ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that anthropologists, who otherwise strive for objectivity in their descriptions and analysis, approached missionaries with stereotypes and presuppositions. It suggests that two common presuppositions may contribute to the negative attitude of anthropologists toward missionaries: that primitive cultures are characterized by an organic unity and that religious beliefs are essentially meaningless. Anthropologists who have battled missionaries through the years have often bolstered their position with a cultural relativism and romanticism about the "primitive" that seems increasingly anachronistic. The anthropologist who finds himself in defense of infanticide, head-hunting, or the segregation and subordination of women, and in opposition to missionization, can well be uncomfortable about the premises from which he argues. Many anthropologists have a penchant for seeing the culture they are studying as a "work of art whose beauty [lies] in the way in which the parts [are] counterbalanced and interrelated".
