nnn

The Contribution of Post-colonial Critique

to an Anthropology of Missions

Paula Montero

n ABSTRACT: When compared to the extensive historiography on missionary activity, the

anthropology of missions is a relative newcomer, emerging as such in the context of the
recent critique of the colonial system. In view of the importance of historiographical
literature in outlining the subject, on the one hand, and of the impact of the decolo-
nization of the African continent on anthropology, on the other hand, my purposes
in this essay are, firstly, to examine how the historiography of colonial America and
of African colonialism has handled the subject of missions; secondly, to describe the
role of missionary activity in the historiographical debate in the context of the crisis of
colonialism; and, lastly, to analyze how post-colonial critique has given rise to a new
anthropology of missions.

n KEYWORDS: anthropology of missions, colonialism, contact, conversion, historiography,

religion, post-colonialism

Missionary activity has long been the privileged object of missiology and of historians of Chris-
tianity. Generally speaking, this vast literature has considered missionary activity to be equiva-
lent to the expansion of Christianity and of the Catholic Church in the West. On a par with this
extensive literature, which is frequently no more than a chronicle of missionary feats, recent
academic historiography has become interested in the subject of missions as an important gate-
way to colonial history. In effect, ecclesiastical agents have always acted in collaboration with
imperial expansion, taking positions and charges that frequently have gone well beyond cat-
echizing. Moreover, they have elaborated theological, juridical, and political conceptions that
have reinforced the very institutional production of imperial power.
As far as the history of America is concerned, one of the privileged objects of this approach
was the Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Catholic Church, which since its creation in
1540 became a political and ideological actor that was key to the expansion of the Iberian
empires in the sixteenth century. The quick consolidation of this field of interest is manifested
in the fact that the International Conference on Jesuit Missions has, since 1998, successfully
assembled the most reputable specialists in the history of missions. The importance, scope,
and continuance of this event are important indicators of the Jesuits’ hegemony of the subject
in the field of academic historiography on missionary America. As for the African continent,

Religion and Society: Advances in Research 3 (2012): 115–129 © Berghahn Books

doi:10.3167/arrs.2012.030107
116  n  Paula Montero

the interest in missionary activity is much more recent. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a result
of the decolonization of the African continent, interest in religious innovations turned the
focus of anthropological studies away from local religious systems and served as an inspiration
to produce works aimed at the description of modern movements and variations of popular
Christianities (Ajayi 1965; Ayandele 1966; Binsbergen 1979; Fabian 1979, 1985; Horton 1971;
Ranger 1979, 1985; Turner 1979).
The anthropology of missions is a relative newcomer when compared to the vast and dense
historiography on missionary activity. It emerges as such only in the context of the recent
critique of the colonial system. This critique, whose point of anchorage is British and French
colonialism in the African continent, has presented a new ideological frame in which mission-
aries and anthropologists are perceived as key instruments in the construction of the colonial
empire. In view of the importance of historiographical literature in the outline of the sub-
ject, on the one hand, and of the impact of the decolonization of the African continent on
anthropology, on the other, my purposes in this article are threefold: firstly, to examine how
the historiographies of colonial America and African colonialism have treated the subject of
missions; secondly, to describe historiographical debate against the background of the crisis of
colonialism; and, thirdly, to analyze how post-colonial critique has inspired a new anthropol-
ogy of missions.
As multiple variables—such as the background of the agents, their identity as Catholic or Prot-
estant, their region of origin, their place of activity, the extent and form of their funding, their
status and degree of commitment—have impacted missionary activities and shaped their style, it
is very difficult to approach missionary activity in general and/or universal terms. In fact, the lit-
erature itself has tended to specialize in case studies with a precise geographic location. A general
and balanced overview based on themes and regions would therefore be almost impossible within
the clear-cut scope of this article. I have thus chosen to focus on the literature dealing with the
issue of Christian missions in some regions of Africa and South America and will not take into
account the large body of work discussing missionary processes in other continents and regions.
In contrast with historiographical literature, I have also tried to point to ways that might help
distinguish an anthropological approach to missionary activity from a theoretical perspective.

The Historiography of Missions

The documentation of missionary activity in America since its beginnings is vast and productive.
Although the first missions were founded by Franciscan and Dominican priests at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, it was the Jesuits who, with their tradition of writing periodical reports
on their activities to their superiors in Rome, have left a legacy that has allowed generations of
historians to investigate both the operation of the Society of Jesus and an important part of colo-
nial history. The Jesuits have also written historical and ethnographic accounts. For instance, in
his monumental Historia de la Conquista del Paraguay (History of the Conquest of Paraguay)
([1745] 2010), Father Pedro Lozano (1697–1752) described the process of the Spanish conquest.
The renowned superior of the missions in Paraguay, Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585–
1652), authored some of the ‘classics’ on indigenous language and on life in the settlements
known as ‘reductions’. These works include The Spiritual Conquest and Treasure of the Guarani
Language, both published in 1639. These and other accounts of the same nature have become
important reference points and sources of inspiration for recent historical and anthropological
scholarly investigations. They have made it possible for the mission to be thought of in its insti-
tutional dimensions and local variations.
 Contribution of Post-colonial Critique to an Anthropology of Missions  n  117

