commentary on missionary positions: christian, modernist, postmodernist by robert priest

C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 42, Number i, February 2001© 2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved ooii-3io4/20oi/420i-ooo2$3.oo

Missionary Positions

Christian, Modernist,Postmodernist^

by Robert J. Priest

In the late 1960s and early 1970s "the missionary position" be-came widespread as a technical expression for face-to-face man-on-top sexual intercourse. It was accompanied by standard (andundocumented) stories as to the origin of the expression, storiesfeaturing missionaries and either Polynesians, Africans, Chinese,Native Americans, or Melanesians. By the late 1980s and 1990sthe expression had become a core symbol in modernist and post-modernist moral discourses. This paper examines accounts of theorigin of the expression, provides evidence that it originated inKinsey's |mis)reading of Malinowski, analyzes the symbolic ele-ments of the missionary-position narrative as synthesizing mod-ernist objections to Christian morality, analyzes the "missionaryposition" in postmodernist narratives as synthesizing postmod-ernist objections to modernist morality, and explores some of thefunctions of this myth within the academy.

ROBERT J. PRIEST is Associate Professor of Intercultural Stud-ies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a division of TrinityInternational University (2065 Half Day Rd., Deerfleld, 111.60015, U.S.A. [[email protected]]|. Born in 1957, he was edu-cated at Columbia Bible College jB.A., 1979), Trinity EvangelicalDivinity School |M.Div., 1982), the University of Chicago (M.A.,1984I, and the University of California, Berkeley |Ph.D., 1993).His dissertation research was on the symbolism of filth in Agua-runa-Jivaro culture. He has published "Anthropologists and Mis-sionaries: Moral Roots of Conflict," in Cuiient Concerns of An-thropologists and Missionaries, edited by Karl Franklin (Dallas:International Museum of Cultures, 1987), and "Christian Theol-ogy, Sin, and Cultural Anthropology," in Explorations in Anthro-pology and Theology, edited by Frank Salamone and Walter Ad-ams (New York: University Press of America, 1997). The presentpaper was accepted for publication 5 vi 00.

I. Research for this paper was funded by a grant from the WabashCenter. I thank the Kinsey Institute staff for allowing me to accesstheir library and providing bibliographic assistance and the TrinityEvangelical Divinity School faculty for the invitation to present tbelecture on morality and postmodernism that inspired the research.I am grateful for written critical comments from Patricia Townsend,Don Carson, Alex Bolyanatz, Dan Shaw, Tite Tienou, Kevin Van-hoozer, Ben Mitchell, Darrell Whiteman, Paul Hiebert, Harold Net-land, and Kersten Priest as well as Miles Richardson and threeanonymous referees.

We see, then, that the sexual practices of a peopleare indeed prototypical and that from their positionin coitus their whole psychic attitude may beinferred.

GEZA ROHEiM, "Psycbo-analysis of Primitive Cul-tural Types," 1932

Three years ago I was invited, as an anthropologist anda seminary professor, to give a lecture on morality andpostmodernism to the faculty of another seminary. In-trigued, I accepted. This invitation led me not only tovisit another institution to v̂ rhich I had strong connec-tions as an academic and as a Christian hut also to traveldown a complex intellectual path. My initial goal wasto compare conservative Christian, modernist, and post-modernist moral discourses. Rather than focus on ex-plicit propositions or grand abstractions, I chose to searchthe moral discourses of each movement for distinctivemetaphors, myths, and symhols. One trope which I firstobserved in postmodernist writings was that of "the mis-sionary position." This trope appears, for example, indozens of titles such as "Postmodernism and the Mis-sionary Position" (Wilde 1988), "Pomosexualities: Chal-lenging the Missionary Position" (in Rogers et al. 1995),and "(Un)doing the Missionary Position" (Kafka 1997).Eventually I collected hundreds of usages of the expres-sion both in contexts marking the postmodernist breakwith modernism and in contexts marking modernistbreaks with Christian morality. A single symbol occursat two different boundaries, employed by two differentmovements on behalf of their moral visions.

As I explored the image of "the missionary position"I discovered a history quite different from that imaginedby many people, and this discovery reinforced my desireto examine its meanings and functions as a discursivesymbol. This examination, in turn, led me to considersome troubling issues of openness and closure in con-temporary academic discourse. In this article, I offer aguided tour through this terrain.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "mission-ary position" as "a position for sexual intercourse inwhich a woman and man lie facing each other, with thewoman on the bottom and the man on the top." MerriamWebster's Collegiate explains the term as arising fromthe idea that "missionaries insisted that this coital po-sition is the only acceptable one." Modernist and post-modernist usages of this trope clearly draw on this im-agery but employ the phrase in contexts in which coitalkinesics is not directly the subject. Before analyzing thistrope in moral discourse, an excursus on the origins ofthe expression is needed.

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (secondedition) explains that it was "so-called because it wasallegedly favored by Christian missionaries workingamong indigenous peoples, in preference to positions inwhich the man approaches the woman from behind."Westheimer (1995:171) writes: "South Pacific folk didn'tlimit themselves to one position, and . . . missionaries. . . were shocked by this 'sinful' behavior. . . . Mission-

3O I cuRMtNT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42. Numbcr I. February 2001

arics . . . advocated tlie use of the male-superior position,and that's how it got its name." She explains (1994:76)that "the term was first used by indigenous peoples ofthe South Pacific to describe the preferences of mission-aries, who considered other positions sinful." Similar ac-counts are given in Richter (1993:143), Goldenson andAnderson (1986:172), Holder (1995:2,41], Wilson (1972:194), Carrera (r99T:ia'^l, Tuleja (1987:45), Adams (1994:216), Hooper (1992:28), Stoppard (1998:74), Comfort(1972), Graves and Patai (1963:69), Camphausen (1991),Allen and Martin (r97i:TO9), Francoeur (1991), Haeberle(1978:216), Masters (1962:63), Partridge (1984), Harrarand Vantine (1999:71), Block (1999:69), Cox (1998:62),Calderone and Johnson (1981), Gotwald and Golden(1981), the Encarta World English Dictionary, and theReader's Digest Guide to Love and Sex (1998:78).

Some locate the origin of the expres.sion in the SouthPacific (Westheimer 1994, 1995) or among Pacific Is-landers (Tuleja T987; Reinisch 1990:123; Block 1999).Others pinpoint Polynesia {Comfort 1972, Wilson 1972,Calderone and Johnson 1981, Goldenson and Anderson1986, Holder 1995, George and Caine 1998, Reader's Di-gest 1998) or Melanesia (Graves and Patai 1963:69; Cam-phausen 1991). Partridge (1984) ptjints to the South Seaislands and China andFrancoeur (1991) to Africa and theSouth Pacific, while Haeberle (1978:216) simply states,"The less inhibited 'heathens' of Africa, Asia, and thePacific Islands used to ridicule it as the 'missionary po-sition."'Allen and Martin (1971:109) assert that "inmostof the world this position is ridiculed as the 'missionaryposition."' Other sources point to unidentified nativepeoples as the original users of the expression (Masters1962:63; Adams 1994; Hooper 1992,- Riehter 1993).

Similarly, sources are unelear as to when the expres-sion was eoined. Partridge (1984) and Richter (199 )̂ dateits origin to the 19th century, but Wilson's (1972) sexualdictionary appears to be the first reference work to in-clude it. The Oxford English Dictionary included it in1976 but gave a date of 1969 as the first usage it wasable to document. The Random House Unabridged in-dicates that the term first showed up ca. 1965-70. Manysources prefaee their aeeount by phrases ("it is thoughtthat," "allegedly") indicating that they are repeating anundocumented story. Other sources present it straight-forwardly as historical fact hut without documentation.I asked for help in documenting its origin from variousInternet diseussion groups. Those who respondedseemed sure of their faets but could not remember theirsources. On every lead they suggested (Malinowski,Micbener, Mead, the Human Relations Area Files) 1 drewa blank.

Initially tbe earliest references to the expression Icould find were in 1962 and 1963. Masters (1962:63)writes that this position "is sometimes referred to as the'missionary position' by natives of primitive lands."Graves and Patai (1963:69) state: "Malinowski writesthat Melanesian girls ridicule what they call 'the mis-sionary position.'" Unlike later references, these reporta native expression but do not assume that it is part ofthe English language, though Masters seems to believe

that readers will have heard the story before. Graves andPatai pinpoint a specific source. No such reference oc-curs in Malinowski, but three other authorities (Gotwaldand Golden 1981:339; Camphausen 1991; Westheimer1995) refer to Malinowski as the source and a fourth(Partridge 1984) references an unnamed ethnographer. Inpublished sources on tbe topie, Malinowski is the onlyname given. It seemed obvious that each was dependingon some as yet unidentified further source which itselfcited Malinowski.

Further searching turned up sucb a source. Alfred Kin-sey, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey,Pomeroy, and Martin 1948), documents an Americanpreference for face-to-face man-on-top woman-below in-tercourse, wbieh be ealls "the English-American posi-tion." He writes (p. 373), "It will be recalled that Mali-nowski (1929) records the nearly universal use of a totallydifferent position among the Trobrianders . . . [and] . . .that caricatures of the English-American position areperformed around . . , campfires, to the great amusementof the natives who refer to the position as the 'missionaryposition."' The book referred to is Malinowski's The Sex-ual Life of Savages in North-Westem Melanesia, but nosuch account occurs in it.

Kinsey only reports a story; it is not until the late 1960sthat writers begin to use tbe expression for this positionin intercourse. Some of them clearly cite the story in aform (with references to Malinowski) that ean only havecome from Kinsey (Graves and Patai L963; Gotwald andGolden 1981:339; Camphausen 1991; Westheimer 1995).Many had doubtless tried without success to documentKinsey's reference and, rather than cite a clearly faultysource, decided to eite no source at all. Despite extensiveefforts, lexieographers and sexologists have turned up nousage of this expression prior to Kinsey.

How are we to account for Kinsey's faulty memory?Trobrianders do gather to play and sing mocking songs(Malinowski 1929:238-39), but under tbe full moon, notaround campfires, and it is not here that we learn aboutsexual positions. Later we learn that Trobrianders moekface-to-face man-on-top woman-below intercourse (p.338), but no context is given, Kinsey's memory appar-ently substituted mockery around a campfire for mock-ery under a full moon and conflated the topie beingmocked—a certain position in intercourse (p. 338)—withthe occasion when moekery occurs—a ribald nigbt ses-sion in tbe village center (p, 238). Furthermore, whenTrobrianders moek this position it is said to have beenlearned from "white traders, planters, or officials" (p.338); there is no refcrenee here to missionaries. Anothermemory in this same context seems key. Kinsey recallsmedieval Catholic teaching that preseribed faee-to-faceman-on-top woman-below intercourse. Clearly be wasstruck by Trobriand mockery of the very position pre-scribed by medieval theologians. The distance betweentwo elements separated by centuries and half a world isovercome through the simple addition of Christianmissionaries.

We need not aeeuse Kinsey of inventing this out ofwhole cloth, however, for Malinowski's text does speak

PRIEST Missionary Positions \ 31

of missionaries and of Trohrianders' coining an expres-sion of disapproval for one of their romantic practices.On p, 479 Malinowski tells of seeing an engaged Troh-riand couple in puhlic, in his words, "leaning againsteach other and holding hands, in a manner which wewould find perfectly natural in a pair of lovers soon tohe married. But, , , I was told at once that it was a newfashion and not correct according to old custom [and], , , that this was misinari si bubunela, 'missionary fash-ion,' one of those novel immoralities introduced hy mis-sionaries," All of the elements of Kinsey's narrative arepresent here. It seems clear that his memory reworkedand combined various elements scattered throughoutMalinowski's hook and elements from medieval Cath-olic history. In the process he transposed "missionaryfashion," which speaks of missionaries' expanding thepossible romantic repertoire, with its opposite, "mis-sionary position," an expression speaking of restraint andtahoo and one more compatible with his rhetorical pur-poses, Kinsey apparently invented a legend while be-lieving himself to be reporting historical fact and coineda new expression while thinking he was reporting an oldone.

From there, apparently, the story was told and retolduntil the expression evolved into a technical term forface-to-face man-on-top woman-below sexual inter-course. Virtually tbe whole English-speaking world even-tually learned both the expression and the accompanyingexplanation. By this time the connection with Kinsey orMalinowski appears to bave been forgotten. Dictionaries,atlases, and encyclopedias of sexuality, anthropologists,and even subsequent publications of the Kinsey Instituteseem unable to document usage of tbe expression priorto 1969, Nonetbeless, they have no hesitation in ex-plaining that missionaries taught tbat any other sexualposition was sinful and that Chinese, Africans, Polyne-sians, Melanesians, and/or American Indians have usedthe expression to mock this missionary etbic. Comfort's1972 bestseller The foy of Sex taugbt the expression tomillions, and in 1976 the Oxford English Dictionarylisted it, to be followed by tbe major English-languagedictionaries. Older synonyms ("the matrimonial," "theMama-Papa position," "the English-American position,""the male superior position") were increasingly replacedby "the missionary position," By the 1990s Spanish,French, and German dictionaries carried correspondingexpressions in those languages: German Missionarsstel-lung, Spanish posture del misionero, and French positiondu missionnaire.

Parallel to its rise as a technical term was an increasein its invocation as a symbol. In 1973 the Associationfor Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) held a sym-posium on missionaries entitled "The Missionary Po-sition in Oceania" (Heider 1973a, b]. While not recallingwhere he first heard the expression and accompanyingnarrative, Heider (personal communication, March 1997)reports having felt sure that readers would understandthe reference. Increasingly one finds the expression ap-

pearing in the titles of books,^ articles,^ papers presentedat scholarly meetings," chapter titles,^ and plays* as wellas in scholarly narrative, poetry, and song lyrics. Mostreferences occur after the mid-1980s, and many recentones are clearly postmodernist.

Like urban legends, tbe story of the missionary posi-tion was not generated and sustained by rational concernwitb evidence. No authority documents a single situa-tion in which missionaries taught such an ethic and na-tives used such an expression. Yet our society has ac-cepted the "truth" of the missionary position. In contrastto most urban legends, this legend has managed to certifyitself through the accredited reality-defining institutionsof society and to instantiate its truth as part of the Eng-lish language. If we wish to understand the meaning anddynamism of this myth, it is to symbolism that we mustturn,

A symbol's meaning must be sought not in referentsexternal to discourse but by examining otber symbols inthe same discursive formation, "The missionary posi-tion" draws on symbolism present in modernist dis-courses, and each element of the narrative must be ex-amined not in isolation but witbin tbose discourses. Onecritical element is the "social others" who ostensiblycoined this derisive expression.

The Missionary Position as a ModernistSymbol

SOCIAL OTHERS

Theologians all to expose, 'tis the mission of primi-tive man, [E, B, Tylor, quoted in Taylor 1986:17]

Social others are central to modernist moral discourses.As Europeans "discovered" new worlds, the concept of"modern" was defined with reference to social otherswho were "not modern" and constituted as superior. The

2, Hendry (1972), Hayward (r978), Van der Merwe and Avery (1986),Hatch (1990I, MoenchandMoench(i99i), Dickinson (1992), Taylor(1993), Hitchens (r995|, Kafka I1997), Christophers (1998), Buslick(1999), Prager (1999),3,Peirce(i977), Krieger 1198 i),Ansen|i982), Newman (1982), Vogel(1982), Freedom Writer {19SS], Rudat (1985), Forrest (1987), Wilde(1988), Blond (r989), Campbell (1989), Clark (1989), Virshup I1989I,Watney (1989), Adams (1990), Hirsch (1990I, Control and Instru-mentation (1991), Carr (1991), Cockburn (1991), Lieberman (r99i),Seabrook (1992), Economist (1993), Tome (1993), Adams (1994),Baker (1994), Boettger (1994), Cook (1994), Cornwell ^994), BrentI1995), Brown (1995), Cantwell (1995), Dent (1995), Edge (1995),Goldberg (1995), Leadbeater (r996), Steyn (1996), Todd I1996), Bred-beck I1997), Mamdami (r997), McWilliam (i997fl, b]. Far EasternEconomic Review (1998), Balden (1998), Harmon (1998), Kissick(1998), Segal etal, (1998), Wat (1998), Hines|i999|, Kennedy (1999),Miihlhausler (1999), Pappas (1999), McWilliam (2000),4, O'Conner (1994), Sheriff (1997I, Schork I1998), Mayer (1998),Amoko (1999), Hoad (1999), Kohiyama (1999),5, Rogers et al, (1995), Heidenry (1997I, Trevellian (1997],6, Hendry (1972), Chatterton (1998),

32 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 2001

modern was constructed in opposition to the traditionalgrounding of morality in religion partially through dis-courses on social others. As Tylor pointed out, discoursesahout "primitive" (not-modern) man had utility for dis-crediting the view of theologians. Three emphases canbe identified in these discourses.

I. The norms of other people were considered irra-tional. Captain Cook discovered that Polynesians refusedto engage in many seemingly unexceptionahle hehaviors.When asked about their odd interdictions, they explainedthat such things were taboo. Europeans were fascinatedhy the concept. Within decades the word had moved intoEnglish usage, where it was understood to mean essen-tially "an interdiction that does not make rationalsense." Europeans had morals; social others had tahoos.What distinguished the two was thought to he ration-ality. And yet modernist philosophers insisted that West-ern morality owed too much to Christian morality,which was itself irrational and tahoo-based. Modernistethics required rational foundations which could claimuniversality and owed nothing to particularistic traditionor Christian revelation. Kant grounded ethics in a tran-scendental rationality detached from cultural particu-larities. Others, like Frazer, focused attention on the cul-tural particularities of other times and places, definingall others with reference to the modern and the suhor-dinating them to it. In The Golden Bough (1927), writingof reason hattling through centuries of superstition, Fra-zer devoted hundreds of pages to the taboos of others,and in Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1923) he madeclear that the Bible itself was grounded in taboo. Mod-ernist ethics were articulated through a discourse of con-trast with the morality of the not-modern other and dis-tingiuished from Christian morality through a discoursewhich equated the latter with the morality of the not-modern other.

2. Europeans were fascinated hy accounts of peoplewho were naked and not ashamed, of "guiltless Men whodanc'd away their time. Fresh as their Groves, and Happyas their Clime" (John Dryden [Kinsley 1958:33]). Mod-ernist discourses endlessly exploited the theme of socialothers who enjoyed freedom and pleasure without guiltprecisely where European "Christian" morality imposedrestraint and inculcated a sense of sin. By implication,Christian interdictions were not inherent in universalmorality hut an unnecessary and unhealthy imposition.

3. Whereas Christians insisted that God was founda-tional to morality, modernist discourses stressed that so-cial others who did not worship God were nonethelessmoral. The Chinese, for example, were moral: they hon-ored their parents, their ancestors, their teachers. Theirleaders were scholars, instructors in morality, and athe-ists. Clearly God was unnecessary to morality. "Can-nihalism aside," Melville stressed in Typee, Tahitianswere "more kindly" and "more humane than many whostudy essays on virtue and benevolence" (1846:258-59).Rather than needing missionaries, he argued, such peopleshould send missionaries to America (p. 159).

Pivotal to the narrative of "the missionary position"is the presence of those who are not Christians or Eur-

opeans hut are sexually free in ways which contrast withthe sexual ethic articulated hy Christians. Almost anysocial others will do, hut the most common location forthe narrative is on some South Pacific island. In assessingthis symholism, what is important is not the objectiveproperties of social others in a geographical spacebut their properties as they appear in the dis-courses of modernity. Bougainville, Melville, Gauguin,Maugham, Mead, and Michener are hut a few of thesources constructing Western images of South Pacificislanders. While narrative may locate the missionary po-sition in the South Pacific, it is a South Pacific of theWestern imagination. It is douhtless hecause light-skinned Polynesians, for racial reasons, occupy a moreprominent place in the Western sexual imagination thando dark-skinned Melanesians that the narrative com-monly refers to Polynesia or, more hroadly, to the SouthPacific instead of to Trohriand Melanesia.

THE MISSIONARY

Missionaries . . . considered other positions sinful.[Westheimer 1994:76]

A second element of the "missionary position" narrativeis the missionary. The prior "knowledge" of missionarieswhich gives this image its plausihility and persuasive-ness is a shared hackground shaped hy modernist dis-courses which feature missionaries. Somerset Maugham,for example, skillfully exploited the image of the mis-sionary in his short story "Miss Thompson" (later called"Rain"). An enormously successful Broadway play, threeHollywood movies, a Broadway musical, and an African-American film based on this short story were suhse-quently produced. Pivotal to its extraordinary grip onAmerican viewers was the theme of the repressed mis-sionary hringing sin to an exuherant, life-filled people.Maugham had the missionary say: "The most difficultpart of my work [was] to instill in the natives the senseof sin. . . . We had to make sins out of what they thoughtwere natural actions. We had to make it a sin, not onlyto commit adultery . . . but to expose their hodies, andto dance and not to come to church. I made it a sin fora girl to show her hosom and a sin for a man not to weartrousers" (1950:279, 281). The missionary's wife saysthat the natives had formerly heen "crazy with dancing"(p. 272) hut "no one has danced in our district for eightyears" (p. 273). The missionary's life-denying ethic isdiscredited when he commits suicide after having sexwith the prostitute he has puhlicly condemned.

Michener picked up similar themes in his "historicalnovel" Hawaii (1959). When a naked young womansurfed toward the missionaries' ship, the missionarieswere aghast. In Michener's words, "to the missionariesshe was a terrifying vision, the personification of all theyhad come to conquer. Her nakedness was a challenge,her heauty a danger, her way of life an ahomination and


her existence an evil" (p. 222). When the first church washuilt, the missionary Abner Hale announced, "There willhe no nakedness in this church" (p. 268), and so womenwore high collars and long sleeves "hiding the offensivenakedness of the wrists" (p. 268). Men wore outlandishcombinations of clothes, "but in deference to the whiteman's God, who refused to share his mysteries with thenaked, all wore something" (p. 268). Hale summarizedthe job responsibilities for bis top deacon as follows:"[You] find out wbo is smoking. You cbeck to see wbobas alcobol on bis breatb. Eacb week you band me a listof people to be expelled from cburcb. At nigbt you willcreep quietly tbrougb Labaina to let me know wbo issleeping witb anotber man's wife" (p. 282). Tbe mis-sionaries disapproved of pleasure, and even wben tbeyfelt deep love, as did Abner and Jerusba Hale, they lackedthe "capacity to speak of it to the other, because tbeyjudged that Congregationalism would not approve" (p.244).

