the footnotes of academic anthropology. Colonial missionaries were, nevertheless, crucial producers of cultural practices, knowledge, and texts in the particular locations where they worked. Missionary linguists, for example, contributed to the standardization of regional variations through the production of writing systems and the teaching of reading in mission schools. Missionaries also interacted with literate Africans in mission stations to produce cultural descriptions that then filtered back into local practices or auto-ethnographic representations, to be discovered anew by later anthropologists. At the same time, of course, as many missionaries themselves recognized, there was inherent tension between the scientific study of African cultural practices and the evangelizing project that sought to induce radical cultural change.To examine the often contentious relationship between missionary expertise, social science, and ethnographic knowledge in colonial Gabon, I look comparatively at the fieldwork experiences and writings of the American Presbyterian, Robert Hamill Nassau (1835-1921), and the French Spiritan, Henri Trilles (1866-1949). Nassau worked in present-day Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Cameroon from 1861 to 1906, while Trilles spent three extended stays in Gabon between 1893 and 1907. Both men claimed expert ethnographic understanding based on long-term, firsthand daily contact with Africans, fluency in African languages, and empa-thetic understanding of Africans, while at the same time expressing standard missionary shock and awe at African customs, fetishism, and cannibalism. Both learned African languages, traveled in the interior of present-day Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, clashed with fellow missionaries, and wrote prolifically, especially after their definitive departures from Africa. Although each man's personality, experiences, and approaches to ethnography were unique, together they nonetheless exemplify the broader uses and challenges of missionary ethnography.