The Jesuit model of mission, the reductions, has fascinated philosophers and thinkers of vari-
ous backgrounds.1 There is a vast literature on the utopias and imaginaries that they have engen-
dered (see, e.g., Kern 1982; Lafaye 1997; Leroy 1992). Both for the complexity and for the success
and continuance of this undertaking—which lasted over a century and a half (from 1609 to
1768) in the most specific and famous case of the 30 Indian/missionary villages created in the
borders of present-day Paraguay—Jesuit missions in America have been the subject of extensive
research. The study of reductions has been prompted by different interests: their ways of func-
tioning and government, daily and ritual life, architecture, and evangelizing. The theologian
and historian Karl-Heinz Arenz (2010: 28), a researcher of Jesuit missions in Maranhão and
Grão Pará, considers that the historiography on Jesuit missions can be outlined according to
four major tendencies. The first involves authors who are Jesuits themselves, such as Serafim
Soares Leite (1890–1969), a Portuguese historian who wrote the monumental two-volume
work História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (History of the Company of Jesus in Brazil)
(1938–1950). This approach ascribes a more laudatory aspect to the reductions and points to the
‘civilizing’ contribution of the Society of Jesus. The second tendency, marked by the strong anti-
Jesuitism that flourished in the nineteenth century, points to the success and economic prosper-
ity of missions as evidence of their materialistic and self-seeking character (Malachi 1989). The
third and more recent tendency from the 1960s adopts a Marxist interpretation that either char-
acterizes Jesuit action as a form of engagement for the freedom of indigenous people or portrays
Jesuits as usurpers and instruments in the service of colonial power (Hoornaert 1982; Neves
1978). Lastly, the contemporary trend is to ‘let the documents speak’ in order to interpret them
from the perspective of the humanistic and Baroque worldview that characterized the period.
Any attempt at qualifying such a vast literature in too encompassing a way poses the risk of
oversimplifying and doing injustice to it. In any event, it could be affirmed that the incorpora-
tion of an ethnographically more qualified knowledge of the life and thinking of Amerindian
populations due to more recent studies—a knowledge that has been accumulated by anthropol-
ogy in the last decades of the twentieth century—has helped to transform the paradigm of the
historiography of missions since the 1990s. The rigorous analysis of sources has also included
a heuristic effort to follow the evidence provided by indigenous perspectives beyond mission-
ary discourse. This new approach has marked the most recent historical and anthropological
literature in different ways and has caused it to enter into dialogue with what might be called ‘a
paradigm of the colonial encounter’.
The scholarly work of the historian and anthropologist Adone Agnolin (2005, 2007), which
goes in this direction, represents an important analytical effort toward understanding the modes
of incorporation of the ‘indigenous universe’ to the Inacian evangelizing project. The author
points to the importance of Christian fideism for the production of a colonial culture. A legacy
of the Christian expansion within the Roman Empire, fideism—the public testimony of an act
of faith in the existence of an ultramundane world—was incorporated into Iberian ideology and
allowed for the emergence of a new representation of the empire that was not marked by any
ethnic dimension. Jesuit reductions reprojected this civitas Dei—a new form of transcendent
civility that incorporated natives into a universal legal system through conversion—into indig-
enous America. According to Agnolin, the fideistic presupposition of missionaries lay at the core
of their catechizing. They noticed that, in order to implement fideism quickly, it was not enough
to translate the Christian doctrine; it was also necessary to modify it by making it absorb mate-
rial and symbolic elements from indigenous universes. The author’s conclusion that religion is
the result of a historical development of evangelization, and not its starting point, seems to be his
greatest contribution to the field of an anthropology of missions. As ‘savages’ and their societ-
ies were initially perceived to be devoid of law and faith, the reduction was looked on primarily
118  n  Paula Montero

