For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology

Abstract

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.

Some Gender Implications of the ‘Civilising Mission’ of the Anglican Church for the Acholi Peoples of Northern Uganda

“…14 He is not the only scholar who has questioned how African peoples first came to the church. Moreover, rather than a simple process in which once and for all someone moved from a state of unbelief to belief, perhaps culminating in being formally received into a religion, this more nearly resembled a series of encounters, resistances, and struggles (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, p. 249ff;Peel 1995). It was made the more complicated because, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the manner of its teaching to African peoples by European missionaries went far beyond the issue of accepting God in Christ to include what appeared almost more important-the inculcation of an ontologically distinct way of being in the world, in which gender played the primary role (Bowie 1993;Hall 1996;Peel 1995;Prevost 2010;Russell 1966).…”

Review article

“…This anchorage in a temporal otherness, mediated by narratives and other vehicles of 'collective memory,' both gives strength to religious motivation and renders inadequate any attempt, such as we find in functionalist theories of religion (including their Marxist variant), to tie particular religious manifestations into a purely synchronic set of determinations. (5) On this score, he makes a witty observation in relation to the Comaroffs (1993Comaroffs ( , 1997 on whose work he has commented pointing precisely to this issue of how to take adequate account of religious identity (Peel 1995). In Peel's view, the Comaroffs present too neat a fit between mission ideas and the secular forces of capitalism and the market.…”

“…Peel has already developed this theme in an influential article (Peel 1995) showing not only how the interactions of these religious intellectuals (missionary and babalawo) can tell us about the spiritual chemistry of religious encounter but also about the historical form of that encounter: the babalawo was not a timeless religious specialist but one on the ascendant at the time missionaries arrived.…”

Killing God

“…4. On the importance of placing religious understandings at the forefront of examinations of mission, see Peel (2000). produced through a gradual process of collective forgetting and effacement.…”