In Peter Matthiessen's novel At Play in the Fields ofthe Lord (1965), missionaries were horrified when theNiaruna "indulged . . . with much laughter . . . in eroticgames" (p. 148), but tbey tbemselves were consumedwitb lust. One missionary, Martin Quarrier, began toconclude tbat Indian nudity and sexual play were "nat-ural," not "sinful" or "filtby." After bis son died of feverand bis wife went insane, be lost bis faitb and made plansto become an antbropologist. Andy Huben, after ber en-counter at a secluded pool witb a naked "Indian," re-called, "I was naked, and I wasn't asbamed. Am I a sin-ner? . . . For tbe first time tbe jungle seemed like paradise. . . be was beautiful. And I was beautiful. . . . He wantedme, really wanted me. . . . I wanted bim .. . but I pusbedbim away. . . . And my immortal soul was saved" (pp.259-61). Mattbiessen weaves a narrative of missionaries"pinned like butterfiies to tbe frame of tbeir own mo-rality" (p. 312), a life-denying morality. Leslie Hubentbreatened to witbbold medicine from dying Indians un-less tbey would submit to bis direction. "Better deadtban to live in sin," be cried (p. 29r). His wife Andy lostber faitb and offered berself to a soldier of fortune. "Idon't even know wbat sin is anymore," sbe said (p. 357).By tbe novel's end, sin bas been deconstructed, tbe sacredprofaned. No prayer is unaccompanied by a lustfultbougbt, an overbeard profanity, someone scratcbing biscrotcb, or some otber desanctifying accompaniment.

Tbe narrative of tbe missionary position is plausibleand persuasive to tbose whose knowledge of mission-aries is derived from Maugham's "Rain," Michener's Ha-waii, or Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord.It is missionaries of the modern secular imaginationrather than fiesh-and-blood missionaries tbat inform tbisnarrative.

S I N

[Missionaries] found wbat tbe "beatbens" were do-ing between tbe sbeets to be sinful and . . . [told

tbem] tbe "Missionary" position was tbe only onetbat God endorsed. [Wells 1997]

Sin is a tbird component of tbe narrative. At tbe timeof tbe discovery of tbe New World, tbe concept of sinwas at tbe beart of Western refiection on tbe bumancondition. Tbeology, sermons, tbe confessional, art, andliterature united in instructing people to interpret tbem-selves tbrougb a vocabulary of sin. Tbe encounter witbsocial otbers wbo lacked a sense of sin and guilt waselectrifying. Wben in 1555 Villegaignon led Huguenotcolonists to Brazil to civilize and evangelize tbe natives,Ronsard reproacbed bim for trying to cbange a people so"innocently and completely untamed and nude, as nakedin dress as tbey are stripped of malice, wbo know neitberthe names of virtue nor vice. . . . Live happy, you peoplewithout pain, without cares. Live joyously: I myselfwould wish to live so" (Delumeau 1990:127). Here wesee tbemes repeatedly elaborated in modernist dis-courses on social otbers. Nudity and innocence werelinked. Lacking any sense of sin, tbese people weretbougbt to enjoy a bappiness tbat escaped tbe guilt-rid-den European. Tbe image of people witbout guilt was apowerful and moving symbol to be exploited in dis-courses designed to remove guilt and sin.• Antbropologists repeat similar refrains. MargaretMead (1949) stresses, for example, tbat in spite of a mis-sion cburcb tbe sexually free Samoans are still witbouta "conviction of Sin" (p. 126), "an individual conscious-ness of sin" (p. 164), or a "doctrine of original sin" (p.277). Kroeber (1948:612) claims tbat tbere is "little or nosense of sin" in "Asiatic, Oceanic, native American, andAfrican cultures"—tbat it is found principally in "Anglo-Saxon and Protestant culture." Missionaries enter spaceswbere sin and guilt are absent and bring witb tbem "cos-mic guilt" (Mayer 1983:618). Tbe result, according to oneantbropology text, is tbat a "pall of Protestant gloombangs over many a community in the Pacific and tropicalSouth America that once throbbed witb life, laugbter andsong. Tbe concept of sin must rank witb smallpox amongour most damaging exports" (Keesing 1981:40). Tbe sinmotif is central to tbe narrative of "tbe missionary po-sition" and to modernist discourses about missionariesand social otbers more broadly. In bis 1975 presidentialaddress to tbe American Antbropological Association,Walter Goldscbmidt (1979:296) stated, "Missionaries arein many ways our opposites; tbey believe in original sin."In Science and Magic in Traditional Iron Smelting inMalawi: The Materialist and the Missionary Position,van der Merwe and Avery (1986) consider and reject onemissionary's explanation of tbe sexual taboos involvedin iron-smelting magic: tbat even tbose witb "lax" mor-als "recognize perfectly tbe beauty of purity, suspect itsbappy influence [and] know very well tbat sin displeasesGod, attracts punisbment, [and] causes many failureseven in temporal affairs."

34 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number r, February 2001

ETHNOCENTRISM

"If it wasn't for all those British missionaries, theentire heathen world would still be procreating inthe most unspeakable ways. Upside down, bent overdouble, end-on-end, back-to-front. Disgusting, isn'tit?" "Ghastly," he said with a shudder. "No self-re-specting Englishman would ever use anything butthe missionary position." [Dubow 1997]

There are other viewpoints in the world besidesChristian, man-wife-2.3 kids, and missionary posi-tion. [Egbert 1997]

Goldschmidt is not alone in positing an antithesis be-tween anthropologist and missionary (cf. Stipe 1980;Bonsen, Marks, and Miedema 1990; Stocking 1992:20;Van der Geest 1996). Littlewood contrasts "the mission-ary position, close to the locals but with the aim of trans-forming them," and "the anthropologist's planned andsanctioned 'going native'" (1985:197). Salamone writes:"The ideal culture of anthropological students codesmissionaries as 'enemies'" (1979:54). If missionaries areidentified by an idea of sin, as Goldschmidt says, an-thropologists historically have been identified by theiremphasis on cultural relativism and respect for culturaldifference. It follows that if the key anthropological vir-tue is respect, then the primary sin is to evidence a lackof respect by crossing boundaries with a message imply-ing moral judgment—in a word, to be ethnocentric. Andif "the anthropologist's severest term of moral abuse" is"ethnocentric" (Geertz 1973:24), then perhaps the an-thropologist's clearest example of ethnocentrism is themissionary.

In calling for a symposium on the missionary positionin Oceania, Karl Heider (1973a) writes, "Anthropolo-gists' relationships with missionaries are remarkable: welive off of them . . . in the field; we tell stories aboutthem in classes and at parties; and we ignore them inour ethnographies.'^ David Spain (1984:205) agrees: "Asanthropologists, we talk a lot about missionaries, but weseldom write about them. One cannot but wonder whythis is true." A partial answer becomes clear if we ex-amine the ways in which anthropologists invoke themissionary in their discourses. Typically the missionaryis referred to as a symbol of ethnocentrism, as in thefollowing quote from an anthropology text (Cohen andEames 1982:376-77):

The premises of missionary work are directly oppo-site to those of anthropology. As cultural relativists,anthropologists begin with the assumption that anycultural system is as good or bad as any other. . . .Missionaries begin with the ethnocentric view that

7. Anthropologieal silence about missionaries in Afriean ethnog-raphy (1930-65) has been documented by van der Geest and Kirby(1992). In "Exploring the Missionary Position," Miihlhausler (1999)critiques texts on anthropological linguistics for not paying "at-tention to missionary language work."

their religion is the true path to salvation. . . . Con-version . . . was the major objective of missionarywork . . . [and] often involved the destruction of na-tive beliefs and rituals. . . . Missionaries in the Pa-cific are known to have urinated and defecated onnative shrines to demonstrate . . . that their god wassuperior to native deities.

Whether missionaries urinated and defecated on nativeshrines is undocumented; the phrase "are known tohave" suggests hearsay. My queries of ethnohistoriansfailed to elicit knowledge of such a practice. Clearly themeaning of the account lies not in history but in symboland allegory. The text's message is that the essence ofethnocentrism is to defecate on the sacred values of oth-ers as, in essence, missionaries do. Many anthropologistshistorically have been interested in the missionary pri-marily as a symbol and thus have been less likely tostudy missionaries than to refer to them in socializingstudents to relativistic values or warning that such val-ues are threatened.

I should qualify these comments by noting that, whileone is hard-pressed to find systematic examination byanthropologists of missionary realities prior to the late1970s (for a notable exception see Rapoport 1954), thereis now a sizable body of anthropological writings on mis-sionaries and indigenous responses to them (e.g., Annis1987; Barker 1991; Beidelman 1982; Boutilier, Hughes,and Tiffany 1978; Burridge 1991; Clifford 1992; Comaroffand Comaroff 1991,1997; Headland and Whiteman 1996;Hefner 1993; Hvalkof and Aaby 1981; James and Johnson1988; Kipp 1990; Pels 1999; Poewe 1994; Salamone 1983;Saunders 1988; Schneider and Lindenbaum 1987; Stear-man 1987; StoU 1990; Swain and Rose 1988; Whiteman1985). Whereas historically anthropological discoursestended to allude to missionaries only briefiy, often forsymbolic ends, anthropologists have increasingly chosento make them the object of careful, sustained research.Even here, of course, scholarly texts are underdeterminedby the data, with standard symbolism sometimes beinginvoked to bring meaning to the data. For example, thetitle of Hvalkof and Aaby's (1981) "anthropological"treatment of Summer Institute of Linguistics mission-aries—Is God an American^—invokes standard imageryof missionaries as symbols of imperialism and ethno-centrism. Yet only 4 of the 13 essays in this volume aresolidly anthropological (Canfield 1983:56; Stipe 1985:118), and 3 of these provide rich ethnographic descriptionwhich repeatedly fails to support the symbolic rhetoricof the other chapters. What missionaries actually are fre-quently diverges as markedly from the missionary of themodernist secular imagination as it does from the mis-sionary of the devout religious imagination. But whenanthropologists engage in careful anthropological studyof missionaries, the results cumulatively tend towardunderstandings resistant to summary in standard stere-otypes. Although the ASAO mobilized an examinationof missionaries under the title "The Missionary Positionin Oceania," the eventual publication (Boutilier, Hughes,


and Tiffany 1978) was of high quality and minimallyreflective of the original symbolism. Many of the sourcescited above are similarly of high quality.

The message of the missionary-position narrative isthat the morality of the missionary is ethnocentric. Howmuch more ethnocentric could one be than to insist thatonly one position in intercourse is permissible?

TABOO

Sex was brought into the realm of the taboo by tbeCbristian church . . . Absolutely notbing outside of. . . missionary intercourse sbould go on at all. [Rif-fenburgb 1997]

If Cbristian morality is summarized in tbe image of amissionary forbidding as sinful any sexual position inintercourse but one, tbe image is clearly one of moralityas taboo. Tbat is, the missionary's morality is equatedwith the most irrational and objectionable element inthe morality of "primitive" social others. In Michener'sHawaii, for example. Hale tells Malama the queen thatshe must renounce her husband because be is also herbrotber. Sbe is puzzled over sucb a moral judgment, buttben comprehension dawns (pp. 237-38):

"You mean it is kapu!" she asked brigbtly. "It is notkapu," Abner insisted. "It is forbidden by God'slaw." "That's what kapu means," Malama explainedpatiently. . . . "All gods have kapu. You mustn't eatthis fisb, it is kapu. You mustn't sleep witb awoman who is having her period, it is kapu. Youmustn't . . ." "Malama!" Abner thundered. "Beingmarried to your brother is not kapu! It's not someidle superstition. It's a law of God." "I know. Iknow. Not a little kapu like certain fish, but a bigkapu, like not entering tbe temple if you are un-clean. All gods bave big and little kapus. So Kelolo[my busband] is a big kapu and he must go. Iunderstand."

What, after all, is the ban on all positions in intercourseexcept one but a kapu, a taboo? In a taboo-based etbic,ethical interdictions do not make sense; they are notavailable universally to moral intuitions and recogni-tions. Instead they are imposed by raw assertion and au-thority. Lacking universal grounds, taboo-based etbicsare, above all, etbnocentric. Tbe irrational prejudices ofone's own tradition are imposed on social otbers. Tbisis wbat tbe missionary-position story asserts aboutCbristian morality. Thus Harmon (1998) suggests thatChristian morality for Solomon Islanders is defined interms of taboos on betel nut, tobacco, alcobol, pork,scaleless fisb, magic, and fornication. Islanders wbo ig-nore Cbristian obligations are said to be "ignoring themissionary position."

ANTILIFE/ANTIPLEASURE

How the missionaries became apprised of what posi-tion the natives were using I don't know, but I sup-pose if it becomes apparent that everybody else intbe village is baving a lot more fun tban you are,you make it your business to find out. [Adams 1994:216]

[Missionaries said tbe] "missionary" position wasthe only one God endorsed, and tbat the others weretoo exciting and likely to get you sent to hell, asmost exciting things do. [Wells 1997]

A taboo morality is arbitrary and against—against pleas-ure, joy, desire, variety, love, life. It insists tbat "tboushalt not go near, thou shalt not touch, thou shalt notexperience pleasure, thou shalt not exist, except in dark-ness and secrecy" (Foucault 1980:84) and guilt. The nar-rative of the missionary position essentializes Christianmorality as drawing lines restrictively, banning variety,pleasure, and joy. Examining tbe marriages of Oberlinmissionary graduates between 1840 and 1855, Clark(1989) found tbat in some cases marriage proposals weredelivered to virtual strangers. Personal feelings were"suppressed" (p. 8), marriage decisions being governedby vocational commitment to missionary service and bythe single question of the will of God. Clark analyzesthe diary of a 17-year-old girl being courted by an ascetic,mirthless, rigid, and deeply pious missionary. She de-scribes ber feelings for another person, her less than pos-itive feelings for the missionary, and her eventual sub-mission to God's will, as sbe saw it, that she marry him.Such decisions, devoid of love and attraction, are life-denying. Thus Clark's title: "The Missionary Position."

MORALITY AND POWER: THE MISSIONARY ON TOP

T. J. Last . . . like many missionaries wanted tofound a Christian village which he could governalone. [Beidelman 1982:55]

We're the Moral Majority and we know what'sRIGHT/We'll come to your bedroom to cbeck everynight/We'll let you have sex on just one condition/it's done with your spouse in the missionary posi-tion. [Shuster 1998]

Since a taboo morality lacks rational foundations, itmust be grounded in power. For Tongans and Tahitiansthe ability to impose a taboo was directly dependent onthe mana—the mystical power—of the imposer. Mich-ener's missionary imposed moral norms that made nosense to Hawaiians. He could not, as a result, trustHawaiians to run the church (pp. 281, 356); he had torun and control everything himself. Sucb a morality, inturn, underpins specific power relationsbips. Francoeur(1991:402) explains tbat missionaries advocated tbe

36 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 200r

missionary coital position because of "an interpretationof tbe story of Genesis in whicb man is created firstand given primacy over woman in all tbings. Hence tbesupposed immorality of woman being in any positionsuperior to or above a man," Man-on-top involves dom-inance. As one antbropologist explained to me, mis-sionaries taugbt "tbe 'male above' sexual position toHawai'ian and Polynesian groups in tbe late i8oo's, asan indicator of 'God's order' (i,e,, God, Man, Woman,bierarcbically in tbat 'position')," Campbausen (1991:127) asserts tbat tbe "missionary position" is charac-teristic only of "civilizations wbere women are treatedas cbattels,"

Tbis logic is persuasive not because of any evidenceof a cross-cultural correlation between male dominanceand tbe "missionary position"* but because Westernersbave been unconsciously sbaped by metaphors in whicbpower and status are conceptualized in spatialterms—as up or down (Lakoff and Jobnson 1980:15-16),As a result, body positions in intercourse are easily seenas implying power relations. Even an expression like"tbe male-superior sexual position" not only describestbe physical position of two bodies but privileges "up,"In Western contexts, tben, one does find sexual positionoccasionally thought of as iconic of power relations.

Feminists have often stressed sexual position asiconic of power. For example, in "Missionary Position,"Judy Forrest (1987:208) explores Fay Weldon's novels,in which "downtrodden" women (women in the mis-sionary position) are able to "gain power," "end up incbarge," and "always end up on top," Again, one mayobserve the appropriation of Lilitb as a feminist icon.In postbiblical Judaism Lilith was a female demon thatseduced men and killed babies. Under tbe infiuence ofa 9tb-century story (Schwartz 1992:107), Lilith becameknown in Judaism as Adam's first wife, who refused tolie under him in intercourse, insisting that she be ontop, and tben fied to the wilderness, where she took upher activities as succubus and child-destroying witch.Many females have appropriated Lilith as the prototyp-ical feminist, rejecter of patriarchy. Two journals arenamed for this figure; summer music tours of femaleartists have been named after ber (The Lilith Fair tour);a burgeoning literature of poetry and refiection onwomen's issues takes its inspiration from Lilith (cf,Cantor-Zuckoff 1976, Plaskow 1979, Colonna 1980,

8, Kluckhohn (1948) provides statistics on sexual positions reportedin different societies but establishes no correlation with male dom-inance, Roheim (1932:221) concludes that "posture in coitus" is"prototypical" of a society's "psychic attitude," His focus, however,is not on power but on the distinction between impersonal sex, inwhich only the genitals are surrendered to one's partner, and per-sonal sex, in which the total self is given (cf, pp, 206, 221), Marks(1978), a Classicist, says that rear entry is typical in Greek art, withRoman art typically featuring the female sitting or kneeling abovethe reclining male. She says that Americans typically recline witheither on top though female-on-top is less common in patriarchalmarriages. Although Marks (1978), Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin(1948), and Beigel (19853) provide evidence that some North Amer-icans treat sexual position as iconic of power, there is no data baseestablishing this as a cross-cultural universal pattern.

Koltuv 1986, Pirani 1991, Schwartz 1992, Starck andStern 1993), The element of the Lihth myth most stra-tegic for catalyzing this response is the story of Lilith'srefusing to lie under Adam in intercourse.

When the myth of the missionary position is used toevoke the theme that Christian morality is really buta cover for dominance and power, it is not only patri-arcby wbicb is in view but tbe dominance of the mis-sionary over the native social other. Thus one anthro-pologist told me that this position was taught to SouthSea islanders "in an attempt to control them," Anothersource simply defines "missionary position" as a "termcoined by savages wbo associated this position with theconquering missionaries" (Joannides 1997:358), In aradical upending of traditional Christian rhetoric,which associates missionaries with loving service, self-abnegation, and sacrifice, new discourses constructmissionaries as motivated by a will to power (see Bei-delman 1982, StoU 1982, Hvalkof and Aaby 1981, Colby1995, Mulball 1986)—power exercised in part throughthe imposition of a taboo morality. In Missionary Po-sition: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, Chris-topher Hitchens (1995) presents Mother Theresa as pro-moting moral taboos (no birtb control, no abortion)wbich contribute to the problems of overpopulation,poverty ,̂ and suffering wbose existence is tbe secret ofher position and infiuence. Although the image is awk-ward, it is the male subject position which Hitchensimputes to Mother Theresa, She invites the poor to ac-cept their one-down position but herself hobnobs withthe hkes of Charles Keating and "Baby Doc" Duvalier,administers large sums of money, often in ways otherthan intended by donors, and furtbers patriarcbalCatholicism,

Bruce Dickinson's Monty-Python-like-novel TheMissionary Position (1992) similarly features the questfor power and wealth under the rubric of missionaryreligion, in this case by a TV evangehst. In "Falwell'sMissionary Position" [Freedom Writer 1985) we learnof a fundamentalist program to "pursue missionary ac-tivity" in public scbools and to "attend and take controlof party conventions" to bring about "a second Amer-ican Revolution," Again, in "Tbe Missionary Position"(Virsbup 1989), Reverend Wildmon mobilizes funda-mentalist Christians to pressure advertisers not to fund"immoral" television shows. Here again, power is usedto impose taboo morality.

In sbort, "tbe missionary position" may be thoughtof as a symbol synthesizing modernist objections toChristian morality. When this symbol is co-opted bypostmodernists, bowever, it botb extends and intensi-fies tbese objections and redirects tbem toward mod-ernist morality.

P R I E S T M i s s i o n a r y P o s i t i o n s [ 3 7

The Missionary Position as a PostmodernistSymbol

I challenge puritanism. Western religion, our heliefin nature external to ourselves and the missionaryposition. [Joe 1997]

In "Mark Twain's Missionary Position," O'Conner(1994) documents Twain's frequent negative commentsabout the moral and religious activities of missionariesand his positive comments on missionary "civilizing"activities. Twain criticizes missionary effort on behalf ofChristianity hut welcomes missionary activity on hehalfof modernity. O'Conner explores Twain's A ConnecticutYankee in King Arthur's Court, demonstrating frequentthemes first treated hy Twain in his writings on mis-sionaries. Hank Morgan is a missionary of civilization,technology, and progress to the natives of England."From the hrutalities of feudalism [he] delivered theminto the 'light' of the 'modern' world. Within Twain'snovel, the Church ultimately represents a form of pa-ganism that needs to he replaced hy Hank Morgan's gos-pel of progress" (p. 14). O'Conner takes the expression"missionary position," created to stigmatize a mission-ary commitment to Christianity, and redeploys it to stig-matize Twain's missionary commitments to civilizationand progress. In his hook St. Gorbachev and Other Neo-missionary Positions John Hatch (1990) critiques modernagendas as neo-missionary positions. Jeremy Seahrook(1992) suggests that while the West has liherated itselffrom "the controlling revelations of religion" (p. 12), ittreats free-market ideas as grounded in "reason" (p. 12)and preaches free-market virtues. He argues that Westernpromises of development are "prescriptions for suhor-dination [and] the maintenance of Western privilege" (p.12). An ideology mandating that others embrace "free-market" ethics is essentially an "ideology of dominance"(p. 13). His title? "Still in the Missionary Position." Mo-dernity's ethic, ostensibly grounded in reason, is but acover for dominance.

THE FOCUS ON DOMINANCE AND POWER

Postmodernism has made dominance and power a cen-tral preoccupation. In a review of Sonia Boyce's Londonart exhibition, Michael Archer (19 8 7) notes the rhetoricalhias of modernism which excludes those already ex-cluded from mainstream culture—such as Boyce, hornin London of West Indian parents. He focuses on one artpiece: "Missionary Position II addresses the interpene-tration of gender, race, politics and religion within theact of submission" (p. 144). Boyce's painting MissionaryPosition I clearly elaborates similar themes (Beaumont1987:12). While religion is still present, the missionary-position idea has been broadened to implicate modernistpatterns as well in dominance and subordination.

