(a) 'Incidental' ethnographers (b) An empire divided

JEAN MICHAUD

‘Incidental’ ethnographers. French Catholic missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan frontier, 1880–1930

Leiden: Brill, 2007. xvi + 279 pp., photos, bibliography, index.

ISBN 978-90-04-13996-1. €104, US$155

J.P. DAUGHTON

An empire divided. Religion, republicanism, and the making of French colonialism, 1880–1914

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xii + 330 pp., notes, index. ISBN 978-0-19-530530-2, hb £32.99; 978-0-19-537401, pb, £13.99

Reviewed by Jan Ovesen, Uppsala University

Jean Michaud has done a great service to the history of anthropology with his meticulously researched account of French Catholic missionary ethnography of the highland populations of Tonkin (present-day northern Vietnam) and adjacent areas of Yunnan and northern Laos. Through his own contemporary anthropological work in that region, Michaud is eminently qualified for the task, and the reader gets a vivid sense of the author’s dedication and his occasional thrills at new discoveries when trawling the archives of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris (MEP, the French Overseas Missionary Society), the most important missionary organisation in Tonkin.

The book is divided into four parts. The first is a general introduction that discusses the relation between missionary and anthropological endeavours and gives an overview of the Tonkin area. The second goes into detail about the formation (also in the French sense of the word) of Catholic overseas missionaries. The third part takes us back to Tonkin and reviews the MEP’s presence in the area. For readers with a sympathetic interest in the organisation and personnel of the missionary society this part contains a lot of detailed factual information. Given the considerable number of missionaries active in the Tonkin area, all these potential ‘incidental’ ethnographers, who lived mostly alone in the local communities and could hardly avoid doing participant observation, produced very little of scholarly interest. If this comes as a surprise (given that one might assume the book would be about missionaries’ contributions to historical ethnography), the author (pp. 68-80) explains the reasons: Prospective overseas missionaries were mainly recruited from rural peasant families. A family might give one of their brighter sons to the Church at about the age of 12.[1] He would then be taken away to an elementary boarding school seminary, from which he would proceed to higher seminaries and eventually to the society’s seminary in Paris. All through this education, the young man had virtually no exposure, socially or intellectually, to the secular world around him. After having thus been brainwashed, he would be shipped off to the penultimate destination of this religious trafficking, the mission’s headquarters in Hanoi, to spend a year learning the Vietnamese language and the practicalities of missionary work, and finally he would be sent out into the bush to live among the natives and convert them to Christianity. The missionaries regularly submitted written reports to their bishop, detailing success rates of conversion and conveying ethnographic observations. Such reports, however, were not preserved in the original as they were censored and edited by the bishop and synthesised with others into the vicariate’s official annual report, the compte-rendu. Appropriately sanitised versions of individual missionaries’ travelogues and ethnographic observations could find their way into missionary journals for the home market, for the purpose of boosting financial contributions to the mission. As Daughton shows in his book (pp. 230-2), the missionary journals’ fanciful accounts of the savagery of not yet converted natives served the double purpose of titillating the readers’ taste for exoticism and impressing upon them the urgency of conversion. During their education, the missionaries had been admonished not unduly to attempt to change local customs, unless, of course, they were ‘decisively wrong habits, contrary to moral and religion’ (Michaud, p. 80). For a missionary working among highland groups in Tonkin, chances were that a fair proportion of local customs would fall into the decisively wrong category: Polygyny, pre-marital sex, or lavish communal feasts involving the invocation of spirits of nature or of the ancestors, animal sacrifices and the consumption of copious amounts of liquor – definitely not the way things were done back home in the village in Auvergne or Bretagne.

Against this background the most remarkable thing is that any missionary of the Société des missions étrangères would produce anything of scholarly value, and indeed those who did were few and far between. In the fourth part of the book Michaud goes into detail about the contributions of (the only) five missionary ethnographers whose works merit serious attention as historical ethnography. To me, this is the most rewarding part of the book. Among the five, the most prominent was François Savina, both because of the quality of his scholarly output and its sheer quantity due to the fact that he managed to stay alive till the ripe old age of 65 at which time he had spent 40 years in the field (1901–1941). He published extensively on linguistics (French bilingual dictionaries of Tai, Miao and Chinese languages); his main ethnographic works were devoted to the Miao/Hmong (also the group among whom Michaud has done field research), his magnum opus being Histoire des Miao (1924). Michaud provides a balanced and informative assessment of this work. Savina was a colourful figure, decidedly a maverick. Right from the beginning he was reprimanded for ‘transgressing the rules,’ apparently by going native, and for most of his career his superiors tried their best to be ‘rid of this turbulent priest.’ But as the missionary order could not dismiss him against his will and he himself refused to defrock, he was instead allowed unofficial leave of absence from his conversion duties for extended periods, among other things to assist military campaigns in Tonkin and northern Laos, and even to work for the Dominicans, missionary competitors of the MEP, on the Chinese border. The author (or perhaps the archive?) is tactfully silent about the specific nature of Savina’s alleged transgressions, but he was eventually banned from Tonkin altogether and sent off to Hong Kong, where he spent five years writing his monumental Guide linguistique de l’Indochine français (1939) – after which he managed to return to Tonkin for the last two years of his life.

