Arrested Circulation: Catholic Missionaries, Anthropological Knowledge and the Politics of Cultural Difference in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914

Abstract

This chapter studies a case of colonial moral panic that reverberated in German imperial politics and affected anthropological research. In 1908 Benedictine missionaries in southern Tanzania realized that the initiation rites (unyago) of the Mwera, Makua, Makonde and Yao people of their field included sex education, circumcision and female genital cutting. For three decades missionaries tried to suppress initiation before attempting a compromise. This chapter argues that such conflicts about colonial intimacy echoed in the Catholic Centre Party’s undecided stance on inter-ethnic marriages, in the weakness of African Catholicism in the area and in cultural anthropology’s ideas of rites of passage. As a result of their moral panic, missionaries stopped circulating their findings on initiation. The chapter concludes by differentiating between current notions of cultural brokerage and knowledge circulation.