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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Missionary Expertise, Social Science, and the Use of Ethnographic Knowledge in Colonial Gabon |
Author: | Cinnamon, John M. |
Year: | 2006 |
Periodical: | History in Africa |
Volume: | 33 |
Pages: | 413-432 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Gabon |
Subjects: | missions anthropology colonial period Religion and Witchcraft History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) colonialism |
About persons: | Robert Hamill Nassau (1835-1921) H. Trilles (1866-1949) |
External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_in_africa/v033/33.1cinnamon.pdf |
Abstract: | To examine the often contentious relationship between missionary expertise, social science, and ethnographic knowledge in colonial Gabon, this article looks comparatively at the fieldwork experiences and writings of the American Presbyterian, Robert Hamill Nassau (1835-1921), and the French Spiritan, Henri Trilles (1866-1949). Both men claimed expert ethnographic understanding based on long-term, first-hand daily contact with Africans, while at the same time expressing standard missionary shock at African customs, fetishism and cannibalism. The article shows that, while their works were not primarily intended to be acknowledged and appreciated by the colonial State, their current value is to be found to a large extent in the insights they provide in the day-to-day specifics of the early colonial encounter - as ethnographies, therefore, not of the African people described, but of interactions on the colonial frontier. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |