Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Humans crave meaning: we use language to discover, invent, reflect upon, share, and negotiate meanings with one another.Some Christian anthropologists even pinpoint language as a key indicator of the imago Dei in Homo sapiens.Humans tell stories to one another in all available modalities-verbal, visual, digital, and print-making and sharing meanings of events, relationships, and encounters ranging from the quotidian to the eternal.In "British Social Anthropologists and Missionaries in the Twentieth Century," historian Timothy Larsen offers an interpretive frame for the history of anthropology, one that raises opportunity to reflect on the stories we tell about the professionalization of anthropology and the presence of Christians in the field.His essay reads like a mystery: things are often not what they seem.Larsen interrupts the story as commonly told, interrogating the historical accuracy of the reasons given for antipathy between anthropologists and missionaries.He shows how the stories we tell are shaped by broader pressures including university resources, funding structures, political agendas, and global forces such as colonialism and globalization.Pressures intensify when they intersect with career trajectories, job security, and stigma and prestige.Larsen unravels a taken-for-granted story, that anthropologists have antipathy toward missionaries because missionaries engage in cultural imperialism.Larsen shows that anthropologists, too, actively colluded with colonialism and imperialism, and in the British context they even marketed themselves as especially useful to those projects.Larsen points out
Author: Jenell Paris
Institution: Messiah University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4400969801