This volume is in the important series, Studies in the History of Christian Missions, of which R. E. Frykenberg and Brian Stanley are general editors. The series has released some important volumes with accomplished authors from the fields of church history, mission and religious anthropology. The only reservation here is that most of the authors, even for the volume under review, are from the Western Academy. This Western orientation notwithstanding, in The spiritual in the secular Harries and Maxwell have brought together some informative historical articles that provide interesting and stimulating insights on how missionaries, often working as amateurs and generally perceived as ‘cultural imperialists’, established the foundations for the academic study of social and religious anthropology worldwide. In their introduction to the essays, the editors discuss the social transition from missionaries being seen as objects of scorn and caricatured in films as figures of fun to being respectable researchers and custodians of anthropological data that have served to advance knowledge in science.

Several of the series of essays in the present volume focus on how missionaries showed interest in the medicinal value of herbs and the African environment generally. This, the various authors argue, led to some important breakthroughs showing that Christian missionary work need not be accessed simply through its hostile attitude towards African cultural beliefs. It is true that missionaries often used the tropes of darkness and savagery to secure funding for their work but at the same time they also stressed what Harris and Maxwell cast as ‘the picturesque and romantic sides of African life’ in their anthropological writings, with revealing references in those writings to science as ordered knowledge (p. 4). It took time for this to happen but it is an important theme in this collection of essays that missionaries were eventually able to shed their ‘ethnocentric self-confidence and accompanying belief that African cultures were diabolical and in need of erasure before Christianization could occur’ (p. 6). From then on, as each of the essays seeks to illustrate, ‘African cultures increasingly became the object of legitimate scientific monotheism’ (p. 6).

The essays in this volume focus mainly on twentieth-century missionary endeavours with initial work focusing on amateur scientific investigations across the continent. The heart of the initial essay by Harris is missionary contribution to early knowledge in botany and entomology, which is part of a broader initiative that led to the construction of science as universal concept and practice (p. 30). Missionaries did not just collect specimens to study their behaviour but, as Erika Eichholza writes in the second chapter, we also owe the linguistic study of African languages to missionary interests in language and literacy. African Christian scholars still talk and write about missionary mastery of local languages and their reduction into written form as the most important tool for the evangelisation of the continent. Johann Gottlieb Christaller, for example, is still hailed for his mastery of the Twi language of the Akan peoples of Ghana and for working with students at the local Presbyterian Seminary to translate the New Testament into Twi (pp. 86, 91). The translation of the Bible into Twi, it is said, increased the rate of literacy beyond the geographical locations of the Akuapem peoples to the Fante areas along the coastal regions (p. 93).

The range of essays include two by Jon Cinnamon and Dmitri van den Bersselaar that deal with the contribution of missionary ethnographers to anthropological knowledge; and a very innovative one by Maxwell on the tensions arising between the demonisation of African customs by Pentecostal missionaries on the one hand and the simultaneous engagement in ethnographic research (ch. v). Writing on a missionary of the Pentecostal faith mission in the Belgian Congo, W. F. P. Burton, Maxwell traces how he switched from ‘an aggressive, intrusive mode of research’ to a position where he begins to sympathise with the rich cultures of his subjects in Mwanza through a study of their language, proverbs and folklore. This again is a process that, as Maxwell demonstrates, culminates in the attention that is now given to African theology and religious studies as academic disciplines in their own right (p. 157). In Maxwell's chapter we also come across some of the early tensions emerging between missionary Pentecostal practices such as belief in divine healing and the commitment of the colonial authorities to medical science.

The rest of the chapters are equally fascinating and illuminating. Deborah Gaitskell's study (ch. vi) is on Dora Earthy who worked in Mozambique and how her research laid the foundations for academic anthropology in South Africa. In chapter viii Walima T. Kalusa provides a fascinating analysis of the popularity of mission medicine as a consequence of its ability to accommodate indigenous cultural values and worldviews. The last three chapters deal with issues relating to missionary institutions and African marriages and family life; church and society; and finally something on curing leprosy in mid twentieth-century Nigerian society.

This is a very engaging book because, although written as individual essays, there is no doubting the fact that they have been written to tell an important story dealing with aspects of mission history that have sometimes escaped its undiscerning narrators. The foundations that missionary research and inquiry helped to lay for modern science, medicine, botany, anthropology and linguistics are incredible. The essays are highly scholarly, making this a book not necessarily for the ordinary reader but for historians, religious anthropologists, even theologians, who are interested in the contribution of missionaries to the development of modern African societies. On the whole the material is very useful but a little more effort could have gone into standardising the structure of the essays. Some give a clear indication of what they are about in the opening paragraphs but for quite a number one has to read several paragraphs down the line to appreciate what the author aims to do. This observation must be considered a minor one that should not detract from the importance of this book in the series on the historical study of Christian mission in colonial Africa.