The body has long heen treated as metaphor. Every-thing from a society to a church has been thought of as

a hody. Postmodernist writings, in particular, treat thebody as text. If one body over another in sexual inter-course is a semiotic text narrating sexual power asym-metries and if the hody is itself a metaphor for society,then power asymmetries hetween societies or socialgroups may naturally be symbolized through sexual ico-nography. U.S. advocacy of a Canada-U.S. free-tradeagreement is critiqued by the Canadian Margaret At-wood as follows: "Canada as a separate hut dominatedcountry has done ahout as well under the U.S. as women,worldwide, have done under men; about the only posi-tion they've ever adopted toward us, country to country,has heen the missionary position, and we were not ontop" (quoted in Tome 1993:74). In "On the Limitationsof the Missionary Position," Lieherman (1991) exploresthe ways in which regional art puhlishing is suhordinatedto the New York cultural mecca and marketplace. In"Between the Missionaries' Positions and the Mission-ary Position: Mexican Dirty Jokes and the Puhlic(Suh)version of Sexuality," Jennifer Hirsch (1990) arguesthat Mexican dirty-joke discourses which affirm patri-archy are really metaphors for Spanish dominance overIndians and Mestizos. The "missionary position" is sym-hoiic of patriarchy, which in turn symbolizes dominancehetween social groups.

In "(Un)Doing the Missionary Position," Kafka (1997:62) suggests that white men force Asian men "into themissionary position—into feminine suhject positions inwork and social situations. . . . [Such men], in order toavoid internalizing female acculturation, . . . tend 'toreassert their lost patriarchal power' hy dominating . . .[their] women." These women are douhly suhordinatedhoth "as racial minority and as women crossing betweentwo patriarchal cultures, . .. Chinese and . . . American"(p. 4). '"The missionary position,' patriarchy is a glohalsystem" (p. 170), Kafka argues. She says that anger atthis "global asymmetry" is the "source of inspiration for. . . the contemporary Asian American women writersin this text" (p. 93).

In "Missionary Positions," Bredheck (1997) analyzesE. M. Forster's story "The Life to Come," in which "twodominant topics" of Forster's fiction, "homosexualityand British colonialist expansion . . . are fused" (p. 141).Pinmay, a missionary, preaches love, has sex with nativechief Vithohai, and, guilt-stricken, preaches law. Vitho-hai is marginalized as the colonial enterprise advances;after "years of painful denial and repression caused hyPinmay's refusal to have further relations with him" (p.140), Vithohai kills Pinmay and commits suicide, ex-pecting they will consummate their love in "the life tocome." Bredheck argues that Forster deconstructs theChristian colonial missionary position but has his own"missionary position." It is Forster's "own deferrederotic desires," working through "projection and intro-jection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displace-ment, overdetermination, guilt and aggressivity" (p. 147),which create "that most pernicious trope of colonial rep-resentation, the stereotype" (p. 146) of "unrepressed erot-icism" (p. 145) or even of "the hestial sexual license ofthe African" (p. 147). That is, Forster's depiction of oth-

38 ] CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 2001

erness "in point of fact erases any possibility of otber-ness" (p. 144).

Postmodernists see begemonic realities as discursivelyconstructed. Brown, in "Alternatives to the MissionaryPosition" (199s), argues that the writers of Victorian (andmodernist) travel narratives tend to adopt the "mission-ary position" as a discursive strategy (p. 596), hegemon-ically "positioning" themselves in the text above thosethey write about. (Sbe explores an exception to tbe rule,tbe writings of Anna Leonowens.) Suzaan Boettger, in areview of feminist ecological art entitled "In tbe Mis-sionary Position," suggests tbat feminist discursive priv-ileging of tbe feminine over tbe masculine is itself a"missionary position" violating feminists' own non-bierarcbical precepts (1994:255). In "Gotta Be on Top:Wby tbe Missionary Position Fails to Excite Me," MarieBaker (1994), wbo describes berself as an "uppity" nativewoman writer (p. 299), suggests tbat wbite feminists con-trol and set tbe agenda for writing and publisbing aboutnative women and tbeir cultures and are tbus in tbe "OnTop Wbite position" (p. 310). Gina Dent, in "MissionaryPosition" (1995), argues tbat the feminist discursive formof "confession" is governed by disciplinary and exclu-sionary rules wbicb privilege wbite feminism over blackfeminism or "womanism."

zed bomo/betero binary," universalizing tbe bomosexualas "transbistorical, trans-spatial subject." "Like tbeirmissionary forebears," tbey export tbeir sexual "mis-sionary-position" norms, failing to be sensitive to otberways of organizing corporeal intimacies wbich are notgrounded in such a binary.

SEXUALITY AND MORALITY

Tbere sbould be taboos on sex in tbe office, wroteMargaret Mead. . . . Witbout strict bans on work-place romance, . . . it would be impossible forwomen "to work on an equal basis witb men."However, Dr. Mead didn't cleave to ber own mis-sionary position—ber second and tbird busbandswere close colleagues. [Kesterton 1991]

Drawing on ber own rational and commonsense ideas.Mead asserted ber own moral taboos on sexuality, butlike tbe missionary in "Rain" sbe failed to live by tbemberself. Similarly, postmodernists accuse modernists ofimposing taboos wbicb restrict and restrain otbers. Fou-cault (1980) argues tbat modernists obsessively pursuediscourses on sexuality wbicb claim to be liberating butin fact impose restraints. Medical, demograpbic, psycbo-logical, and sociological discourses force bodies andpleasures to submit to the dictates of rationality, replac-ing premodern concepts like sin with modern conceptslike pathology that equally restrict. Thus, in "MissionaryPositions" one psychoanalyst (Goldberg 1995) condemnsthe "missionary position" of another who sees homo-sexuality as pathological. In "Making the World Safe forthe Missionary Position" (Adams 1990) we learn thatliterary images of lesbianism as pathological are moti-vated by tbe old restrictive etbic of tbe missionaryposition.

In "Representing 'African' 'Sodomy' in tbe MissionaryPosition," Hoad (1999; cf. 2000) argues tbat many ho-mosexual-rights advocates operate with an "essentiali-

PROCREATIVE SEX

"Ah, yes. For uncounted millennia Elosia was thetrysting place for all the species of the galaxy. Thensuddenly, my dear Mr. Rider, horror! [Missionariesinitiated] a formal prohibition of all forms of sexualactivity save in the pursuit of mindless procreation.And as the Elosians—delightful trisexuals in theirnative form, as I recall—are fertile for perhaps aweek in every thousand years, you can imagine thegravity of the prohibition." [Science fiction sbortstory entitled "Tbe Missionaries' Position," Peirce1977:104].

If biblical fundamentalists are going to follow [tbeBible] . . . tbey will no longer engage in any sexualact otber tban missionary intercourse—and tbenonly wben procreation is tbe goal. [Duberman 1991:347]

Despite biblical silence about sexual position, churchauthorities from the 6 th to the i6th centuries taughtthat, except when illness, obesity, or pregnancy dictatedotberwise, sexual intercourse sbould be face-to-face witbtbe man on top (Brundage 1984,- Payer 1980, 1984, 1993;Ten tier 1977). A procreative ethic combined witb a par-ticular medical model of conception (semen needed torun witb gravity) undergirded tbis teacbing. While Prot-estants did not produce discourses on sexual position andCatholics eventually abandoned sucb discourses, thishistorical association makes "the missionary position"naturally symbolic of a procreative etbic. Tbose espous-ing "more deviation, less population" do so in oppositionto "tbe missionary position" (Nicbols 1997)—wbicb, byextension, now stands for all beterosexual intercourse.For example, in a review of tbe 1995-96 Paris art exbi-bition "Feminine-Masculine: Tbe Art of Sex," StepbenTodd writes: "In the exhibition's anteroom, Louise Bour-geois' pneumatic Twosome (1991) goes tbrougb its pen-etrative perpetual motions. Enormous, beavymetal, andsleekly mecbanical, as you pass on tbe way in it looksimpressive. On tbe way out, it looks like it's pumpingin tbe missionary position" (1996:67). Todd argues tbattbe position of this modernist machine is symbolic ofthe wbole exbibition. Wby? Because tbis exbibition sub-limated "tbe anus as a site of erotic pleasure" and priv-ileged "male and female reproductive organs as tbe locusof libidinous activity," tbus relegating "sex to a progen-itive role" (p. 67). Tbe title of bis review: "Tbe Mission-ary Position."


NATURAL VERSUS UNNATURAL SEX

Missionaries told . . . converts other positions wereunnatural. [Alice 1996]

[There are] 3 intrinsic differences between the ani-mal kingdom and human-kind: the opposablethumb, the neo-cortex, and the missionary position.[La Rocque 1993]

How can you tell your dog is kinky? When it startshaving sex in the missionary position.

The medieval Catholic Church, observing that animalscopulated in the ventro-dorsal position and humans inthe ventro-ventral position, concluded that the ventro-dorsal position was unnatural to humans. That is, it in-terdicted ventro-dorsal intercourse on the basis of an ap-peal to "nature," not to Scripture. When modernistsrejected the revelation of Scripture, they nonethelesscontinued to make moral judgments under the rubric ofthe natural versus unnatural. Lawmakers ceased toground their sexual interdictions in religion and insteadappealed to nature. Homosexual acts were banned as"crimes against nature." Of course, laws euphemisticallybanning "unnatural and lascivious acts," "crimes againstnature," or even "sodomy" were unclear. When pressed,lawmakers often clarified them by defining which bodyparts were not to be brought into contact. A law mightstipulate anal or oral sex as "a crime against nature," forexample, and while homosexual relations may have beenin the minds of lawmakers, the law, as written, providedno indication that it should not apply to heterosexualmarital relations as well as to homosexual ones. Whilemany states have repealed these laws, others have not.

In "Sex Laws and Alternative Life Styles" Myricks andRubin (1977:357) write: "Many states have laws whichprohibit every sexual act except sexual intercourse, inthe missionary position, between husband and wife."The Oxford English Dictionary quotes a newspaper: "Insix States [in the U.S.] a woman may still be awarded adivorce if her husband makes love to her in any otherthan the missionary position." Repeatedly it is assertedthat in Arkansas (Hypercleats 1985), Florida (Stupid Laws1997), North Carolina (Cariaga 1996), and South Carolina(Gv̂ ryn 1991), all sex other than married sex "in the mis-sionary position" is illegal. At least one human-sexualitytext (Gotwald and Golden 1981:339-40) stresses thesame. What do these laws actually say? South Carolinabans "the abominable crime of buggery," North Carolinaany "crime against nature," Florida any "unnatural andlascivious act," and Arkansas "sodomy"—same sex only(Summersgill 1994). Such laws do not refer to positionsin intercourse. Despite the rhetoric, it would appear thatno U.S. law has ever banned ventro-dorsal heterosexualintercourse or stipulated which partner needed to be ontop. But such laws have banned sexual activities, in-cluding oral and anal sex, on the ground that certainbehaviors are "against nature" (cf. Leonard 1993), the

same logic appealed to by medieval theologians writingabout sexual position. Thus, the "missionary position"has been employed to symbolize laws which restrict sex-ual behavior said to be "against nature." In an articlereporting on Congress's failure to pass a bill that wouldhave "decriminalized homosexual conduct," the titleproclaims: "Congress Assumes the Missionary Position"(Krieger 1981).

The missionary position serves as a symbol of an ethicgrounded in a distinction between the natural and theunnatural and is deployed by postmodernists againstmodernist moralizing grounded in such an ethic, as isevident in the articles by Adams (1990), Goldberg (1995),and Todd (1996) summarized above. In an explicitly post-modernist textbook, Rogers et al. (1995) set themselvesthe task of resisting "social psychology's own missionaryagenda" (p. i). "We seek . . . not to define but to un-define" (p. i)—that is, to deconstruct modernist dis-courses as mixing biology with ideology. Their chapteron sexuality (pp. 192—224) follows Foucault in seeingmodernist discourses as normalizing certain patterns ofsexual behavior and pathologizing others. Sexual "de-viations" cease to be treated in a language of sin but aremedicalized or psychiatrized as pathology (i.e., againstnature). Yet moralizing impulses underlie such modern-ist and scientistic categories, operating by stealth, andshould be critiqued. Their chapter title: "Pomosexuali-ties: Challenging the Missionary Position."

In "Missionary Positions: AIDS, 'Africa,' and Race,"Watney (1989) examines "the discursive regularities ofWestern AIDS commentary . . . in the construction of'African AIDS'" (p. 45). Watney argues that discoursesabout a medical problem are shot through with imageryand references of a moral sort (to promiscuity, prosti-tution, Sodom and Gomorrah, orgies) which repHcate themoral rhetoric of missionaries. Medical discourse be-comes a cover for moral discourse. Black Africans andgay men are rendered interchangeable, Africa becominga deviant continent and Western gay men effectively Af-ricanized (p. 50).

BEYOND THE MISSIONARY POSITION

Dan Ouinn struck her as a simple man. Steak andpotatoes. The missionary position. [Hoag 1994:256]

We are a . . . couple . . . looking for sexual adven-tures above and beyond the missionary position. . . .Seeking women, men, mixed-sex couples or groups.[Polypersonals 1997]

In a book on "the sexual revolution," Heidenry (1997)covers the antipornography efforts of Christian funda-mentalists and liberal feminists in a chapter entitled"Missionary Positions," indicating that missionary po-sitions are espoused not just by fundamentalists but byother movements in the mainstream of modernity. Vogel(1982) in "Missionary Positions" argues that the Motion

40 ] CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 2001

Picture Association of America and tbe National Asso-ciation of Broadcasters support the missionary positionthrough rating systems which enforce an absence of "re-alistic sex." Sex manuals and sex seminars bear tbe title"Beyond tbe Missionary Position," a rallying cry for tbeadvocacy of sexual diversity.

This expression is used in calling for the rejection ofa variety of modern patterns. Food cooked in restaurant-chain "cook-by-tbe numbers establisbments" is "mis-sionary position food" (Childress 1996, Nasser-McMil-lan 1996). Art which essentializes ethnic and genderidentity is "missionary position" art (Steyn 1996). Thosewbo pursue democracy in Cambodia or Congo are adopt-ing "tbe missionary position" {Economist 1993, Mam-dami 1997). Writers wbo begin with their own great ideasrather than with the need of the audience are performing"the missionary position in public" (Carr 1991). Rbet-oricians who impose their understandings of rhetoric onother disciplines with different discourse conventionsare in the "missionary position" (Brent 1995; Segal et al.1998a, b). In "Beyond the Missionary Position" Wat(1998) calls for "student activism from the bottom up."In "Beyond tbe Missionary Position: Teacber Desire andRadical Pedagogy" McWilliam (1997^:219-20) theorizes"the pedagogical relation as a power relation" in which,under the guise of "value-free knowledge . . . Eurocentricand androcentric knowledges and cultural practices . . .delegitimate the claims of those disadvantaged by theiridentity position in terms of race, class, culture, gender,and ecology." And yet a feminism which "refuses to ac-knowledge its own will to power" (p. 224), refuses toaffirm eros, and fails to "perform" its "critiques in waystbat point to its own lack of innocence" (p. 221) is alsoin the "missionary position." (For similar and highlyelaborated uses of missionary-position imagery, seeMcWilliam i^^jb, 2000.)

Final Analysis: Tbe Missionary Position as aSymbol

Modernism and postmodernism are cultural movementssustained and transmitted tbrough symbols. Wbat givesdefinition and coberence to each is less its explicit prop-ositions than its distinctive metaphors, narratives, andmytbs. As one movement emerges from and contests thehegemony of another, it co-opts old symbols and inventsnew ones not only to legitimate and sanctify new ideasand values but to desanctify and discredit prior ones.Postmodernism's moral vision diverges from that ofmodernism just as modernism's diverged from that oforthodox Christianity. Each prescribes ways of relatingto social otbers, distinctive views of power/authority,characteristic approaches to the body, desire, and sexu-ality, and common justifications/foundations. While ab-stract univocal logic engages only one sucb issue at atime, the symbol's multivocalic properties allow it toengage all of tbese matters at once. Tbis paper analyzessuch a symbol—a symbol first used by modernists to

mark tbe break witb Christian morality and then co-opted by postmodernists to mark tbe break with mod-ernism. As originally articulated, the missionary-posi-tion symbol summarizes modernist objections toCbristian morality as a morality of negation, as ethno-centric, and as lacking adequate foundations. By post-modernists this symbol is employed to argue that mod-ernism itself is a morality of negation, that it isethnocentric, and that it lacks adequate foundations. Asa foundation for morality, rationality is as inadequate asGod and special revelation.

Postmodernism can be read as an intensification ofmodernism—as a call for modernists to abandon alto-getber any morality of restriction and any effort to findrational grounds for morality and carry tbrough moreconsistently tbe valorizing of social otbers. And yet thereis another sense in which the postmodernist critique ofmodernism represents a significant rupture; postmod-ernists argue that, lacking rational foundations for mo-rality, modernism's hegemonic exclusion and suppres-sion of other moral voices can only be grounded in power.This critique opens up the need for rethinking the orig-inal modernist silencing and exclusion of otber voices,including Cbristian voices. And since it is tbrough nar-rative that power is visibly operative, it is in the contextof modernist narratives—such as narratives of the mis-sionary position—that such reassessment should takeplace.

Ernest Gellner has suggested that while most ideolog-ical confiicts have been binary, currently "tbere are nottwo, but three basic contestants . . . tbree fundamentaland irreducible positions" (1992:1). "Roughly equidis-tant" from each other are modernism, postmodernism,and religious fundamentalism—which Gellner defines asany brand of religion wbicb resists modernism or post-modernism wbile insisting tbat its own historical relig-ious meanings are true. In these terms, any version ofChristianity which continues to be missionary on behalfof historical orthodoxies may be defined as fundamen-talist. Religious fundamentalism, of course, comes in dif-ferent forms. Gellner's particular focus was fundamen-talist Islam; ours bere is fundamentalist/ortbodox/evangelical Christianity.

More commonly scholars tend to frame things in dy-adic terms: modernism versus postmodernism. In part,this tendency refiects the social location of scholarswithin the academy, where only two positions are sig-nificantly represented. Until recently, the discourses ofthe academy were modernist—notable for claims to im-partial, disinterested, and universal knowledge. Modern-ists employed an impersonal voice of autbority and de-nied tbat tbeir discourses refiected a particular position.At tbe same time, since religious voices were clearlyrefiective of particular subject positions, tbey were si-lenced in the academy. Only those writing from an "ob-jective nowhere" were allowed a voice. More recently,postmodernists have stressed tbat scholars do not writeabout gender, race, religion, or colonial subalterns "fromtbe moon," to borrow a pbrase from Geertz (Olson 1991:262). Every "social analyst is a positioned subject" (Ros-


aldo 1989:207) and is prepared by bis or ber position toobserve "witb a particular angle of vision" (p, 19), Par-ticular subject positions "botb enable and inbibit par-ticular kinds of insigbt" (p, 19), Despite modernist rhet-oric, no scholar sees from an "Archimedean point" (p,169) giving a "God's eye view" (p, 173), Even modernistconstruals of reality contain metaphoric, value-laden,mythic, metanarrative dimensions refiective of modern-ist subject positions. Postmodernism bas now won aplace in tbe academy. University-based discourses aremodernist and/or postmodernist. Conversation is binary;tbe tbird party is talked about, not talked witb.

Postmodernists bave taugbt us to attend to tbe si-lencing and exclusion of voices and to tbe ways poweris used for sucb ends, Boas's effort to prevent missionarylinguists from entering tbe "American Indian linguisticsestablishment" (Stocking 1992:69) exemplifies the powerof academic gatekeepers to silence and exclude. Mis-sionaries desirous of becoming antbropologists oftenbave linguistic fiuency and long-term field experience inminority communities (desirable traits for any antbro-pologist) but may nonetbeless find tbat gatekeepers actdeliberately to exclude tbem. Again, I bave queried sev-eral dozen antbropologists wbo were devout evangelicalsand/or missionaries (botb Catbolic and Protestant) abouttheir experiences in the academy. With few exceptions,their narratives told of painful struggles with forms ofexclusionary power. This paper, however, focuses on an-other form of power—the power of the symbol. Post-modernists bave stressed tbat power is operative tbroughdiscourse and that discourse should be assessed in termsnot just of truth but of power, Antbropologists, of course,bave long understood tbat, more tban just transmittingmeanings, symbols operate as active forces in tbe socialprocess. As "agencies and foci of social mobilization"(Turner 1975:150), symbols not only "say" tbings but"do" things.

THE MISSION OF METAPHOR

What is truth?: A mobile army of metapbors , , ,wbicb , , , come to be thought of, after long usage, , , as fixed, binding, and canonical. Truths are illu-sions which we have forgotten are illusions , , ,[Nietzsche, quoted in Maclntyre 1990:35]

James Fernandez suggests that "in metaphoric predica-tion we are generally not interested in mere parallelalignment, but in adornment or disparagement, Tbe in-tention is to move tbe 'I,' the 'he,' and the 'we' around"(1974:129), The missionary-position metaphor, part of a"mobile army of metaphors," accomplishes its strategicends through disparagement. Disparagement can ofcourse take many forms. When Michener describes bismissionary Abner Hale as "skinny, bad complexion, eyesruined tbrougb too mucb study, sanctimonious, dirty fin-gernails, about six years retarded in all social graces"(1959:139), repeating sucb disparaging descriptions again

and again (pp, 127, 129, 131, 132, 139, 142, 143), it isclear tbat tbis is not a person tbe reader ougbt to like.It sbould be noted, bowever, tbat such descriptions areusually placed in the mouth of a family member, friend,or acquaintance. In tbis way Micbener disguises bis ownsubject position, conveying tbe illusion tbat as a bistor-ical novelist be is impartial and dispassionate wbilenonetbeless accomplisbing disparaging ends,

Tbe narrative of the missionary position refiects a sim-ilar rhetorical move. It purports to report on an expres-sion coined by social otbers to ridicule tbe missionarysexual etbic, Tbe expression bas power because of tbeillusion tbat it was coined by social others. In fact, how-ever, it was coined by a modernist (Kinsey) and taugbtto the whole world through a ventriloquism which ledlisteners to believe it came from autbentic social otb-ers—a move wbich was necessary for modernism tomaintain its stance of dispassionate neutrality while rid-iculing Christian morality.

