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Religiosity and Scientificity: The Transformation of Missionary Anthropology in the West China Border Research Society (1922–1950)
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Religiosity and Scientificity: The Transformation of Missionary Anthropology in the West China Border Research Society (1922–1950)
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Journal Article
Religiosity and Scientificity: The Transformation of Missionary Anthropology in the West China Border Research Society (1922–1950)
2024
Overview
Religiosity and scientificity have long been intertwined in missionary anthropology. Since the 20th century, there has been a shift from religious missionary anthropology to scientific anthropology worldwide. Reviewing published materials and archives, this paper provides a case study of this transformation. It focuses on how the foreign missionary-founded West China Border Research Society transformed from a relatively closed and fixed local Christian academic research institution into a more open, international, and purely scientific research institution disciplined by Christian rationality. It sheds some new light into the Society’s roles and its transformation process. Contrary to the views of many scholars who assert that the Society “died” in 1937 and subsequently engaged in China’s state service and nation-building efforts, we contend that after 1937, the Society sought greater independence and a more scientific approach. Christianity dominated the Society in the early stages after its inception in 1922 in Chengdu, China, and its research results could not be objective or scientific. Although the Society later became more open and globalized, missionary anthropologists still mainly controlled it. After 1937, missionary anthropologists returned to religious rationality under the pressure of being connected to global academia. The Society eventually adopted “salvage anthropology” and tried to develop into a scientific research institution aimed at objective recording, while this somewhat rigid research approach also disciplined and suppressed the nationalist research orientation of Chinese colleagues and scholars. In response, Chinese researchers established other institutions and journals with stronger nationalism and undertook the “border construction work” that the Society could not accomplish.
