“Redeemed from savagery”: Sanctification and civilization in the accounts of Cook Islands missionaries Aaron Buzacott and John Williams

Abstract

This article explores the way in which two Protestant missionaries to the Cook Islands in the mid-nineteenth century, John Williams and Aaron Buzacott, engaged with the idea of civilization in their ethnographic descriptions of the islanders. It contributes to an important strand of recent scholarship which focuses on developing a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and evangelical missionaries in the Pacific. While Buzacott and Williams firmly understood that the missionary was the instrument of transforming civilization, they did not merely replicate the lexicon or concept of civilization contained in secular Enlightenment philosophy. I argue that Buzacott and Williams used the theological concept of sanctification to frame the secular, historical, process of “civilizing” the Cook islanders, such that they argued that the driving force in the process of civilizing was not historical development, but rather, the sanctifying transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit. In short, Williams and Buzacott used the theological concept of sanctification to perform descriptive and ethnographic, rather than purely theological and normative, work. This study provides a window into a significant phenomenon, in which theological concepts played a formative, and frequently overlooked, role in Pacific missionary anthropology and ethnography.