as a civilizing process: natives were to be brought under political control first by trimming the
‘excesses’ in their customs (anthropophagy, polygamy, etc.) and then by introducing the doctrine
that would make up for their absence of faith. In the very unfolding of this civilizational process,
catechetical methodologies were developed to unveil and expose traces of faith. The translation
and comparison of languages and customs became basic instruments in the process of conver-
sion and a consequence, one might add, of the ‘invention’ of indigenous religions. Agnolin’s work
is particularly important for an anthropology of missions that is capable of considering the par-
ticularities of Christian cosmology and the resignification of the indigenous world.
While the historiography of missions has benefited from advances in knowledge concerning
the modes of living of American indigenous populations that have furthered its understand-
ing of the social dynamics involved, scholarly anthropology, at least as far as the region of the
South American lowlands is concerned, has frequently considered missionary activity with sus-
picion. Aside from the recurrent use of missionary writings as a primary ethnographic source,
catechization has been widely reduced to an instrument of destruction of native cultures. Until
very recently, the field of missions, when not completely ignored, was assessed in two opposing
ways: either indigenous populations had been passively Christianized, uprooted, and margin-
ally incorporated into national states, or they had resisted before coming to accept the Christian
faith ‘on their own terms’, in the phrase consecrated by Marshall Sahlins (1997). In any case, the
mission itself was not the subject of investigation, nor did it pose relevant theoretical questions
for anthropological reflection, unlike what occurred in the field of history.
This acculturation-resistance dualism seems to mirror a dilemma that is internal to the
development of the field of ethnological practice among indigenous populations in Brazil. The
field of ethnology has for many decades opposed those who were concerned about the impacts
and responses of the expansion of the colonial state and those who were focused on a more
precise characterization of native social and cosmological systems. The first practiced a soci-
ology of contact that emphasized the broader determinants of historical processes, while the
latter benefited from the new institutional conditions that allowed for longer periods of field
research since the 1970s and avoided the issue of ‘contact’ and progressive Christianization
among native populations.
In the 1990s, partly due to the increasing presence of indigenous leaders in the political sce-
nario, an interesting turning point in this debate outlined a third theoretical possibility concern-
ing how to deal with the problem of the relation between the ethnic universe of native Indians
and the national universe of Brazilian society. While some studies, inspired by Fredrik Barth’s
([1969] 1997, 2000) pioneering work, placed more emphasis on how native populations elaborate
their own ways of ethnic belonging, other studies drew on the historical structuralism of Mar-
shall Sahlins (1981, 1985) to introduce the issue of change into so-called traditional societies and
to address the issue of contact from the native’s perspective. This last current has produced inter-
esting studies, such as Aparecida Vilaça’s (1996, 2008) work on Wari conversion to Christianity.
Through an analysis of myths that, according to her, narrate processes of conversion, the author
relates the adoption of Christianity by the Wari to the desire to solve one of the cosmological
aporias that are central to their thinking—that of the permanent reversibility between the human
and the animal form and, consequently, of predator/prey positions. In Vilaça’s interpretation,
when natives became Christians, they stabilized the position of humans in their cosmology and
no longer perceived animals as people and affines as enemies. Thus, predation came to be under-
stood as an exclusive ability of the Wari, to be directed only at external enemies.
This attempt to understand how natives appropriated what was presented to them by emis-
saries coming from the outside is undoubtedly an advance in relation to previous approaches
that did not pay attention to how indigenous people interpreted and understood the message of
 Contribution of Post-colonial Critique to an Anthropology of Missions  n  119

missionaries and catechization. However, it seems that by formulating the issue of contact in terms
of conversion, this stream of analysis ends up turning a practical/ideological category, which is
intrinsic mainly to Protestantism, into a key concept. This point is also true of many other studies
on missionization in the African continent in the 1990s. The implications of such an approach to
an anthropology of missions will be considered soon. For now, it is interesting to point out that by
introducing the subject of change in relation to the problem of native conversion into Christianity,
this literature implicitly accepts the terms organizing the debate on the continuity and/or rupture
of traditional cultures in a rigidly disjunctive way, even if only in order to deny them: conversion
might be read either as a singular and autonomous mode of reproduction of the native culture
or as a local and impoverished version of incorporation into Christianity and, as a consequence,
into national society. Either way, in this viewpoint, which is an heir to Lévi-Straussian structural-
ism, the idea of agency remains entirely dependent on the structure of symbolic syntax, or it is
understood as a mere result of the structure of meaning that is derived from native cosmologies.
In another stream of debate, the historical anthropology of missions aims at giving more vis-
ibility and autonomy to indigenous agency in the construction of what this literature calls ‘mis-
sionary culture’. Following the paths of this recent historiography, for example, the Argentinian
anthropologist Guillermo Wilde (2009: 24–25) intends to study the ‘missionized Guarani’, a singu-
lar historical configuration whose construction depended upon various groups and actors oper-
ating on very different scales and whose form was modified over 200 years. The author considers
the perspective that portrays indigenous people as passive subjects who submitted to missionary
action that had to be overcome. His work aims at demonstrating how the success and longevity of
the Jesuit model were possible only because the missionary regime was negotiated and supported
by educated indigenous elites. The latter had an active role in the configuration of the political,
spatial, and symbolic patterns of the reductions and collaborated intimately with the priests in
exchange for goods and privileges. The historical anthropology proposed by Wilde is aimed at
understanding “the meaning of the discourses and practices of past actors within the context in
which they were produced” (ibid.: 25). Inspired by the micro-history of authors such as Jacques
Revel (1996) and Carlo Ginzburg (1990), Wilde considers sources ‘ethnographically’ in order to
reconstruct the lived dimension of particular historical contexts. He properly observes that writ-
ings on the Jesuits had crystallized the view that religious missions were culturally homogeneous
spaces, a fiction that persisted in scholarly writings until very recently. More recent works have
widely demonstrated how, both in America and in Africa, the bureaucratic apparatus of the state,
missionaries, travelers, historians, and anthropologists embraced the effort to classify differences
and name ethnic belongings as a fundamental means to obtain knowledge about and secure
control of colonial territories (L’Éstoile et al. 2002; Montero 2012; Oliveira 1998). Thus, Wilde’s
(2009) proposal to develop his analysis based on what he designates as a ‘paradigm of mobility’
seems to be an important advance. He supposes the existence of a profound contrast between the
discourse of order, grounded in an effort to classify and establish ethnic borders, and the concrete
practices of exchange between the ‘interior’ and the ‘exterior’ of the missions, oriented less by
ethnic affiliations than by political alliances built in a given conjuncture.

