Missionaries as Ethnographers and as Agents of Globalization

The role of early modern Christian missionaries as ethnographers, or indeed as proto-anthropologists, has long been recognized. Often working within a consolidated colonial project, but sometimes also acting precariously in areas with limited European presence and at the mercy of local powers, missionaries were often at the forefront of the encounter with various peoples across the world, whom they generally sought to convert to their own version of the faith, while perhaps also indirectly supporting an imperialist agenda. Missionaries were not of course the only European participants in any such cross-cultural interactions, and a wide range of agents – traders, soldiers, adventurers, ambassadors and colonial officials – were involved in the process of generating knowledge about the diverse lands and peoples of the world. How often they did so, however, varied considerably depending on the circumstances. Missionaries, by contrast, beginning with the Catholic religious orders operating under the patronage of the kings of Castile, Portugal and France, often had the quasi-professional training and motivation to learn about local cultures and write about them. Assessing the historical importance of this body of sources is less a question of noting their sheer quantity than of appreciating their analytical depth, founded upon linguistic and antiquarian research.

Given the complex interconnections between commercial, political and religious aims in many of these early colonial empires, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the strictly religious concerns of some of these missionaries from the tasks that they might also occasionally undertake as diplomatic or commercial agents. This is particularly true of those areas of Asia where the interaction was precarious and fluid: we might think of the Augustinians who first visited China from the Philippines in 1575, such as Martín de Rada; of the numerous Jesuits in late sixteenth-century Japan, with their privileged position in the port of Nagasaki and their connection to the Portuguese traders in Macao; of those Portuguese Augustinian friars who, a few years later, were allowed into the Safavid empire at the time of Shah Abbas, such as António de Gouvea, who acted as agent for the authorities in Goa, Lisbon and Madrid; or of the Jesuits who, in a parallel mission led by Jerome Xavier, spent some years at the court of Jahangir, with their close connection to the authorities in Goa, and often in rivalry with the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe. In all these cases, missionaries were protagonists of multi-faceted exchanges and negotiations with Asian powers representing the high cultures of Persia, India, China or Japan. When assessing such mediating roles it is therefore important to distinguish the ultimate aims of missionaries and the various means – including art and science – they sometimes used to achieve them.Footnote ¹ Nonetheless, it is fair to say that religious concerns were key to the ethnographic practices of the majority of early modern missionaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, and that such concerns account for the large proportion of ethnographic materials from this period that we owe to their pens. Even when religion was not a primary ethnographic concern, the intermediary role of the clergy was often crucial. Thus, when in the 1540s the colonial authorities of New Spain commissioned an account of the history, tributes and customs of the Mexica, they relied on a friar working with Nahua translators for the interpretation of native pictographic codices.Footnote ² Similarly, in the following decades the Spanish historian of the Indies Francisco López de Gómara, the royal magistrate Alonso de Zorita and the naturalist Francisco Hernández would rely on the missionary writings of the Franciscans, notably Andrés de Olmos and Toribio de Benavente (or Motolinía), when describing the native history, religion and customs of New Spain.Footnote ³

For missionaries, learning about other cultures meant first of all learning how to communicate their own message effectively. Second, it meant learning how to navigate the social codes of the host society, something especially important in areas not previously conquered. Third, it meant developing an effective missionary strategy, which often involved a degree of accommodation to local customs, and the need to distinguish those customs that could be accommodated – because they concerned matters indifferent to salvation – from those that could not be accepted by a Christian, usually because they were perceived as idolatrous (although of course ‘idolatry’ was a loaded term). Finally, missionaries sometimes put their ethnographic knowledge at the service of the needs of the colonial state, of the Church in Europe (for example through religious propaganda, which could at times be rather sectarian), or of the Republic of Letters more generally, intervening when necessary in debates about the rights of conquerors and conquered, natural history and ethnology, or ancient chronology and sacred history.

However, the fact that missionaries became experts on the societies they studied can lead to a misunderstanding of the nature of their work and its scientific pretensions. A case in point is the work of the French Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Indians compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, Paris, 1724). Often hailed as a precursor of scientific anthropology for his description of Huron and Iroquois customs, twentieth-century editors imbued with a positivist spirit went as far as to produce editions which were drastically abridged so as avoid presenting readers with ‘outdated’ antiquarian and religious speculations.Footnote ⁴ However, consideration of the work's title, as well as an analysis of its engraved frontispiece (with Lafitau's own explanation), immediately reveals that anyone looking here simply for an accurate description of native customs is missing the point: antiquarian comparisons were central to the Jesuit's intellectual aim, and this comparative exercise was in turn at the service of interpreting the religious history of humankind. The story of origins symbolized by the figures of Adam and Eve and their original knowledge of God was an essential inspiration to the task of the historian, providing a religious foundation for the idea of primitive humankind, and the details about native customs – few of which were the result of Lafitau's own observations – were simply the empirical materials that would prove the fundamental similarity between the customs of modern savages and those of the peoples of the ancient world, as described by Herodotus and other Greek and Roman authors. The point was to sustain a polemical argument about the unity of humankind and about the universality of its religious impulse towards a single creator God. Lafitau was indeed a missionary, but his work as ethnologist transcended his immediate aims as a preacher amongst the natives of New France. Instead, his intellectual aims were connected to Christian apologetics, an increasingly necessary task in early eighteenth-century Europe. Far from the proto-anthropologist of later editors, we have here the missionary as a participant in the crucial Enlightenment debate about religion.

The implications of exotic ethnography for sacred history were always in the background, although in a divided Europe that no longer had one single authoritative source of religious orthodoxy, and in which radical ideas were gaining considerable ground, these debates became more urgent throughout the seventeenth century. By contrast, what can be considered more permanent is the fact that missionary ethnographers, whatever their confessional or theological inclinations, sought to generate knowledge that was useful for evangelization. The extent to which each missionary project was also overtly imperialist, on the other hand, varied considerably. It has often been noted that spreading the faith was frequently the counterpart for spreading European dominion, with the cross marching alongside the sword, but this is more obviously true of some areas than others. In the Spanish Americas, for example, evangelization was essential both to the justification of conquest and as an instrument of colonial rule, and friars acquired an important educational and economic role among the native communities – in some frontier areas, such as Paraguay, with remarkable levels of autonomy. However, this position was not without its contradictions, and often stood in tension with the secular concerns of the European settlers. While by implication the friars participated in the imposition of Spanish authority, they also sought to defend the Indians from abuse, and in the most extreme cases – notably the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas – they even questioned the legitimacy of conquest and the actual colonial order which had been created. But this was Spanish America, which saw the most massive experiment in cultural assimilation in the sixteenth century. In many other parts of the world, by contrast, the prospects for outright conquest were dubious and trading interests were paramount. Although a strict focus on commercial strategies was sometimes proclaimed as official policy – this was clearly the case of the English East India Company in the seventeenth century – the boundaries between commercial business and political pressure could be very fluid. For example, the Portuguese in Africa and Asia combined commercial negotiations with a selective use of strategic conquest when opportunity and need arose, and colonies such as Goa, Hormuz, Malacca or Macao, with varying degrees of Catholic acculturation, were the product of a marked imperial flexibility. When significant territorial conquests took place, for example in the case of Ceylon at the turn of the seventeenth century, the role of native converts to Catholicism could be highly significant, although nothing could match the thoroughness with which the Spanish imbued their conquest of the Philippines with evangelical zeal. But in many other areas, such as Japan or China, missionaries were capable of operating for many decades without any obvious prospect of conquest.

