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The contribution of Protestant Pacific missionary correspondents, including Robert Henry Codrington (1830-1922) and George Brown (1835-1917), to the development of anglophone social evolutionary theories during the latter half of the nineteenth century is well documented by scholars.[1] The theorists Henry Maine (1822-1888), John Lubbock (1834-1913), John McLennan (1827-1881), Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), and Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) were writing in the metropoles and were thus reliant for their data on firsthand accounts of exotic people produced by others. These theorists attempted in various ways to systematize the assumption — longstanding and sometimes explicit as in the writings of the eighteenth-century Scottish stadial theorists — that human beings progress through a universal sequence of stages from primitive to civilized. To comprehend the origins of modern civilized society, one had to look to the 'primitive' societies of the contemporary present. The presupposition, variously identified as 'classical evolutionism' or 'social evolutionism', that the non-European world provided theorists with a living museum of the history of present-day Western society was well entrenched by the middle of the nineteenth century. As Stocking neatly put it:
Contemporaneity in space was therefore converted into succession in time by re-arranging the cultural forms coexisting in the Victorian present along an axis of assumed structural or ideational archaism — from the simple to the complex, or from that which human reason showed was manifestly primitive to that which habitual association established as obviously civilized (1987:173).
The equation of the European past with the primitive present and the consequent establishment of developmental rules appealed to the legal minds of Maine and McLennan. But it was also a profoundly progressivist notion containing the implicit assumption that Europeans had climbed furthest up the universal ladder of social progress.
The growing attractiveness of a social evolutionist understanding of human difference was influenced but not determined by Darwinism. Maine's 1861 treatise on the development of legal structures, Ancient Law, used Old Testament and Roman history to surmise that law had originated with status-based patriarchal authority and moved towards a contractual state only in recent times.[2] This was not a universal approach amongst evolutionary theorists: McLennan, in his work on the development of marriage, attempted to explain the institution of marriage 'in naturalistic developmental terms' rather than using Biblical evidence (Stocking 1987:167). But all saw contemporary Western Christian (male) society as the zenith of human achievement and saw the increasing complexity of religious concepts and practice as fundamentally linked to changes in other elements of society. In working out their theoretical models, the early anglophone anthropologists drew heavily for ethnographic evidence on the writings of missionaries, especially those stationed in Oceania. Oceanic missionaries contributed to learned anthropological journals and their expertise was acknowledged by Tylor, Sir James Frazer (1854-1941), Maine, and Morgan.
Missionary collaboration with metropolitan theorists was welcomed at least in part because of the increased interest in religious belief and practice emanating from the studies in language and religion of Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), as well as in marriage patterns or forms of legal authority, as indicators of evolutionary status.[3] Tylor, continuing such investigations, corresponded with missionaries in Oceania and assisted in publishing their ethnographic descriptions of indigenous religions in such periodicals as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (later Man). He did so despite the tendency of missionaries to dispute theoretical generalizations in order to assert the uniqueness and value of the communities they knew and lived amongst. At least in principle, missionary arguments and ethnography were always underpinned by the assumption that all human beings were capable of progress towards a 'higher state' since all were valuable in God's sight.[4] They took seriously St. Paul's dictum that 'there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all' (Colossians 3:11).[5] Those working in Melanesia also had a particular desire to prevent 'their' people from being placed near the bottom ranks of any theoretical model. Helen Gardner (2006:114-20, 127) has documented the unease of the Methodist George Brown, writing from experience in Samoa and New Britain, with the widely held distinction drawn between Polynesians and Melanesians. Brown's disagreement with Frazer over totemism demonstrated the 'tension' between Brown's acknowledgement of 'the logic of social evolutionist theory' and his simultaneous resolve 'to temper the implications of its findings'. This subversive impulse came from his 'Christian insistence on human similitude' but also from a deep and close familiarity with the people amongst whom he had long lived. Broad generalizations satisfied few of the missionary ethnographers who had personal knowledge of counter-examples. In his academic writings, the Anglican missionary Codrington (1881:313) disputed Tylor's contention that the belief in souls originated in speculation about the meaning of dreams, for his personal experience amongst the Banks Islanders (of what is now north Vanuatu) was that no such link was made. Codrington (1889:310) complicated any easy relationship between forbidden foods and totems, suggesting that many taboos were of a recent origin and somewhat ad hoc in nature. Although direct and prolonged contact with Islanders led to writing which emphasized local specificity, potentially subverting universalist developmental models, such empirically-based ethnographic work by missionaries remained acceptable in metropolitan scientific circles.
John Barker (1996:111) has suggested that the collaboration with metropolitan theorists also changed missionary attitudes with their scientific work 'mark[ing] a notable instance of the "capture" of missionary ethnography by a professionalizing anthropology, based on the discourse of the natural sciences'. Yet he also noted that this scientific turn was complemented by a 'gradually liberalizing mood in the missionary movement as a whole', with a complex interaction between different perspectives. The collaboration with metropolitan theorists strengthened a tendency, which had been apparent in some considerably earlier missionary writings such as those of the Methodist Thomas Williams (1815-1891) on Fiji, to see traditional religion in systematic terms rather than just as a collection of abhorrent practices. In his representation of a Fijian religious system (1858), Williams began to valorize it in powerful, positive terms (Herbert 1991; Weir 1998), thus anticipating the social evolutionary view that all people had some form of religion which marked a definable stage in human religious and social development. By around 1890, the view was widely held both by theorists and by many of their missionary collaborators that early religions should be 'respected for their place in preparing humankind for higher religions' (Gunson 1994:303). This opinion was especially strong amongst Anglicans but John Henry Holmes (1866-1943) of the London Missionary Society (LMS), who worked with members of the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits and with other anthropologists, expressed similar attitudes. In his own writings, partly under the influence of the leader of the Torres Straits expedition, Alfred Haddon (1855-1940), Holmes moved from a position of revulsion at the religious practices of the Elema of the Papuan Gulf to a sensitivity to the importance of their traditional beliefs, in particular in the lives of older people (Reid 1978).
[1] Barker 1996; Douglas 2001; Gardner 2006 and Chapter Six, this volume; Gunson 1994; Stocking 1996.
[2] Kuper 1988:17-34; Stocking 1987:121‑8.
[3] See Chapter Six (Gardner), this volume.
[4] But see Chapter Six (Gardner), this volume, for instances of senior clergymen in the Australian colonies who, frustrated in their efforts to evangelize Aboriginal people, had henceforth denied their capacity for religion.
[5] Biblical citations are from the King James Version of 1611, the version most commonly used by anglophone Protestants in the period under discussion.