The Spiritual in the Secular offers a collection of 11 articles that discuss the production by missionaries of what the volume labels as ‘scientific’ or ‘secular’ knowledge. The chronological framework of most of the articles is the era of European colonialism in Africa, roughly 1900–40. Patrick Harries's article provides helpful background on missionary ethnography before the colonial era while the articles by Natasha Erlank, John Stuart, and John Manton deal with developments after the Second World War.
In their introductory chapter, the editors explain that behind the volume is a desire to demonstrate how missionaries reconciled their spiritual commitment to the conversion of Africans to Christianity with the secular scientific sensibilities missionaries shared with other Europeans. The articles in The Spiritual in the Secular realize this desire by doing one or some combination of three things. First and most typically, the articles challenge past scholarly characterizations of missionary ethnography as antithetical to science. Anthropologists in particular are identified as having painted the ethnographic studies conducted by missionaries as blinded by religious convictions. The articles by Erica Eichholzer, John Cinnamon, Dmitri van der Bersselaar, David Maxwell, Deborah Gaitskell, and Honore Vinck all show the extent to which studies conducted by missionaries built upon and sought to broaden social scientific knowledge about Africa.
The second thing many of the articles do is call attention to the contributions by ‘neglected’ missionary researchers to Western knowledge and expertise on Africa. Eichholzer writes about the work of Hans Nicolai Riis and Johan Gottleib Christaller on Twi linguistics. Cinnamon talks about the ideas of Robert Hammill Nassau on fetishism and Henri Trilles on totemism. Van den Bersselaar considers the writings of G. T. Basden on Ibo ethnography, while Maxwell focuses on the writings of W. F. P. Burton on Luba ethnography. Gaitskell narrates the development of Dora Earthy's ideas on the anthropology of women's lives among the Valenge people, while Vinck offers an assessment of Fathers Edmond Boelaert and Gustaaf Hulsteart, their research center, and their journal Aequatoria.
As these articles show, the long stretches of time missionaries spent among particular African peoples granted them far greater familiarity with that people, their language, and their ways than most anthropologists could achieve. Missionaries reinforced this point in their published writings, which continued to mount across the colonial era. Progressively though, as anthropology gained a footing in universities as a research discipline, studies written by missionaries were dismissed as the work of amateurs. Missionaries were acknowledged as storehouses of ethnological or ‘local’ knowledge about African peoples. But they were also deemed incapable, both because of training and proclivities, of using that knowledge to validate broader anthropological or scientific theory. As several of the articles note, many of the best-known anthropological studies dating from the era of European colonization were constructed on fieldwork first conducted by missionaries. These works, however, rarely acknowledged their debt to their missionary antecedents.
The third thing many of the articles seek to show is how missionary scholarship became increasingly marginal to the colonial understanding of Africa and Africans. The articles by Gaitskell and Vinck are most representative here, to which may be added Stuart's study of the background to the book Christians of the Copperbelt. Missionaries wanted to know what they could about African peoples in order to convert them. The conversion of Africans to Christianity, though, never was a priority of any colonial state. During the early decades of European colonial rule, governments and intellectual communities in Europe turned to missionaries for expertise on Africa. By the middle decades of the colonial era, however, new sets of experts had emerged who could look at Africa without the coloration of Christianizing eyes, and because of this, could better identify strategies for ‘developing’ Africa with European interests in mind. Missionaries declined to keep up with these new ideas. As a consequence, colonial governments and metropolitan intellectual communities came to grant missionaries less and less authority as experts.
As the discussion has suggested, most of the articles are concerned with missionaries who published ethnographic or anthropologic research. The articles by Walima T. Kalusa and John Manton, however, are concerned with missionaries and the practice of Western medicine in colonial Africa. The Erlank piece takes up the issue of missions and the sociological theorizing prompted by the pursuit of the Christian ideal of monogamy in Africa.
The Spiritual in the Secular is a first harvest of historical study of missionaries in their guise as producers of secular knowledge, as distinct from their much better known guise as Christian evangelists. The hope has to be that the book will serve as a seedbed for a second generation of research on this promising subject.
