MISSIONARY POSITIONS

LEE D. BAKER

As I was exploring the ways in which Franz Boas's Journal of American Folk-Lore articulated ideas about Africa during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the threads of evidence led me to the Dakotas and Hawaii and to the early missions on the Sandwich Islands during the 1840s—west across the Pacific, not east across the Atlantic. These civilizing missions form a discursive diaspora of colonial desires that are as much a part of (and have forged) global processes as the political and economic dimensions so often referenced. Indeed, missionaries and reformers deployed folklore in complex ways to contribute to a project of racial uplift that linked Hawaiians, American Indians, and African Americans together during the late nineteenth century. During this earlier period of globalization, the macronarrative of Christianity worked hand in glove with the reproduction of racial ideologies to discipline peoples whose customs and behaviors did not conform to the puritanical (and tyrannical) desires of colonial administrators and church leaders. In this essay, I demonstrate that in forging networks across diverse populations, reformers engaged in projects whose civilizing missions transcended the specific racial and colonial contexts that confronted them, ultimately leading to the formulation of a universal model of industrial education.

Uplift and the Uses of Folklore

Documenting, conserving, and reifying African cultural practices in the Americas was not initiated by Melville and Frances Herskovits in the 1920s, as Sally and Richard Price have contended (Price and Price 2003). In the United States, these processes started right after the Civil War when missionaries and military personnel began documenting the languages and customs of indigenous peoples in North America and the South Pacific, and of African Americans during reconstruction. In order to "convert the heathen," the colonial logic went, they first had to understand and document their languages, behaviors, and customs. Although the term culture (as we know it today) was not employed, missionaries, scholars, and educators confidently described and documented aboriginal practices that were "a real hindrance and obstacle in the way of civilization" (Eastman 1896: 93). This obsession with eradicating traditional African, Indian, and Hawaiian practices and beliefs motivated people like Merrill E. Gates, president of the influential reform group The Lake Mohonk Friends of the Indian, to confidently declare: "We are for a vanishing policy" (M. Gates 1900:12). By the 1880s, anthropologists joined this group and eventually took over the colonial project of documenting disappearing cultures in the wake of "Christian civilization."

By calibrating culture as the index with which to measure civilization, missionaries, reformers, educators, and ethnologists sutured culture to race, helping to fuel the exploitation of imperial and colonial regimes. The goal of these maneuvers was racial uplift, a pedagogical project that emphasized individual savings and thrift, back-breaking and exploitative labor, temperance and sobriety, fidelity and monogamy, and Christian salvation in the disciplining of countless "savages" from South Africa to South Dakota, Montego Bay to Maui, Perth to Pohnpei (Gaines 1996; Hoxie 1984; Brumble 1988). Reformers and missionaries involved in these projects shared a putatively progressive Lamarckian vision that social and racial traits were acquired and then transmitted to the next generation. In the United States (inclusive of its territories and protectorates) and the Caribbean, the racial uplift discourse made a particularly deep impress, so deep that even the venerable Frederick Douglass played this race-as-indexed-by-culture card in his influential speech on Colored American Day at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He juxtaposed American Negroes with the extended Fon family from present-day Benin who resided at the fair in a living ethnological exhibition called the Dahomey Village. Pushing the racial uplift metaphor to its limits, Douglass implored his rapt audience to "look at the progress the Negro has made in thirty years! We have come up out of Dahomey unto this. Measure the Negro. But not by the standard of the splendid civilization of the Caucasian. Bend down and measure him—measure him from the depths out of which he has risen" (Douglass 2000 [1893]: 194).

There is little epistemological difference between Douglass's call to "bend down and measure him" and reformers' vanishing policies. Both articulated a theory of racial progress predicated upon the eradication of putatively indigenous customs and beliefs. This was the same gospel of racial uplift that flowed around the world during the 1890s as American Protestant missionaries began to dominate the foreign mission movement and the United States slowly, but never surely, blazed its way through the Wounded Knee massacre, Chinese exclusion, the Spanish-American War, acquisition of island territories, Jim Crow segregation, and the Progressive Era (Hutchison 1987:62-124).

In 1922, Elsie Clews Parson published "Playing Dead Twice in the Road" in the Journal of American Folk-Lore. This was a short folktale from Elizabeth City County, Virginia, that articulated the distinctive pan-African trickster motif. This was not unusual. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Boas's Journal of American Folk-Lore published a half-dozen issues dedicated exclusively to African and African American folklore. Affectionately known as the "Negro Numbers," these issues became standard fare for "New Negroes" as they documented and celebrated African cultural patterns in the Americas. What made this one tale from 1922 unique was the fact that a member of the Hampton Folk-Lore Society had originally recorded it in 1893. The educators and graduates of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute had formed the society to record cultural practices of rural blacks in order to demonstrate that industrial education had succeeded in fostering the so-called Christian civilization of its graduates, in part by identifying how much African heritage remained to be rooted out. "Playing Dead Twice in the Road" was one of hundreds of tales, jokes, and conundrums Alice M. Bacon, founder of the Hampton Folk-Lore Society, organized into many notebooks of fieldwork during the last decade of the...