The Uncanniness of Missionary Others

A Discursive Analysis of a Century of Anthropological Writings on Missionary Ethnographers

in Religion and Society
Author:
Travis Warren Cooper Butler University twcooper@butler.edu

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2018.090106
Keywords:
anthropology of religion; Christian missions; colonialism; disciplinary for mation; ethnographic method; history of anthropology; travel
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ABSTRACT

This article examines discussions of missionaries penned by anthropologists and existing in disciplinary consciousness. Questions of alterity, distance and sameness, the potentially exploitative effects of ethnography, and the uncomfortable colonialist underpinnings of both missionary and anthropological pasts come to the fore in these texts. Drawing on a wealth of journal articles, ethnographic monographs, and edited volumes, I identify, describe, and analyze six predominant discourses on missionaries, including anthropological depictions of missionaries as foils (Discourse One), as intermediaries (Discourse Two), and as present in good or bad manifestations (Discourse Three). Other threads constitute missionaries as data (Discourse Four), conceive of them as methodological ancestors and ethnographic colleagues (Discourse Five), or identify them reflexively as both anthropologists and Christians (Discourse Six). I suggest that missionaries serve as an archetypical foil against which the anthropological discipline emerges. Missionary ethnographers are for anthropologists a necessarily uncanny, repressed, productive other.

Contributor Notes

TRAVIS WARREN COOPER holds a double PhD in Anthropology and Religious Studies and lectures at Butler University. His dissertation project, “The Digital Evangelicals: Contesting Authority and Authenticity after the New Media Turn,” examines religious boundary maintenance strategies in the era of social media. His current research focuses on the various social architectures that structure everyday American life-worlds, rituals, and traditions—systems ranging from social media ideologies to evangelical material culture and the communicative environment. As an ethnographer of the American Midwest, he studies suburban habitudes, residential and religious architecture, and the anthropology of design. E-mail: twcooper@butler.edu

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Religion and Society

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Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
18
Keywords:
anthropology of religion; Christian missions; colonialism; disciplinary for mation; ethnographic method; history of anthropology; travel
Print Publication Date:
01 Sep 2018
Online Publication Date:
01 Sep 2018
Copyright:
© Berghahn Books 2018

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