When anthropologists come to examine the role of Christian missionaries in the transformation of non-Western societies, as they have done increasingly over the past decade, they soon become deeply embroiled in debates about narrative. Most obvious and immediate are the written and published narratives in which missionaries report their activities, providing the single most important source of data. But the more fundamental issues lie beyond: They have to do with the role of narrative in the social transformation itself, and eventually with the place of narrative in the ethnographic account that anthropology sets itself to produce. In this essay, which arises from a larger project on the encounter of religions in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, the focus of the argument will move through several levels of narrative, but it will start and finish with an argument that demonstrates why narrative is so important for the achievement of a properly historical anthropology.
A superficial view of what happens when a large number of people forsake their former religion for a new one is that some of the old beliefs become mixed with the new. It is a commonplace to hear that folk Catholicism is mixed with pagan survivals, or that newly converted African Christians are “not real Christians” or “have a veneer of Christianity”, because they have not totally abandoned all that they once believed. Such a judgment, however ethnocentric, would be pardonable in a European missionary who held a particular view of Christianity, which itself furnished a clear criterion of “real Christianity”. But similar opinions are often expressed by sociologists and anthropologists who profess themselves neutral with respect to religious belief. They are usually interested in “acculturation” or “culture contact” and consider it of great moment to be able to say how far any particular belief or practice lies along a continuum whose poles are marked “traditional” and “acculturated”. Such assumptions underlay Malinowski's much criticized scheme for the analysis of culture-contact in Africa and the great bulk of the work, by Linton, Wallace, Lanternari and others, on independent religious movements. This tradition of interpretation is still very much alive.
This chapter argues that the histories of social anthropology and sociology in Britain have been so closely intertwined and overlapping that they cannot really be seen as external to one another at all. The two disciplines have common origins in the social thought of the Enlightenment. This was an enquiry into the character of the emergent, modern society of contemporary Europe, with a view to realizing the conditions for human emancipation from tyranny, ignorance, and poverty. By the early 1950s, sociology at the London School of Economics started to acquire the coherence and momentum that would power its lift-off in the 1960s. Many sociologists and anthropologists were attracted by the new analytical possibilities offered by structuralism, but they were also drawn by external circumstances to address issues of social change. The resurgence of Marxism, as much a feature of the late 1960s and 1970s as the rise of structuralism, was much more a response to events in the world than a movement internal to the realm of ideas.
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