In the concluding chapter, Michaud touches lightly on the fraught relationship between the Catholic missions and the civil colonial government after the turn of the century and indirectly blames the latter for the decline of the missions in the northern uplands after 1920 and the fact that no worthwhile missionary ethnographic publications appeared after Savina (pp. 228-30). The complex and uneasy relationship between the Catholic missions and the colonial state is the subject of J.P. Daughton’s book, which analyses the case of Indochina (as well as French Polynesia and Madagascar). Rather than taking for granted a collusion between missionaries and colonisers, Daughton shows convincingly that their separate agendas eventually led to mutual distrust. For the highlands of Tonkin, Michaud points to the connection between the apostolic assignments and the colonial military agenda of winning territories and controlling populations (p. 74) and sees the missionary as the perfect scout, the eyes and ears of the colonial system at the margins of the empire (p. 80). This was no doubt generally the case during the phase of colonial military conquest and ‘pacification’ which in Tonkin was a protracted affair, lasting a decade from around 1884. But the alliance between the missions and the military during that period was first of all a pragmatic one: the military needed logistic intelligence, and the missionaries could hope for military protection for themselves and ‘their’ communities of Christian converts. This did not mean, as Michaud claims, that the missionaries were totally committed to the colonial institution and aligned themselves ideologically and politically with the colonial project (pp. 13, 79). Daughton cites former Governor General of Indochina, Jean-Marie de Lanessan, for the observation that the missionaries had only one goal, to make Christians, and that this should hardly surprise us, since that was the reason they became missionaries in the first place (p. 96). By this Lanessan implied that the missionaries were not to be trusted as part of the colonial project which was the Third Republic’s mission civilisatrice based on the liberal, secular values of the Enlightenment. The law separating the Church from the State had been passed in 1905,[2] and the ideological and political division between the church/military on the one hand and the republicans on the other was made painfully obvious by the Dreyfus affair. For the missionaries this meant that they had to persuade the government that they were indeed patriots, working for the glory of France and not only for the glory of God. In Indochina the division emerged in practical terms in the cause of everyday colonial administration, once it had been established and manned mainly by republicans. The often bitter antagonism between missionaries and colonial administrators also revealed something about the impact of the missionaries on the local societies, which was not restricted to the formal religious conversion. Daughton (p. 12) observes that ‘missionaries’ mere presence in a community often led to devastating social unrest, as conversions could turn neighbors against one another’. Notwithstanding the hardships of missionary life, a benefit of working in Tonkin was that both among lowland Vietnamese and upland minority groups, the local societies were generally organised communally, along the lines of kinship or territory. This meant that religious conversion was not an individual affair; once the village or clan leader was persuaded, the whole community could be declared Christian, something that significantly aided conversion statistics. As part of the conversion deal, the missionary would often assume the role of spiritual and social authority of ‘his’ communities and was expected to act as their patron. Daughton relates examples of how missionaries intervened in favour of their Christian clients accused of criminal conduct, which the colonial administration saw as the obstruction of both French and indigenous legal procedures (p. 68). But there were limits to the missionaries’ abilities to protect their converts, even during the pragmatic alliance with the military. During the religious violence that accompanied the French military invasion of Tonkin from 1884, Daughton notes (p. 63) that between 30,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese Christian converts were killed, by the Vietnamese emperor’s army and by non-Christian communities who saw them as traitors collaborating with the invading enemy. This amounted to the death of about 20% of all converts in Tonkin, but lest we believe that this was a serious set-back for the mission, rather the opposite turned out to be the case: the mission needed converts, but it also needed martyrs. The killings of Christians were glorified as martyrdom in the missionary journals; that the martyrs were natives rather than French was of course an added benefit.

Daughton’s book is indispensable for scholars with an interest in French colonialism. Michaud’s book will appeal to a more specialised audience, but even so it deserves a wider readership than it is likely to get, considering its outrageous price (equivalent to £1 per 3 to 4 pages). Moreover, language editing has obviously not contributed to the production costs. English is not Michaud’s first language, and the correction of the occasional awkward choice of words and turns of phrase would have made reading an even greater pleasure.

[1] A similar recruitment strategy was employed by the Khmer Rouge revolutionary movement in Cambodia in the early 1970s.

[2] The same year saw the establishment of the state’s colonial medical service which, at least in Indochina, implied that the religious sisters were no longer permitted to work as nurses in government hospitals and that the military physicians became subordinate to their civilian confrères.