Let the Cannibals Eat the Missionaries

As someone who has been (sort of) anthropologically trained, I deplore all those cases in history where missionaries have interfered with a native culture, usually in the name of bringing them Christianity.

In the United States in the nineteenth century, Native American children were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to so-called Indian schools, typically run by missionaries. There they were forbidden to speak their native language and in fact were punished if they did so. This was part of a deliberate and systematic attempt to "assimilate" the Indians to mainstream (white) culture—in other words, to destroy their own culture.

As a result, Indian languages nearly died out. Today, in many tribes, only the very old—grandparents or even great-grandparents—can speak the ancestral language. Where a desire exists to preserve the native culture, schools are teaching the ancient language; but then the language has to be learned as a foreign language, and it has skipped a generation or two.

And possibly traditions such as songs, dances, tales, and other parts of the culture are being taught to the young Native Americans, too. Again, only an older generation is still in possession of this cultural material. Thus the educational efforts unfortunately are sort of a remedial effort, more to restore and revive than maintain the culture.

It wasn't only in the United States, nor only with the Native Americans that cultural destruction happened. Sad to say, Canada and Australia have just about as bad a record regarding their native peoples. Canada had outlawed some practices of its native tribes until the 1950s, I believe.

Intervention by missionaries started in 1797 in Tahiti, where missionaries outlawed tattooing, because the biblical book of Leviticus forbids decorating of the body. And in Samoa, just as an example, when missionaries arrived they found a blissful situation, where the the people felt no shame in sex or in the human body. But these missionaries were scandalized by bare-breasted women and got them to cover their bosoms. (Except for purposes of photography and painting: "Okay, now take your clothes off because we want to paint [or photograph] you bare-breasted." Hmm.)

As I said, with the viewpoint of an anthropologist, I deplore missionaries as interfering with and destroying native cultures. I think I might go so far as to say that headhunting should not be outlawed (it was still going on in the Solomon Islands, in New Guinea, in the Philippines, and elsewhere in the twentieth century). It's part of their war, and I'm not sure our wars are less brutal. How do we point an accusatory finger when we (meaning the U.S. and its allies) incinerated Vietnamese people with napalm and poisoned their ecosystem with Agent Orange, which is still causing horrible birth defects?

Or, in World War II, 75,000 people were killed—incinerated—in the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. And one-quarter of Tokyo was destroyed by fire-bombing, with the result of over a million people losing their homes.

However, I frankly see a difficult, morally ambiguous case where we are talking about native practices that involve killing. As I said I might condone headhunting, maybe even cannibalism (which has been practiced, at various times, almost everywhere in the world). I am more conflicted when it comes to human sacrifice such as was being practiced by Mesoamerican peoples such as the Aztecs and the Maya when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century.

On the one hand I might stick to the non-interference that I espoused above as an absolute. On the other hand, the rationale for human sacrifice is to be found in these peoples' religion. To us it is primitive superstition. Since I am not too sympathetic to any religious beliefs whatsoever—even in our "advanced," that is, Western, Christian, etc., world —I find it hard to say, "Well, even here we need to leave the native practices alone." I guess that these peoples, who believed that (for example) human sacrifice was needed to keep the sun rising every day, and/or to appease the rain god so that the crops would grow, learned, after they were forced to stop the practice, that the sun rose anyway and the crops grew anyway. It can be viewed as anti-anthropological interference or it can be viewed as science triumphing over superstition.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein