British Social Anthropologists and Missionaries in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Since 1980 there has been an open discussion on the hostility that anthropologists typically have for missionaries. A consensus in this conversation has been that anthropologists dislike missionaries because they are engaged in cultural imperialism. This article, however, explores another hidden factor: the professionalization aspirations of those self-identifying with anthropology as a discipline which created a strong desire to eliminate missionaries as potential rivals. Missionaries indisputably acquired a deep knowledge of indigenous languages and cultures which made it all the more important to dismiss them as biased amateurs lest they should be accepted as competing experts. This dynamic is documented and explored across the twentieth century in the context of British social anthropologists. One particularly telling example is evolving critiques of missionaries in regards to fieldwork as the practice of anthropologists themselves changed in this regard from armchair anthropology, through survey work, to intensive participant observation.