Peter Pels

Critique and Reflexivity in Anthropology A Report On the Bob Scholte Memorial Conference, Held in Amsterdam, December 1988

Organizing a conference about critical anthropology in memory of Bob Scholte was the opposite of attending it. As the organizers of the conference, we felt satisfied with and grateful for the enthusiasm and cooperation with which would-be participants greeted the announcement of our plans 1. This was largely but not solely determined by the goodwill the memory of Bob Scholte evokes. Our attempts to plan the conference were met with an eagerness which suggested that critical anthropologists of different persuasions wanted to engage in dialogue with one another. During the conference, however, we were struck by the extent to which critique and reflexivity in anthropology can lead to dissensus and polarization. In the following we will sketch the way the conference was structured, its proceedings, and the lines along which it tended to come apart.

Review article : Contradiction and irony in the ethnography of missions, or :How Did Bishop Arkfeld Get His Feathered Mitre ?

Contemporary ethnography of missions finds itself caught in a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, anthropologists are highly suspicious of missionaries’ motives and their relationship with colonial powers; missionaries are treated as the paradigm of ethnocentrism, that which every anthropologist is inclined to combat On the other hand, a reflexive anthropologist has to acknowledge that this distrust of missionaries has been a staple of anthropological rhetoric during the 20th century. The denial of missionary ethnography and the affirmation of the missionaries’ ethnocentricity was part and parcel of the efforts of early ethnographers to establish themselves as the only experts on the affairs of the Other (see Pels 1990). In other words, anthropologists have to be suspicious of their own suspicion towards missionaries, as it may be more in their own interest to denounce missionaries than in the interests of