The Anthropology of Contact and the Crisis of the Colonial System:

The Missionary as Oppressor
The epistemology of civilization lost its power of persuasion during the process of colonization
epitomized by the Bandung Conference of 1955, which precipitated the emancipation movements
in Africa. In gaining political independence, African countries became involved in a process in
120  n  Paula Montero

which matters such as the construction of national states, economic development, and the pro-
motion of education and means of communication displaced tribal political power in favor of
the emergence of a nationalist bourgeoisie. The theoretical crisis that ensued in the 1960s is
well-known to anthropologists. The conviction that the subject of anthropology was the study
of primitive societies vanished over time. Talal Asad (1973) observes that the anthropological
undertaking started to lose its plausibility during that period.
When anthropology was politically and ideologically faced with the need to tackle the issue
of domination implied by the colonial system, the problem of contact between cultural universes
perceived as heterogeneous emerged as a theme of theoretical reflection. Until then, anthropol-
ogy had been producing knowledge on the native perspective as if natives were isolated. The
conditions set by the crisis of the colonial system caused this heuristic condition of observation
and description of the Other to disappear. The anthropology of colonialism was already born
as a political anthropology that focused on the criticism of systems of domination. Thus, mutu-
ally conflicting rules, the cultural dynamics of resistance, and native forms of rebellion became
the new paradigm of anthropology, now focused on the relations between ‘traditional societies’
and ‘colonialism’, as well as on the cultural changes related to migration, urbanization, and con-
version to Christianity. The Marxist perspective gained purchase within Anglophone universi-
ties in the 1970s to 1980s, and its political struggle against the ethnicizing effects of apartheid
did not leave much room for studies focusing on tradition, ethnicity, and culture, perceived as
“mystification in the service of a policy that aimed at dividing in order to rule better” (Kuper
2002: 53). In this political and ideological context, research on traditional religions remained
marginal in the field of human sciences.
The same cannot be said of the study of Christianity, which, in the case of Africa, was already
a consolidated field at the end of the 1970s. In 1979, the African Studies Centre in Leiden orga-
nized a conference with the purpose of producing an overview of contemporary studies on
religion in the continent. After decades of research on the expansion of Christianity in Africa,
it was, according to the organizers of the event, Wim van Binsbergen and Matthew Schoffeleers
(1985: 3), time to consider the interactions between religions, syncretism, and the confronta-
tions both between the two world religions (Christianity and Islamism) and between autoch-
thonous religions. Specialists in religions and theologians involved with missionary activity
gathered for the conference, shaping the two main themes of the conference. In the scholarly
field, the main debate concerned the opposition between those emphasizing a more phenom-
enological or structuralist analysis of rites, myths, and beliefs in order to penetrate the symbol-
ism of African religions—based on, for example, the contributions of anthropologists Johannes
Fabian (1979, 1985) and John Janzen (1985)—and those approaching religion in terms of its
relation to the fields of production and class formation—influenced, for example, by the work of
Terence Ranger (1979, 1985, 1993). In the first case, criticism was directed mainly at the risk of a
generalized ethnographic account of a symbolic system that remains too distant from real, prac-
tical dynamics, on the one hand, and at the impossibility of historically grounding any attempt
to project contemporary ethnographic knowledge of a particular symbolic system into the past
(van Binsbergen and Schoffeleers 1985: 11), on the other hand. In the second case, the material-
istic approach was criticized for posing the risk of reducing the symbolic world to a mere reflex
of the social and material context. Either way, the main theoretical difficulty in the field, in the
formulation presented by Binsbergen and Schoffeleers, was to come to a synthesis that would
connect the internal analyses of the symbolic syntax of myths and cosmologies to the external
analyses of practices and social contexts. It has been noted above that studies on Amerindian
Christianity still face the same difficulty. In addition, according to the organizers of the event, it
may generally be observed that the theme of missions, as a field of interest, is largely restricted
 Contribution of Post-colonial Critique to an Anthropology of Missions  n  121

