Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missions Joan-Pau Rubiés * ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Early modern Christian missionaries often learnt about other cultures in remark- able depth, and made an extremely important contribution to the writing of ethnog- raphy and to the global circulation of knowledge. While their cultural insight was usually built upon linguistic expertise, missionary writings were of a complex na- ture, often combining scientific observations and historical speculations with wider rhetorical aims. In fact, issues such as accommodation to local customs became complex ideological battlegrounds. Whilst an earlier historiography may have been tempted to emphasize either the pioneering character of the Christian missionar- ies as proto-anthropologists, or – in a more critical fashion – their Eurocentric ideological agendas, there is growing awareness of the crucial importance of the native mediators who acted as knowledge brokers, and who also had their own personal agendas and cultural biases. However, the cultural interactions did not end here: in parallel to these complex acts of local translation, missionaries also ’translated’ cultural diversity in another direction, to the European Republic of Letters, where they increasingly had to defend religious orthodoxy in the context of a rapidly changing intellectual landscape. MISSIONARIES AS ETHNOGRAPHERS AND AS AGENTS OF GLOBALIZATION The role of early modern Christian missionaries as ethnographers, or indeed as proto-anthropologists, has long been recognized. Often working within a consolidated colonial project, but sometimes also acting precariously in areas with limited European presence and at the mercy of local powers, missionaries were often at the forefront of the encounter with various peoples across the world, whom they generally sought to convert to their own version of the faith, while perhaps also indirectly supporting an imperialist agenda. Missionar- ies were not of course the only European participants in any such * Department of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: joan-pau.rubies@upf.edu. Studies in Church History 53 (2017) 272–310 © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017 doi: 10.1017/stc.2016.17 Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/stc.2016.17 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.6.167.68, on 27 May 2017 at 14:38:25, subject to the