February 9, 2006
Missionaries, Brazil's tribes and 'cultural contagion'
An article in the Washington Post today, Evangelical Missionaries Move Into Amazon Villages, looks at wrangling between anthropologists, Indian officials and missionaries over who essentially "owns" members of remote Brazilian tribes.
From the article:
But [the missionaries] often lack the permission of Brazil's government, which is now trying to regain control of the activity. Many anthropologists fear the missionaries will harm indigenous people by weakening native culture and religion and by exposing them to new germs and illnesses.... But critics say a weak Brazilian state has left the 215 known tribes vulnerable to the outreach efforts of evangelicals, however well-intentioned they may be. They fear oral history, origin myths and native religions will be lost.
"The Surui no longer worship shamans because missionaries told them it was bad. That's a terrible, immense cultural loss," said Ivaneide Cardozo, a board member at Kaninde, a nonreligious group in Rondonia state.
Christian groups say the government is acting irresponsibly and that its policies prevent it from intervening even in life-or-death situations involving tribespeople. In an effort to protect indigenous culture, many government officials do not want to introduce outside influences in tribal villages including food and medicine.
"This relativist stance violates the human rights of Indian children all over Brazil," said Braulia Ribeiro, who heads the Brazilian chapter of the international missionary group Youth With A Mission ... .
This is a very complex topic. It's funny to me to see in this article the usual proprietary interest anthropologists take in indigenous peoples -- they often resent both missionaries and backpackers who "invade" their turf, even though the anthropologists themselves also bring change through contact with remote people, no matter how careful they are.
In my first book, 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, I looked at missionaries who visited the remote upcountry of Borneo. I'll quote a passage from Chapter 3.
Language, transmitted today by a world pop and computer culture dominated by English, ultimately exerts a much bigger influence than religion on a cultures such as that of [Borneo's] Dayaks.Lesson : Language may be a more irreversible re-director of thought patterns than the discarding of animism for Christian beliefs.
For example, Afro-Brazilians, despite adopting Portuguese and nominally Catholicism, fused tribal gods to saints to create the religion called candomblé. They use the Yoruba language for ceremonies to the present day, and thus preserve an important aspect of African culture.
Professor Jerome Rousseau of McGill University put it this way in an e-mail to the author:
"The main threat to local cultures, in Borneo as in Canada, France, the United States, or what have you, is probably television. It, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. [And] the the most significant re-director of thought patterns is the socio-economic changes of a society, e.g., moving from subsistence to commodity production, moving from the country to the city and changing educational patterns and media of communication."
Change wrought by missionaries, logging and emigration had already come to the Dayaks. Perhaps it had weakened their art, perhaps it had created a need for kerosene and 90-minute air transport to the coast that people had previously managed to cope without. Possibly this was bad. But as [medical anthropologist Sjaak] van der Geest pointed out, if one accepts change as a normal part of life, “it will be agreed that the prevention of change is indeed ‘change’ in another more complex sense of the term.”
The modern world was bound to reach the remote Apau Kayan, in the same way that Chinese bead traders, Javanese transmigrasi and people who enjoyed Redmond O’Hanlon’s book have also turned up.
Lesson: Explorers, adventurer travelers, anthropologists and missionaries alike bring change no matter how much lip service they pay to cultural preservation.
Van der Geest wrote of anthropologists and missionaries (he could have included travelers as well) that "their mere presence is in itself a formidable factor of change. The culture which missionaries and anthropologists carry with them is 'contagious.' "
Exactly! All contact with the outside world is contagious -- and inevitable. While one understands the beauty and mystery of premodern people and the value of probing their beliefs, it is ultimately patronizing to exclude them from the lives we choose for ourselves, free of superstition and with top-notch nutrition, health care, choices and ultimately ease.
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