It would obviously be reductionist to assess the spread of Christianity by missionaries simply as an expression of an imperialist programme. Rather, we should think of commercial, territorial and religious strategies as largely autonomous aims that could, however, be combined in a powerful cocktail according to a variety of institutional drives and local circumstances. Missionaries acted as ethnographers and engaged in a kind of cultural dialogue in all cases: as essential participants in a colonial order, such as the Jesuits in the Philippines, or trying to distance themselves from European imperialism, like the same Jesuits in Japan, China and elsewhere; as part of a high-level diplomatic exchange, such as those Catholic missionaries active in the Safavid and Mughal courts, or on their own initiative, like the Dutch predikant Abraham Rogerius (1609–49), who wrote one of the most detailed accounts of Hinduism whilst employed by the Dutch East India Company in the commercial colony of Pulicat.Footnote ⁵ We could perhaps generalize by saying that that the most substantial missionary ethnographies were bound to two kinds of approaches: assimilating subject populations, such as in the Spanish colonies of the New World, or seducing those living under independent ‘gentile’ (pagan) rulers, in areas like Japan, China, South India or Siam. Two of the most insightful late sixteenth-century ethnographers, the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún and the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, belong to these very different kinds of context.

Beyond personal curiosity, a force never to be dismissed entirely, the point of missionary ethnographies was that one needed to know what one was fighting against: ignorance, idolatry and the Devil. In the course of learning about culturally embedded religious systems, it became necessary to identify the elements of the local culture that supported a legitimate social and political order whilst isolating those religious beliefs and practices that must be eliminated because they were considered to be superstitious or to involve idolatry. These two closely related but distinct concepts, superstition and idolatry, were essential markers, and in effect functioned to define the absolute limits of any kind of cultural accommodation; however, deciding where exactly to draw the line could be very tricky. As the Jesuits in China and South India were to discover throughout the seventeenth century, being too accommodating could lead to bitter disputes between rival Catholic orders, and even within them. Nonetheless, we are talking about differences of degree. Even Protestant missionaries, despite their different attitudes on a wide range of issues (for example towards translating Scripture into vernacular languages), shared with Catholics many assumptions and strategies of accommodation: hence Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a pietist missionary in South India at the turn of the eighteenth century, bought manuscripts written by his Jesuit rivals, and came to adopt similar ideas about the existence of a core of doctrinal monotheism behind the multiplicity of idolatrous cults in the religion of the ‘gentiles’.Footnote ⁶

Rather than a single imperialist drive, what defines all the various missionary efforts, taken together, is their participation in the early modern process of globalization, understood as the development of worldwide exchanges and connections. Christian missionaries from Europe had a very prominent role in establishing those, especially in cultural terms.Footnote ⁷ They were often the protagonists of first encounters, and in their ethnographic practice they recorded and interpreted those very religious traditions that they sought to transform. Whether this was a friendly, dialogical process is another issue, to which we shall return.

The Religious Imagination and European Modernity

One apparent paradox that derives from this emphasis on the role of missionaries as agents of globalization is the association of religious universalism – and most clearly Roman Catholic universalism – with the emergence of modernity.Footnote ⁸ This seems to run counter to secularist narratives which focus on the Enlightenment critique of religious excess – clericalism, superstition, enthusiasm, intolerance and fanaticism – as the key to the emergence of modern liberal values. However, the Enlightenment critique of religion was often shaped by the intellectual strategies of Christian apologists confronting religious diversity; indeed, secular cosmopolitanism was often built upon ideas of the moral unity of humankind and the universality of natural law that Christian thinkers and missionaries had been particularly keen to embrace. The apparent paradox is best resolved by considering the chronological sequence in some detail. The early modern period on the whole led to a global vision of humanity across the various parts of the world – a mental map, or a ‘great map of mankind’, to use Edmund Burke's felicitous phrase of 1777 – that found ample expression in both cartographic and literary genres.Footnote ⁹ However, between this mature vision of the late Enlightenment and the original impetus towards geographical exploration led by the Iberian monarchies at the turn of the sixteenth century, we can identify other important moments in European conceptualization of the circumnavigated world and its peoples. One such moment is the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Between 1550 and 1620, a number of historical, geographical and cosmographical works were written and published that decisively shaped a new ‘modern’ vision of the world. What defined ‘modernity’ in this context was precisely the global scope that the ancients, confined to the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern oecumene, had lacked. Hence the theme of modernity was symbolically articulated through images of trans-oceanic navigations and the increase of knowledge, combining a newly acquired global geographical reach with scientific universalism. Although the recovery of classical learning set the horizons for this notion of modernity, the new historical consciousness would eventually come to oppose newly observed facts – drawn from experience – to the authority of old books. This was not, however, in any way an anti-religious vision of modernity: rather, it was a vision primarily articulated from a religious standpoint. It was precisely because there was a providential design that all the parts and peoples of the world had a common origin and common destiny. Celebrating modernity was also celebrating the providential significance of an exceptional moment in the history of humankind, as Christian Europeans understood it (Muslims in Turkey, Persia and India, or the Chinese in the ‘Middle Kingdom’, might have thought about this differently). Christian humanist geographers such as Gerhard Mercator, or armchair cosmographers and travel collectors like Sebastian Münster and Giovanni Battista Ramusio, were the first to articulate this global modern vision, in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, and increasingly they came to rely on the works of missionaries in the most distant countries for their new information. In subsequent decades, missionaries, in particular those imbued with Catholic universalism, were heavily involved in articulating the new historical and geographical vision, from Peru and Mexico to Goa, Macao and Nagasaki. There was of course a distinction between the natural and civil categories of ethnographic analysis and those which concerned the ‘super-natural’, or religious, experience; however, for most authors at the turn of the seventeenth century this did not imply a clash between religion and secularity.Footnote ¹⁰

It has rightly been noted that for a long time this globalized world was more a vision than a reality.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, while the world had been circumnavigated, interactions with distant peoples were often violent, the commercial connections tenuous and knowledge of other cultures partial and often extremely superficial. But this is precisely the point: religious idealism and propaganda helped to articulate a historical and moral vision for a united humankind out of an experience that was very fragmented and potentially bewildering. The work of the Italian cosmographer Giovanni Botero provides an example. His Relationi universali (Universal Relations; 4 parts, Rome, 1591–6) was conceived as an extended report on the situation of Christianity in the world.Footnote ¹² In order to achieve this Botero developed an ambitious programme for an up-to-date description of the world, drawing on Venetian ambassadorial reports, Spanish and Portuguese accounts of the conquest of the Indies, Jesuit histories and letters – for example, the recent works of Maffei and Acosta – and travel collections, notably Ramusio's Delle Navigationi et viaggi (Navigations and Travels; 3 vols, Venice, 1553–9). He thus assembled a remarkably complete picture. The first two parts described the various countries of the known world geographically and politically; the third and fourth parts described the religions of the Old World and the New. Despite the growing importance of political analysis in his oeuvre, Botero never lost his concern with assessing the global expansion of true (that is, Catholic) religion. He was particularly emphatic about the role of European civilization in facilitating the conversion of savage barbarians, refining the distinction between different degrees of civility and barbarism proposed by the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta. As has often been noted, Botero's descriptions were frequently rushed and error-ridden, as he copied and summarized his sources without acknowledgment and with little care for detail.Footnote ¹³ However, he had access to a range of materials unthinkable a few decades earlier, to a very large extent thanks to the writings of missionaries. Most decisively, he articulated a global vision of humanity imbued with Roman Catholic providentialism and not a small dose of imperialism (struggling to balance the claims of the rival dynasties of Spain with Portugal, France and the Holy Roman Empire). Although Botero's philosophical reflections about the history of the expansion of Christianity often lacked depth or cogency, his global religious vision imposed a sort of coherence onto his diverse sources, while the numerous editions and translations of the Universal Relations ensured that readers across Europe, whether Catholic or Protestant, would rely on a work of Catholic propaganda for their knowledge of far-flung lands and peoples.

