Anthropologists and Missionaries: Brothers Under the Skin

Geest, Sjaak van der

doi:10.2307/2803655

Cited by 38 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The instrumental approach is useful in some instances, for example in engagement of the UN with religious organizations that are registered with the UN (UNFPA, 2008). Yet the narrow focus enables donors to fund development projects by actors with explicit missionary aims, as long as they agree not to engage in specific "missionary activities" such as religious education or handing out religious literature.…”

Section: Why Development Scholars and Practitioners Struggle To Positmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Green & Sherman, 2002;Monsma, 2004;Thaut, 2009) -Intuitive (Gerald Clarke, 2006) -faith pervasiveness (J. Berger, 2003) -faith permeation (Sider & Unruh, 2004) -faith-related (Smith & Sosin, 2001) -integrating faith into practice (Goggin & Orth, 2002) -self-professed religiousness (T. H. Jeavons, 1997) -secular-moderate to militant (Benedetti, 2006); -secular to religious (Bradley, 2009 (Boehle, 2010;UNFPA, 2008), and governmental donors such as CIDA (Audet et al, 2014;Paras, 2012; Vander Zaag, 2013) -Sectoral: HIV/AIDS responses in Nigeria (C. Davis, Jegede, Leurs, Sunmola, & Ukiwo, 2011;Leurs, 2012), health care services in Sub-Saharan Africa (Lipsky, 2011), and welfare programs in the US (Monsma, 2004) -Organizational (Aiken, 2010;Olson, 2008) -USA (Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2006;Kniss & Campbell, 1997) -Canada (Audet et al, 2014;Vander Zaag, 2013) -UK (Gerald Clarke, 2006Clarke, , 2008 -India and Rwanda (Bradley, 2009) -Latin America and Caribbean countries (Hefferan, Adkins, & Occhipinti, 2009) -Nigeria (Odumosu, Olaniyi, & Alonge, 2009;…”

Section: Why Fbo Typologies Struggle To Locate Missionariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Positioning Missionaries in Development Studies, Policy, and Practice

Smith

2017

World Development

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This article diagnoses major causes of the uncomfortable relationship between missionaries and development scholars and practitioners, and it proposes new ways to clarify the relationship through shared reflection on sacred influences that shape global development. In the past fifteen years the turn to religion in development studies has altered how development scholars and practitioners perceive religious actors, opening up possibilities for renewed partnership. Yet the turn to religion in development has mostly disregarded missionaries. This oversight is partly due to the complicated historical relationship between Western Christian missionaries and development workers. Although missionaries have long participated in the work of development, present-day missionaries remain associated with coercive proselytization, or they are overlooked in literature on religion and development. In order to understand the challenges of positioning missionaries in development, I review 48 sources which create, apply or critique typologies of faith-based organizations (FBOs). FBO typologies of the past fifteen years have broken new ground in exploring the links between beliefs and practices of religious actors doing development work. Yet these typologies struggle to position missionaries due to 1) simplistic categorization of FBOs, 2) unhelpful scales of religiosity, and 3) a basis in outdated assumptions of separate spheres of religious and secular actors, and separate worlds of religion and development. Based on shared critiques of FBO typologies, I propose a new framework for positioning missionaries. The framework provides a shared space to explore how all development actors, both religious and secular, are shaped by the interaction between sacred and material influences. The framework offers a way to move beyond circular arguments about comparative advantage of religious or secular approaches toward an appreciation of the complementarity of 2 different approaches to development. The article concludes with a shared critique of missionaries and development workers who impose their beliefs and values on others.