One may, of course, argue that the "truth value" ofthe story depends not on whether missionaries actuallytaught such a sexual position and natives coined suchan expression but on metapborical truth grounded in a"parallel alignment" between tbe mytb and wbat it sym-bolizes—tbat is, tbat tbe mytb accurately portrays Chris-tian morality as restrictive of pleasure. Nonetheless, wemust not forget Fernandez's insight that "in metaphoricpredication we are , , , not interested in mere parallelalignment, but in adornment or disparagement," TbatCbristian morality contains restrictions is not enoughto establisb tbat tbe mytb exemplifies parallel align-ment; one must first consider wbere the restriction oc-curs botb in Cbristian morality and in tbe mytb. Andwbile Christian communities through time have variedin boundaries drawn, drawing boundaries as to how bod-ies are positioned bas not been common. The mission-ary-position myth was constructed by drawing on an el-ement affirmed in one Cbristian communion bundredsof years earlier—an element not affirmed by any otberChristian community or even by contemporary repre-sentatives of tbat same communion, Tbe myth was cre-ated and deployed in the mid-to-late 20th century as away of essentializing and discrediting Christian moralityby obtaining tbe putative witness of social otbers againstit—but in a context in wbicb no contemporary Cbris-tians affirm sucb norms,

Jobannes Fabian argues tbat antbropologists bave "apersistent , , , tendency to place tbe referent(s) of an-tbropology in a Time otber than the present of the pro-ducer of anthropological discourse" (1983:31), Social oth-ers are construed in terms of temporal distance anddenied coevality, I suggest that the moral position offundamentalist/orthodox/evangelical Christian others isessentialized not in terms of current exponents but interms of wbat current exponents would consider an ab-erration in history. The rhetoric of the missionary po-sition allows one to talk about Cbristians witbout trulyaccepting tbem as contemporaries,

Metapboric misalignment occurs through allochron-ism and misdirection. Contemporary Christians do not


advocate restricting positions in intercourse to face-to-face man-on-top. Most do affirm an ethic restricting sex-ual relationships outside of marriage, but for modernistsessentializing Christian sexual morality as tied to mar-riage has less rhetorical utility than essentializing it interms of the missionary position. For one thing, it wouldbe more likely to mobilize a defense, since it would beframed in terms that really do matter to many contem-poraries. One would he forced to talk with and not justabout those who affirm a Christian sexual ethic, and thiswould make the outcome of the discussion less easy tocontrol. Furthermore, how one frames the issue is pivotalin rhetorical terms. If all of paradise can be portrayed aslying on the other side of prohibition, then one mobilizesgreat energy against the prohibition. When in the Gen-esis narrative God grants all the fruit in the garden toAdam and Eve, with one exception, and the serpent sub-sequently asks if God has not banned all the fruit in thegarden, a modest restriction is portrayed as an extremerestriction, a great negative—something hiblical inter-preters understand as a key rhetorical move in the se-duction of Eve. Similarly, essentializing Christian sexualmorality in terms of the missionary position involvesmoving the boundary over to an extreme—essentializingChristian morality as a great negative, a great no to life.

It is true that particular Christian communities his-torically have stigmatized all sexual pleasure. Others,however, have celehrated the joys of marital sex. It isequally true that modernist forces in particular timesand places have stigmatized sexual pleasure. Recent re-visionist historiography argues that Victorians weremore sex-affirming than is commonly thought and/orthat Victorian antisensualism had modernist rather thanChristian roots (Gay 1998; Haller and Haller 1995; Ma-son 1994a, b]. Mason argues, for example, that 19th-cen-tury "anti-sensual attitudes tended ahove all to emanatefrom secularist and progressive quarters" (1994^:3), withBritish Evangelicalism a "counter culture" that was, aspertains to marital sexuality, decidedly prosensual(19940, a]. Measuring the effects of religious morality onsexual pleasure poses difficult methodological prohlems.But, adopting the modernist strategy pioneered hy Kinseyof measuring sexual pleasure by counting reported or-gasms, Laumann et al. (1994), in the most comprehensivenationwide study conducted to date in the United States,indicate that 21.5% of women with no religion, 26.5%of Catholic women, 27.4% of liheral Protestants, andfully 32.6% of evangelical/fundamentalist Protestantsreported always having an orgasm with their partner (p.117). Clearly realities here are more complex and variahlethan is sometimes assumed.

SEX AS A SITE OF RESISTANCE

Foucault suggests that modernism produced a "discur-sive explosion" (1980:17) on sexuality. For centuries theWestern world spoke nonstop about sex while pretendingit was censored and secret (pp. 33-35). Whether the topicwas culture, kinship, morality, religion, or missionaries,sex was a pivotal theme. The missionary in "Rain" com-

mits adultery; Abner Hale feels guilt for marital pleasure;Pinmay has sexual relations with Chief Vithohai; sexualplay and missionary lust are central themes in At Playin the Fields of the Lord. Michael Palin's movie TheMissionary features a rescue mission filled "with happywhores, all of whom are sleeping with the missionary,"according to Ansen's (1982:90) review entitled "The Mis-sionary Position." Kathleen Taylor's (1993) novel TheMissionary Position features a missionary who is thesole holdout in a corrupt hut outwardly pious town tothe seductions of Delphine. He eventually is sexuallyseduced, then murdered. Hayward (1978) and Dickinson(1992) have produced novels entitled The Missionary Po-sition that feature missionaries and sex. The expression"missionary position" is part of a wider pattern in whichmodern discourses on missionaries are simultaneouslydiscourses on sexuality. Discourses on social others anddiscourses concerning Christianity, modernism, andpostmodernism often focus on sexuality. While modern-ist discourses ahout sexuality are supposedly rational anddispassionate, in fact they are moral in nature. Foucault(1980:7-8) writes:

Today it is sex that serves as a support for the an-cient form—so familiar and important in the West—of preaching. A great sexual sermon—which has hadits suhtle theologians and its popular voices—hasswept through our societies; . . . it has chastised theold order, denounced hypocrisy, and praised therights of the immediate and real; it has made peopledream of a New City. . . . the lyricism and religios-ity that long accompanied the revolutionary projecthave, in Western industrial societies, been largelycarried over to sex.

Such sexual preaching allows one to "speak out againstthe powers that he, to utter truths and promise hliss, tolink together enlightenment, liheration and manifoldpleasures" (p. 7). As one small part of that great sexualsermon referred to hy Foucault, we find the "missionaryposition."

SUBTECT POSITIONS

In "Map-making in the Missionary Position," Cornwell(1994) critiques a modernist scholar who writes aboutSouth Africa with an "impersonal voice" of "sovereignohjectivity," never acknowledging that his own dis-course is implicated in the very power dynamics heingauthoritatively addressed—that his scientific descriptionserves prescriptive ends. When Kinsey read of two Trob-rianders, soon to be married, holding hands in puhlic"missionary-fashion," what he did with the story re-flected a particular suhject position. One could imaginesomeone from a different suhject position accurately re-porting the incident and suggesting this as a symhol ofChristian morality in which marital sex should be pub-licly acknowledged in a socially approved relationshipwith hand-holding the appropriate symhol. "Missionar-


ies taugbt native peoples tbat engaged and married cou-ples ougbt to bold bands in public!" moves people quitedifferently from "Missionaries taugbt native peoples tbatall positions in intercourse except one are sinful!" Mypoint is not to construct an alternative mytb but simplyto point out tbat Kinsey's own narrative reworked var-ious tropes (sin, social otbers, missionaries, taboo, etc.)into a mytb refiective of and in tbe service of a particularsubject position.

Kinsey's success in deploying scientific rbetoric of ob-jectivity, disinterestedness, and neutrality was critical totbe "trutb" value ascribed to bis writings. He wrote, asit were, "from tbe moon," but bis writings clearly bavestrong modernist subject positions underpinning tbem(Robinson 1977:42-119). Tbe bistorian James Jones(1997) deconstructs bis cultivated image of conventionalfamily man and simple empiricist devoid of any ideo-logical agenda. He documents Kinsey's sexual "maso-cbism" and "bomosexuality" (bisexuality would be moreaccurate) and bis decree tbat tbe men of tbe senior staffof tbe Kinsey Institute "could bave sex witb eacb otber,wives would be swapped, and wives, too, would be freeto embrace wbicbever sexual partners tbey liked" (p.603) and explores tbe relationsbip of all tbis to bis earlyexperiences of and attitudes toward Gbristianity in re-lation to sexuality. Jones writes, "Mucb of Kinsey's lifecan be read as a struggle to use science to free bimselffrom bis own religious upbringing and tbe sexual guiltbe felt as a boy" (p. 790). Repeatedly Jones cbaracterizesKinsey as a man witb a "mission" (pp. 335, 465, 488,687), a "secular evangelist" (pp. 334, 335, 684) witb a"gospel" (pp. 466, 615, 684, 686) to proclaim, and as dis-playing "missionary" (pp. 468, 614) zeal and instincts.

Like Kinsey, modernist antbropologists wrote aboutsexual matters witb a distanced voice of dispassionatescientificity wbile "remaining very tigbt-lipped abouttbeir own sexuality" (Kulick 1996:3). Rutb Benedict'streatment of bomosexuality (1934a; ig^^b-.ioo) andMar-garet Mead's treatment of bisexuality (1975), for exam-ple, are solidly witbin tbe modernist tradition—writingfrom a distanced stance of objective rationality wbileremaining "tigbt-lipped" about tbe fact tbat tbeir topicwas deeply personal (cf. Bateson 1984:115-24; Caffrey1989:188-205; Lapsley 1999). Witb tbe postbumous pub-lication of Malinowski's diary (1967) disclosing bis con-tinual struggles witb sexual lust and guilt, bis "pawing"of native women (pp. 256, 268), and bis "batred of mis-sionaries" (pp. 31, 41, 46, 57), it bas become increasinglydifficult to maintain tbe modernist conviction tbat tbepersonal position of the ethnographer is not a factor inthe production of academic discourse.

Under the infiuence of postmodernism, recent anthro-pological treatments of sexuality are much more likelyto stress that all scholars write from subject positions,tbat tbose subject positions sbould be explicitly noted,or even tbat tbe sexuality of etbnograpbers ougbt to re-ceive explicit attention as a factor in the production ofethnographic texts. From this perspective. Mead, Bene-dict, Malinowski, and Kinsey are to be critiqued not forbaving personal positions but for pretending tbat tbey

did not—a pretense designed to justify tbeir own au-tboritative voices wbile also justifying tbe exclusion oftbose wbose position was more evident. Tbe postmod-ernist answer to tbe problem of possible bias is to declareone's subject position. Positioned knowledge is account-able knowledge.

Under modernism, religious scbolars learned that dis-closing their religious subject position was a quick wayto discredit themselves. Those who could not convincethemselves that their religious subject position was ir-relevant to tbeir scbolarsbip found the modernist acad-emy unfriendly and tended either to withdraw from ac-ademic endeavors altogether or to pursue such endeavorswithin a smaller, less academic enclave of schools andpublisbing bouses devoted exclusively to tbeir faitb-in-formed subject positions. Some, of course, mastered tbeart of writing from "nowbere" and successfully partici-pated in tbe larger academy. However, subject positions,wbetber sexual or religious, do not cease to affect tbeintellectual process wben tbey are denied or unacknowl-edged. Tbey simply operate in more circuitous and sur-reptitious ways, accompanied by camoufiage or evendeception.

Postmodernists call for a recognition tbat tbe sociallocation of a scbolar (in terms of race, etbnicity, class,gender, sexual orientation/identity, or religion) is salientto knowledge production and sbould receive explicit ack-nowledgment. Indeed, subject positions provide anglesof vision, perspectives, and motivations and affect field-work relationsbips in ways wbicb potentially contributeto knowledge production in areas wbicb might be missedby scbolars witb otber subject positions. African-Amer-icans, women, gays, Buddbists, or evangelicals migbt ap-proacb social researcb witb motivations, perspectives,and fieldwork relationsbips wbicb allow tbem to dis-cover trutbs unlikely to be discovered or pursued by, forexample, wbite, male, beterosexual secularists. Post-modernists, tben, bave called for openness to tbe voicesof social otbers—tbose wbom tbe modernist academybas excluded.

Many religious academics realize tbat tbeir own relig-ious commitments are basic to tbeir social location andto tbe perspectives from wbicb tbey approach research.But with the new call for display tbey fear that theavowed openness to the voices of social others does notinclude openness to their voices—that religious subjectpositions are still seen as discreditable. Now judgmentwill be rendered not just on tbe merits of wbat is saidbut on tbe location of tbe speaker. Tbe requirement tbatone display one's subject position in a power field wberedisplay results in exclusion or subordination is doublyproblematic. Now even tbe survival strategy of "passing"or "staying in tbe closet" is no longer available.

At tbe same time, some express bope tbat the rhetoricof openness is more than rhetoric. The historian GeorgeMarsden (1994), for example, argues that the dismantlingof the old Protestant establisbment in bigber educationwas laudable but went too far. It replaced one hegemonicposition with another—one hostile to any expression re-fiective of religious belief. Marsden notes tbe new open-

44 [ CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 2001

ness to diverse subject positions, argues that such open-ness has inconsistently been withheld from traditionalreligionists, and calls on the academy to live out its ownnew ethic and allow traditional religious subject posi-tions to be present. In a follow-up book, Marsden (1997),himself an evangelical, further elaborates his hope thatresearch from a Christian subject position will take itsplace alongside research from other subject positions.

The idea that a Christian subject position should bediscredited because it entails personal commitments andvalues is a modernist norm which founders on the wide-spread critique that everyone writes from a subject po-sition (Rosaldo 1989). Again and again one finds the tropeof modernist scholars as missionaries (Boettger 1994;Brent 1995; Goldberg 1995; Herbert 1991:155; Hoad1999; Rogers et al. 1995:1-14, 192-224; Segal et al. 1998;Watney 1989). A number of writers explicitly acknowl-edge that they are themselves "in the missionary posi-tion" (cf. Kissick 1998, Kitzelman 1998, Snow 1998,Wilde 1988, Prager 1999). While some postmodernistsclaim not to be missionary, most acknowledge a mis-sionary agenda of some type. In "Postmodernism and theMissionary Position" Alan Wilde (1988) finds himself onthe horns of a dilemma. To be consistently postmodern-ist, one should not be missionary, but if one is not insome sense missionary on behalf of postmodernism, thenin what sense is one truly postmodernist? He argues that"all-inclusiveness is indistinguishable from chaos" (p.23) and that postmodernism requires its own definedlimits and categories if it is not to dissolve into chaos.As such, it requires taking a missionary position. In theirpostmodernist text on social psychology Rogers et al.(1995) argue that modernist social psychologists are mis-sionary but fail to admit it. They acknowledge that theythemselves are not neutral—that they have a "mission-ary agenda" (pp. i, 4)—but, unlike modernists, they ex-plicitly acknowledge the personal commitments whichinform their work.

Positions affect what one is likely to see or not see.Most modernist and postmodernist scholars have beenso shaped by myths and metanarratives essentializingreligion and Christianity that they are incapable of un-covering the myth-making properties of their own think-ing. As an evangelical Christian, son of missionary par-ents, educated at a Bible college and a theologicalseminary, with graduate degrees from the University ofChicago (M.A., social sciences) and the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley (Ph.D., anthropology), I encoun-tered these myths from a rather different subject posi-tion—one in which the myths served not to liberate orempower me but, within the academy, to essentialize,marginalize, and silence key elements of the self. I en-countered such myths from a "one-down" position—avantage point predisposing me to question and doubt.While religious people are often seen as credulous be-lievers in contrast to scientists, who are rational doubt-ers, in fact doubt is' a function of where one stands vis-a-vis the culture's dominant myths and certitudes. In thecase of this essay, I doubted the veracity of the story ofthe missionary position, examined it at length, and, I

believe, moved us closer to an accurate understandingof the history and symbolic functions of the expression.My subject position gave me a perspective which helpedme to see certain realities that were not as likely to beseen from another position but quite capable of beingconsidered and evaluated once they were pointed out.This essay treats evidence and appeals to standards ofinterpretation and reason which are public and which,if I am to count my work successful, should be persuasiveto those not sharing my subject position. I submit mywork to peer review by those from other subject posi-tions, inviting critique and engagement. I disclose mysubject position despite the temptation to "pass"—toconceal a discreditable position—not as an appeal to ir-rational subjectivity or as a demand that I be allowed tospeak ex cathedra but because an essay on subject po-sitions naturally requires such disclosure and becausethis provides an illustration of my point that even relig-ious subject positions, if not excluded or silenced, maymake positive contributions to scholarship.

POSITIONING AND POWER

If Christian subject positions are not discreditable be-cause they alone fail to be neutral, then perhaps they arediscreditable for having a unique propensity for abuse ofpower. Certainly Christianity has played key roles in oldhegemonies, but whether it should be essentialized asdominator (as in the myth of the missionary position) isanother matter. Missionaries were present in colonialsettings, but their activity was often less straightfor-wardly colonial than modernist myths would suggestand modernism itself more aggressively colonial. In Po-sitioning the Missionary Brett Christophers (1998) con-trasts British secular (modernist) colonial discourses,which employed a grammar of "race," "time," and"space" to construct a fixed hierarchical relationshipgrounded in immutable and asymmetrical differences,with that of Anglican missionaries in British Columbia,who rejected this modernist grammar and the secularcolonial agenda. While some colonial governments ac-cepted interracial sexual contact, interracial marriagewas seen as a threat to fixed hierarchies (p. 61). TheseAnglican missionaries, in contrast, criticized concubi-nage out of moral concern; they encouraged Europeanmen to marry the native women with whom they werecohabiting. Their sexual morality "transcended 'race'and space" (p. 62). Christophers sees the missionaries ascolonialists but of a "peculiar" (p. 95) sort. They wereoften at odds with other white interests, were "adamantthat ungodly white colonialists were responsible for Na-tive depopulation" (p. 95), and worked to promote health,to secure means of subsistence, and to intervene withcolonial governments on behalf of Native peoples (p. 95)."Few other colonists had Native welfare in mind, stillfewer made it the kernel of their calling" (p. 95). Mis-sionary rhetoric stressed "transformation rather thansubjugation" (p. 21) and called for a community of faithin which hierarchies of space, time, and race woulddisappear.


Modernist discourses essentializing Cbristianity asaiming for social hierarchy are motivated discourses andcommonly reflect the requirements of modernistmetanarrative more closely than they do actual socialrealities. Missionary realities vis-a-vis power are morediverse and complex than modernist myths would sug-gest (cf. Strayer 1976, Fields 1982, Clifford 1992, Sanneh1989, Headland and Whiteman 1996). Marsden (1994)documents a historical process in which Protestants losthegemony in the academy in significant part because oftheir renunciation of exclusionary power. That is, it ispossible to arrive at moral disapproval of inappropriatepower (including historical uses of power by Clbristiancommunities) from a distinctively Cbristian subjectposition.

Tbis is not to say that fear of an exercise of power byreligious people is groundless. Any exercise of power byone group wbicb impinges on otber groups will andshould raise legitimate concerns by members of tboseother groups. Indeed, according to Marsden, in the latterhalf of the 20th century it was the hegemony of "estab-lisbed nonbeiief" which, within the academy, exercisedcoercive power. Coercive power incites resistant or re-actionary power. Any exclusion grounded simply inpower tends to encourage the excluded to strategize interms of power—particularly if they lose faith in the ra-tionale of the caste system which excludes them. Thoseemploying a rhetoric that supports pluralist structureswhile excluding and silencing certain social groupsshould not be surprised if those groups fail to displaystrong commitment to pluralist structures. A societythat muzzles academically sophisticated religious voiceswill instead hear religious voices that are less rational,less interested in constructive reasoned interaction, lesssupportive of structures underpinning procedural plu-ralist participation, and more grounded in and refiectiveof a quest for power. Silence in the academic arena isbought at tbe price of shouting in the political arena.Theologically conservative Christians are feared in pol-itics in part because they are squelched elsewhere.

MYTH IN THE SERVICE OF EXCLUSION

While postmodernists stress inclusion, they have gen-erally not directed their attention toward religious in-clusion. In his study of American academia, Hollinger(1996:30) notes that "a persistent deficiency in the mul-ticultural debate is tbe relative silence of almost all ma-jor participants concerning tbe place of religious affili-ation." In bis book The Culture of Disbelief, the Yalelaw professor Stephen Carter writes that "for ail the callsfor diversity in the hiring of university faculty, one rarelyhears such arguments in favor of the devoutly relig-ious—a group, according to survey data, that is grosslyunderrepresented on campus" (1994:57). Even whensomeone like Jiirgen Habermas calls for inclusion of allparties in an "ideal speech" seminar, he refuses to admit"religious fundamentalists" (1994:133)—in StanleyFish's (1998:80) paraphrase, "I hear you knocking, butyou can't come in!"

Peremptory exclusion and silencing of this sort isgrounded in power. Silencing, of course, requires justi-fication. Dominant groups typically generate narrativeswhich contribute to tbe subordination and exclusion ofother groups by essentializing them as meriting exclu-sion. In such narratives the symbol becomes more realthan the real; image equals essence. The missionary ortraditional Christian of the modernist and postmodernistimagination depends very little on what missionaries ortraditional Christians are. Mythic narratives displace andexclude the real. The displacement occurs in narrative,but it enables and is enabled by tbe exclusion or at leastsilencing of such persons within the academy. Academ-ics ban such people from their midst and then tell storiesabout tbem designed to justify tbe exclusion. Tbe storiesassume a presence wbicb stands in for tbose absent. Con-versation about such people is carried on in their absenceor in a voice wbich assumes their absence.

Modernist and postmodernist metanarratives do notsimply ignore Christian narratives and tropes. Rather,they incorporate such tropes in ways wbich dismantle,subvert, and desanctify Christian metanarratives andjustify uses of power that silence and exclude Christianvoices. One may critique such narratives not only forbeing mytbic or for justifying exclusion and silencingbut for doing so in bad faitb. The myth of the missionaryposition essentializes (and scorns) Christian morality astaboo morality and uses this very scorn of taboo moralityas justification for imposing a taboo on speecb from anexplicitly religious subject position in academic discur-sive spaces. Violating this taboo is a "sin" meriting ex-communication from the community of faith. This newtaboo is grounded in mytb and metaphor every bit asmucb as were tbe taboos of ancient Tabiti. Tbe mytb ofthe missionary position takes a group which, insofar asthe academy is concerned, is marginalized, silenced, anddominated and essentializes it as dominator in order tojustify its subordination and exclusion. That is, the dom-inator constructs a myth pretending great indignationover the idea of domination as a mecbanism for domi-nation and exclusion. Modernists and postmodernistsproject tbeir own attributes onto Christians and justifytheir exclusion in terms of the dangers associated witbthese attributes. Tbey employ power against religionistsand tben point to any resistant power moves wbicb tbeirown actions have provoked as evidence that religionistshave a dangerous problem witb power. Modernists claim"male" virtues of rationality and objectivity for them-selves while attributing "female" traits of subjectivityand irrationality to religious believers—wbo are ex-pected, within tbe academy, to lie quiet and subordinate,with minds receptively open to penetration and insem-ination by those on top, those in privileged positions ofpower within the academy. Postmodernists, of course,formally renounce any one-up claims to such "male"virtues. However, against their own stated values, manynonetheless expect religious believers in the academy toremain in the silent one-down position. Or they repeat,with Stanley Fish, "I hear you knocking, but you can't

come in!I "

46 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 2oor

Nevertheless, I am not without some faith that thereis openness in the academy. In fact, I am convinced thatthe time is ripe for this discussion and that there is nobetter disciplinary community to engage these mattersthan the community of anthropologists—we who spendour lives theorizing about relations with diverse socialothers.