Botero's efforts to give coherence to the political and religious diversity of the various peoples of the world were largely inspired by the more systematic thinking of José de Acosta in relation to the Spanish American Empire, both in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Natural and Moral History of the Indies) of 1590, and the earlier and more technical missionary treatise De procuranda indorum salute (How to pursue the Salvation of the Indians) of 1588–9. Acosta's work, the product of a high-ranking missionary who held important responsibilities in Peru and was distinguished by his exceptional training as a humanist and theologian, provided a response to decades of debate about adequate policies for the conversion of the Indians to Christianity. His key insight, that different approaches were appropriate to different kinds of ‘barbarian’ according to differing degrees of rationality, or civility, was not, however, simply offered as an informed and sophisticated answer to the practical need for an effective religious and colonial policy in a mature imperial system. Instead, it was also framed by a historical reflection on the nature of the New World, as both a physical and a human reality. Hence, while part of his analysis was devoted to establishing the connection between religion and civilization (maintaining, for instance, that the most savage barbarians must be taught to become men before they could be taught to be Christians), and to a detailed analysis of the various types of idolatry, another section sought to examine the history of the American peoples, from their origins in the Old World, through a necessary migration by land in remote times, to the development of the partial civilizations of Mexico and Peru. Religious logic dictated Acosta's fundamental anthropological assumptions, in particular about the unity of humankind and the possibility of conversion of what were, in effect, rational human beings. At the same time, observations of cultural diversity amongst ‘gentiles’ – that is, those peoples who were not Christian, Jewish or Muslim – required a sophisticated use of analytical distinctions, and led Acosta to adopt a hierarchical model of degrees of civility which was well suited to the needs of Spanish colonialism. Acosta's model implied various historical stages of social development, culminating with the ‘modern’ union of reason and faith in Catholic Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ Quite clearly, Acosta was not afraid to rethink his scientific (as opposed to religious) assumptions in the light of experience, and if necessary to question Aristotle (for example in relation to the existence of a torrid zone): in the pursuit of truth, religion and science, or faith and reason, were complementary. It did not occur to Acosta that one might be used coherently to question the other.

Ethnography as Science and Ethnography as Rhetoric

Acosta's exceptional work illustrates the extent to which early modern Catholic missionaries were willing to subject rational speculations about the natural world and its peoples to the discipline of experience. We could emphasize Acosta's unique genius, but he was also the product of the late Renaissance eclectic cultivation of Aristotelian science, humanist historical learning and scholastic theology (in particular Aquinas). Early modern ethnography was scientific primarily in the sense that it was empirically informed and methodically organized. The concept of ethnography, the description of peoples, is of course somewhat anachronistic: early modern writers instead wrote about religions, manners and customs.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite their lack of specific academic training (until the late eighteenth century there was no such thing as a discipline called ethnography), they pursued with clarity and tenacity the production of descriptive accounts, whether simple relations and travelogues or as part of more scholarly genres such as cosmographies, histories of the missions, natural histories and comparative works. These authors assumed that new observations could correct popular opinions and the authority of earlier writers, but they also pursued the methodical exposition of distinct themes according to a notion of systematic coverage. Lafitau, for example, compared natural temperaments (that is, the character and inclinations of savage nations), religious beliefs and rituals, secular government, marriage ceremonies, education, male and female occupations, war, diplomacy, trade, hunting and fishing, medicine, languages, games and death rituals. These lists were not identical between authors, but the coverage tended to converge around similar topics. Indeed, the institutions that encouraged the continuous production of geographic and ethnographic descriptions, whether the Spanish Council of the Indies or the Jesuit order, often used questionnaires and techniques of note-taking in order to facilitate comprehensive coverage, a practice that many curious savants in Europe interested in exotic lands and peoples came to share. The scientific academies of the seventeenth century would follow suit.

While the emphasis on full and accurate descriptions was generalized across a wide range of missionary ethnographers, the step from observation to philosophical and historical, or antiquarian, speculation – what we might retrospectively define as ethnology – was less typical. Writers such as Acosta and Lafitau were clearly engaged in such theoretical speculations, and their intellectual impact was often significant. Whilst their motivations were, generally speaking, apologetic, their concerns varied, from Acosta's practical engagement with missionary policies in the Spanish New World colonies to Lafitau's desire to challenge some of the sources of religious scepticism in Europe. However, the first important impetus for a philosophical discussion of the ethnographic evidence was the debate on the legitimacy of conquest of ‘barbarian gentiles’ in sixteenth-century Spain. Some theologians, such as the highly influential Francisco de Vitoria, were concerned with the theory of just war in the light of natural law, but did not engage in any detailed ethnographic analysis, relying when necessary on existing relations or works of history written by laymen. Historians of the Indies of the first half of the century, such as Peter Martyr, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Francisco López de Gómara or Agustín de Zárate, were generally considered to provide reliable evidence even by those who disagreed with their usually imperialist political bias, and (as we have already mentioned in the case of Gómara) these authors in turn often depended on missionary ethnographies for some of their evidence. However, as the political debate deepened throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, Bartolomé de Las Casas, a radical thinker with an interesting transatlantic biography, responded to these polemics about imperial legitimacy and colonial policy with an ambitious effort at comparative ethnology. It was as a result of his desire to prove a number of theses about the rational capacity of the American Indians, and about the foundation of their idolatry in natural religiosity, that in his Apologética historia (Apologetic History), completed in the 1550s, he engaged in a systematic comparison of their character, religion and customs with those of the ancient gentiles – that is, those very Greeks and Romans that humanist writers so admired for their cultural achievements.

As these debates progressed, the idea that exotic gentiles could be civilized became hard to contest, even though the extent to which they were already civilized when compared to modern Europeans could still be disputed. Attempts at reinforcing hierarchies varied considerably, from a sheer assertion of the positive influence of Christianity and the evils of devilish idolatry, to a more secular emphasis on political and institutional differences (hence Botero, for example, analysed monarchical despotism in Asia), to a nuanced discussion of systems of writing (notably in the work of Acosta), and finally to some attempts to connect the capacity for full rationality to racial differences. The dubious honour of articulating this last model fell to an Italian Jesuit of aristocratic origins, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), who as Visitor of the Eastern Missions was also responsible for supporting a native clergy and Matteo Ricci's novel strategy of cultural accommodation in China: the Chinese and Japanese were, after all, perfectly white.Footnote ¹⁶

By the end of the sixteenth century, while systems of cultural hierarchy proliferated, it had also become apparent that fitting the historical and religious traditions of the various newly discovered gentile nations within the unitary narrative of universal history, which was of course also that of sacred history, would pose some important challenges. The starting point was always the biblical account of human origins. While in the Americas it became imperative to be able to connect the origins of the natives to the peoples of the Old World, in Asia, especially in China, a pre-Noachian chronology posed a considerable challenge, as quickly noted by the Augustinian friar Martín de Rada in his pioneering account of the kingdom (1575) and, following him, by friar Juan González de Mendoza in his widely translated Historia del gran reyno de la China (History of the great Kingdom of China; Rome, 1585). Even before the Protestant scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger noticed the problem, writers like Jerónimo Román, also an Augustinian, had attempted to solve the conundrum by suggesting that the Chinese used lunar, rather than solar, years.Footnote ¹⁷

