Missionary Positions

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s "the missionary position" became widespread as a technical expression for face-to-face man-on-top sexual intercourse. It was accompanied by standard (and undocumented) stories as to the origin of the expression, stories featuring missionaries and either Polynesians, Africans, Chinese, Native Americans, or Melanesians. By the late 1980s and 1990s the expression had become a core symbol in modernist and postmodernist moral discourses. This paper examines accounts of the origin of the expression, provides evidence that it originated in Kinsey's (mis)reading of Malinowski, analyzes the symbolic elements of the missionary-position narrative as synthesizing modernist objections to Christian morality, analyzes the "missionary position" in postmodernist narratives as synthesizing postmodernist objections to modernist morality, and explores some of the functions of this myth within the academy.

The Anthropology of Christianity

“…Until this point, however, just as anthropology has previously marginalized Christianity as an object of study, it has also marginalized Christian thinkers, including Christian anthropologists -insisting that they refrain from bringing their Christian identities to bear on their work aimed at an anthropological audience. Such a move runs counter to the reflexive trend in the discipline mentioned earlier, which has seen many other anthropologists in the last several decades come to link their personal backgrounds very successfully to their research foci (see Priest 2001, Howell 2007. The absence of such a link in the work of Christian anthropologists has largely prevented a particularly motivated population from fully engaging in, and contributing a valuable perspective to, an incipient anthropology of Christianity and has until recently further contributed to the anthropological neglect of the subject (Howell 2007).…”

Positioning Missionaries in Development Studies, Policy, and Practice

“…One reason is the resonant archetype of the missionary as a 19 th -century white European male subjugating local people (Priest, 2001). In his description of the missionary Abner Hale in Hawaii, Michener embraces this archetype fully.…”

OKH Rising

“…However, for the previous 40 years or so they had been relatively scarce in the discipline's mainstream, and anthropologists had also become hostile to, or at least willfully ignorant of, the concerns of Christian anthropologists and global Christians, while rarely acknowledging the existence of the latter in their field sites [see criticisms by Barker (2008), Robbins (e.g., 1998;2004); John and Jean Comaroff (e.g., 1991) were earlier examples of anthropologists studying Christians, albeit employing different analytical approaches than would be used later. For expression of concern about the relative absence of Christians from the most advanced discussions and institutions in anthropology, see the latter pages of Priest (2001)].…”