46 - The Culture Concept and Christian Missions in the Pacific

Summary

From the Spanish Jesuits, who arrived first on the island of Guam in 1688 then spread the gospel through the Marianas,¹ to the stream of missions, both Protestant and Catholic, which swept through Oceania in the following centuries, European missionaries struggled to understand and describe the lives of the people they encountered. From high islands and coral atolls priests and reverends reported back to Europe on the polity, the religion, or the kinship of the peoples with whom they worked, using terms such as ‘tradition’, ‘custom’, or ‘practice’ or their Spanish, French, or German equivalent, often prefaced with ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’.² Except for German missionaries, the word they did not use – up until the twentieth century – was ‘culture’. For English-speaking missionaries, at least, ‘culture’ referred to refinement and the attainment of civilization. It was reserved for the higher classes and almost exclusively to Europeans. Yet, in a remarkable shift for a single word, ‘culture’ – led by the new discipline of anthropology – largely lost its older meaning, to emerge in the twentieth century as a new conceptual tool for the understanding and describing of human difference. As professional anthropologists arrived in Oceania they honed the culture concept to insist on the plurality of cultures and to defend Islander traditions and customs. Many did their research with the assistance of in situ missionaries, who were eager to engage in the new disciplines. Most anthropologists, however, viewed mission as the enemy of ‘culture’, yet from the 1930s many missionaries trained in anthropology and the culture concept was picked up by theology.