to theologians and religious intellectuals. In this sense, most of the scholars’ contributions to the
meeting aimed at making African myths compatible with Christian myths and commended the
development of the various forms of African Christianity.
Although many local African groups were Christianized during the nineteenth century, Afri-
can Christianities have remained a subject of little interest to anthropologists and sociologists.
However, the theme of the acceptance of Christianity by local people gained importance when
it was considered in relation to the problematic of the changes caused by colonial contact. The
1960s and 1970s bore witness to the beginning of a great number of studies on the emergence
of local Christianities and missionary activity. In the 1980s, the theme of religious conversion
was central to a debate, involving many scholarly disciplines, on the problem of the incorpora-
tion of tribal groups into a more encompassing social order and on the transformation of such
non-state groups into translocal communities. In April 1988, the Institute on Culture, Religion,
and World Affairs at Boston University, coordinated by anthropologist and Islam specialist Rob-
ert W. Hefner, organized a conference titled “Conversion to World Religions: Historical and
Ethnographic Interpretations.”2 The conference entered into critical dialogue with Weberian
theories of universalist religions and aimed to understand the religious changes resulting from
the encounter between traditional religions in different parts of the world and both Christianity
and Islam. Hefner (1993) suggests that universalist religions offer ideals for a post-traditional
world that has been transformed by the processes of industrialization and now constitutes a
macrocosm in which native populations have been incorporated.
The subject of missions follows the tangent of the work presented by Terence Ranger at
this conference. Choosing the history of religions in South Africa as his focus, he proposed to
challenge the then very widespread Weberian idea that traditional African religions are inher-
ently incapable of developing translocal dynamics. According to Ranger (1993: 74), extensive
networks of cult centers pre-existed the colonial world in many parts of Africa. In this sense,
the immobilization of the population in villages and the reinforcement of ethnic boundar-
ies were processes dictated by the effort of pacification that took place in the years following
1895. However, Ranger’s work intends to demonstrate that the ancient dynamics have none-
theless remained alive and that new principles of generalization, such as the introduction of
writing by missionaries, have been developed, causing tradition to be reinvented in another
way (ibid.: 83). By accepting the supposition that Christianity was a modernizing religion,
historians became victims of the image that missions had presented of themselves, according
to Ranger. In fact, in spite of their universalizing ideals, most Protestant missionaries were con-
cerned about building stable local communities that mirrored peasant villages (ibid.: 66, 89).
On a par with a historical anthropology of missions aimed at strengthening colonial history
is the work of T. O. Beidelman (1982) on the Church Missionary Society among the Ukaguru
(present-day Tanzania). The author proposes not only to study Christianized Africans but also
to examine colonial administration. His work focuses mainly on the ethnographic description
of how a Protestant mission operated locally. Convinced that most studies on colonial societies
aim to provide a broader and more abstract image of missionary activity, Beidelman criticizes
the lack of enough empirical material to understand how local groups were entangled in the
colonial system. The anthropology of local societies leads us to imagine that they exist outside
of any immediate colonial experience. Studying colonialism through missions compels us to
consider more complex contact theories, for colonialism was the producer not only of physical
constraint but also of a new society.
In the 1990s, a new missionary phenomenon fascinated specialists in this field, that is, the fast
expansion of Protestant churches in Europe presided over by preachers and missionaries from
Africa and Asia whose goal was to evangelize the great contingent of migrants who had relocated
122  n  Paula Montero

to the European continent to escape the economic crises and political conflicts in their own
countries of origin. Confronted with the apparent secularization of European society, these mis-
sionaries took on a revivalist agenda of markedly Pentecostal character. This reverse of the flow
of missionary activity—with preachers being sent from the periphery of Christianity to its cen-
ter—has just started to be systematically studied by anthropology and has already been named
by the literature as ‘reverse mission’. This new movement surely poses not yet clearly outlined
challenges to an anthropology of the encounter between civilizations.

For a Historical Anthropology of Missions: The Metaphor of Encounter

The issue of conversion has prompted anthropologists and historians to examine the con-
ditions that facilitate the acceptance of the Christian faith by local groups. This interest has
opened a path for missions to become the focus of studies on the interactions between local
cultures and the colonial world. Jean and John Comaroff ’s Of Revelation and Revolution (1991,
1997), a historical anthropology of the non-conformist mission among the Tswana, may be
considered a work of reference that definitively places the study of missions outside of missiol-
ogy and the history of the Catholic Church (Morier-Genoud and Urban-Mead 2011). Inspired
by the questions posed by the Comaroffs, many social scientists have taken this field of studies
as a port of entry in order to understand the different modes of producing, remodeling, and
resisting colonialism. At the core of their reflection on the construction of colonial society, the
Comaroffs have replaced great political structures (such as imperialism or the world system
or the study of legal frameworks) with local agents. Influenced by a historiography of daily
practices in the style of E. P. Thompson, they have tried to develop a historical anthropology
of missions focused on the body, on formal acts, on the axioms and daily ways of thinking. In
a recent interview in the journal Social Sciences and Missions, Jean Comaroff observes that her
work in South Africa was based on the perception that traditional African religions were no
longer capable of making sense of a rural world dominated by a sort of Africanized Christian-
ity (Comaroff and Morier-Genoud 2011: 157). When the Comaroffs tried to understand how
this new ethical and apocalyptic imagination had become ingrained, they encountered ‘non-
conformist’ Protestant missions. In order to describe the complexity of these agents without
reducing them to mere vectors of the political and economic forces of colonialism, they tried
to capture the poetics of the agents and the meanings that they attributed to their own actions.
In this approach, they acknowledge the pioneering efforts of Beidelman (1982: 29), who pro-
posed to examine the “day-to-day workings of beliefs and values by which colonialists picture
themselves and their activities, as well as the stereotypes they hold about those they seek to
dominate and change.”
Criticism of the Comaroffs’ work by historians includes the remarks of Johannes du Bruyn
(1994), who considered the point of view of the Tswana to be absent from their work. For him,
the Tswana were frequently portrayed as unconscious receivers, incapable of agency. Such a
critique of works that place missionary agency at the core of their interest is still in evidence
among anthropologists and historians of traditional religions today. However, in the case of
this specific work, it seems now to be very paradoxical, for both the Comaroffs and their critics
were striving to produce a ‘history of the defeated’ along the lines of E. P. Thompson’s school.
Indeed, one of the declared purposes of the Comaroffs’ work is to describe the process of recip-
rocal determination by emphasizing how the Tswana were also engaged in the resignification
of colonial culture. The Comaroffs (1991: 198) resorted to the metaphor of ‘a long conversa-
tion’ in their analysis of the signs and substances negotiated by the missionaries and the local
 Contribution of Post-colonial Critique to an Anthropology of Missions  n  123

population: while the former tried to persuade the latter to convert, the latter tried to appropri-
ate the power of the former.
The major problem with the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation and Revolution may lie with the
very metaphor used to express the articulation of transcultural relations—that of the ‘colonial
encounter’. The image of the ‘encounter’ implicitly transmits the idea of two opposing cultural
universes entering into relation. This understanding of agency as the encounter between two
sides is manifested in the way that the authors structure the first volume: in chapter 2, they pres-
ent the missionary cosmology and project; in chapter 4, African society and culture; in chapters
5 and 6, the narratives of the encounter and the forms of negotiation it calls forth. The two cul-
tures, the English and the African, outlined in their essential qualities, are presented as a consis-
tent and integrated whole. In my opinion, Derek Peterson (2011: 211) is right to observe that “by
identifying missionaries and Tswana people as representatives for whole cultures, the Comaroffs
made it seem as if creative actors were working off a script, with their actions programmed in
advance.” Thus, it seems that the authors have fallen down in their project of not taking agency
merely as “structure in the active voice” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 10).
Many historians have criticized approaches that privilege the colonial encounter. Although
it is used in a metaphorical way, the phrase makes us mistakenly believe that the first encoun-
ter narrated by missionary sources effectively corresponds to a first encounter at the historical
level. However, as was rightly observed by Peterson, these first encounters were far more com-
plicated than what was suggested by the Comaroffs. In the cases I have studied in Brazil on the
encounters between Salesian Catholic missionaries and the Tukano peoples of Rio Negro (as
narrated by these missionaries), there were many first encounters: the indigenous societies in
this region presented themselves to the nineteenth-century observer as a mosaic of multi-ethnic
identities articulated through matrimonial and linguistic exogamy (Montero 2012). In the case
analyzed by the Comaroffs, the encounter was also between multi-ethnic groups. When Rev.
John Campbell entered Tswana chief Mothibi’s town in 1813, it was inhabited by an ethnically
varied population, and the missionary himself was also accompanied by a culturally diversified
group, including a black West Indian (Peterson 2011: 212). Moreover, as in the Salesian case,
Campbell was not the first to arrive; many other preachers had already visited the place before
him. He thus concluded that “the London Missionary Society entered in a world in which peo-
ple were already arguing over Christianity and political power” (Peterson 2011: 212). In effect,
approaching colonialism as an encounter not only restores the problem of treating culture as a
homogeneous and consistent whole, but also leads one to ignore oblique and partial alignments
as well as the agents’ motivations and strategies. The ‘stranger’ versus ‘native’ dichotomy weak-
ens an understanding of the complex discursive networks in which Africans and missionaries
were inserted. In equating the concept of discourse and the notion of ideology, the Comaroffs’
work set aside the study of the circulation of ideas, projects, and people, and, in my opinion, did
not pose the problem of understanding how this circulation instituted new ways of living and
connected differentiated parts and/or fragments of the colonial system.
As I see it, the Comaroffs (1991: 13–15) are right in their critique of the excesses of certain
postmodern authors, such as Fredric Jameson (1984) and Michael Taussig (1987), who seem to
reduce historical analysis to arbitrary text exercises and anthropologists and historians to mere
producers of texts. Nevertheless, I think that post-colonial critique and the way in which it deals
with the concept of discourse offer interesting insights. This approach makes it possible for the
analysis to avoid both the reification of the notion of (colonial and/or native) culture implicit
in the idea of encounter and the reduction of missionaries to mere emissaries of a hegemonic
worldview whose attributes are known beforehand. Let us thus examine the contributions of
this post-colonial current to an anthropology of missions.
124  n  Paula Montero