Comments

JONATHAN BENTHALL

212 Hammersmith Grove, London W6 7HG, U.K.{[email protected]]. 7 ix 00

The influence of a significant Christian minority withinthe mainly non-religious profession of anthropology isrecognized in Britain, where some major social anthro-pologists have been Catholic. But Evans-Pritchard,Turner, Lienhardt, Pocock, and Douglas have been farfrom evangelical in their styles of Christianity, and Brit-ish anthropology has not extended to evangelical Chris-tianity the degree of generous open-mindedness that ithas shown towards countless other belief systems. Re-cently, however, mindful of the entanglement of theirown roots in the colonial era, some anthropologists havebegun to consider what tbey have in common withChristian missionaries as well as wbat divides them,with the protection of indigenous human rights as onerallying point.

I would like to develop Priest's point tbat post-En-lightenment philosophers tried to ground ethics in a sec-ular rationality. Many of my generation (I am nearly 60)were brought up in a religious tradition but opted inadultbood for some variety of liberal humanism, whetherlooking to tbe arts and literature as religious surrogatesor pinning our bopes on science. Attempts bave beenmade to ground etbical principles in anthropologicalfindings, but tbey run up against two problems. First,bow firm can tbis grounding be, seeing tbat modern bi-ological anthropology presents tbe features distinguisb-ing buman beings from tbe otber primates as differencesin degree ratber tban kind?—a consequence of Darwin-ism wbicb is still painful to consider. Second, even if ascientifically grounded etbic were to be agreed upon intbe universities, its acceptance by tbe wider publicwould presuppose nothing sbort of tbe skills of epocb-making propbecy, some kind of revival of Saint-Simon-ianism or Comte's religion universelle, wbicb currentlyseems unlikely.

Wbile we are waiting for a good Scientology to befounded, I would contend tbat non-religious Western an-thropologists are more dependent than tbey care to admiton tbe Judaeo-Cbristian etbical heritage: particularly, ontbe ideal of a moral equality of all buman souls and tbespecific rights of "marginal cases" sucb as severely brain-damaged children. Cbristians maintain tbese values ex-plicitly, if sometimes naively. But if new assaults on bu-man dignity are mounted tbis century—and probably tbe

de facto neglect of elderly patients in many of our publicbospitals is tbe tbin end of a wedge—it is bard to imaginea persuasive defense's being mounted in tbe idioms oftbe buman sciences alone. Personally (for Priest's articleseems to invite a personal response) I call myself an etb-ical Cbristian without commitment to tbe religion's bis-torical claims and would bappily settle for tbe label"Judaeo-Cbristian," but tbis is sidestepping ratber tbanresolving tbe problem.

By contrast witb tbeir prominence in addressing issuesof etbics and buman rigbts, most of tbe world religionsbave been laggard in supporting tbe conservation move-ment, in wbicb scientists bave taken a significant lead.Yet tbey bave a buge potential role to play in using tbeirrepertoire of ideas and imagery to alert tbe billions ofpeople under tbeir influence to conservation issues.

Botb Judaism and Cbristianity bave developed liberalinterpretations wbicb are more or less compatible witbtbe antbropological spirit of enquiry, Tbe borrors to tbisday inflicted in tbe name of religions may be adduced asgrounds for opposing tbem root and brancb, but atbeiststates a la Stalin and Pol Pot and tbe Nazi neo-paganstate were probably even more damaging, wbereas tbeworld's current ideological ortbodoxy—deregulated cap-italism—meets no more coordinated and articulate op-position tban from religious movements. Moreover,tbere seems to be a prima facie bistorical correlationbetween religion and tbe private cbaritable activitywbicb—to tbe displeasure of old-style socialists andMarxists—bas given rise to tbe now extremely influ-ential NGO sector; and bow will tbis develop in time,as its debt to its founders attenuates?

Wben anthropologists study exotic belief systems tbeyare adept at pointing out tbe elusiveness of concepts suchas belief and tbe prevalence of performative utterancesand ritual in religious practices. I suggest tbat anthro-pologists' distaste for evangelical Cbristianity stems lessfrom rejection of its trutb value (since tbis botbers tbemless in otber contexts) tban from tbe embarrassmentwbicb a sophisticated cosmopolite migbt feel if seen intbe company of a sibling similar in many ways but bluntand tactless. However, antbropologists are good at mak-ing up for tbeir blind spots wben tbese are pointed outto tbem (e.g., tourism and mass media). One sign is tbeincreasing number of serious etbnograpbies of Cbristiangroups and missionary activities. But comparisons be-tween Cbristian and non-Cbristian forms of proselytiz-ing activity are not commonly encountered: comparisonswitb Islam and witb present-day Buddbism could be es-pecially fruitful.

Finally, tbat Priest's valuable article will lead to a mor-atorium on all metapborical uses of tbe term "mission-ary position" outside tbe spbere of sexology is a con-summation devoutly to be wisbed.


KENELM BURRIDGE

231 Prince John Way, Nanaimo, B.C., Canada V9T4L4. 5 IX 00

This is a brilliant and timely essay, informative and wellargued. (One might add exhaustive if that were ever so.)

Regarding the origins of the phrase in print Priestseems to me authoritative, hut folklore, I think, takes itback much farther. Unless I wholly misremember, rightafter World War II we ex-servicemen-become-undergrad-uates were wont to foregather in pubs, where old Indiahands would discuss the Kama Sutra, Hindu temple carv-ings, and Rajput paintings, contrasting these with, say,Boccaccio's Decameron and other works as well as withwhat missionaries were supposed to have been teaching.And it was then, I think, that I first encountered thephrase, which must have been part of Indian Army lorefor generations. But there! Let that add to the mythology!

Novelists (except perhaps for Paul Scott in his seriesThe Jewel in the Crown] nearly always pick on "the mis-sionary" as though they had visited an old store wherethe only missionaries in stock were "dirty old man,""wimp," or "frustrated spinster"—all under "patheticcharacters." No doubt there are such among mission-aries, as there would he in any extensive community.But my own researches and a fairly extensive acquain-tance with real missionaries show them to be of muchsterner and more subtle stuff than a novelist can handlein a bit part. But then, with a slight twist of the neckwriters such as Hitchens might well write a hagiographyof, say. Hitler, who dealt pretty decisively with a partic-ular population problem and also tried to ensure that noundesirable babies should he born.

Priest's analysis of the dialectic between modernistand postmodernist is well taken. However, it could beargued that this particular dialectic belongs within awider historical process. In contrast to other world re-ligions, Christianity tends to repeat the circumstancesof its birth and entry into a civilized ambience well sup-plied with a plethora of other gods and rituals by con-tinually breeding a series of ongoing dialectics at severallevels but always moving towards secularism (at thelevel of the individual, where religious enthusiasts fre-quently ahjure their faith, as well as collectively): thebreak with Judaism or fulfilment/innovation, accom-modations or not with extant rites, orthodoxy dealingwith heresies, the normative or popular religion/relig-ious orders, tradition/Protestantism, Enlightenment/modernism/postmodernism and, some might add, post-Christianity. Also, within these dialectics, the notion ofhierarchy cannot be avoided. Indeed, there is no enthu-siasm that does not assume the missionary zeal and po-sition. While in monastic life the claim to be more hum-hle/compassionate/moral'was a capital sin (of pride),today there is no hesitation in claiming the moral highground. In Canada the New Democratic Party claims tobe the party of compassion, and in the United StatesRepublicans claim to be compassionate conservatives.

Priest ends his essay with the statement that the timeis ripe for more openness in academe and that anthro-

pologists will surely lead the way. May the dream cometrue!

In addition to the breeding of oppositional ideologies,anthropologists have to deal not only with competingtheoretical perspectives (each assuming its own dog-matic missionary position), a present if passing phase ofpolitical correctness, and the much more durable pro-cedures for recruitment, granting tenure, and promotionin vogue in many universities but also with the legacyof socio-intellectual arrogance and higotry bequeathed tothe subject by such as Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski.

I once knew an anthropologist, now deceased, who hadspent ahout ten years as a Jesuit priest and missionary.Resigning his priesthood and leaving his order, he spentsome years qualifying as an anthropologist—M.A., Ph.D.,and all. But could he obtain a faculty posting? He wastold again and again that, qualified as he was, the facultywould not stand for a colleague who had been a Jesuitmissionary. Can we imagine that happening in historyor economics or even sociology? I doubt it—and certainlynot in biological or physical sciences. Perhaps we reallyought to rethink where we come from and who and whatwe are and do as anthropologists. That is why this essayis timely.

JAMES CLIFFORD

Program in the History of Consciousness, Universityof California, Santa Cruz, 218 Oakes College, SantaCruz, Calif. 95064, U.S.A. [[email protected]].19 IX 00

Priest (or his search engine) has certainly found a lot ofworks, scholarly or otherwise, that use the phrase "mis-sionary position"—a quick-and-dirty image for Christianmoralism. The effect of the heaped-up examples is todrain the phrase of substantive content, leaving only arather ugly cliche. I felt myself gritting my teeth andinwardly making a sign of the cross as yet another ci-tation loomed. At this level, at least. Priest hassucceeded.

Moreover, his identification of the source for this itemof anticlerical folklore (Kinsey's creative adaptation fromMalinowski), with its apparent lack of factual basis, istelling. It reminds me of recent demolitions of the ever-popular culture-bite about Eskimo words for "snow"(Martin 1986, Pullum 1991). Like the purported scoresof Eskimo "words," fahles of missionaries' telling sav-ages how, exactly, to have sex have attained a kind ofcommonsense status, something everyone alreadyknows. As such they may be resistant to critique. How-ever dubious, these fables (one negative, the other pos-itive) condense in concrete images, if not exactly truthsthen at least things that ought, at times, to he said. Weneed handy ways to assert that other peoples have dif-ferent and often richer ways of evoking material reality.And phrases like "missionary position" do efficientlysatirize postures of authoritarian moralism.

Writing within and against his discipline. Priest showsthe efficacy of a cultural symbol. But the culture at issue


is slippery—sometimes academic antbropology, some-times tbe secular university at large, sometimes ratberloosely invoked formations, "modernism" and "post-modernism." I often wisbed tbe analysis more attunedto tbe diverse work accomplisbed by tbe symbol in par-ticular contexts of use and abuse. Wbat sorts of mod-ernists bave antbropologists been, and wbat is tbeir pe-culiarly entangled relation witb missionaries? Areso-called postmodernists—wbo deploy "tbe missionaryposition" to deflate any and all prescriptive rules, some-times including tbeir own—really of a piece witb sci-entists wbo use it to reject religious agendas in tbe nameof objectivity, primitivists wbo just want native peoplesto be left alone, or political radicals wbo want victimsto get out from underneatb? Is bostility to Cbristian mor-alism sufficient to unite tbem? Perbaps tbe image worksso widely because it articulates basic issues of authority,morality, positionality, gender, sex, and power.

Wbile rigbtly insisting tbat Cbristian practice bas beenmore complex tban tbe "missionary-position" stereo-type allows. Priest could bave grappled more witb co-lonial and neocolonial contexts for evangelization.Cbristian morality (distinct from moralizing) bas indeedsupported liberation tbeologies and radical reformers. Itwas not always as ignorant or beavy-banded as tbe "mis-sionary-position" cartoon suggests. But often enougb itwas (and is). Moreover, wben backed by overwbelmingeconomic, military, and cultural power even tbe mostsensitive evangelism can seem not very different in itseffects from cruder forms of oppression. By focusing bisessay so exbaustively on tbe "missionary position" im-age. Priest sometimes gives tbe impression tbat criticismof aggressive, intolerant evangelism is a colonial-periodpbenomenon, an outmoded stereotype: no missionary to-day would do anytbing like wbat Kinsey described/sat-irized. But wbat if, instead of missionary positions, wefocused on insistent radio messages or intrusive air-planes? Tbere are probably more well-funded Cbristianspreacbing today in remote, powerless places tban in Kin-sey's time. And tbe articulation of tbeir message witbglobal American power bas obvious neocolonial impor-tance, Perbaps tbere is a rational kernel in tbe "mis-sionary-position" stereotype which helps account for itscontinued use.

Priest's appeal for more inclusiveness in antbropologyraises questions about tbe social process I bave called"disciplining" (Clifford i998:cbap, 3), How does an in-stitutionalized intellectual community recognize itsown, negotiate its borders? Priest urges tbat "academi-cally sopbisticated religious voices" need to be beard,Wbat are tbe marks of tbis sopbistication? If scbolarssucb as Priest are to draw explicitly on tbeir "religioussubject position," wbat protocols guarantee tbeir profes-sionalism? Empirical researcb? Scbolarly citations? Ananalytic tone? A graduate scbool pedigree? Note tbe pre-sent article's carefully explicit antbropological moves(tbe elaborate, at times belabored, symbolic analysis) andits final invocation of antbropological community values(a devotion to tbinking about diverse social otbers).Moreover, bere tbe Cbristian scbolar is beard (accepted

for publication in a prestigious journal) speaking froman excluded "subject position," a familiar place of enun-ciation recently carved out by feminists, multicultural-ists, and indigenists. Beyond invoking tbe negative ex-perience of exclusion. Priest does not (yet) offer anacademic defense of religious content, an explicit Cbris-tian analysis ratber tban a discussion of tbe Cbristianacademic predicament. It would be interesting to knowbow Priest tbinks about tbe stronger claim, particularlyin relation (and alliance?) witb recent attempts by in-digenous scholars to make room in tbe academy for non-Western epistemologies.

Priest is surely rigbt tbat tbe difficulties facing openlyCbristian scbolars are inseparable from tbe long, ago-nistic, and mutually implicated relationsbip of antbro-pologists and missionaries. But, as be notes in passing,tbe disciplinary bostility to and ignorance of tbe fullrange of missionary positions bas cbanged in recent dec-ades, Tbe more complex scbolarsbip tbat Priest cites,mucb of it by antbropologists, goes some way towardquestioning a sbarp distinction of professional roles, An-tbropologists bave repelled, depended on, admired, anddeplored tbeir neigbboring "fieldworkers," On tbe spec-trum of missionary positions, tbose nearest antbropologyin attitude and practice bave often been uncomfortablyclose, mocking disciplinary pretensions to deptb ofknowledge and etbical commitment. No wonder a linebas been insistently drawn and redrawn, sometimes ster-eotypically. Yet tbere bas always been complicity, con-tamination, Tbe fact tbat mucb of tbe recent scbolarsbipon missionaries tbat Priest applauds bas been producedfrom witbin tbe professional community be critiqueswould suggest a need to complicate tbe diagnosis, tograpple witb countercurrents of modernist/postmodern-ist secularism, Tbis would advance a self-critical, bis-torically positioned dialogue.

MICHELE D. DOMINY

Department of Anthropology, Bard College,Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. 12504, U.S.A.{[email protected]]. 19 ix 00

Priest writes of multiple mytbs of missionary posi-tions—in tbe bestsellers of Micbener and tbe novels ofMaugbam, on tbe Internet and in song lyrics, in dic-tionaries and in encyclopaedias of sexuality, in Kinsey'ssexology and in symposia on Pacific antbropology—butconcludes bis article witb a speculative statement abouta singular "mytb of tbe missionary position," one tbat"takes a group [Cbristians] wbicb, insofar as tbe academy[embodying modernist and postmodernist discourses] isconcerned, is marginalized, silenced, and dominated andessentializes it [Cbristianity] as dominator in order tojustify its subordination and exclusion," He invites aricbly developed and nuanced antbropology of missions,one focused specifically on tbe Cbristian missionary associal actor, and be laments tbe anti-Cbristian bias oftbe modernist and postmodernist discourses be cbarac-terizes. At issue for Priest, himself avowedly botb an-


thropologist and seminarian, are the meanings and con-sequences of the use of "missionary" as a modifier for asexual position. His authority derives from what hewould call his "suhject position" as Christian more thanfrom ethnographic or sociolinguistic research on histopic or from the historical and anthropological litera-tures on missions, sexuality, and imperial politics (see,e.g., Etherington 1999, Manderson and Jolly 1996, Stoler1991). His concern is not in reading the missionary po-sition as metaphor for colonial or even sexual domina-tion but rather in reading it as a device for distortingwhat he characterizes as positive Christian attitudes to-ward pleasurable marital sex. His approach to the symbolis not so much discursive as literal.

Priest hegins hy arguing that attribution of the phrase"the missionary position" to the Trohriand Islanders ismyth, by which he means false or imagined, becauseAlfred Kinsey in his work on human sexual behavior (inthe male) mistakenly wrote that Malinowski had re-corded the phrase in The Sexual Life of Savages. AsPriest's reading of Malinowski reveals, Kinsey confusedone phrase and one setting with another. Priest is curiousto know why. He traces the first use of the expressionto 1969, and he focuses on three elements of modernistdiscourse—a fascination with social others, sin, and neg-ative stereotypes of missionary attitudes toward sex—toaccount for its origin and subsequent popular use. Notdiscussed is the sociopolitical context of the late 1960s,a surprising omission given the pivotal significance of1969 in U.S. domestic politics and in the developmentof feminist and lesbian/gay sexual politics in the UnitedStates. Some ethnographic data, in addition to the useof textual sources, might have been revealing. For mygeneration of post-World War II baby boomers, thephrase "missionary position" evoked images of neitherChristians nor sexually liherated South Pacific islanders;instead it stood for the conventional morality of our par-ents' generation, for the presumed normalcy of hetero-sexuality (Gayle Rubin [1975] called it heterosexism), forrelations of domination and subordination between U.S.culture and its youthful counterculture, between maleand female, between white and black, and eventuallybetween West and non-West, colonizer and colonized. Isuspect that in 1969 "missionary" stood not for Chris-tianity hut for convention and the residue of 1950s main-stream morality. Even so. Priest's question remains, why"missionary"?

Priest is quite right that a focus on sexuality persists.Thirty years later, with Foucault's History of Sexualityhaving sidelined Kinsey and his modernist coUahorators,we now focus on sexuality as a discursive formation inorder to understand not only how the forces of state con-trol and surveillance invade our intimate lives in termsof our sexual hodies, our experience of desire, and theradical reshaping of our suhjectivities but also how thosesame forces depend upon violence against the body.Power and intimacy are inextricably linked in ways thatsuggest that Priest has discovered an important key sym-bol while at the same time missing some of the multi-vocal properties of that symbol. It is difficult to sustain

the argument that Christianity is essentialized as dom-inator when Priest's (male) missionary as dominator ison top hut presumahly a (female) missionary is on thehottom.

Excellent work in the anthropology of empire and inimperial history seeks to reveal how missions and mis-sionaries can be rendered complex in ways that respondto Priest's concerns. Indeed, he cites some of this work(e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997). Norman Eth-erington, in an essay on the historiography of missionsand empire, not only points to the ambiguity of the term"mission" but also attends to the significance of the "au-thentic expression of Christianity in local idioms," re-vealing as he does so that Christianity hecame indigen-ized. Citing Jean Comaroff, he notes that the missioncommunicated "a language for contesting the newmodes of domination it had itself helped to create" (1999:309). Similarly, Margaret Jolly, in her analysis of the in-terplay between eroticism, exoticism, and the politics ofempire in the Pacific, links the effects of the U.S. mili-tary presence to those of Christianity; she writes thatthey were "hoth colonizing and decolonizing" (1996:121). These kinds of analyses provide the more compli-cated reading of Christianity that Priest invites, and theyqualify a reading of Christianity as unidirectional andessentialized dominator.

ALAN DUNDES

Department of Anthropology, University of California,Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. 8 ix 00

Priest has produced a cogent and provocative essay onthe intellectual significance of the construct "mission-ary position" and its hitherto unrecognized role in thehistory of anthropological thought. Here is clearly a well-trained anthropologist-scholar!

There does seem to be some confusion about how todefine "the missionary position." Priest begins by callingit a "technical expression" but then proceeds to refer toit as a "myth," "trope," "image," "symbol," and "leg-end." A folklorist would probably label it as a "folk met-aphor" functioning as a Mason populaire or stereotype,in this instance a stereotype of the Christian missionaryand his or her attitudes toward morality and sexuality.Many folk metaphors are based on body postures or ges-tures (e.g., to thumh one's nose at someone, to give some-one a glad hand or a thumbs-up). The "missionary po-sition" is thus a folk metaphor referring to a specific bodyposture. It is certainly not a myth, which is a fuU-fiedgedsacred narrative explaining how the world and human-kind came to be in their present form. Rather it is aMason populaire or derisive slur of the same order as"Bronx cheer," "French leave," "Irish pennant," "Phil-adelphia lawyer," and "Russian roulette" (Cray 1962).

The traditionality of "the missionary position" is welldocumented by Priest—especially praiseworthy is hisdemonstrating the false attribution of the item to Bron-islaw Malinowski. It is a common occurrence in folklorefor informants to insist upon "origins," but in the ma-

50 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY VoluTue 42, Number I, February 2OOI

jority of instances the purported origins are little morethan folk etymologies. Freud, for example, is typicallycredited with saying, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,"but there is no evidence that he ever uttered these words.What is sad and unfair is that this anti-Freudian, anti-symbolic platitude is put into Freud's own cigar-smokingmouth by those hostile to psychoanalytic interpreta-tions. (For other pseudo-attributions, see Boiler andGeorge 1989.)

There is no doubt that missionary-anthropologistshave made important contributions to our pool of eth-nographic knowledge. Bruno Gutmann (1876-1966)would be one example (Winter 1979). Missionaries veryoften have a far better knowledge of the culture and lan-guage of the people among whom they may have spenta lifetime than do many academic anthropologists,whose periods of time in the field are necessarily muchshorter. Verrier Elwin, one of the finest ethnographersever to write about India, illustrates this, although heeventually left the church and abandoned his initial cel-ibate missionary status to become anti-Christian and anadvocate of free love and indigenous rights (Guha 1999).

Nevertheless, it is likely that Priest's eloquent plea formore tolerance of missionary-anthropologists is doomedto fall on deaf ears. There are two reasons for this. Thefirst is the announced underlying agenda of missionaries.One of the most articulate and respected spokespersonsof this position (not cited by Priest) is Eugene A. Nida,author of Customs and Cultures: Anthropology forChristian Missions. Here is one of his statements (1954:23):

No one must imagine, however, that cultural an-thropology is the answer to the problems of Chris-tian missions, but it can aid very materially in theprocess by which the missionary endeavors to com-municate to others the significance of the new wayof life made possible through the vicarious death ofthe Son of God. . . . The task of Christian missionsis essentially one of communication, making knownin human language the nature of that life whichcomes from God.

Other anthropologically informed primers make similardeclarations: "The mission of the church of Jesus Christis to introduce Christ into the lives of people every-where: 'Go into all the world and preach the good newsto all creation' (Mark 16:15). The missionary becomesan agent of change whether he likes it or not" (Mayersi987:xiii). Priest criticizes anthropologists who accusemissionaries of ethnocentrism, but it seems to me thatmissionaries have made their own bed, judging from theunequivocal credo accepted by Nida and others.

