Religious and secular colonization [1990]

After having exposed the external workings of imperialism, anthropologists, historians and others should strive to understand, beyond and

beneath the brutal facts of military, technological, and economic Western supe-

riority, those deep-seated convictions and beliefs which in the eyes of many

contemporaries made colonization a noble and necessary undertaking. Not the

crooks and brutal exploiters, but the honest and intelligent agents of colonization

need to be accounted for. The role which religion-through the missions-played

in formulating and sustaining colonialism cannot be reduced to mere ideological

justification or pragmatic collaboration. At any rate, demonstrating ideologi-

cal support and collaboration, I submit, has long ceased to generate interesting

questions. O n the other hand, accumulating more and more evidence of the

complexity of relations between missionary and secular colonialism1 increases the

need for new synthesizing approaches.