Colonial Reformation: Religion, Empire, and the Origins of Modern Social Thought

Abstract

This dissertation tells a new story about the origins of the modern European social sciences. I set out to understand why the founders of French sociology and anthropology, including Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, drew so heavily on ethnographic accounts of non-Western societies. What, I wanted to know, were they learning from these accounts? And how did what they learn contribute to the innovation for which they are today known: the articulation of the “social” as a discrete realm of human activity? Archival research that I carried out in France, Britain, Australia, and the U.S. revealed that ethnographic literature in this period can be traced, almost exclusively, back to a surprising source: nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries working on the frontiers of Western empires to convert indigenous people to Christianity. Conversion was not, however, a one-way process. Rather, I argue that in their efforts to produce vernacular scripture, missionaries confronted a range of indigenous ideas that profoundly challenged Christian frameworks. I then show how those ideas circulated back to Europe through published texts, museum artifacts, and correspondences. Analyzing both canonical texts and archival sources, this dissertation explores the indigenous origins of the modern European social sciences. In addition to revealing the imprint of global intellectual currents on modern European ideas, the story I tell distills for us enduring lessons about the relation between the political and the social realms. Given the historical and conceptual links between Protestant Christianity and Western notions of sovereignty, I argue that the resistance of indigenous ideas to Christian translation should be understood as a form of resistance to the assertion of Western sovereignty, and to the conceptual apparatus of state power. Understood this way, modern European social thought emerged, in the early twentieth century, as a response to the indigenous resistance to the assertion of Western sovereignty in the nineteenth century. I argue, then, that European thinkers were able to describe and imagine the social realm thanks to their encounter with a set of ideas that challenged fundamental tenets within the European tradition of political thought. European political and social thought do not just name and define two distinct fields of action: the political and the social. Rather, they have their origins in two distinct, even antagonistic, intellectual traditions, one statist and one indigenous.