Dialogue with Anthropologists Begins

The war of words between anthropologists and foreign missionaries may be ending as both groups realize the importance of preserving endangered tribal peoples.

For decades, anthropologists have accused missionaries of suppressing native religions and even destroying whole societies. Missionaries have faulted anthropologists for ignoring the good that foreign missions do and for competing with them for access to tribal peoples.

Can the parties in this rocky relationship find any common ground? Jonathan Benthall, president of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, says the plight of tribal peoples requires that all who care about them set aside differences and cooperate before it is too late.

"It is time to stop the sibling rivalry between anthropologists and missionaries," Benthall said last month at the annual American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in Atlanta.

Victor Montejo, a Guatemalan Maya with a Ph.D. in anthropology, blasted both groups for their possessiveness toward peoples among whom they work. "Don't any of you refer to us as 'my tribe' or 'my people,' " Montejo said. "We are the property of no one.

"Do we really need the Bible in our languages?" asked Montejo. "Do we really need anthropologists to be 'baptizing' us with their own names for us like 'the fierce people,' or do we instead need missionaries and anthropologists to help us in the most important matter of all—survival?"

BEYOND STEREOTYPES: Human rights for native peoples has emerged as an area of common concern for anthropologists and missionaries. Often, anthropologists avoid advocacy of human rights to preserve the field's traditional observer status in dealing with tribes. Missionaries are finding their outreach to native peoples made more difficult when encroaching development puts a tribal society in jeopardy.

Some anthropologists have accused missionaries, especially American Protestants, of being dangerous and ignorant bumblers. They criticize missionaries for living well on funds from wealthy churches, for labeling native culture as demonic, and for attempting to get people "saved."

Foreign missionaries see anthropologists at times as amoral agnostics who take pride in being shocked by nothing and who think that native people should be left pristine in a sort of human zoo to serve the purposes of scientific research.

While the Atlanta meeting did not resolve long-held differences, the civil discussion between the two groups represented real progress. It came as a result of a warm friendship between anthropologists Leslie Sponsel, chair of the AAA's Commission on Human Rights, and Thomas Headland of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Allyn Stearman, professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, had been unsympathetic and critical toward New Tribes missionaries working among the Yuqui of Bolivia. But the threat of an outside development project awakened the missionaries to the Yuqui's lack of recourse, and they went to their critics, including Stearman, for help. Together they were able to consolidate enough support to halt the project and strengthen the Yuqui's capacity for self-advocacy. "If the New Tribes people had not intervened, the Yuqui would have been overwhelmed," Stearman said.

Missionaries, by seeking more training in anthropology, have admitted how much they have to learn from that academic discipline. Meanwhile, the new willingness of secular anthropologists to commit themselves to a higher purpose, even if it means being responsible for cultural change, may be giving them something more in common with missionaries: the understanding of what it means to have a mission.