While some ethnographic documents were originally produced to support the internal needs of a missionary order – for information and edification, or in order to develop more effective strategies – they were often also publicized in support of propaganda efforts. For this reason, a great deal of missionary ethnography circulated widely. Historians have often emphasized the rivalries between different orders, notably the opposition of Franciscans and Dominicans to the methods of the Jesuits, but there is ample evidence of much ethnographic material being shared, even before it was published. Some of the most important historical documents relating to the history of the natives of the valley of Mexico and their religion were based on native chronicles and oral discourses collected by the Franciscans, who were pioneers in the missions of New Spain and produced many of the best materials. The successive writings of Andrés de Olmos, Toribio de Benavente and Bernardino de Sahagún were soon read by many others in the colony: government officials such as the magistrate Alonso de Zorita, naturalists such as Philip II's scientific agent Francisco Hernández, and political activists like the Dominican Las Casas, who largely built his Apologética historia on their evidence (despite the fact that Toribio de Benavente and other missionaries were highly sceptical of his radical anti-colonial critique).Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, the contents of the substantial history of the Indies by the Dominican Diego Durán, and in particular his account of the imperial history of Mexica (the Aztecs), were shared with the Jesuit Juan de Tovar, who in turn informed Acosta. Another interesting case is that of Jerónimo Román, the Augustinian with antiquarian inclinations whom we encountered in relation to the chronology of China. Active in Spain during the reign of Philip II, he had access to the manuscript of Las Casas's Apologética historia and offered a substantial summary in his Repúblicas del mundo (Republics of the World; Salamanca, 1575), albeit omitting its comparative arguments. In this way, an Augustinian summary of a polemical ethnological treatise by a Dominican, largely based on the ethnographic materials collected by Franciscan missionaries, came to inform the Republic of Letters in Spain about the government and customs of the Indias Occidentales. Román's was the only global cosmography originally written and published in Spain during its imperial century.

Linguistic expertise was the foundation of the most insightful ethnographies. It was precisely because missionaries lived close to their charges and learnt their language in order to preach to them that they had access to their oral and written cultures. Training a sufficient number of missionaries and deploying them across many localities posed a considerable practical challenge, as not all missionaries were equally eager to learn, or capable of learning, the languages needed to work in the field, and colonial societies tended to privilege acculturation in languages such as Spanish or Portuguese. Nevertheless, the number of languages learnt by early modern missionaries, both Catholic and (to a lesser extent) Protestant, is staggering. Not only did missionaries learn to communicate, preach and hear confessions in these languages, they also wrote dictionaries, grammars and Christian literature, in some cases even printing these works. Their linguistic skill was the foundation for deeper cultural interpretation, since it allowed missionaries to go well beyond the mere observation of behaviour, and engage in an exchange of subjective information with the peoples they sought to convert. Of course many laymen, for example traders and adventurers, also learnt many of those languages, at least at the colloquial level, and a few erudite or philosophical travellers, such as Filippo Sassetti, Pietro della Valle or Jean Chardin, became expert practitioners and engaged with literary traditions. The mestizo historian of Ancient Peru, Inca Garcilaso, who took pride in his double cultural heritage, became an inspiration for many European readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the natural historian Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan (1727) came to replace the writings of Jesuits as a more up-to-date authority on those hard-to-access islands. Nevertheless, it was more often missionaries who wrote about the languages of America, Asia and Africa as the key to understanding native religion and customs, and who sought out the local written literatures, and even contributed to them. There were no lay equivalents of Matteo Ricci's philosophical dialogues and collections of moral maxims written in Chinese, which became classics in Mandarin literature, and it was still to the Jesuits or other missionaries – often their ideological enemies – that many philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire turned when seeking to learn more about the civilizations of China, India or ancient Mexico.

Besides their unprecedented attention to the written literatures of many gentile nations, missionaries also expressed deep appreciation for the expressive capacity of oral cultures amongst non-literate societies. The fact that some missionaries spent many years living with their converts, away from European society, and often with little prospect of returning to Europe, helped shape their attitudes. Thus the linguistic and cultural expertise of the Valencian Jesuit Francisco Ignacio Alzina, missionary in the Spanish Philippines between 1632 and 1674, was developed over many decades. As he made clear in his manuscript ‘Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas’ (‘History of the Bisayan Islands and Indians’; c.1668), the expressive capacity of the Bisayan language revealed that the key difference between the Bisayan and the Europeans was not intellectual capacity, but simply education. The cultivation of the liberal arts and sciences, which in turn depended on political organization, alone distinguished the civilized from the barbarians.Footnote ¹⁹ In this way Alzina detached the kind of cultural hierarchy that José de Acosta had brilliantly formulated from any racial or climatic explanation, by insisting that the rational capacity of human beings was ultimately linguistic.

Concern with acquiring and reporting accurate empirical information about potential converts was only one aspect of the various genres of missionary writing, what may be defined as missionary knowledge or savoirs missionaires.Footnote ²⁰ In order to avoid an exaggerated emphasis on factual knowledge, I prefer to use the term ‘missionary discourse’, taking into consideration the full complexity of ideological and instrumental aspects that shaped the various genres of missionary writing. Ethnography could be found in many of those genres: primarily letters, relations (or memoirs) and historical works, but also other forms of apologetic and educational literature, such as catechisms, confession manuals and literary dialogues. While letters and relations were the main vehicles for reporting ethnography from the mission field (notably in the case of the Jesuit system of centralized information), the historical genre, influenced but not overly constrained by humanist models, represented the most complete, and at the same time the most complex, ethnological discourse: it combined natural and moral history, super-natural or providential history (in essence the history of the missions, often hagiographic but sometimes also polemical) and antiquarian erudition and speculation, including comparative works such as those by Las Casas and Lafitau. In this context, ethnography in the sense of organized information about peoples and their génies and moeurs was often enmeshed in, and substantially affected by, a wider narrative of religious propaganda and apologetics. Religious edification, in particular, was a central purpose of much of the published literature. While Christianity aspired to universalism, the actual audiences for these writings were often far more concrete, and religious propaganda could acquire a particular tinge, whether confessional, national or that of a specific religious order. With all these conditions, missionary ethnography also became, inevitably, a rhetorical exercise, quite often with elements of fictionalization.

A revealing example is the Histoire des Isles Marianes (History of the Mariana Islands) published in 1700 by the French Jesuit Charles le Gobien.Footnote ²¹ What interested Le Gobien about the Mariana archipelago – modern Guam – was precisely the fact that it was a Jesuit mission in a poor, remote and neglected region. The lack of resources in the islands demonstrated that the society's motivations were purely apostolic, and enhanced the contested legitimacy of its missions elsewhere in East Asia, notably in China. Diego Luis de San Vitores, who had died a martyr, was presented as the key figure: by means of his apostolic vision, he had been able to mobilize the support of lay patrons such as the governor of the Philippines and the viceroy of New Spain. The attention paid by Le Gobien to the new mission in the Marianas was therefore part of the apologetic for the society's missionary activity.

Throughout Le Gobien's Histoire, there is tension between two seemingly contradictory themes: on the one hand, the hagiographical construction of the role of Providence in the history of the activities of the apostle Diego Luis de San Vitores and his companions; on the other, the scientific and sometimes sympathetic tone of the descriptions of the way of life and customs of the supposedly savage islanders. The chapter devoted to describing the natives is in this respect a particularly successful example of the extent to which ethnography was a complex rhetorical construct.Footnote ²² On the one hand, it depicted the Chamorro as enjoying a carefree and secure life; on the other hand, it condemned them for their ignorance. Extreme liberty (jamais peuple n'a vescu dans une plus grande liberté, ni dans une indépendance plus absolue) also implied lack of justice and profound ethnocentrism: the Chamorro thought of themselves the world's wisest people, or, indeed, the original stock of humankind. This was something far more complex than the simple opposition between civilization and barbarism.

