Time and the Work of Anthropology by Johanne Fabian

Author:Johanne Fabian [Fabian, Johanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781134347223
Google: maiYAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-14T05:55:33+00:00

CONCLUSION

Inquiry into the role of missions in linguistic colonization is difficult for two reasons. One is the problem of how to avoid relating language and religion, either merely on the level of social institutions or by way of structural isomorphisms between religion and language. The other is the temptation to treat missionary involvement in colonization only in general, abstract terms of collaboration. Social history, working with notions such as colonial and world-systems, urges us to see communicative praxis as an important domain for symbolic control. In the specific case of the Belgian Congo, we can identify the external institutional bases on which cooperation between missions, administration, and private enterprise was grounded—land grants, monopoly of education. We can also describe the practical ideological tasks which the missions were expected to (and intended to) perform under colonial rule.

The ‘language question’ was one of the areas more or less reserved to the missions. The historical record suggests that missionary linguistic work began with descriptive appropriation of African languages. It soon turned to projects of prescriptive imposition of standards of correctness. African and European languages were chosen to serve as vehicles of communication. A normative orientation gained in importance as literacy was promoted, and a certain mode of literary production and consumption became the chief concern of missionary linguists and educators.

Ideological operators made it possible for religious and secular concerns to be articulated in one and the same colonial discourse on language. These turned out to be certain kinds of spatial and temporal concepts, notions of individual identity, the value attached to ‘work’ as means and end of education, and a propensity to equate order with hierarchy and both with a rational approach to linguistic diversity.

If a general conclusion were to be drawn from the material considered in this paper, it would have to be that in the field of language studies and policies, as in other areas, a will to control spontaneous processes and to bend them to the purposes of the colonizing society was the driving force. Deep connections existed between missionary and linguistic work. I should like to conclude with a roundabout illustration which was suggested to me by the following passage from the introduction to an ambitious language handbook. It was published by a Baptist missionary, W. Stapleton, in 1903. The author notes the vitality of Lingala as a vehicular language. He is troubled by such linguistic wild growth and considers what might be done about it:

We could try to direct and control this movement and make, step by step, a language out of it which would be of service to the State post, the colony, and the missionary school, that is, it would be useful for the Government, for business, and for philanthropic societies, as an effective means to establish reciprocal exchange of ideas between the tribes that are spread all over this region of the black continent (1903: g).

The key to this somewhat muddled statement is, I believe, the word ‘movement,’ as in social and religious movement. In

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