The Spiritual in the Secular
Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa
- Evangelism & Missions
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Published: 2012
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Publisher's Description
David Livingstone's visit to Cambridge in 1857 was seen as much as a scientific event as a religious one. But he was by no means alone among missionaries in integrating mission with science and other fields of research. Rather, many missionaries were remarkable, pioneering polymaths. This collection of essays explores the ways in which late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries to Africa contributed to various academic disciplines, such as linguistics, ethnography, social anthropology, zoology, medicine, and many more. This volume includes an introductory chapter by the editors and eleven chapters that analyze missionary research and its impact on knowledge about African contexts. Several themes emerge, including many missionaries' positive views of indigenous discourses and the complicated relationship between missionaries and professional anthropologists. Contributors:John CinnamonErika EichholzerNatasha ErlankDeborah GaitskellPatrick HarriesWalima T. KalusaJohn MantonDavid MaxwellJohn StuartDmitri van den BersselaarHonoré Vinck
Endorsements (4)
“Serious scholarship has long moved past the stereotype of missionaries as bumbling colonialists mindlessly serving the interests of hegemonic imperialism. But not until this book has the significant contribution of missionaries to careful scientific investigation been properly probed. Backed by unusually careful research, these chapters show how missionary mastery of local knowledge has contributed significantly to a wide range of sciences -- geology, ethnography, social anthropology, linguistics, and more. This book is especially welcome for its setting aside of ideological denunciation (or affirmation) in favor of disciplined empirical investigation.”
“The Spiritual in the Secular offers a series of compelling studies documenting the scholarly work that missionaries did. . . . Reopens a closed chapter in the history of science.”
“This book deals with contributions to social policy, social amelioration, and the advancement of knowledge, made in the course of mission by an extraordinary gallery of different kinds of people, Africans very much included. . . . The lingering ghosts of misapprehension are served notice by a band of sober scholars, and we see emerging the lineaments of complicated truths.”
“At a time when the historical and contemporary boundaries between the sacred and the secular in the social sciences are under intense examination, The Spiritual in the Secular will resonate well beyond the particular historical situations its contributors so compellingly illuminate.”
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