Priest fails to appreciate that religion involves a pro-jective system (Freud 1949) and that Christianity is verymuch a Western projection with overt Oedipal elements.The Electral appeal to females has a virgin impregnatedby a heavenly father figure, while the Oedipal appeal tomales has a son born of a virgin mother (meaning that

his father never had sexual intercourse with his mother)with, in some sects, the doctrine of consubstantiationinsisting that Jesus and God are one, making the son thesame as his father—in effect, making him his own be-getter (Dundes 1980). In that context, Christian mis-sionaries could be said to be engaged in an unending,unrelenting effort to foist their hegemonic projectiononto the non-Western pagan "Other."

The second reason Priest's efforts will probably be invain is the continued existence of Western folklore aboutmissionaries. Those who take pleasure in recountingjokes, for example, are not likely to be swayed by Priest'sargument, even assuming they ever read it. Here is onechestnut: A famous French sexologist is giving a publiclecture on coital positions. He announces that there are70 known positions and proceeds to give details of all ofthem. At the end of his lecture, a voice from the backof the room asks, "What about the missionary positionwhere the man lies on top of the woman?" "Oo la la!"says the Frenchman. "Ziss I never heard! That makes71!"(For another version, see Legman 1968:545-46.) Thisjoke is also a comment on the stereotype of the allegedFrench proclivity for exotic love-making, the lecturer be-ing depicted as being unaware of the "normal" coitalposition. There are also jokes dealing specifically withmissionaries and their repression of sexuality. A mis-sionary is attempting to teach English to a native chief.Walking along, they see a man with an axe cutting downa tree. The missionary explains, "He is chopping downthat tree." Then they see a man drinking water from aspring. Says the missionary, "He is getting a drink ofwater." Then they come upon a couple in a forest gladein the act of intercourse. "What's that?" asks the chief.The missionary, somewhat embarrassed, not wanting touse the appropriate descriptive terms, resorts to "He isriding a bicycle." At that point, the chief whips out agun and shoots the man in the glade dead with one shot.The missionary is horrified. "I have tried to teach youthe Christian way of life where there is no violence, nokilling. Why did you shoot that poor man?" The chiefexplains, "My bicycle!"

So long as such jokes continue to circulate, the ster-eotype of the sexually repressed missionary in Westernthought is likely to persist. Finally, it is surely somewhatironic that an anthropologist named Priest, an admittedevangelical Christian son of missionary parents, shouldwrite about the "missionary position," thus putting him-self in the position of a missionary trying to convertother anthropologists to his way of thinking.

JAMES D. FAUBIONDepartment of Anthropology, Rice University,Houston, Tex. 77003, U.S.A. 11 ix 00

Priest is a fine intellectual sleuth. He has an ear for ex-aggeration, a nose for the non sequitur, an eye for themoralism that hides beneath the costume of the appar-ently simple truth. His investigative report is a work ofdiscovery. It should teach us to watch both our stereo-


types and our tongues. If I find myself compelled to takeissue with a few of its editorial flourishes, this is in nosmall part because it succeeds in casting the contem-porary aporias of intellectual tolerance into such pro-vocative relief.

In "the missionary position," Priest discerns a keysymbol of the stigmatization of the Christian subjectwithin the academy, modernist and postmodernist alike.He is, however, less quick to discern that his deploymentof the latter four categories is also symbolic and that itis guilty of many of the same distortions and elisionsthat he identifies in the deployment of the first. Manypietistic Christians could balk at his operative reductioneven of their discursive subjectivity to that of the evan-gelical or fundamentalist. They could balk further at hisfollowing Stephen Carter in distinguishing the evangel-ical Christian as notably "devout." Priest in fact slipstwice at this juncture in his argument: once in his con-flation of discursive subjectivity with its living,breathing counterpart and again in his confiation of bib-licist activism with devotion. His claim that "the de-voutly religious" are "grossly underrepresented on cam-pus" is, moreover. Carter's own. In Carter's Culture ofDisbelief, the claim has a pointed rhetorical effect butrather feeble evidential support. It rests upon a singleand by no means comprehensive survey of the religiousbeliefs of members of the faculties of various social andnatural sciences, who surely constitute a minority oncampus and are far from sovereign within the academyitself. As scientists they are perhaps (symbolic) standard-bearers of academic propriety—of those discursive normsthat mark the dividing line between academic reasona-bleness and either creationist or Castanedan extrava-gance—but do those putatively modernist norms includeor entail a moral relativism whose postmodernist de-volution comes to nothing more than moralirrationalism?

Precisely because they are so "symbolic," so muchterms of grand pronouncements and grand polemics,"modernism" and "postmodernism" continue to defyprecise definition. Priest, for his part, is in broad accordwith Gellner's definitional precedent, behind which thestolid Oxonian polemics against Wittgenstein's allegedextravagance always lurks. Quite apart from this, hisgood ear remains carefully tuned; some of the self-ap-pointed postmodernists whose moral reflections he citesdo indeed sound just plain anti-Christian and some ofthe others rather arbitrary, if not positively incoherent.Even so, a slightly more charitable ear might detect inmuch of what they have to say about sex especially asimple hedonism—hardly beyond criticizing but still ra-tionalist and, as subject positions go, as venerable as theearly Socrates. It might not even be excessively chari-table to detect at least an occasional hint of the morecomplex hedonism of an Epicurus or the hedonistic lib-ertarianism of a John Stuart Mill. Priest is right to un-derscore that the most adamantly egalitarian and "in-clusive" of the authors he cites have trouble articulatinga criterion that would justify the exclusions they actuallyexercise. He is to my mind far less charitable than he

ought to be in summarizing as "irrationalist" what isoften an earnest (if sometimes immature) attempt to re-spond to a problem with which self-appointed modern-ists and self-appointed fundamentalists are also strug-gling: how to think, write, and live responsibly in a worldin which the plurality of subjectivities and moralities isan irrevocable fact.

As Priest indeed recognizes, the problem is notwhether our inclusiveness, our tolerance, should havelimits; it could be nothing more than chaos withoutthem. The problem is instead one of their most respon-sible tempering. Priest touches upon all the prevailingalchemies: blithe bigotry, substantive absolutism. En-lightened formalism, pragmatic communitarianism, si-tuationist emancipationism. All have their infelicities,their palpable inadequacies. Then there is Priest himself,setting an example for us that, his personal confessionnotwithstanding, strikes me as having nothing "funda-mentalist" about it at all but instead as in elegant andeloquent conformity with the guidelines of social-sci-entific objectivity that Weber articulated almost a cen-tury ago. It has its impetus in patently (if not exclusively)personal commitments. It makes its appeal, however, tocommitments—some substantive, others formal—thatmay fail of universality but press toward being as im-personal, as public, as possible. It is an exercise not sim-ply of method but of an intellectual ethic. It might seemold-fashioned, but I have to agree with what I take to bePriest's own judgment—it is still the most responsibleethic we have.

NEVILLE HOAD

Department of English, University of Chicago,Chicago, 111. 60637, U.S.A. {[email protected]). 23 viii 00

Priest offers a salutary reminder that any joke will beunfunny to someone sometime and may even be hurtful.He provides a persuasive rhetorical analysis of how thephrase "the missionary position" is deployed in order"to ridicule Christian morality." Making an appeal tonotions of inclusion and tolerance that he finds in anentity of uncertain definition that he terms postmod-ernism, he implies that the analytic, historical, and sa-tirical work performed by the phrase "the missionaryposition" is derogatory and implicitly academically il-legitimate. However, given the heterogeneity of the ref-erences of the phrase, something which Priest clearlyestablishes in his tracking of its emergence in diversedisciplines, genres, and publics, it is possible to arguethat some missionary positions are more useful thanothers.

I use the phrase as a playful, if perhaps ungenerous,shorthand for a range of discourses which attempted toregulate the corporeal intimacies of indigenous peo-ples—many of which intimacies looked sexual to Eu-ropean observers, missionaries notable among them, butmay have had cosmological, religious, or political sig-nificance to the practitioners. In the context of Buganda


in the 1880s, the analytic category "sex" itself, as appliedto an unspecified range of activities hetween the kahaka(king) and his pages, may have heen a missionary(im)position. While the missionary archive does not tellus whether "penis in vagina, man on top of woman" wasexplicitly taught as the only legitimate method ofachieving sexual gratification, it does reveal that manycorporeal intimacies, many other positions of potentialpleasure and/or power (particularly those hetween mem-hers of the same gender) and hodily exchanges thatlooked sexual to missionaries, were not to he sanctioned.These missionary positions, while not entirely reducihleto the now-commonsense referent of the term, on whatwere good and had things for natives to do with theirbodies often had unforeseen consequences. In the caseof Buganda, it might not he going too far at all to assertthat the consequences of the missionary recodings ofsame-sex corporeal intimacies as sodomy—the mission-ary position in this instance—involved the hurning aliveof more than 30 young men and a civil war. While thecolonial regulation/imposition of sexuality was not leftto missionaries alone, they were often at the leading edgeof such initiatives, as even the most cursory glance atthe Intelligencer, the newsletter of the Christian Mis-sionary Society, will reveal. Missionaries were concernedwith telling natives what to do with their hodies on arange of issues from personal hygiene to polygamy toinitiation rites to practices that looked to them like sod-omy. In my playful usage, the missionary in the mis-sionary position functions as a metonym for Europeancolonialism and as its straw man and, contra Priest, notsimply as a metaphor for heating up on missionaries.Flesh-and-hlood missionaries in East Africa in the 1880shad positions on what constituted normative sex. Someof them were funny, some disastrous.

While Priest does a thorough joh of documenting manyinstances of the use of the phrase and hemoans the factthat they tell us nothing of what missionaries actuallytaught ahout sex, he too tells us nothing of this exceptto imply that they may have permitted heterosexual in-tercourse a tergo in monogamous marriage. While I sus-pect that his tracing of the genealogy of more recent usesof the term hack to Malinowski via Kinsey is correct andhis description of the term as functioning as somethinglike an urhan legend is accurate, much more careful troll-ing of the primary sources availahle in the archives ofcolonial missionaries is in order to establish what exactlywere the missionary positions on sex. If we can acceptthe missionary as a metonym of the European and asrepresenting that branch of the colonial enterprise mostconcerned with native bodily pleasures in contradistinc-tion to, let us say, bodily labors, a return, sensitive totone, of Malinowski's (1987:2,84-85) perhaps founda-tional anecdote may be instructive:

Above all, the natives despise the European positionand consider it impractical and unproper. The na-tives, of course, know it, hecause white men fre-quently cohabit with native women, some even be-ing married to them. But as they say: The man

overlies heavily the woman; he presses her heavilydownwards, she cannot respond [ibilampu].

Altogether the natives are certain that white mendo not know how to carry out intercourse effec-tively. As a matter of fact, it is one of the special ac-complishments of native cook boys and servantswho have been for some time in the employ ofwhite traders, planters and officials, to imitate thecopulatory methods of their masters. In the Trob-riands, Gomaya was perhaps the best actor in thisrespect. . . . Gomaya's performance consisted of avery clumsy reclining position and in the executionof a few fiahby and sketchy movements. In this thebrevity and lack of vigour in the European perform-ance were caricatured. Indeed, to the native idea, thewhite man achieves orgasm far too quickly,- andthere seems no doubt that the Melanesian takes amuch longer time and employs a much greateramount of mechanical energy to reach the sameresult.

Besides noting that traders, planters, and officials arementioned here, not missionaries. Priest wisely leavesthe anecdote well alone and argues instead that in Mal-inowski's account, missionaries "expand the possihle ro-mantic repertoire" by allowing an engaged Trobriandcouple to hold hands in public. While not wishing toknock public hand-holding, the fact that this is stagedin Priest's text as an expansion tips his ethnocentric nor-mative hand. In his heartfelt appeal for his religious dif-ference to be tolerated by the hegemonic norms of thecontemporary academy, how tolerant is he prepared tobe of people whose difference is offensive precisely tothe religious beliefs that render him different? The ar-ticle's use of the terms "Christian," "modernist," and"postmodernist" is further at odds with its sustainedappeals to diversity, respect, and inclusion. A massivediversity of competing epistemologies is homogeneouslyyoked together in the service of Priest's polemic, and inthe colonial and postcolonial spheres the neat sequenceand apparently oppositional assumptions of these per-iodizing logics refuse to map. Missionaries often pre-sented Christianity as the agent of modernity againstindigenous practices, which were staged as primitive andbackward. Priest's implicitly progressivist "expansion ofthe possible romantic repertoire" may indicate this leg-acy. Christianity frequently fused with local customs toproduce the hybridity, fragmentation, and collapse ofmaster-narratives that Priest associates with what hecalls "postmodernism." This leads me to ask where hewould put the epistemologies (sexual and other) andhroader symbolic orders of the peoples missionaries pros-letyzed in his schema. Neither Christian nor modern,they could perhaps he postmodern, though this wouldseriously undermine his implied chronology. Perhapsthey are not sufficiently important for him to consider.His own historical and analytic schema lends legitimacyto the allegation of ethnocentrism that he wishes to de-fend his missionary position against.


Priest tends to read bis sources cursorily. Tbe idea ofcaricature is central to Malinowski's anecdote, and sen-sitivity to tone, genre, and irony are not tbe strengtbs ofPriest's article, I tbink be is correct in claiming tbatmany scbolars invoke tbe pbrase to ventriloquize tbenatives laugbing at tbe missionary—as a metonym of tbeEuropean. However, wbat be does is not tbat different.He too wisbes to occupy and ventriloquize tbe positionof tbe native—bis native as victim of a colonizing, ex-clusionary secular antbropology. At least tbe earlier realor imagined native was laugbing; Priest as native is wbin-ing. Until tbe bistorical scbolarsbip of tbe impact offlesb-and-blood missionaries on tbe sexual practices ofcolonial or soon-to-be colonial subjects is done—andmany of tbe scbolars Priest cites do precisely sucb work(tbougb one would not know it from reading bis arti-cle)—the risk of shuttling back and forth between tbeseidentificatory positions, of ventriloquizing as silencingin tbe benevolent project of giving voice, is large. In biswider appeal for tbe inclusion of devoutly religiousvoices in academic antbropological debates, wbicb ven-tures a claim tbat evangelicals are entitled to a kind ofacademic affirmative action, there is an acute, if some-what expedient, sense of many of the paradoxes and con-tradictions in U.S, multiculturalism. To unpack tbesewould take us too far from tbe missionary position, butGayatri Spivak's (i999:x) notion of "not presenting theetbics of alterity as a politics of identity" is a usefulsbortband for thinking about tbe problems of power andsilencing, agency and victimage, tbat Priest raises.

Remaining witbin tbose realms of power and silencingbut I bope invoking some of tbe double-edged lightnessof Malinowski's anecdote, in the spirit of its inspiredsilliness, I conclude: As long as Christmas Day continuesas a public holiday in many countries wbicb experiencedEuropean rule, as long as the bulk of the world's businesscontinues to be conducted according to tbe scbedule oftbe Cbristian calendar (the politically correct change ofAnno Domini to Christian Era is purely cosmetic), aslong as there is a single sodomy statute of colonial prov-enance on the law books of any country, as long as tbemoutb and anus are not accorded tbe same respect asorgans of sexual pleasure as tbe genitals, as long as Pres-ident Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe invokes Cbristian-ity—paradoxically as African tradition—to call bomo-sexuals lower tban dogs and pigs, I do not tbink we needto feel too bad if we, along with Gomaya and Malinow-ski, continue to bave a little fun at tbe expense of tbemissionary position. In fact, tbere may be an etbical andpolitical obligation to do so.

SJOERD R, JAARSMACentre for Pacific and Asian Studies, Nijmegen, TheNetherlands {[email protected]]. 12 ix 00

Tbe missionary position is a mytb and a proper one attbat. It not only convinces us of its inherent applicabilityin describing the present but provides us witb an expla-nation of its origins. While the mytb was gradually cre-

ated during tbe 1960s and 1970s in tbe Western litera-ture, tbose employing it trace its origins to colonial timesand to mostly Pacific locations. Apparently few everdoubt its veracity. Priest, bowever, leaves little doubttbat Alfred Kinsey originally based tbe mytb of tbe mis-sionary position on a misreading of Malinowski's work.

Tbe missionary position stands for wbat we perceive20th-century missionary intervention to be: tbe impo-sition of Cbristian moral ethics and Western gender re-lations on indigenous peoples and—wbat is most perti-nent bere—religious bias on Western etbnograpby, Tbeseissues are interrelated and, as Priest sbows, alternativelycballenged and underwritten at various levels by botbmodernist and postmodernist discourse in etbnograpbyand tbe social sciences in general. Tbe pervasiveness oftbe mytb is furtber sbown by tbe fact tbat it serves asa focus both in tbe postmodernist critique of modernismand in tbe modernist critique of missionary etbnograpby.

What we need to recognize, though, is tbat ethnog-raphy is finally about representation. Modernism andpostmodernism and, in this respect, Christian ethnog-raphy too are, as Priest indicates, "cultural movementssustained and transmitted through symbols," Tbe ac-ceptance of any etbnograpbic statement, wbetber Cbris-tian, modernist, or postmodernist, is dependent on itsconformity to cultural conventions. This is not just amatter of "writing properly" but implies tbe social in-clusion or exclusion of the ethnographer in specific dis-courses. This is an ongoing social process, and postmod-ernism at least realizes its own involvement by activelyexploring tbe "social otber" it creates in tbe process ofethnographic description.

Yet, it is bere tbat Priest neglects to account for tbefull complexity of wbat be is dealing with. Not onlyethnographers but also the people they bave studied andthe audience(s) they address come together (Robatynskyjand Jaarsma 2000:7), Modern ethnographers bave longbeen able to deceive tbemselves about describing peopleable to access and comprehend wbat is written abouttbem, Tbeir audience bas been eitber academic or pro-fessionally interested in tbe academic description andanalysis of tbe "otber," Tbe people studied have beenobjectified and safely ignored, tbeir ability to compre-bend what was written about tbem considered limitedand tbeir independent access to sucb information non-existent. Postmodernists can no longer cling to tbeseeasy qualifications. Not only do tbey acknowledge tbeexistence of multiple voices in etbnograpby, but in tbepresent era of globalization tbe traditional subject of etb-nograpby definitely becomes an interested audience.Grant McCall (2000:77-81) acknowledges not only tbatwe sbould account for tbe presence of an audience inpresent-day etbnograpby but also that such an audiencemay be "native," Excbanges like tbose between RogerKeesing and Haunani-Kay Trask sbow tbat indigenousaudiences may very well sustain and transmit alterna-tive and opposing representations (Keesing 1989, 1991;Trask 1991),

An indigenous audience will inevitably recognize it-self and reclaim rigbts to its image. Priest shows post-


modernist assessments of the missionary position tomove away from just this point. Postmodernists ac-knowledge their agendas in ethnographic writing, thusplacing themselves in the missionary position (notice theshift from the missionary position heing forced upon thenative to one willingly adopted by the ethnographer), butby that very acknowledgment they move their ethno-graphic data farther into the background, sometimes re-ducing it nearly to the anecdotal. Where modernists ac-knowledged the missionary ethnographic voice it was inpart to condemn it as ethnocentric and biased. The post-modernist acknowledgment of multiple voices—especially indigenous ones—in present-day ethnogra-phy may well lead to similar exclusions.

Identifying the missionary position for the myth it is.Priest has opened something resemhling Pandora's boxcontaining far more than just the one myth. Ahove Ipointed to the need to acknowledge the existence of anindigenous audience. Doubtless ethnography applyingthis particular myth is read in the Pacific, but to whateffect? Is ethnography just seen to describe the phenom-ena in "acceptahle" anthropological terminology, or doesit introduce the phenomena through its authoritative de-scription? What if "the missionary position" hecomesculturally acceptable and, like "cargo cults," for in-stance, another small part of some Pacific identities?There is a lot that still needs to be reviewed not onlyabout this myth and its particular effects but also aboutothers that we accept without question simply hecausethey are part of our academic anthropological culture.

LOTHAR KASERInstitut fiir Volkerkunde, Werderring 10, D-79085Freiburg, Germany [[email protected]]. 22 ix 00

The controversy that Priest deals with is apparently,among many in the history of anthropology, one in whichthe theses and antitheses cannot, or cannot easily, heresolved into useful syntheses. It is old, tenacious, and,as he demonstrates, replete with possibilities for mis-understanding, misrepresentation, and exclusion. It con-tinues to smoulder, surfacing with a certain regularityonly to disappear again with no tangihle result, becausethe anthropological dehate on it does not conform to thestandards of the discipline.

Reading ethnographic descriptions of religious phe-nomena and their alteration as a result of Christianiza-tion, one gets the impression that mission work has al-most universally failed. The relevant ethnographic dataare rarely given or are not convincing, and if anthropol-ogists to discuss the missionaries' work it is either donein their absence or places them in the position of un-acceptable opponents, one in which they find it verydifficult to argue their case. Attacks on Christian mis-sions—at least in German anthropology—almost alwaysbegin with the word of an eminent anthropologist whoseevaluation of Christianity is as low as his understandingof it. His arguments usually call forth a strong reactionamong his professional colleagues. If things go well at

all, there will be a somewhat less eminent colleague whowill defend Christianity because he knows it well andattempts to live according to its tenets, but his argu-ments are generally dismissed or not taken seriously bythe profession.

With Priest's contrihution the controversy reemergesbut this time, it seems, with new stipulations. First ofall, it is an anthropologist who has a decidedly Christianbackground who takes hold of the hot iron, and insteadof launching an attack he presents us with an analysis.Moreover, he has researched his subject carefully and ingreat depth, as his hibliography demonstrates, and heargues with remarkahle intellectual vigor. In addition,his play on the words "missionary position" and "po-sition of the missionary" is masterful, a constant chal-lenge to follow his penetrating thought processes to theirlogical conclusion.

Priest points out what writers such as Michener andMaugham have not been ashamed to publish: descrip-tions of missionaries and their work as attempting ahoveall to show the pagans how sinful they are and equatingsexuality with sin. (With his own sexuality the mission-ary, of course, is unahle to come to terms.) He also dem-onstrates the carelessness of unsupported claims thatmissionaries had taught their pagan charges that "themissionary position" was the only morally unohjection-ahle one, claims relegating missionaries to a positionoutside the realm of common sense. He shows that thismyth functions in the same way as those used in Pacificisland societies after initial settlement to justify claimsto land titles and power after the fact.

Those who use the myth of "the missionary position"in the way outlined by Priest make the classical mistakeof taking an "etic" point of view and leaving it at that.Any anthropologist with a modicum of self-respect willreject an ethnographic description which gives credenceonly to this point of view and energetically demand thatthe "emic" point of view he explored—that the mis-sionaries' worldview as well as that of those amongwhom they work be taken into account.

