Missionaries are religious actors. Their main purpose and pursuit is to spread faith, to evangelize. Some of them were also scholars: they have made significant contributions not only to ethnographic knowledge by mediating empirical data and theoretical concepts, but also to the formation of the discipline of anthropology in the crucial decades around 1900. Our panel suggests that the religious and the secular spheres of missionary work are bound together more strongly than is often implied by perspectives that take on a disciplinary anthropology angle. We invite papers that examine missionary transgressions of the boundary of the religious and the secular, both in missionary ethnographic fieldwork and in missionary exhibitions, museums, collections, popular and scientific publications. We encourage contributors to rethink the impact of Christian concepts, of theological imperatives, of evangelical aims, of local interactions and conflicts on ethnographic work in the 19th and 20thcenturies. We aim to include a discussant to facilitate a productive debate on the uses and legacies of missionary ethnographies, and on its wider implications for anthropology as a (secular) discipline.

The period of submission for paper proposals to the congress website is January 8 to February 28, 2018; panellists will be notified by the March 15, 2018. The panel’s language will be English.

For further information on procedure, organisation and location please refer to: http://www.iuaes2018.org

With best regards,

Ana Rita de Almeida Amaral (University of the Free State)
Richard Hölzl (University of Göttingen)
(Convenors)

Contact:
rhoelzl@gwdg.de
ana.r.amaral@gmail.com