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Section: Why Development Scholars and Practitioners Struggle To Positmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Why Fbo Typologies Struggle To Locate Missionariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positioning Missionaries in Development Studies, Policy, and Practice

Smith

2017

World Development

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“…However, despite these flaws, missionaries did assemble oral tradition philological elements, proverbs, myths, and legends, which can be accessed today. And, despite apparent division between Christian missionaries and anthropologists [93], both were doing similar work and they equally contributed to the creation of the knowledge on African cultures. Therefore, it is sensible to lump them together here.…”

Section: Deconstructing and Reconstructing A New African Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemology, African Scholarship in Human and Social Sciences and demands from African Societies

Inogwabini¹

2017

Anthropol

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This paper is a re-assesses anthropological methods and frames broad epistemological question on knowledge production and distribution. Sampling published materials, it argues that the fundamental question African scholarship faces in the African Studies is the recourse to an outdated epistemology of comparative methods meant to serve the western views of otherness. Using Anthropological Hermeneutics would help lighten problems of comparison and lead other forms of knowledge. With that background and questioning the fundamentals of the intellectual property right, the paper concludes that knowledge is to be a public good, paid by society and should be accessible to all.

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“…As various scholars of the anthropology of Christianity have shown, following a pioneering article by John Barker (1992), this lacuna is not limited to Amazonia as an ethnographic region. Joel Robbins (2004) traces this oversight to the continuing influence in the discipline of the Malinowskian myth of the primeval savage and to the historical rivalry between anthropologists and missionaries (Harding 2001; Van der Geest 1991), as well as to the relative absence, in anthropology, of conceptual tools for thinking about cultural change (see Viveiros de Castro 2002: 191). In the case of Christianity, the situation is further complicated by the fact that this religion is the predominant faith in the countries from which most anthropologists originate: the interest in the exotic is incompatible with the study of Christianized natives (Cannell 2006: 8; Gow 2009; Robbins 2007).…”

Section: The Missionary Presencementioning

confidence: 99%

Dividuality in Amazonia: God, the Devil, and the constitution of personhood in Wari' Christianity

Vilaça

2011

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

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This article explores the Christian experience of the Wari', an Amazonian native group, in light of a central feature of their personhood: its dual composition, both human and animal. Arguing that the centrality of the relation with God has resulted in a more stable human person, the article provides an ethnographic examination of how this relation is produced and maintained. Analytic categories derived from the New Melanesian Ethnography – the notions of the ‘dividual’ and the ‘partible person’– are applied to the Amazonian context, enabling a particular description of the Wari' person and the Christian God, and the subsequent visualization of some key aspects of the relationship between God and humans. Through this comparative exercise, the article looks to contribute to the dialogue between Amazonianists and Melanesianists that has been unfolding over the past decade or so. It also aims to insert Amazonian ethnography into the anthropological debate on Christianity, today strongly anchored in data and conceptual tools derived from Pacific societies in general and Melanesia in particular. Résumé L'auteure étudie l'expérience chrétienne des Wari', un groupe autochtone d'Amazonie, à la lumière d'un trait central de leur conception de la personne : sa composition duale, à la fois humaine et animale. Partant de l'idée que la centralité de la relation avec Dieu a donné naissance à une personne humaine plus stable, l'article examine du point de vue ethnographique la manière dont cette relation est créée et entretenue. Les catégories analytiques issues de la Nouvelle ethnographie mélanésienne (notions de personne « dividuelle » et « partible ») sont appliquées au contexte amazonien, permettant ainsi une description particulière de la personne Wari' et du Dieu chrétien et la visualisation de certains aspects fondamentaux de la relation entre Dieu et les humains. Par cet exercice comparatif, l'auteure cherche à contribuer au dialogue entre amazonistes et mélanésianistes qui s'est établi depuis une dizaine d'années. Elle cherche aussi à insérer l'ethnographie de l'Amazonie dans le débat anthropologique sur le christianisme, aujourd'hui solidement ancré dans les données et les outils conceptuels issus des sociétés du Pacifique en général, et de la Mélanésie en particulier.

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Anthropologists and Missionaries: Brothers Under the Skin

Cited by 38 publications

References 20 publications

Positioning Missionaries in Development Studies, Policy, and Practice

Positioning Missionaries in Development Studies, Policy, and Practice

Epistemology, African Scholarship in Human and Social Sciences and demands from African Societies

Dividuality in Amazonia: God, the Devil, and the constitution of personhood in Wari' Christianity

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