ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two kinds of fieldworker, the anthropologist and the Christian missionary, their relationships with indigenous people, and issues of morality, politics and prejudice relating to their work. In a wide-ranging review of Aboriginal studies, Burridge provides the first detailed comparison of these two kinds of reach into Otherness in Australia, and mounts a spirited defense of missionaries along with a strong critique of anthropological fieldwork. In 1946, it began to minister to about a hundred needy Aboriginal people camped around the old Jigalong depot. The missionaries were members of a small Protestant Pentecostal fundamentalist sect that had been established in Britain in 1922 as "a direct move of God and a result of the preaching and teaching of the whole counsel of God as taught by the Holy Spirit". The issue of cultural continuities as variables contributing to contemporary social problems harks back to the missionary/anthropologist divide and their respective attitudes towards Aboriginal culture.