Historical Anthropology and the Post-colonial Critique:

The Missionary as Translator
The end of the colonial system and the emergence of authors from peripheral countries after their
independence led to the development of a new field of theoretical studies in the 1990s. Known
as post-colonialism, this area of research aims to reflect on the new configurations of identity
and culture that are emerging at the present stage of rearrangement of the relations between the
global and the local. This approach proposes a reinterpretation of the relation between colo-
nial societies and their various Others in terms of ‘translation’ or ‘transculturation’ (Appadurai
1997; Bhabha 1994; Gilroy 2004; Hall 2003; Said 1978). In its critique of narratives based on the
concepts of race, nation, and ethnicity, this theoretical framework has created conditions for
the emergence of other intellectual and political stances that have had a profound impact on
how to do anthropology. Anthropological theory has already been shaken by the postmodern-
ist movement coming from literary criticism in the 1980s. Various overviews of postmodern
anthropology have already been published (e.g., Geertz 1988; Marcus 1991; Rabinow 1977),
and it is not our purpose to revisit them here. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that the
impossibility of representing the Other lay at the core of the postmodernist debate. In my view,
however, the post-colonial critique went further by reconsidering the very idea of Otherness.
Although Jean and John Comaroff acknowledge the importance of postmodernist theory for a
historical anthropology of colonialism, the relations between postmodernist and post-colonial
anthropology are not easy to retrace. I would only like to point to the anxiety that one of the
main ideas of post-colonialism critique has caused to the study of contact: these post-colonial
studies demonstrate that the local and the global are articulated to such an extent in many post-
colonial situations that any attempt at an analytical and practical ‘return’ to the ethnic identities
that preceded the system becomes ineffective and illusory. If the colonial system has encouraged
the production of differences at the level of racial and ethnic constructions, the heuristic condi-
tions that ensued from post-colonialism make it possible to historicize these constructions and
inaugurate a perspective in which differences are of the order of language and might be thought
of as positions in a discursive system as proposed by Hall (2003). Thus, ‘cultural identities’ are
not to be rediscovered in the continuities suppressed by the colonial past; on the contrary, they
are to be found in the ways in which the past is retold.
The theoretical review proposed by post-colonial studies has encouraged a new reading of mis-
sionary activity as a more complex and diversified historical phenomenon than the one described
by historical anthropology—even in its more critical version, as in the case of the Comaroffs’
work mentioned above. In order to avoid reducing the mission to a mere instrument of colonial
power, the Comaroffs (1991: 23–24) have tried to link the concept of culture to the concept of
hegemony, which they understand as forms of “constructs and conventions that have come to
be shared and naturalized throughout a political community.” Nonetheless, the analysis of these
authors still considers the objectification of the culture of the colonized to be an effect of colonial-
ism. The post-colonial approach, on the contrary, by allocating the phenomenon of the produc-
tion of differences at the level of language (and not of consciousness), suggests that any discourse
about the Other must be deciphered through the analytical exposition of discursive positions.
In this viewpoint, alterity is no longer a given and self-evident term—the Other of the West—as
supposed in the critical theories of colonial contact; it becomes, according to Hall (2003), a sys-
tem of positions in which differences are constantly reformulated within a chain of discourse.
In the practice of evangelization, it is important to note that, as in the case of colonial admin-
istration, the narratives of difference require mastering the codes of the societies one intends
to convert and/or translate. Missionary chains of discourse have produced forms of knowledge
 Contribution of Post-colonial Critique to an Anthropology of Missions  n  125

inscribed in grammars, dictionaries, catechisms, and monographs. In this sense, missionization

might be partly understood as an activity whose agents dedicate themselves to the production
of discourse about difference as ethnicity.