Priest is not without hope for positive change in thissituation. I am eager to learn how the community ofanthropologists will react.'

RITA SMITH KIPPDepartment of Anthropology and Sociology, KenyonCollege, Gambier, Ohio 43022-9623, U.S.A. 4 ix 00

Priest draws our attention to the rhetorical uses of aphrase that has roots in anthropology but has now en-tered everyday speech. Perhaps his essay will make an-thropologists more cautious ahout using it, but I suspectthat the phrase "the missionary position," like the oldchestnut about Eskimo words for snow and even theculture concept, will not soon disappear from commondiscourse. To the extent that scholarly terms percolateinto the general vocahulary, they do so because they are

I. Translated by Helen Ens.


useful or seem to ring true to people's knowledge andexperience. We employ this one so frequently, both inand outside the discipline, because it resonates with anissue that has no easy resolution: the morality of rela-tivism versus other kinds of moral convictions. Becausethis issue is so central to our discipline, anthropologistshave been among those who keep reproducing the phraseand the myth of its origins.

Priest fingers Kinsey as the pater of this now ubiqui-tous phrase and suggests that he had a personal moti-vation for resenting missionary moralizing. If it is nowclear that the phrase "the missionary position" does notactually appear in The Sexual Life of Savages, it is stillclearly consonant with many things in that salaciouslytitled book: Trobrianders did mock the man-on-top po-sition, and missionaries who aimed to discipline andshape the natives' sexuality were certainly part of thesocial environment of the Trobriands. The mythicalphrase fit Kinsey's, and no doubt Malinowski's, precon-ceptions about what missionaries probably w^ouldadvocate.

It is our preconceptions, both past and present, thatPriest's essay especially challenges. Anthropologists arenot alone responsible for creating the image of the sanc-timonious missionary, as Priest's literary examples il-lustrate. Barbara Kingsolver's recent best-seller The Poi-sonviTOod Bible again stereotypes the missionary as anarrogant, narrow-minded boor in the heart of darkness.Those who make missionaries the focus of scholarlystudy. Priest observes, less frequently stereotype and ho-mogenize them than scholars who view them only froma distance, but in general our postmodern archrelativismhas not yet extended to include missionaries and themissionary project.

As someone who has written about missionaries (al-though not from the perspective of a Christian), I agreewith Priest's assessment of the climate of opinion inanthropology about missionaries and about religiousconviction in general. A religious perspective expressedopenly in the academy generates mainly embarrassment.In other public settings in heterogeneous societies, peo-ple are reticent about religious conviction so as not toinfringe on others' religious sensibilities. In academicsettings, reticence reigns because not being religious atall is the unspoken norm to which we hold ourselves,an article of faith for us, as it were.

TANYA LUHRMANN

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago,Chicago, 111. 60637, U.S.A. 27 ix 00

This is a delightful paper. Who knew that the "mission-ary position" was Kinsey's misreading of Malinowski?But more than that, it is an important paper, for it isabout the silencing of the religious perspective in con-temporary academic discourse. This silencing is partic-ularly striking in American social science. While mostAmericans say that they are religious (95 % routinely saythat they believe in God, or in a spiritual power greater

than themselves), atheism is the common theologicalstance in social science departments and the presump-tion of nonbelief is widespread.

I believe that the author is correct when he claims thatmodernist and postmodernist metanarratives can incor-porate Christian tropes in ways that desanctify the Chris-tian metanarrative: angels as an ironic theatrical gesture,the cross as a fashion accessory. Madonna. In the acad-emy, a devout faith in Christ can seem somehow incom-patible with serious social science. To hear that col-leagues are Christian can be enough to cause one todismiss them or at least to think about their intellectualquestions quite differently. A colleague said to me re-cently, speaking of his discovery that a peer was deeplyreligious, "I thought he was normal, you know, like us."(In these presumptions, devout Judaism often is inter-preted quite differently from devout Christianity, pri-marily because Judaism can be thought of as an ethnicityand therefore does not necessarily raise the specter ofbelief commitment.)

This is a foolish prejudice, as blind and arrogant as theworst of missionary enthusiams. One's faith should beno more relevant to the collection of data than one's skinor age, which is to say that it may affect what data canbe collected but it should not affect the data per se. Amale graduate student may have a harder time conduct-ing fieldwork among young women than a female would;a non-Jewish student will likely have more difficultyconducting fieldwork among the Hasidim than a Jewishone. In fact, faith may well be an advantage in studyingreligious practice. E. E. Evans-Pritchard was a RomanCatholic, as is Mary Douglas, and anthropology's un-derstanding of religion would be much the poorer with-out them.

The prejudice is also foolish because neither rationalanalysis nor empirical data can clinch the argumentagainst divinity. I once heard Rick Shweder silence aroom of argumentative anthropologists by asking whywe were so concerned to explain why a Hindu widowmight immolate herself upon her husband's funeral pyre,for who were we to know so confidently that she wouldnot, as she thought, transcend mere mortal existence andbecome of another realm? He was right. We do not knowwhether we have immortal souls, whether there are an-gels, whether Jesus was sent by a heavenly father to re-deem us from our sin, or whether Tuhami was indeedvisited by a Moroccan demoness.

And yet there is also sense behind the prejudice. Hav-ing a religious conviction is not like being of a differentrace, gender or sexual orientation, because faith—atleast, devout Christian faith—entails a belief commit-ment about the fundamental nature of reality. So toodoes one's race, gender, and sexual orientation, but themulticultural stance has been to accept those differencesas different ways to be in the same world. Religious faith,and particularly a devout Christian faith, tends to assertthat there is a different kind of world, that it cannot bethe case that both the atheist and the believer are correctin their understanding of their world.

I myself feel that I cannot write about religion effec-

56 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, NumbeT I, February 2OOI

tively unless I take seriously the inherent undecidabilityof divinity. It seems to me intellectually dishonest andessentially uninteresting to approach religion as a prob-lem of false belief. I think that the anthropologist's jobis to enter another world as a well-intentioned guest andthat to empathize with those others demands that onedoes not begin by thinking of them as deluded. Yet I findthat I can only leave room intellectually for the realityof divinity if I assume that divinity manifests itself todifferent peoples in different ways and that all religionsare thus epistemologically more or less equivalent.

It is only fair to disclose my own subject position here.For years I have believed in the inherent undecidabilityof divinity and believed that the anthropologist's task inunderstanding religion is to begin with the fact that weall have brains and bodies and then to explore the wayculture and social practice affect our capacities to ex-perience. I have believed that this was the only reason-able position for an intellectual to accept. And then afew months ago I had an insight. Of course I believe this.I was raised a Unitarian. What I have just described isabout as close as Unitarians come to a creed.

PETER PELSResearch Centre for Religion and Society, Universityof Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgv^al i8s, 1012DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands {[email protected]].13 IX 00

Priest's paper confirms a thesis I have developed else-where (Pels 1990): that the modern anthropological sus-picion of missionaries—which has its roots in, amongother things, colonial desires to build on and protect in-digenous religion—acquires specific cultural elaborationonly after the postwar decolonization period. I still thinkthis can in part be explained by the fact that missionarieswere, under decolonization, the most appropriate scape-goat that anthropologists could find to uphold their ownself-image as critics of ethnocentrism and to avoid beingbranded, together with missionaries, as quintessentialcolonizers. Priest's painstaking collection of mentions ofthe "missionary position" suggests that a broader cul-tural and historical shift may have been occurring at thetime, one that in fact may show continuities with a later,"postmodern" phase. This raises the question why suchmetaphors and the sexually repressed nature of theChristian missionary that they symbolize did not maketheir appearance in novels and scholarly discourse ear-lier. I do not think Priest's paper advances us towards ahistorically informed answer to this question. Nor isthat, perhaps, his intention.

I wonder, however, what other intentions this paperhas if it does not ask about the cultural, sociological, andhistorical circumstances that cause the spread of such ametaphor to the extent that no stylist in his right mindwould dare to use it any longer. Perhaps the latter resultis one that Priest will be happy with. The paper is, inany case, not an argument about the practice of Christianmissions as such—Priest cannot seriously claim, as he

does at several points, that these "missionaries of themodern secular imagination" are not and have not been"flesh-and-blood missionaries." If indeed he makes thatclaim, I wonder how he has managed to overlook all thereferences to Christian missionaries struggling againstalien sexual mores and habits in the "careful, sustainedresearch" by historians and anthropologists that he listsin extenso in another part of his argument. In my owncase, at least, the prohibition of certain sexual practices,especially as taught hy African female initiation, was aconstant worry of Catholic missionaries, and they dis-cussed them in detail with their African followers andamongst themselves (in Latin, to be sure; see Pels 1999:chaps. 2 and 4).

If, then, the paper cannot be meant to investigate thesociocultural and historical context of the metaphor of"missionary position" or to unmask a wrong image ofmissionaries, what is it supposed to achieve? It seemsto be to point out that religious subject positions are, bystereotyping such as is achieved by metaphors of the"missionary position," excluded from the academy.Modernist positions often use stereotyped images of re-ligion—the play of power of modernism is demonstratedby many of the "postmodernist" examples Priest men-tions. It would indeed be important to research the ex-tent to which the modernist belief in secularization has,in practice, led to the exclusion of certain religious sub-ject positions from the academy, but Priest offers littlethat allows one to say where and how they do, exceptby drawing up a series of quotes of a single symbol andfleshing out some of their parameters. I do not think thatit is accepted anthropological practice (except, perhaps,by some latter-day "postmodernists"?) to base an inquiryon the isolation of a single symbol from its social andhistorical background and to refrain from the ethnog-raphy that shows how this symbol works in social prac-tice. With this problematic mode of argument and itsselective citing of the evidence on missionary behavior.Priest's paper invites a critique that may do other Chris-tian subject positions' contribution to academic debateconsiderable harm.

TUDITH SHAPIROBarnard College, Columbia University, New York,N.Y. 10027, U.S.A. {[email protected]]. i ix 00

In the current film An Affair of Love, which chroniclesa relationship initiated by a woman's desire to act out aspecific sexual fantasy with an anonymous partner, thereis a pivotal moment when the male partner asks thewoman whether they can make love "normally." Sheasks whether he means "the missionary position." Hereassures her that this is not what he means and thatwhat he wants would encompass her preference for beingon top. What he seems to be asking for, although he isunable to explain it explicitly himself, is that they engagein sex that is not an obsessive, repetitive act of fetishismbut a culturally and psychologically recognizable ex-pression of love, of feeling for a specific other.


Seeing this film so soon after reading Priest's essayreinforced for me the value of taking issue with the re-petitive, fetishized use of the phrase "missionary posi-tion," which, as Priest demonstrates, has for some timeserved to short-circuit understanding rather than ad-vance it. Priest also nicely turns the hermeneutic tahleson some of his academic colleagues by noting how met-aphor and myth operate in their own writings, stressingthe pragmatic function of these rhetorical devices in in-dicating respect or disdain.

Those of us who carried out ethnographic research onmissionaries in the '70s, before it became an acceptedgenre of anthropological research, sometimes used theexpression "missionary position" because we thought itwas clever—generally in a quite superficial way, withouthoisting any of the conceptual weight that Priest doeswell to explore and dissect. We could perhaps be forgivenat the time, and the joke wore thin fairly soon anyway.(At this point, the expression evokes such a Pavloviannegative reaction in this reader that I almost gave up onthe paper from the get-go. Priest might have done betterto use the title "Beyond the Missionary Position" notfor the last section only but for the essay as a whole.)

If earlier uses of the phrase in missionary studies couldbe categorized as heavy-handed attempts at humor, thecliche soon became a blunt instrument of cultural cri-tique and has thus been able to provide Priest with anexample of how simple and literal-minded scholars canbe just when they think they are at their most subtleand theoretically sophisticated. His whirlwind literaturesurvey had a special impact on someone who has spent16 years as an academic administrator unable to keep upwith her special fields of interest. Instead of experiencingthe expected Rip Van Winkle effect (a whole new world!),I felt as if an even more extended period of sleep—withadvanced cryogenics—would, on the contrary, have min-imal consequences as far as some of our scholarly jour-nals are concerned.

In many field situations, the missionary has literallybeen the hand that has fed the anthropologist. Too often,anthropologists have been unable to think of anythingmore interesting to do than to bite it. There has, how-ever, been excellent research on missionaries by anthro-pologists, and Priest gives such research clear (if not suf-ficiently full) credit. Historical and anthropologicalstudies have revealed the diversity of missionary activityat different times and in different parts of the world.They have also quite rightly revealed some horrific ep-isodes. Priest is surely justified in claiming that mis-sionaries have too often been stereotyped, but his essayveers too far toward implicit apologetics.

The center of gravity in Priest's essay is the followingsentence: "My subject position [as a believing Christian]gave me a perspective which helped me to see certainrealities that were not as likely to be seen from anotherposition but quite capable of being considered and eval-uated once they were pointed out." While acknowledg-ing that there are public, intersubjective standards ofscholarship. Priest argues that he is in a privileged po-

sition, because of his own social history and beliefs, tosee certain things that may be invisible to his colleagues.

This may be true in some ways but perhaps not in asdeep a way as Priest asserts. These are times when it isall too common to draw overly facile and momentousconnections between identity and outlook. As I read thisessay, I was reminded of one of Charles Saxon's classic1950s cartoons in The New Yorker, the scene is a PTAmeeting in an affiuent Connecticut suburb, the topic isthe construction of a new school, and a young womanwith pearl earrings and hair in a ponytail has the floor,-she is saying, "I am a mother and I think cinderblock isugly."

What exactly does Priest mean when he says that his"perspective" enabled him to write this essay? Let usconsider a magisterial version of the type of project un-dertaken by Priest, Robert Merton's (1965) inquiry intothe origins and history of the phrase "standing on theshoulders of giants" as a way of acknowledging an in-tellectual debt to one's precursors.' This study grew outof Merton's work in the sociology of science, but, as apre-postmodernist, he would not have thought to engagein any epistemological special pleading about his qual-ifications to produce it. His achievement resulted froma combination of motivation, scrupulous scholarship,careful thought, and elegant writing.

Why do some missionary linguists, as Priest pointsout, do excellent and important work? Because they hadthe motivation to stay for very long periods of time in"the field," far longer than most academic anthropolo-gists and linguists. Because they shared with their suc-cessful academic colleagues the intelligence and pa-tience to grapple with a deeply unfamiliar language.Because a number of them have also had good linguistictraining.

This is not to say that one cannot inquire productivelyinto how the vocation and worldview of missionariesmay have affected their linguistic research. One can, forexample, ask interesting questions about the effects ofBible translation projects on language learning. (Protes-tant missionaries in New Guinea had a compelling les-son in the cultural rootedness of metaphors when theyhad to try translating the moral concept of Jesus as shep-herd into the local language of pig husbandry.) Such in-quiries, though, need to be undertaken with care andprecision.

While it is very much in the interest of cultural an-thropology to encourage conversation among many dif-ferent voices, this is not the same as adopting an "it takesone to know one" position. On the contrary, if we wantto gain any intellectual altitude at all, we must stand onthe shoulders of those giants who understood that cul-tural study depends upon a willingness to journey awayfrom one's self.

I. The phrase is attributed to Isaac Newton: "If I have seen farther,it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

S8 ] CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 200r

SJAAK VAN DER GEESTCultural Anthropology, University of Amsterdam,Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam,The Netherlands {[email protected]]. 13 ix 00

If it is true, as Priest asserts, tbat tbe expression "mis-sionary position" came into existence tbrougb Kinsey'slapse (one wonders bow accurate tbe remainder of hisbook is), we sbould be grateful to Kinsey for providingus with an irresistible metapbor, (I say "If it is true"because I would not be surprised if—in spite of Priest'smeticulous searcb—one day an old etbnograpbic textcropped up in wbicb tbis coital position is indeed calledtbe "missionary,") Tbe metapbor is irresistible becauseit joins in one image two worlds wbicb in "real life"bardly tolerate one anotber. It fiourisbes on tbe soil ofone of tbe most powerful classic figures of style: tbecontradictio. A missionary baving sex! It is botb sbock-ing and amusing. From its beginning, tbe expression wasdestined for success. Priest's long list of titles from ar-ticles, books, and seminars bears witness to its popular-ity, and so does bis own essay, Tbe only tbing tbat canstop it is its becoming a cliche. In fact, witb tbe publi-cation of tbis essay tbat point may bave been reacbed.

Priest is to be commended for tbe clever way in wbicbbe bends tbe "missionary position" metapbor back to fittbose wbo love to use it. Popular among antbropologistsbecause of its capacity for criticizing and ridiculing mis-sionaries and tbeir etbnocentrism, tbe expression bas aboomerang effect, revealing tbe complacency and intel-lectual etbnocentrism of antbropologists tbemselves (cf.Van der Geest r99o).

Unfortunately for our discussion, tbe European wbosesexual movements were ridiculed by the Trobrianderswas neitber a missionary nor an antbropologist but aGreek buccaneer (Malinowski 1929:284), Malinowskieven knows bis name: Nicbolas Minister. ("Minister"!Could tbis be a clue?) Wby did tbey not imitate tbewooden movements of tbe antbropologist residing intbeir midst? My tentative answer follows:

Tbere are at least tbree aspects of fieldwork on wbicbantbropologists are less tban informative: their taggingalong with missionaries, their sex life, and tbeir defe-cation. Priest's essay playfully deals with two of tbesetopics.

One reason for anthropologists' lack of openness ontbese subjects is, I suspect, tbat revelation of tbese prac-tices in tbeir daily life in tbe field would not enbancetbeir carefully constructed image of being almost inte-grated into tbe community in wbicb tbey conduct tbeirresearcb. Antbropologists in tbe field bave bad and stillbave mucb more contact witb missionaries than theylike to admit in their publications, Tbey bave enjoyedtbe missionary's company, bis beer, and bis toilet.

And wby so taciturn about sex? I bave pondered tbisfor a long time. Could it be prurience, cowardliness, dis-gust, racism, anxiety about relatives at bome, inbibitionabout revealing intimate experiences, fear of disease,metbodological strategy, or simply tbe fact tbat tbey badno sex life to speak of? Only dreams and desires? Evans-

Pritcbard (1976:240) writes tbat bis teacber Seligmantold bim "to take ten grains of quinine every night andto keep off women." Tbe almost complete absence ofany reference to tbe sexual part of participant observa-tion (for some exceptions, see Cesara 1982, Krumeicb1994, Kulick and Willson r995, Markowitz and Asbke-nazi 1999) makes one wonder about tbe antbropologicalposition.

Reply

ROBERT J, PRIESTDeerfleld, III, U.S.A. 13 x 00

I tbank tbe respondents for tbeir comments, critiques,bumor, insigbts, and willingness to participate in tbisconversation, I attempt below to address tbe issueswhich have been raised,

Wbile tbe respondents seem convinced by my evi-dence witb reference to Kinsey, one challenge is tenta-tively raised, Burridge believes tbat be first beard tbepbrase "missionary position" during bis undergraduatedays at Oxford "rigbt after World War 11" and infers tbattbe story predates Kinsey. Kinsey's best-seller came outon January 5, 1948, in tbe second year of Burridge's un-dergraduate work. People gatbering in pubs to discusstbe Kama Sutra or Decameron would bave been tbe veryones to read Kinsey's narratives and incorporate tbem intbeir discussions. Unless Burridge is certain tbat be firstbeard tbis pbrase at tbe beginning of bis undergraduatework and not balfway into bis second year, sucb a mem-ory would not contradict tbe genealogy I propose. Strictlyspeaking, my argument would not preclude the possi-bility tbat Kinsey bad been telling tbis story in publiclectures for several years. According to anotber story,widely repeated by reputable sources, tbe Vatican bas acollection of pornograpby surpassing or second only totbat of the Kinsey Institute, The story is false; E, MichaelJones (1993:88-94) bas traced it to Kinsey's lectures be-ginning in tbe early 1940s, I suspect tbat Burridge'sfriends were directly or indirectly indebted to Kinsey's1948 book and, in tbe best tradition of urban legends,reworked tbe story to imply personal knowledge fromtbeir own prior associations, Burridge's memory wouldtbus provide evidence of just how quickly Kinsey's storyspread,

Clifford, Faubion, and Hoad suggest that my renderingof "modernism" and "postmodernism" either distorts orfails to be adequately nuanced. Certainly, it is not easyto attain consensus on one's usage of tbese terms. AsCellner (1992:22) says of "postmodernism," "it is notaltogetber clear wbat tbe devil it is, , , , Clarity is notamongst its marked attributes," However, I believe tbatmy usage of tbe terms falls well witbin tbe bounds ofdisciplinary understandings. Since these commentatorsfail to specify exactly where I have misrepresented eitherof these, all I can do is acknowledge that more nuancingof the variations within each would be belpful.


Faubion would also question my usage of "evangeli-cal" and "fundamentalist." "Fundamentalism" is Gell-ner's term. In modernist discourses its invocation typi-cally "conjures up a jumbled and troubled universe ofconnotations, cliches, images, feelings, poses and plots:militant, strident, dogmatic, ignorant, duped, backward,rural, southern, uneducated, antiscientific, anti-intellec-tual, irrational, absolutist, authoritarian, bigoted, racist,sexist, anticommunist, war mongers" (Harding 1991:373). In Gellner's case, I did not detect such a loadedusage. However, both because of such problems with theterm and hecause in American Christianity, at least, ithas a much narrower range of reference than Gellner'susage implied, I simply noted that his identification ofa religious suhject position divergent from hoth modern-ism and postmodernism would apply to any Christianwho affirmed historical orthodoxies^including but byno means limited to those who identify themselves asfundamentalist or evangelical. I referred to "fundamen-talist/orthodox/evangelical Christians" simply to bypassa necessarily lengthy defense of particular terms. I do notfully understand Fauhion's concern with Pietism—amovement which historically was orthodox and which,through its infiuence on Methodism and holiness move-ments, has closer links to American evangelicalism thanhe supposes. Indeed, the seminary at which I teach wasfounded by immigrant pietists from Scandinavia.

I do use the term "evangelical" by itself on two oc-casions—once to identify myself and once to identifysome anthropologists I interviewed. It is in this settingthat I employ the term "devout" to which Faubion ob-jects. He correctly recognizes my use of Carter's term,but Carter is not speaking of evangelicals when he usesthe phrase "the devoutly religious." That is, my "devoutevangelicals" is but a subset of Carter's "devoutly relig-ious" and is not designed to make any claims to specialdevoutness of one religious group over another. The in-dividuals to whom I referred are devout in the conven-tional meaning of the term. I do not fully understand theimport of Fauhion's idea that "hihlicist activists" cannotreally be devout, but in this case it is irrelevant hecausethe individuals to whom I refer are in no sense charac-terized hy such activism.