This complexity was fully captured by the account of the speech ‘delivered’ by a native rebel leader, Hurao, and in reality mostly invented by Le Gobien according to the conventions of classical and humanist history-writing.Footnote ²³ Hurao defended the traditional Chamorro lifestyle, arguing that ‘we do not need their help to live happily’, and opposing the natural simplicity of the natives, embodied in their nakedness, to the corruption of a ‘civilizing’ process that in reality created artificial needs. It was not worth while losing natural liberty in exchange for a few trinkets and the promise of a happy afterlife; in fact, the stories told by the missionaries were no less fictitious than the fables told locally.Footnote ²⁴ Alas, the reader was not meant to agree with any of this. This was not a libertine speech, comparable to Montaigne's essay on cannibals, or the dialogues with the Canadian Huron, Adario, published in 1703 by the Baron de Lahontan; nor was it the kind of argument against the colonizing mission that others would make in the eighteenth century. The speech must be interpreted in its broad narrative context, as a dramatic counterpoint to a fundamentally apologetic and even hagiographic text. Like the stirring but futile speech of the British leader Calgacus in Tacitus's life of Agricola, an obvious model, the barbarian's eloquence was a tragic counterpoint to the triumph of civilization. This was the perspective of a civilized writer capable of feeling nostalgia (of a Stoic character) for a golden age of simplicity and innocence that was irrevocably lost. The Jesuits, ideologically more conservative than philosophers such as Montaigne or Rousseau who echoed similar themes, never doubted that Christianity and civilization should go together in a project that was invariably paternalistic. Many missionaries were of course critical of the greed of many Spanish commanders and colonists, but their condemnation of the abuses of colonization did not imply a rejection of the imperial project.

Mediation, Accommodation and the Problem of Cultural Translation

These considerations make it possible to assess both the potential and the limitations of early modern missionary ethnography as a form of cultural translation. Far too often, missionaries, and especially the Jesuits cultivating experimental forms of cultural accommodation, have been hailed as pioneers of scientifically informed interpretations of cultural diversity, or even as initiators of an unprecedented cultural dialogue between religions and civilizations. On both accounts, the reality was far more complex, and we must be wary of replacing the early modern myth of the saintly apostolic missionary or martyr, such as Francis Xavier or Diego Luis de San Vitores, with the modern myth of the ethnographically sophisticated missionary devoted to a cross-cultural dialogue, whether Bernardino de Sahagún, Matteo Ricci or Roberto Nobili. Many missionaries, in particular (but not only) Jesuits, certainly excelled in linguistic competence and ethnographic research; they also believed that in order to conduct their missions successfully they had to educate natives as Christians, and when possible integrate them into the Church hierarchy, albeit in subordinate positions (there was great resistance to native clergy in positions of authority). However, their acceptance of exotic customs and cultural traditions was highly selective, and often calculating; their view of religious diversity entirely one-sided, if not deeply intolerant; and their assumptions of what constituted rational civil behaviour both hierarchical and Eurocentric. What is nevertheless true is that early modern missionaries were willing to experiment with different degrees of cultural accommodation, a consequence, paradoxically, of their deep commitment to the universal validity of their own faith.

A brief consideration of some of the most important works of missionary ethnography may help elucidate this point. The research undertaken by those such as Bernardino de Sahagún or Matteo Ricci was outstanding, not simply for its unprecedented linguistic and cultural insight, but also for its capacity for systematic synthesis. At the same time, the apologetic nature of their projects imposed important limitations. When writing his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain; c.1569), the Franciscan Sahagún (c.1499–1590) described himself as a doctor diagnosing an illness, which in New Spain was primarily idolatry. It was because idolatry lay hidden in all kinds of everyday social practices that systematic research into all things – natural, human and divine – was necessary. Sahagún's history was divided thematically into twelve books, covering the native gods; religious festivals; beliefs and practices concerning the deceased and their afterlife; astrology; divination; moral philosophy; natural philosophy; the native lords and their customs; artisans and traders; the virtues and vices of the various native peoples and social groups, their illnesses and remedies (assuming, as was then usual, a close correlation between mental and physical health); animals, birds and fish (but not plants); and, finally, the history of the Spanish conquest from the native point of view, as remembered by those who survived it (theirs was a markedly retrospective interpretation of events, imbued with the Christian Providentialism of native converts).Footnote ²⁵ All this amounted to a remarkably ambitious research programme, made more impressive by the rich illustrations that accompanied the text. Sahagún's method was philological, focusing on recording precise vocabularies and searching in the meanings of words for the cultural signifiers that would betray idolatry and thus help distinguish licit from illicit beliefs and practices. Thus his most important manuscript, the Florentine Codex, presents the original Mexican (Nahuatl) text alongside a Spanish translation.Footnote ²⁶ Sahagún's originality when compared with other missionary ethnographers of his time and place was his insistence on the value of keeping a record of the original language, instead of relying on a single act of translation.

Following the precedent of Andrés de Olmos, a missionary of an earlier generation skilled in Nahuatl, Sahagún obtained information through his order's proven technique of using guided interviews with Mexican elders who remembered pre-conquest oral traditions and were able to interpret pre-Hispanic books of ‘antiquities’.Footnote ²⁷ These, at least from Sahagún's perspective, were often superstitious books of divination, and while they contained valuable historical detail, this was usually mixed with idolatry. The mistake of many earlier missionaries had been to burn those books, destroying the resources needed to understand what was really going on. Their zeal was in fact self-defeating: only detailed, encyclopaedic knowledge would make it possible for the friars to target effectively the twisted beliefs inspired by the Devil, their enemy in the New World, and turn the natives into good Christians. These Indians had the capacity for faith, since they were fully rational human beings and ‘our brothers’; indeed, the progress of Christianity in the New World would make up for the grievous losses to heresy in northern Europe. At the same time, it was important to recognize the native capacity for policía, that is, their social and political organization and moral order, which before the Spanish arrived had clearly been better than afterwards (it was common to note that the Indians had picked up the worst vices from their new masters).

However, Sahagún represented a particular position within the colonial Church, that of those who believed that a deeper evangelization was possible, and who were committed to teaching Christian letters to native converts at the Franciscan school of Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco. For critics hostile to the more adventurous friars, delving into pre-Hispanic books and keeping alive Nahuatl traditions would only help to perpetuate the very idolatry the friars sought to combat, while attempts to train a native clergy from the better qualified descendants of the native nobility were misguided: surely it was best to leave all Indians in a subordinate position, and without any knowledge of Latin, so that all religious authority would emanate from those untainted by false beliefs, that is, the Spanish? An elderly Sahagún was no doubt disappointed when in 1577 his books were recalled to Spain and their circulation suppressed by order of Philip II.Footnote ²⁸ The obscurantist party had won the day and the experiment in Tlaltelolco was left in crisis. However, this was never a fight between science and religion. Rather, it was a clash of missionary strategies concerning socio-ethnic hierarchies and the proper degree of cultural accommodation, not entirely unlike the one that, a few decades later and in very different circumstances, would rock the Chinese missions.

Beyond his presentation as a model missionary who gave up family and home to pursue a religious vocation, and patiently worked for decades until he managed to penetrate the Ming Empire and reach Beijing, Matteo Ricci's lasting fame rests on his extraordinary capacity to accommodate the literary and intellectual traditions of a modern ‘gentile’ nation characterized by its power and civility. What made Ricci's missionary strategy truly original in comparison to that of so many other Jesuits practising accommodation in India, Japan or Tibet was his idea that, unlike Buddhism, Confucianism, if properly understood as a rational civil philosophy, was entirely compatible with Christianity, in a way analogous to ancient Stoicism. The accommodation of dress, diet, and customs, songs and poetry, as well as politics and social etiquette, had all long been practised in various mission fields; however, the idea that a non-Christian ethical tradition could be perfectly valid (albeit once purified of later Buddhist influences) was, in the early modern context, both new and radical. The move was highly controversial, and eventually spawned the rites controversy. By accepting the philosophy of Confucius in this manner, had Ricci interpreted it liberally, or reinvented it to suit his Christian agenda? It is notable the extent to which his account of an ‘authentic’ Confucianism, purified of atheism and idolatry, required reinterpretation of the ancient history of the religion of the gentiles, usually understood as the degeneration of a primitive natural monotheism towards idolatry. Decades later Lafitau would take a similar approach to the savage peoples of the world, looking for traces of an Adamic religion in pagan rituals and customs.

