FEATURE
FIG. 14 (facing page middle):
Father Ange Dréan (1882–
1933) giving a funerary
sermon during an ecumenical
ceremony accompanying the
traditional burial of a Teke
chief. Brazzaville. 1918.
© CSSp.
FIG. 11 (right):
Inscribed “Tatouages (fl eur
de lys) au Muni.”
Pencil on paper.
From Alexandre Le Roy, En passant,
croquis de route (Gabon), 1895.
© CSSp.
FIG. 12 (below):
Inscribed “Fétiche des
Mpongwés.”
Pencil on paper.
From Alexandre Le Roy, En passant,
croquis de route (Gabon), 1895.
© CSSp.
FIG. 13 (facing page top):
Father Camille Laagel
(1880–1956) preaching, with
a human skull resting on his
knees. Angola. 1932.
© CSSp.
FIG. 10 (left): Inscribed
“Chez les Massongo,
dessins sur les portes (l’art
primitif?).”
Pencil on paper.
From Alexandre Le Roy, En passant,
croquis de route (Gabon), 1895.
© CSSp.
among the peoples they worked with, the missionaries
who went to this kind of effort in their ministries
contributed to the emergence of the burgeoning
new science of ethnology. Indeed, they often
had the advantage of extended periods of interaction
that passing researchers did not. The fi rsthand
information they obtained served as a resource for
many anthropologists. Frequently, the missionaries
were not satisfi ed with just collecting information.
They often analyzed it and drew conclusions that
were dubious. The intermingling of ethnological
and religious considerations found in their publications,
essays, and colloquiums delineated the work
of missionaries from those of the more scientifi cally
minded ethnologists.
The birth of this kind of “religious science,” a sort
of “apologetic anthropology,” has to be understood
within the intellectual context of the period. At the
end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning
of the twentieth, a number of disciplines—sociology,
psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy,
among them—were approaching the subject of religion
and attempting to explain it from a critical and
rationalist perspective. This incursion into what the
men of the church saw as a space reserved solely for
them was deemed by them to be dangerously “irreligious”
6 and denounced as a “reductionist attitude
… whose objective is to dissolve the religious in
the religion of humanity.”7 Anthropology in particular,
with authors like Edward B. Tylor, questioned
the origins of God and developed theories of the
evolution of myths and beliefs based on the study
of archaic social structures. In the face of this competition,
religious groups chose “to appropriate this
knowledge and to produce it themselves, either to
facilitate the propagation of the evangelical message
or to become engaged in anti-science.”8
The periodical Anthropos, founded by the German
priest Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906, was one of
the main channels through which this Catholic
religious ethnology found expression, and it positioned
itself squarely against the academic science
of Marcel Mauss. Alexandre Le Roy, already well
known at the time for his ethnological work, signed
the introductory article to the magazine’s fi rst issue.
In this essay, which remains famous, the Spiritan
explains and defends the scientifi c role that missionaries,
according to him, must play as fi eld researchers,
since they are uniquely in tune with the realities
of the places in which they work. He further argues