Dundes questions my usage of the term "myth,"which he would reserve for sacred and religious narra-tives. He wrongly assumes that I am confused; I em-ployed the term against this venerahle (modernist) tra-dition, and until Dundes can provide me with a moreadequate suhstitute than Mason populaire (which appliesto the phrase, not the accompanying story) or "joke"([Dundes, Hoad, Shapiro] which applies to a story but notto one believed to be true), I will retain the term"myth"—a term I use in ways congruent with the ap-proaches of, for example, Klass (1995:125-26) andBarthes(1972). In Barthes's view, any narrative which is under-stood as unprohlematic, grounded in assumptions we arenot fully conscious of, and understood as a reality jus-tifying one's heliefs hut is in fact a social construct ra-tionalizing one's motives and values is a myth. A mythis a "semiological system, . . . a system of values" rather

than "a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system,whereas it is but a semiological system" (1972:131). Peo-ple really have believed that Christian missionariestaught social others that any sexual position except onewas sinful and that social others coined the derisivephrase "missionary position." Many really have believedthat American sex laws banned everything except themissionary position. They repeat these narratives he-cause they believe them to be true, and the typical re-sponse is not laughter hut amazement and refiection. Ofcourse, when a myth is discovered not to he true but "aninstrument," "it discredits itself in [Barthes's] eyes"(1972:129). While the hasic missionary-position narra-tive does not fall into the category of "joke," it has cer-tainly provided the starting point for many a joke, andtherefore I am quite willing to speak of joke, metaphor,stereotype, meme, symbol, or Mason populaire in theappropriate context. That is, while I employ the term"myth," I do not consider it the only relevant one.

Pels helieves that it was only in the postwar decolo-nization period that negative images of missionariesarose. Admittedly, it is only after Freud that one findsfull-blown narratives of sexual repression, withMaugham's "Rain" a pioneer in Freudian fiction, hutsimilar though less Freudian types of symhoiic elementsare found in Herman Melville's treatment of mission-aries (Herbert 1980, Samson 1984) and indeed in Pierrede Ronsard's 1555 reaction to missionaries, which I cited.European narratives long before the 20th century weremanipulating images of social others, sexual freedom,sin, guilt, taboo, and missionaries in accord with thepurposes and dictates of modernism. While the particularstory I examine dates from 1948, it fuses together in akind of "condensation symbol" multiple symbolic as-sociations and "truths" which long predate it.

Pels protests that I "cannot seriously claim" that "mis-sionaries of the modern secular imagination" are differ-ent from "fiesh-and-blood missionaries." Perhaps a slightdigression on the missionary-sin/guilt theme will clarifymy point. In my fieldwork with the Aguaruna of Peru Ifocused on traditional moral discourses (Priest 1993) andthe vocabulary of moral evil (Priest 1997; 1993:488-542).I explored missionaries' own moral discourse and vo-cabulary (interviewing Nazarene, Swiss Indian Mission,SIL, and Jesuit missionaries to the Aguaruna as well asworking through mission archives and literature). Assis-tants helped me tape and transcribe hundreds of pagesof Aguaruna evangelical conversion and deconversionnarratives (many featuring dreams, visions, near-death-experiences, etc.) as well as a dozen sermons preachedby Aguaruna evangelists. Interviews and participant ob-servation resulted in field notes on religious life, rhetoric,and practice. While my work is still in progress, I haverich and extensive empirical data for an analysis of sindiscourses and consequences in the context of Christianmissions and religious conversion. From the frequencyand confidence with which anthropologists make un-documented pronouncements about the effects of mis-sionary sin and guilt one might infer that there was anextensive anthropological literature grounded in the kind

6o j CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 42, Number i, February 2001

of field research I describe. Such is not the case. But theabsence of any such literature has not prevented mod-ernists from constructing extensive narratives of mis-sionary sin and guilt—narratives that anthropologistsboth have been shaped by and have contributed to. I haveexamined in depth one such narrative, that of the mis-sionary position, and suggested that it derives its mean-ing and efficacy from a network of similar modernistnarratives. Maugham's "Rain" was enormously popularin its day. Ruth Benedict attended the play (Lapsley 1999:88). Margaret Mead commenced fieldwork on adolescentsexuality from the very hotel made famous in "Rain"(Grosskurth 1988:27) and dreamed that her book on Sa-moa was mistakenly titled Seekings for Sin (Lapsley1999:150, 171). While Maugham's work was fiction,Michener's was coded "historical fiction" and widely be-lieved to be "true to history." Alan Tippett, an ethnoh-istorian and specialist in Pacific missions history, sys-tematically compared Michener's portrayal ofmissionary preaching against manuscripts of hundredsof sermons preached by early missionaries to Hawaii andconcluded that the distortion was so severe that onlyincredibly sloppy research or deliberate manipulationcould explain it. In either case, he concluded that thenarrative order was a direct refiection of Michener's owninner emotional "compulsives" (Tippett 1973:147-91).Tippett notes Michener's debt to Melville, who pio-neered the rhetorical device of the fictional missionarysermon (pp. 172-74). Another clue to Michener's sourcesfor Hawaii is found in his 1952 admission that he neverwrites about the South Pacific without first rereadingportions of "Rain" (quoted in Morgan 1980:257-58).While Matthiessen's travel narrative The Cloud Forest(1987) gives a full description of his time with mission-aries in the Amazon, the missionaries constructed in hisnovel At Play in the Fields of the Lord have closer tiesto the missionaries of Melville, Maugham, and Miche-ner. And yet, again and again I have learned of anthro-pologists' telling students that this book (or film) willshow them what missionaries are like.'

There is a sense in which the symbol is more real thanthe real. The missionary as a symbol is present in a waythat real missionaries are not. Fictional missionary ser-mons are present to us in a way that actual missionarysermons are not. Undocumented stories about mission-aries which emerge from the same modernist compul-sions driving Maugham or Michener and refiect depen-dence on the same discursive formations quite naturally"ring true," to use Kipp's phrase. That is, they resonatewith and ratify what is already known via modernistnarratives, the more infiuential of which are minimallygrounded in or refiective of careful empirical research.

Dominy questions whether "the missionary position"essentializes missionaries as dominators, since womenwere missionaries as well. I suggest that she herself, onthis point, is moving to the literal rather than the dis-

I. In contrast, the movie critic Michael Medved assessed this filmas "the most amhitious all-out attack Hollywood has ever launchedon organized religion" (1992:59).

cursive. Discourses and rhetoric of the missionary po-sition do construct missionaries as dominators and sym-bolically male, as the French position du missionairemakes explicit. Dominy's point is an interesting one,however, because in the late 19th century women pro-vided the broadest base of support for missions and madeup nearly half of the missionaries. Indeed, modernist nar-ratives of this period tended to construct missionaries asfeminine. Colonialists who exercised political and eco-nomic power were coded as hard, strong, and masculine,as opposed to missionaries, whose concern with religion,conscience, and domesticity was coded as soft, weak, andfeminine (Huber and Lutkehaus 1999). Postcolonial re-coding of the Christian missionary enterprise as mas-culine dominance may indeed serve the scapegoatingends which Pels insightfully suggests.

Jaarsma rightly points out that the missionary-positionmyth also involves representations of social others, ob-jectifies them, and fails to give them a voice. Indeed,even postmodernist efforts to include diverse voices maysometimes be highly selective. For example, Tite Tienou,my theological colleague from Burkina Faso, regularlycomplains to me that anthropological discursive repre-sentations render African Christians neither authenti-cally African nor authentically Christian. Their voicestend, therefore, to be selectively excluded.

For Dundes, all religion is "projective" and Christi-anity is a "Western projection" foisted ethnocentricallyand hegemonically on others. Several observations arein order. First, neither in its origins nor in its currentdistribution is Christianity (as contrasted with Freud)distinctively Western. For centuries in its early history,Christianity was almost certainly stronger in Africa thanin Europe—as it is again today. Christian missionariestoday are more likely to be Korean, African, Brazilian,or Chinese than Austrian, Dutch, French, or Swiss. Thelocus of authority for most missionaries and Christiansaround the world is a non-Western text which is as likelyto condemn Western cultural patterns as to justify them.Christianity is a world religion with remarkably diverselocal expressions. Missiologists devote energy andthought to helping missionaries distinguish betweenideas and values refiective of their own cultures and ideasand values justified in terms of the Bible. Second, mostmissionaries would reject Dundes's implication thatevangelism is necessarily hegemonic or that conversionoccurs only under coercion. Indeed, evidence from Chinasuggests that in an era when evangelism was perceivedas supported by colonial power conversion was minimal,but in an era without overtones of coercion large num-bers freely embrace Christianity. Missiologists, like an-thropologists, call for reassessment and critique of waysin which historically their professional community hascontributed to colonial hegemonies, but, like anthro-pologists, they would deny that hegemony is at the coreof their action.

What intrigues me, however, is the way in which "pro-jection" enters into Dundes's discussion. He has just readan essay which focuses on a narrative widely andwrongly believed to be true, in short, a projection. And

PRIEST Missionary Positions \ 6i

yet, rather than analyzing the psychological roots of thisprojection, he downgrades it from projection to joke andsubstitutes another narrative as the focus of his "projec-tive" analysis. That is, while deconstructing the relig-ious other and speculating on the psychological motivesof "Priest" (in good fun, to be sure), he declines to putmodernists under the same microscope. For him, the lan-guage of myth can be directed only one way, and theanalysis of projection seemingly moves in only one di-rection as well. Creating another narrative of hegemonicChristians to replace the one just discredited might eas-ily be interpreted as justifying hegemonic exclusion.

There is no reason a psychologically oriented anthro-pologist could not reverse the direction of analysis. Fol-lowing another Freudian, who argues that anthropolo-gists conduct their "private rebellion in the arcanelanguage of academic books" (La Barre 1970:4), onemight refiect on the extent to which such "rebellion" isdirected toward religion, conscious, and shared. Onemight begin with Evans-Pritchard's (1963) claim thatmost anthropologists are "bleakly hostile" toward relig-ion in general and Christianity in particular and explorepossible evidences and consequences of such hostility.Edmund Leach, for example, acknowledges that part ofhis "inspiration . . . comes from a fundamental dislikeof organized religion" (Kuper 1986:381); Paul Riesman(1977:9s) reports that his "long-standing antipathy" to-ward "Western religions" rendered him "almost inca-pable of looking" at Islam "with an unprejudiced eye";Miles Richardson (1975:517-19) describes anthropologyas fulfilling his quest for freedom from Christian ideasand says that in turning toward anthropology he was"moved by the bright joy of perfect hate." There is nogood reason, then, that a psychologically oriented an-thropologist could not take the "projection" examinedin my essay and explore the extent to which it emergesfrom socially shared "private rebellions" such as thoseshared by Leach, Riesman, and Richardson.

Dominy and Shapiro read disclosure of my subject po-sition as "special pleading" (Shapiro), a claim to a priv-ileged authority. In certain respects, this directly invertsmy argument. Contra Dominy, who sees me appealingto my authority "more than" to "research," I explicitlyinsisted that my argument stands or falls in accordancewith publicly acknowledged standards of evidence andreasoning and rejected any right to speak with authority.It was only confidence in the argument and evidencewhich allowed me to point out that a particular subjectposition (normally stigmatized and silent in the acad-emy) might actually make a positive contribution to re-search and knowledge. Shapiro acknowledges the im-portance of motivation to knowledge but fails torecognize that specific motivations often underpin spe-cific beliefs and fictions. A fiction is less likely to beseen as fiction when it serves the purposes of the ob-server. Sometimes things are observable from subordi-nated subject positions that are less observable to onestanding even on the shoulders of modernist giants likeKinsey.

Only a few of my respondents directly address the

question of exclusion and silencing of religious peoplein the academy. Burridge illustrates exclusion throughdiscriminatory hiring. Luhrmann suggests that "silenc-ing is particularly striking in American social science."Clifford implicitly acknowledges exclusion when heasks how disciplinary communities can maintain bor-ders if the religious are not excluded. Faubion questionsCarter's evidence that "the devoutly religious" are"grossly underrepresented on campus" but does not denythat exclusion occurs. Pels would like research thatshows the extent to which there is "exclusion of certainreligious positions in the academy." Kipp acknowledgesthat "not being religious at all is the unspoken norm towhich we hold ourselves." Benthall suggests that somereligious positions are accepted while others are not.Hoad acknowledges that hegemonic norms of the acad-emy exclude the religious. But while Burridge and Luhr-mann strongly support my call for nonexclusion of thereligious and Clifford and Faubion seem to be cautiouslyopen to the possibility, Hoad would support exclusion.The others remain silent on this. Silence in the contextof an acknowledged exclusion might refiect agreementwith exclusion combined with an unwillingness to tryto justify it. Or, in the case of any respondents who maybe religious but silent, silence may refiect awareness ofa power field in which disclosure discredits. Some whofail to address exclusion directly might nonetheless beread as providing justification for exclusion.

Clifford, Dundes, and Shapiro acknowledge that mis-sionaries may well acquire knowledge and understand-ing rivaling or surpassing that of anthropologists. Luhr-mann suggests that "faith may well be an advantage instudying religious practice." T'he implication, it wouldseem, is that any exclusion of religious people from theacademy must be justified in terms other than capacityfor scholarly understanding. Benthall suggests that it isnot so much evangelical beliefs which are objectionableas a style which is "blunt and tactless." This charge hasfrequently been directed against various excluded com-munities (Cuddihy 1978, 1987), but the literature sug-gests that most evangelicals, in America at least, are asstrongly committed to civility as others (Smith 2000:61-91; Cuddihy 1978). Shapiro's observation that mis-sionaries feed anthropologists, who often "bite" in re-turn, directs questions of civility in another direction.Benthall also refers to "horrors . . . inflicted in the nameof religion," Shapiro suggests that there are "horrific ep-isodes" in mission history, and Hoad refers to the "dis-astrous" effects of missionary ethics. Only Hoad pro-vides a documented example of the negative effects ofChristian ethics, and even here, assignment of culpabil-ity is at least contestable. Many of King Mwanga's pageshad converted to Christianity prior to being sent to theking's court by local chiefs, and when the king insistedthat they have sexual relations with him over 30 of themwho were Christians refused. In response, the kingburned them alive, triggering a massive civil war amongthree factions (all of which were opposed to Mwanga).Hoad speculates elsewhere that the king may have beenrequiring something with a valued cultural tradition be-


hind it and that he forced the issue and burned the pages"as an act of anti-colonial resistance" (Hoad 1999). Whilehe provides a fascinating discussion of how these eventsplayed out in the discourses of the day, his suggestionhere that missionary recoding of same-sex corporeal in-timacies is what produced these results constructs a mo-rality tale which some may understandably see aspartisan.

Anthropology texts not infrequently stress, usuallywithout documentation, that "missionary . . . ethnocen-trics have wreaked havoc on native populations" (Vander Elst and Bohannan 1999:189). For years I assignedstudents Lauriston Sharp's (1952) classic on how mis-sionaries caused cultural collapse through their intro-duction of steel axes to Stone Age Australians, only re-cently to discover a follow-up research report (Taylor1988) demonstrating that no such collapse occurred. Al-though Shapiro and Benthall reference evils inflicted inthe name of religion, neither presents these as necessar-ily central to religion or missions. Benthall explicitlyprovides balancing observations, as does Dominy. Pick-ering (i992:ro3) points out that the question of whethermissionaries do harm is not always easy to assess: "Whatcounts as 'damage' is open to debate and involves theapplication of what are very often unacknowledged cri-teria. Deciding what is 'good' for a society is at the veryedge, if not within, the realm of the normative."

Divergent ideas about the normative underpin muchof the rationale for exclusion. Kipp phrases the conflictas "the morality of relativism versus other kinds of moralconvictions." Furthermore, she implicitly links this op-position to another one, that of religious versus nonre-ligious. "Not being religious" is the "unspoken norm"of the same anthropological community which affirmsthe morality of relativism. Or to turn it around, the"other kinds of moral convictions" which are objectedto tend to be those which are religiously based. Reli-giously based moral convictions are not atypical histor-ically. Raymond Firth writes (1951:186) that the "com-monest answer . . . in the history of Western socialthought is that the source of all morality is God." Soclose was the link between the moral and the religiousthat atheism initially brought doubts about the very ideaof the moral, articulated in the oft-repeated phrase "IfGod is dead, then anything is permissible." Nor are re-ligiously based moral convictions atypical in the con-temporary world. They are only atypical among whatsome sociologists call the "New Glass," consisting ofthose who make their living manipulating and distrib-uting symbols—such as educators, journalists, thera-pists, and university professors, especially those in thehumanities and social sciences. While the older middleclass in America, centered in the business communityand traditional professions, tends to be very religious (asLuhrmann notes), members of the New Glass tend to bemarkedly secular (Berger 1992). Berger (1996, 1997) sug-gests that a globalized secular elite culture is the prin-cipal "carrier" of Enlightenment beliefs and valuesaround the world and is nearly everywhere pitted againstlocal populations which are distinctly religious. Around

the world, as in America, a large majority operate withmoral norms which are religiously informed and are ex-cluded from or silenced in the academy.

Two intertwined modernist assumptions—one relatedto the religious and one to the moral—have historicallyunderpinned these exclusions but are increasingly rec-ognized to have been fundamentally flawed. First, it wasassumed that modernist secularism would replace relig-ion. This teleology allowed religious people to be locatedsymbolically in the past.^ Their exclusion involved co-operating with the inevitable flow of history. By the1980s and '90s, however, it was increasingly clear thatreligion remains part of the contemporary world. Whenpeople who are acknowledged as full contemporaries areexcluded and silenced, the raw power dimensions of theexclusion become more evident and problematic.

The second assumption, touched on by Benthall, wasthat consensus could be achieved on foundations for mo-rality which owed nothing to religion (Maclntyre 1984,1990). Initially anthropologists seem not to have beenoverly concerned with morality other than to critiquewhat they saw as ethnocentric. In 1947 the AmericanAnthropological Association rejected the United NationsUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, with Hersko-vits making the argument that there was no such thingas universal human rights (American AnthropologicalAssociation Executive Board 1947:539-43). Many cameto regret this move, and 50 years later the moral rhetoricof human rights is central to anthropological discourse.What is curious is that anthropologists have "rarely con-centrated on the investigation of moral ideas" (Furer-Haimendorf 1967:2), displaying a "reluctance... to studyother people's ethical systems" (Parkin 1985:4). Even thefew who focus extensively on issues of morality ac-knowledge a problem. Elvin Hatch (1997:371) summa-rizes the state of affairs: "No moral theory has yetemerged that provides the theoretical basis for makingcross-cultural value judgments and that enjoys wide-spread acceptance; hence the paradox of ethical relativ-ism: we can't live with it, but it isn't clear how to avoidit." Benthall clings to Ghristian ethics because he be-lieves that the effort to ground ethics in secular ration-ality has failed. He suspects that new assaults on humandignity cannot be adequately resisted with a purely sec-ular rationality.

In the absence of any moral or ethical system able toclaim that it speaks with the single acknowledged voiceof moral reason, we are left with nothing but particularand competing moralities (Maclntyre 1990). Kaser sug-gests that the divisions may be fundamental and notresolvable. Benthall, Maclntyre (1990), and Gellner(1992) argue that secularist hopes of a secure rationalfoundation for moral judgment have failed. Benthall im-plicitly warns that an attack on religiously based mo-ralities may undercut a vital source of the very moral

2. For example, the article "Fundamentalism" in the 1931 Ency-clopedia of the Social Sciences (Niebuhr 1931:526-27) was writtenentirely in the past tense, which is where fundamentalists werethought to belong.


convictions we would wish people to bave. Faubionstresses tbat tbe academy must engage a world "in wbichtbe plurality of , , , moralities is an irrevocable fact." Itis tbis "irrevocable fact" tbat leads Alasdair Maclntyreto call for procedural pluralism—a commitment to en-couraging systematic encounters between people fromdivergent moral standpoints, encounters for wbicb tbeuniversity itself provides space and support (1990:232-36). Wbat is called for is not tbat all parties becomeadvocates of a single moral ideology but tbat all partiesbe committed to procedural pluralism as tbey engage tbemoral,

Hoad asks bow tolerant I am prepared to be of peoplewbose difference is offensive to my religious beliefs, Tbeissue, of course, is wbetber, despite fundamental differ-ences, we can engage tbe other respectfully and not onlytolerate but strongly support the right of the other partyto full participation. It is a fallacy to envision only twopossibilities—Cbristian begemony or suppression ofCbristian voices in support of a different begemony,Smitb (2000:61-91) discovered tbat at tbe grassrootslevel a majority of American evangelicals are deeplycommitted to procedural pluralism and to nonbege-monic forms of public engagement. One suspects thattbe commitment would be even stronger and more wide-spread if evangelicals felt tbat otbers were so committed.

Pels asks wbat I intend to accomplish in this essay, Ido, of course, hope that it will introduce marked con-straints on tbe invocation of "the missionary position,"Initial responses suggest that I will be only partly suc-cessful. Van der Geest finds the image "irresistible," Clif-ford suggests tbis "fable" conveys "not exactly trutbs"but tbings tbat nonetheless "ought to be said," Dundesand Hoad defend its continued use in bumor, witb Hoadbelieving be bas an "etbical obligation" to invoke tbisimage in mocking certain otbers,^ Bentball "devoutly"wisbes for a moratorium on all metapborical uses of theterm. Pels, who has himself used the expression (1999:32), suggests that "no stylist in his right mind woulddare to use it longer," With Clifford gritting his teeth oneach new encounter witb tbe expression and Sbapironow baving a strong negative Pavlovian reaction to it, Isuspect tbat tbis particular goal will to some degree beacbieved.

More important, I boped to provoke discussion of cer-tain widespread biases in tbe academy and tbeir impli-cations for tbe representation of "religious others" andfor social exclusion. Benthall, Burridge, Kaser, Kipp,Luhrmann, Pels, and Van der Geest acknowledge the bi-ases I point to, Clifford, Dundes, and Sbapiro are lesswilling to do so, Bentball, Dominy, Jaarsma, and Kipptoucb on tbe implications of bias for representation,wbile Clifford and Dundes simply invoke new images ofbegemonic missionaries to replace tbe one just discred-ited, A number of respondents also toucb on and/or cri-tique rationales for silencing and exclusion. However,

3. Hoad's defense of such usage is perhaps not unrelated to the factthat he is currently "working on a brief history of 'the missionaryposition"' (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/cgs/Biosi.htmittHoad).

tbere appears to be a singular lack of enthusiasm fordirectly addressing academics' own begemonic exerciseof power and exclusion in tbe academy. Burridge andLubrmann, by contrast, do directly address silencing andexclusion and strongly endorse the call for more open-ness in academe. This is a conversation whicb I bopewill continue.

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