This type of intellectual accommodation had important limitations. The strategy developed by Ricci in his key work of Christian apologetics, the Chinese dialogue Tianzhu shiyi [The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven] (Beijing, 1603), required a highly creative engagement both with the Confucian tradition and against Buddhism, in a clear effort to shape the cultural landscape towards a supposedly rational alliance of Christianity and ‘authentic’ native culture against ‘idolatry’.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, many of the mysteries of the faith furthest from Chinese sensibilities, including the passion of Christ, were absent from this preliminary catechism, and were introduced only gradually to converts.Footnote ³⁰ Jesuit missionaries were also extremely selective about the image of Europe which they portrayed in China, a tactic that would come back to haunt them when they eventually lost the ability to monopolize the encounter. Nevertheless, Ricci's construction of the Confucian tradition was not entirely one-sided; nor was it a failure of translation. Rather it was developed in close collaboration with Chinese converts, whose role in shaping the processes of accommodation is only beginning to be fully appreciated.Footnote ³¹ Accommodation might have been very calculated and even Machiavellian in spirit – it involved manipulating discourse and image in order to achieve a further intention that was only partially declared – but it was culturally hybrid in its practical development.

All this requires a reassessment of our understanding of inter-cultural dialogue in general and of religious dialogue in particular. The issue is substantial (what was accommodation really about?), and it affects how we read many documents key to the process of cross-cultural negotiation. Accommodation was both translation and rhetoric.Footnote ³² It involved understanding translation – whether of philosophical and religious terms, or of rituals and customs – as a selective, dynamic process with complex political and philosophical implications; it also involved the art of persuasion, deciding the extent to which artifice and dissimulation were necessary and legitimate, and assessing whether half-truths would pave the way for full truths or could eventually backfire. Many civil customs could easily be accommodated, depending on the context, and some of the most valuable works of missionary ethnography described diversity in manners and customs with a degree of relativism, without overt condemnation, indeed sometimes even with praise.

An outstanding example is the small treatise by the Portuguese Jesuit in Japan, Luís Fróis, Tratado em que se contêm muito sucinta e abreviadamente algumas contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a gente de Europa e esta província de Japaõ (Treatise in which are noted very briefly and succinctly some Differences and Contradictions between the People of Europe and this Province of Japan; c.1585).Footnote ³³ Clearly the product of the intensive cultural analysis that informed the strategy of selective accommodation developed by the visitor of the Eastern Provinces, Alessandro Valignano, Fróis's Tratado proposed a series of contrasts between Japanese and European (or Portuguese) customs, including male and female dress and behaviour; ways of eating and drinking; religious institutions; books and systems of writing; medicine; streets, buildings and gardens; weapons, ships and horses; music, singing and theatre; laws and punishments; linguistic uses and gestures; and even different ways of killing flies. While Fróis expressed surprise that rational peoples could differ so much in their customs, he did not seek to draw any sceptical philosophical conclusions (as Montaigne was doing in Europe in this same period), instead highlighting the almost incredible extent to which cultural distance was possible within the parameters of ‘civility, intelligence and natural knowledge’.Footnote ³⁴ Many of the differences – for example the fact that children learnt to write before they could read, or that the Japanese did not like grapes and figs – appeared simple curiosities, but under Valignano's leadership others became the basis for missionary adaptations to local conditions, intended to lower the obstacles to the spread of the faith. Removing one's shoes when entering a house, accepting white as the Japanese colour of mourning, or taking a present for one's host were, indeed, innocuous social conventions. The crucial issue when determining which foreign customs were acceptable was that they could be considered secular, and not contrary to either faith or reason (ethical norms, as part of natural law, were assumed to be both rational and universal). Japanese raw fish and silk dress could be acceptable, but a disregard for female virginity or the practices of abortion and infanticide were not.

The difficulties arose when customs with an obvious civil component, for example marriageFootnote ³⁵ or burial ceremonies, were imbued with additional non-Christian religious connotations. Hence in China it was customary to offer condolence to recently bereaved relatives by building an altar and placing on it an image of the deceased, or a tablet with an inscription. The Propaganda Fide was willing to accept these practices as simple piety, provided they did not amount to ancestor worship; therefore, strict rules were established for the wording used in the inscriptions, in order to make clear that the soul of the dead person did not reside in the tablet. Similarly, food or paper money were not to be offered to the ancestors as a form of sacrifice or to help them in the afterlife, and a way had to be found for the expression of filial piety that did not imply that the deceased could actually accept and partake of such traditional gifts, for instance by distributing the food amongst the poor, and not burning the paper money.Footnote ³⁶ What was crucial for Christians was to create distance from the Buddhist ideas of the afterlife, including reincarnation. Despite all these efforts, in the more experimental missions the precise boundary between civil and religious (albeit superstitious) customs created deep and lasting debates, or even divisions, among missionaries, that the Church authorities struggled to control.

The debate about the limits of accommodation led to growing awareness of what constituted an accurate translation in relation to diverse cultural connotations. The missionary faced two alternatives: he could either emphasize the different assumptions behind analogous concepts and practices in order to avoid ambiguity, and therefore the danger of contamination from idolatry, or he could embrace translation as a creative act that might transform the underlying assumptions of the converts from imperfect religiosity to perfect (Trinitarian) monotheism. The latter tendency was particularly clear in India throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: while a Jesuit at the Mughal court such as Roth developed a keen sense of Sanskrit grammar, his colleagues in South India, whether in Madurai, Goa or Sri Lanka, were mostly geared towards producing a ‘nativized’ Christian literature in many different sanskritized vernacular languages; that is, they worked towards a hybrid literature often rich in cross-cultural intertextuality that would take root in specific socio-cultural contexts, rather than towards scientific accuracy or consistency.Footnote ³⁷ It is for this reason that, despite their common theology, Catholic missionaries adopted a variety of linguistic strategies according to a variety of audiences, and ended up with different Tamil and Sanskrit equivalents for ‘God’: tampiran, sarvesvara or brahman.

Whether missionaries sought to mark distances from underlying idolatry or to indigenize Christianity with culturally hybrid discourses, the concept of religious dialogue must be used with caution. Quite clearly, those missionaries in China who worked closely with their converts and were mindful of the concerns of Confucian literati were engaged in a process of dialogue, but for a purpose that had little to do with an open exploration of cultural differences for the sake of sheer curiosity. When Ricci and his successors sought to interpret ancient canonical writings in such a way that Confucianism could be distinguished from any Buddhist influences and made compatible with Christianity, they did not simply respond to the point-of-view of ‘the other’, but actively positioned themselves in the cultural landscape, seeking potential allies while defining their Buddhist rivals as enemies. Religious tolerance as a cross-cultural ideal was out of the question: Christian missionaries in Muslim or gentile countries sought tolerance only for themselves. Hence, when in the late sixteenth century some Japanese daymios of Kyushu converted to Christianity, the Jesuits were keen to encourage their persecution of Buddhism; similarly, in Portuguese Goa – and even more in Spanish Manila – religious tolerance was severely limited.

The rhetorical element was particularly strong in literary dialogues written for apologetic purposes. In the late 1580s Alessandro Valignano was keen to publicize the journey of four Japanese teenagers who travelled to the courts of Catholic Europe under the care of the Society of Jesus, and with the help of another Jesuit, Duarte de Sande, he composed a Latin dialogue in which the young samurai converts recorded their admiration for Europe; however, while the young Japanese – always closely supervised – had written genuine journals, now lost, the interpretation offered in the dialogues was far from spontaneous.Footnote ³⁸ Whose voice was being heard? Similarly, the Chinese voices of Ricci's apologetic dialogues, written with a Chinese audience in mind, were conditioned by the imperative that they would succumb to Ricci's superior arguments for Christianity, in the same way that the Socrates in Plato's dialogues was destined to convince his Greek interlocutors that their previous philosophical assumptions were wrong.Footnote ³⁹ These voices made some plausible points (and may even have been inspired by actual personal encounters), but they cannot be taken as reliable evidence of Confucian or Buddhist views of Christianity.

