Anthropologists Versus Missionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions [and Comments and Reply]
| Autor: | Rodolfo Larios Núñez, Claude E. Stipe, Adriaan C. Van Oss, Martin Ottenheimer, Delbert Rice, Lucy Mair, Vinigi L. Grottanelli, Michael A. Rynkiewich, Julio Teran-Dutari, William H. Newell, Glenn Petersen, Martin Mluanda, Ethel Boissevain, Paul R. Turner, Hermann Hochegger, Robert B. Taylor, Frank A. Salamone, Jean Guiart, Ronald J. Burwell |
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| Rok vydání: | 1980 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Current Anthropology. 21:165-179 |
| ISSN: | 1537-5382 0011-3204 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/202428 |
| Popis: | Although a missionary once served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, anthropological enculturation commonly includes categorizing missionaries as enemies. The conditioning seems to be more covert than overt, since anthropology texbooks seldom deal specifically with missionary activity and few ethnographies contain condemnations of missionaries. Two presuppositions which may influence the antimissionary attitude are (1) that the culture of a primitive society is an "organic unity" and (2) that religious beliefs are essentially meaningless. The organic-unity position conceives of a society as being almost a work of art in the way in which facets of culture are counterbalanced and interrelated. Since the missionary is usually involved in directed culture change, he is seen as doing violence to that "delicate machine," "functioning organism," or "intricate symbolic system." Social anthropologists tend to consider religious beliefs as essentially meaningless and argue that the major importanc... |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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