2 - Historiography

Summary

As a work of comparative history, this book takes from and advances arguments in two separate and quite distinct fields of scholarly inquiry. Studies of Christian evangelization and studies of colonial administration have rarely overlapped. The literatures in these fields have not had much to say to one another. One objective of this piece of historical research is to show how much Christian missionaries and colonial administrators did debate common issues having to do with social engineering. Thus, it is helpful to review both literatures from the perspective of how they open up into a common discussion of the topic.

Of Revelation and Revolution

The idea for a historiography chapter was taken from John and Jean Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution. There they use such a chapter to good effect in laying out the intellectual assumptions that underpin their scholarship. The Comaroffs in fact make a strong case for the value of a historiography chapter (or some similar background on the literature) as part of the introduction of all monographs. A standard part of most dissertations, such chapters are generally skipped in published studies, primarily because, to be frank, they tend to be quite boring, especially to those nonspecialist audiences publishers hope to attract. But such chapters could go a long way toward clearing up the postmodernist haze that permeates much of contemporary social scientific research, both through forcing authors to think through the intellectual legacies on which they are aspiring to build and by forcing readers to acknowledge the true legacies behind an author's ideas. As for historiography chapters being boring, readers who find them so can always do as the Comaroffs recommend, and just skip ahead.

To begin with, it is fair to say that in the past generation no other body of scholarship has come close to equaling the influence of the Comaroffs’ work on the scholarly grasp of what Christian missionaries were trying to do in Africa. Thomas Beidelman should be given credit for showing the possibility of an anthropological study of the missionary experience. Still, in Of Revelation and Revolution, their two-volume study of non-conformist missionaries in what became the Republic of South Africa, the Comaroffs made the case that such an anthropology is key to understanding the nature of cultural contact between European and African as it has occurred in Africa.