Mediation and Agency: An Agenda for the Anthropology of Missions

The adoption of this theoretical stance enables the anthropology of missions to pose a new
set of questions for study and review. The observation and analysis of agency come to the fore
and become more productive and complex. In order to understand what actors do, firstly, it is
necessary, to take into account the ‘logic of practices’, which, as suggested by Pierre Bourdieu
(1980), operates differently from the logic that is implicitly supposed by the cosmological mod-
els produced by anthropological analyses. In Bourdieu’s sense, the agent is constituted socially
as a result of the relation between a position and a worldview.3 Agency thus understood stresses
its mode of operation, which consists of the articulation between a particular type of what
Bourdieu calls a ‘trajectory’ (the abilities that an agent acquires during his or her life) and a
specific set of statements (the discourse that this agent is capable of producing in a particular
situation). In this approach, the elucidation of how missionary discourse appropriates and pro-
duces native differences gains new theoretical relevance. This is so because it bypasses the prob-
lem that is implicit in most theories of practice, which take the actor to be an empirical a priori
whose action is predefined by the agent’s role in the social structure as a native chief, a priest, a
sorcerer, a colonial official, and so forth.
Secondly, if, as mentioned above, post-colonial discursive conditions make it clear that it is no
longer possible to suppose an empirical Other (the native) pre-existing the arrival of missionar-
ies—that is, a native who resists, submits to, or even appropriates the evangelizing discourse—it
seems that the formulation of these interactions in terms of conversion reveals itself as inad-
equate to understand what natives do. As is well demonstrated by the whole literature on mis-
sions, conversion was the fundamental condition for the foundation of missionary settlements,
and it is represented in the narratives of evangelizers as the means for true passage from savagery
to civilization. From the missionary point of view, as in the case of Jesuits in America, the consent
of indigenous people to live with the priests meant either immediate acceptance of the Christian
faith or an agreement to live as a Christian. However, the whole missionary documentation is
punctuated either by optimism in view of the natives’ generous willingness to accept the Chris-
tian faith or by pessimism regarding how easily natives fell back into their ancient customs. In
their strategies of conversion, Jesuits understood cannibalism and polygamy as hindrances to
the acceptance of the Christian faith and saw, in the administration of a cure, a shortcut to gain
a certain authority over the indigenous people. The concept of conversion is thus principally the
product of a Christian theological history constrained by the dilemma imposed by evangelizing
practice. This theological legacy was uncritically incorporated by the human sciences in the nine-
teenth century, which assigned it a universal signification as a theoretical category. Many authors
(e.g., Asad 1993; Tambiah 1990) have already called our attention to the limits of projecting these
categories over other cultural universes. The historical analysis of the concept of religion under-
taken by these authors has proved how dated its understanding as a system of beliefs and dogmas
is. In this sense, it would be necessary to rethink critically the paradigms of the colonial encoun-
ter and/or contact because they still depend on the notions of belief and conversion in order to
account for cultural change. Taking this approach as a reference, I suggest that the phenomenon
of conversion would be more stimulating as an object of anthropological reflection if it were
treated as a privileged topos, both of missionary narratives on natives and of native narratives on
126  n  Paula Montero

natives themselves and on others. Going even further, since (as stated above) agency consists of
the mediation between a particular type of trajectory and a specific set of statements, I propose
that there are not only two ways of narrating conversion—that of the priests and that of the indig-
enous people. Instead, there are as many narratives as there are positions or points of view from
which one speaks within a broad network of interactions.
A first effort to develop this agenda for an anthropology of missions has been carried out in
my analysis of monographs on the Bororo and the Tukano by Salesian missionaries in the first
half of the twentieth century, recently published as a book (Montero 2012). I have approached
missionary textuality as the result of mediations between trajectories and statements that are
produced from different points of view but become crystallized in the monographs as plausible
and conventionalized cultural codes. Thus, by trying to ‘realistically’ describe native experience,
the Salesian narrative actually constitutes its objects. And it does so, as I have previously claimed
(Montero 2009), through modes of argumentation that aim at a compromise between the mis-
sionary codes of ‘reality’, ‘truth’, and ‘possibility’ and the discrepancies that they perceive in the
Other concerning these referents. The ethnographic text thus produced is always the result of a
compromise between alternative forms of codifying meanings, which become conventional in
the process of living together in the mission. Inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Marshall
Sahlins (1981), in his work Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities, suggests that agents, in
their practice, place signs in a relation of indexation to the objects of their projects and interests.
Thus, when Salesian ethnographic text is taken as the object of analysis of mediation processes,
it becomes possible to perceive the indexation marks left, even if in low relief, by the compro-
mise with native meanings and interests.

n Paula Montero is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of São

Paulo and the Director of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). A spe-
cialist in studies of culture and religions in Brazil, she has conducted research on Salesian
missionary activity. Among her recent publications is the monograph Selvagens, Civilizados,
Autênticos: A Produção das Diferenças nas Etnografias Salesianas (Savage, Civilized, Authen-
tic: The Production of Differences in Salesian Ethnographies) (2012); pmontero@usp.br.

n Notes
1. The Jesuit and ethnologist Bartolomeu Melià (2010: 8) describes this model of mission as “Spanish
colonies without settlers.” All translations in this article are my own.
2. The papers presented at this conference were later published as a book, Conversion to Christianity:
Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, edited by Hefner (1993).
3. This is not the right place to develop the theoretical implications of this formulation. I have partly
carried out this task in a previous work (see Montero et al. 2011: 193–194).
 Contribution of Post-colonial Critique to an Anthropology of Missions  n  127

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