This rhetorical strategy was far from unique to the Jesuit mission in Japan and China, since literary dialogues were particularly effective pedagogical tools. In seventeenth-century Siam, Louis Laneau (1637–96), apostolic vicar and member of the Parisian Missions étrangères, composed dialogues in the local language, Thai, in which Christian and Buddhist teachers competed to convince a ‘seeker of wisdom’ of the superiority of their ways. This approach echoes the medieval disputations between Christians and Muslims or Jews (consider the work of Ramon Llull), but was nevertheless distinctive in that the intended audience was clearly external and not yet, or not necessarily, Christian.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the French Missions Étrangères were generally in conflict with the Jesuits (for instance, concerning their jurisdictions in Asia), they shared the ideal of training a native clergy, and Laneau adopted similar theses about the possible salvation of virtuous gentiles and the need for a gradual exposition of the Christian mysteries. Similarly, in the first decades of the eighteenth century the Capuchins in India and Tibet, also sent by the Propaganda in Rome at the expense of the Portuguese-Jesuit jurisdiction over the Eastern missions, condemned Jesuit accommodation of ‘superstitious’ customs in South India, while claiming exclusive control of their missionary fields in the North (in 1721 even forcing Ippolito Desideri, an expert in Tibetan Buddhism, to leave Lhasa); at the same time, they followed very similar apologetic strategies, learning local languages, seeking out the religious writings of the gentiles, and (for example) composing dialogues in Hindi for the king of Bettiah which supposedly proved the superiority of Christianity over the religion of the Brahmans.Footnote ⁴¹ In the end, rivalries over jurisdiction were often more decisive than those about method.

In order to assess the real nature of any religious dialogue, ‘gentile’ voices in Christian apologetic sources can be compared to other documents in which the points of view of Buddhist monks, Indo-Portuguese Brahmans or Chinese converts were not overwritten by Christian missionaries for their own purposes. While sources hostile to the teachings of Christianity are abundant in Japan and China (including those written by former Christian converts returning to Buddhism, such as the famous Fukan Fabian, author of both Christian apologetic works and a refutation of Christianity), they tend to create negative stereotypes of an exclusivist foreign religion with false claims to universality. In their utter lack of sympathy, such stereotypes are like a mirror image of Christian polemical presentations of hypocritical Buddhist monks inspired by the Devil to teach idolatrous cults.Footnote ⁴² By contrast, materials produced by those open to Christianity can be particularly illuminating. A fascinating example is provided by the notes taken in the 1630s by a number of Chinese converts under the care of the Jesuit Giulio Aleni, a close follower of Ricci in the province of Fujian, which were published in eight small books by the prominent convert Li Jubiao as Kouduo richao (Diary of Oral Teachings).Footnote ⁴³ Summarizing Aleni's sermons and teachings in the Chinese tradition of collections of sayings, the Diary recorded the Jesuit's answers to questions posed by low-level literati (xiucai), offering a unique glimpse of their actual concerns, and of what accommodation might have entailed in a genuine dialogical context.Footnote ⁴⁴ They asked, for example, how Adam and Eve could be also the ancestors of the Chinese, since surely their own historical records were just as good as those from ancient Judea, and why God had allowed so many generations of Chinese, however virtuous, to remain in ignorance of the true teachings of Jesus, potentially condemning them to eternal damnation. Aleni's answers, often verging on the unorthodox, make it clear that missionaries struggled to avoid saying things that would not have pleased a superior ignorant of Chinese traditions such as the visitor André Palmeiro, or which might not pass muster in a pulpit in Italy, France or Mexico.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus local deities protecting cities (chenghuang) were not rejected as mere idols, but rather interpreted as guardian angels, and while the Incarnation or the Trinity were not ignored, the doctrinal emphasis was monotheist, insisting especially on the ‘natural’ doctrine of a creator God, following Ricci's selective catechism.Footnote ⁴⁶ This kind of document, published by the Chinese converts rather than by the missionaries, offers unique insight into genuine native voices that, through a dialogical process, stretched the practice of accommodation.

However, even after we set aside obviously literary works of Christian apologetics, not all sources offering native voices in native languages can be accepted as genuine expressions of such native perspectives. For example some of the interventions by Chinese converts in the rites controversy, offering their linguistic and cultural expertise to clarify whether it was orthodox to venerate Confucius or to call God Tian and Shangdi, were clearly orchestrated by the Jesuit missionaries in order to support their case: consider, for instance, the letters written by a gathering of converts in Nanjing in late 1702 under the leadership of leading convert Blasius Liu Yunde Verbiest, to counter the restrictions imposed by vicar apostolic Charles Maigrot.Footnote ⁴⁷ The evidence from supposedly unmediated native voices can be treacherous precisely because the fact that they were genuine was part of the rhetoric. Even such apparently local sources as the letters addressed by Tamil Brahmans to Ziegenbalg and other German Pietist missionaries based in Tranquebar (on the Coromandel Coast) between 1712 and 1714 must be treated with great caution: most seem to have been written, or at least brokered, by a local interpreter with knowledge of various European languages, named Alakappan, and his views were influenced by his considerable knowledge of the obsessive concern of the Christian missionaries who employed him with, for example, denouncing idolatry. It is true that the letters presented the Hindu Brahmans as intellectual equals of Europeans, who merited a place within a global Republic of Letters, and that the replies Ziegenbalg received from his ‘heathen’ correspondents informed his interpretation of Śaivism as a form of natural monotheism, certainly imperfect because bereft of Christian grace, but nevertheless essentially rational. However, the Tamil letters have only come to us through the German version sent to Europe for publication; here again, a dialogical form of religious ethnography merges with sectarian propaganda and Christian apologetics.Footnote ⁴⁸

In general, missionaries studied the religious traditions of gentiles in order to refute them. This is clearly the case for both Buddhism and Hinduism. In India, many of the great Catholic treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – from the Jesuit Jacomé Fenicio's Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais (Book about the Sect of the Oriental Indians; written in Calicut in 1609), which was based on texts in Malayalam, to the Capuchin Marco della Tomba's Livro in cui si descrivono diversi sistemi della religione dei gentili dell'Indostano (Book in which the diverse Systems of the Religion of the Gentiles of Hindustan are described; c.1775), composed on the basis of translations of Hindi sources – combined the summary exposition of doctrinal and mythological texts, such as the Ramayana, with polemical arguments against them, often deploying scholastic distinctions that were hardly appropriate. Although it was generally believed that the Brahmans did not have properly logical philosophical arguments, they nevertheless had ‘reasons’, and these could only be countered by engaging with their religious literature: knowing those books therefore was ‘the most necessary thing after learning their language’, as Marco della Tomba declared.Footnote ⁴⁹ What gradually changed was these missionaries’ linguistic competence in vernacular languages or (more rarely) Sanskrit, and the range of sources to which they had access. Thus, while Rogerius, the Dutch pastor in Pulicat between 1632 and 1642, relied heavily on one single local informer, a Brahman called Padmanaba who had some knowledge of Dutch, in order to gather the materials for his De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (The Open Door to Hidden Paganism; Leiden, 1651), a few decades later Ziegenbalg could read a very wide range of texts directly in Tamil, as witnessed by his catalogue of sources, Bibliotheca Malabarica.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the other hand, their interpretative tendencies – shaped by the existence of a core of monotheism hidden within idolatry – remained remarkably similar.Footnote ⁵¹

As we have seen, the capacity of missionaries to act as ethnographers largely relied on their expertise in local languages and, when possible, local genres. However, learning languages for cultural insight also increased the potential for mistranslations and misunderstandings. It is important to avoid exaggerating this problem as a sign of radical cultural incommensurability. While initial errors were many, they could often be overcome with practice. What characterized missionary ethnographies was the expertise claimed by many of its practitioners, and if some found traces of the Trinity in India, or of the Flood in Peru, it was not because they were ignorant or confused about local beliefs, but rather because they were keen to interpret the evidence in a way that made sense of an assumed narrative of shared sacred history. While some foreign terms might have been culture-specific, translations are seldom about finding simple word-by-word equivalents, and historians of the New World consistently showed some awareness of the danger of false analogies, notably when describing new animals and plants (an American ‘lion’ was not like a lion in the Old World), but also in relation to the human world (a Mexican temple was a ‘mosque’ only for a while, until a local word was found: Aztecs were no Muslims). Natural and moral historians with local knowledge, like Alzina, excelled in their awareness that the uses of words were contextual. The negotiation of meanings, on the other hand, often followed non-scientific agendas, and in this respect an apparent misunderstanding might have been the result not so much of the difficulties of bridging a cultural chasm as of a motivated interpretative choice.

