Ana Rita Amaral (University of Lisbon) and Richard Hölzl (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) invite submissions for a panel on Missionary Ethnographies: Encounters, Uses and Legacies Between Science and Faith (OP 125) which will be presented at the 18th IUAES World Congress held in Florianopolis (Brasil) from July 16-20, 2018. They seek papers that examine missionary transgressions of the boundary of the religious and the secular, both in missionary ethnographic fieldwork and in missionary exhibitions, museums, collections, popular and scientific publications. The full panel abstract and details for submission are provided below:

Open Panel: Missionary Ethnographies: Encounters, Uses and Legacies Between Science and Faith (OP 125)

Thematic Line: 07. Anthropology of Religion and Secularism/Antropologia da Religião e Secularismo

Missionaries are religious actors. Their main purpose and pursuit is to spread faith, to evangelize. Some of them were also scholars: they have made significant contributions not only to ethnographic knowledge by mediating empirical data and theoretical concepts, but also to the formation of the discipline of anthropology in the crucial decades around 1900. Our panel suggests that the religious and the secular spheres of missionary work are bound together more strongly than is often implied by perspectives that take on a disciplinary anthropology angle. We invite papers that examine missionary transgressions of the boundary of the religious and the secular, both in missionary ethnographic fieldwork and in missionary exhibitions, museums, collections, popular and scientific publications. We encourage contributors to rethink the impact of Christian concepts, of theological imperatives, of evangelical aims, of local interactions and conflicts on ethnographic work in the 19th and 20th centuries.

We aim to include a discussant to facilitate a productive debate on the uses and legacies of missionary ethnographies, and on its wider implications for anthropology as a (secular) discipline.

The period of submission of paper proposals to the congress website is January 8 to February 28, 2018; panellists will be notified by the March 15, 2018. The panel’s language will be English.

For further information on procedure, organization and location please refer to:http://www.iuaes2018.org

Questions can be directed to

rhoelzl@gwdg.de

ana.r.amaral@gmail.com