Early Ethnography

Early Ethnography December 15, 2014

Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented? includes a brief outline of William Ward’s 1817 treatise on the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos. He describes the missionary Ward as one of the “first Europeans to adopt an ethnographic stance” (79).

Pennington continues: “He turned from linguistic and textual studies to something closer to an anthropological model that concerns itself not with the textual past but the cultural present, a model not widespread until Bronislaw Malinowski came to champion it in the twentieth century. Ward observed and analyzed people engaged in religious performance, and to a degree, he was able to overcome the bias in favor of texts that mars contemporaneous Orientalist accounts. Ward attempted to paint the actual deeds, convictions, and moods of those Bengali Hindus he studied aside from the idealized versions of religious practice available in Sanskrit texts. For this last reason, Ward is one of Europe’s earliest and best proto-ethnographers.”

Pennington acknowledges that Ward’s evangelicalism shaped his approach to his subjects, but sees that as a plus as much as a minus: “Although there can be no doubt his evangelical biases deeply colored his representations of Hinduism, one might consider also how his commitment to the condition of the souls of real, individual actors enabled, rather than impeded, his observational abilities. I would suggest that his own religious convictions encouragedWard to take the experiences and beliefs of marginalized Hindus— especially lower castes and women—more seriously than contemporaneous Orientalists had. Indeed, evangelical assumptions about the unity and perfectibility of all humankind starkly distinguish this proto-ethnographic stance from the racist anthropology of the later nineteenth century, which was based on scientific models assuming unbridgeable racial difference rather than the common heritage and destiny of humankind” (80).

Ward was one of the earliest and most vigorous critics of the caste system, and in that too he anticipated later activist-anthropology, which sometimes has used lurid description to rouse readers to indignation: “Evangelical theology inclined the missionary to consider individual experience seriously and to observe closely the changing material and emotional fortunes of those he or she hoped eventually to convert. Missionaries’ published journals, their reports to supervising missionary boards, and their letters to denominational newspapers spoke of village life, popular ceremony, and the deprivation of the impoverished. Missionaries carefully followed the lives of individuals out of both genuine biblical compassion and an eagerness for converts. Hence Hindoos’ double-edged character: richly detailed, brimming with compassion for the poor and ignorant, but unrelentingly hostile toward the priests and moral influence of Hindu culture” (80).


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