For missionaries, this was especially the case when dealing with theologically sensitive subjects. The ability to identify different cultural assumptions was not equivalent to a willingness to interpret them sympathetically. When the Jesuit Francis Xavier discovered that using a Buddhist analogy for the supreme deity in Japan, the Dainichī (cosmic principle) of the Shingon sect, carried unwanted connotations, he decided to avoid local words altogether when speaking about God, and instead simply used the Latin Deus.Footnote ⁵² In China, however, just a few decades later, Ricci adopted a very different approach, seeking to enlist the Chinese concepts of Tian (Heaven) and Shangdi (First Deity or Highest Deity, also Ruler on High), and coining Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) for his Christian apologetics. In both cases there was common philosophical assumption: belief in a supreme deity was essentially a natural, rational belief, and could serve as foundation for preaching Christianity. What was different was the judgement made by missionaries in the field about the potential advantages of working with local analogies against the dangers of unwanted associations with ‘idolatrous’ traditions. While Xavier sought no common ground with the Buddhist monks, his direct rivals, Ricci (as we have seen) hoped to find an authentic ancient version of Confucian ethical teachings that would be compatible with natural monotheism and, at a secondary stage, with a full understanding of Christianity. These different sensibilities, developed in the Jesuit missions of Japan and China in the late sixteenth century, led to disputes within the order about the limits of cultural accommodation, which preceded the full explosion of the rites controversy provoked by the attacks of Franciscans and Dominicans. Ricci undeniably developed his accommodation strategy on the basis of his growing proficiency in Mandarin Chinese, but one of the early opponents of his liberal use of Chinese terms for God was an expert in Japanese, João Rodrigues Tsuçu. Following his exile in Macao after 1610, Rodrigues objected to all the Chinese terms adopted by Ricci – who had recently died – as idolatrous.Footnote ⁵³ He was supported by another Jesuit, Niccolò Longobardo, who was based in Beijing, had a good knowledge of Chinese, and had interviewed many Chinese converts.Footnote ⁵⁴ While both Ricci and Rodrigues may be considered cultural experts in China and Japan respectively, their social and educational backgrounds and their ideological temperaments differed markedly. This was not a dispute between missionary ethnographers with knowledge of local languages and those in a distant Church who relied on European cultural prejudice, but rather between rival approaches to the deployment of cultural expertise. While Tianzhu eventually came to be generally accepted as distinctive of the Catholic religion, and hence not overly ambiguous, resistance to the ancient terms Shangdi and Tian as false analogies would become a recurrent theme of the Chinese rites controversy. In the end the issue opened a chasm between the Church in Rome, which in 1704 forbade the use of the terms, and the Jesuits and their converts, who sought ancient monotheistic roots for their Christian faith in China.Footnote ⁵⁵ In all cases the deployment of ‘local’ traditional knowledge had a tactical dimension.

While one line of recent research has questioned the pseudo-liberal myth of an open cultural dialogue, emphasizing instead the ideological limitations of missionary accommodation, another has noted the importance of native converts and interpreters as mediators, both in the development of the missions – translating, preaching, participating in liturgy or even offering confession – and through the production of hybrid cultural discourses. As informants, these figures, too often invisible, were also crucial in the production of missionary ethnographies, making non-European traditions accessible to – but also interpreting them for – the missionaries; at the same time, they explained Christianity to potential converts. It is easy to underestimate the scale of this kind of mediation, both in Catholic and in Protestant missions, and its implications. For example, although several modern historians have used use the vast Nahuatl material collected by Sahagún as reliable evidence for the reconstruction of everyday life in the Mexican empire, these sources must be used with great caution, since the process of gathering this information did not take place in a cultural vacuum but implied the negotiation of meanings in a colonial setting. When in the late 1550s Sahagún, armed with a questionnaire, approached the nobility of Tepepulco and asked to interview elders who were versed in antiquities and able to interpret their pictorial books, he was supported by four ‘grammarians’ who had studied Latin under him in the Franciscan College of Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco. After working with these informants for two years, he returned to Tlaltelolco, where he again interviewed the local elders, and revised his materials with the assistance of the trilingual students of the college.Footnote ⁵⁶ His native informants thus represented a subaltern elite in a process of acculturation. That is, many informants were also converts seeking to please, and missionary ethnographers could be their teachers, masters and protectors. Missionaries were not eager (or equipped) to question their own ideological assumptions, and while they might have been willing to dispute with other Europeans about the intellectual capacity of their charges, or about the interpretation of local rites and calendars, they questioned neither the providential meaning of their mission nor the fundamental identification of rational standards in morality and politics with European ideals. Local discourses could be only praised when they fitted these preconceptions.

What is increasingly clear is that that these mediators, as interpreters and in many cases as low-level preachers, were essential to the construction both of ‘native voices’ within missionary ethnography, and of the voice of Christianity in the mission fields. In the first decades of the Jesuit mission of sixteenth-century Japan, for example, no European could compete with the ability of the almost blind itinerant bard Ryosai, baptized Lorenzo, to spread the message in the local idiom.Footnote ⁵⁷ Mid- and low-level converts facilitated social penetration. As recent work on Chinese and mestizo members of the Jesuit mission in Macao and China has shown, these mediators were numerically not very significant, but their impact was huge.Footnote ⁵⁸ The rarer elite converts, by contrast, may have helped Christians acquire political protection, but were most important as the key to access to literary traditions. Thus, Ricci's literati collaborators were crucial to his development of accommodation in China: officials with scientific interests, such as Li Zhizao, who with Ricci translated several European works of cosmography, mathematics and astronomy into Chinese (although he was reluctant to become a Christian because he did not want to give up his concubines), or Xu Guangqi, baptized as Paul, the most prominent early convert and also a scientific collaborator, who was attracted to Ricci's powerful intellect and to an idealized image of Europe. In India, whether it was Shivadharma for Nobili, Padmanaba for Rogerius, an unnamed pandit from Benares for della Tomba, or Alakappan for Ziegenbalg, Brahman informers and other literate intermediaries were indispensable to the European reconstruction of the Hindu religious system, including access to Sanskrit sacred texts. It has sometimes been argued that these missionaries were ‘inventing’ a religion, rather than simply ‘discovering’ it, since they were imposing on what they found their own Christian assumptions about doctrine, theology and Scripture, not always applicable to a notoriously pluralistic and fluid religious landscape. While the extent to which Catholic or Protestant assumptions – similar but not identical – distorted, or at least shaped, the missionaries’ interpretation of what they learnt about non-European cultures remains controversial, it is very clear that whatever they were doing, they did it on the basis of at least some local knowledge, and under the influence of local mediators who had their own biases and agendas.Footnote ⁵⁹