'Incidental' Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880-1930

By: Michaud, Jean

This book, connecting the fields of social anthropology and missiology, presents a body of colonial ethnographic writing applied to highland societies in the southern portion of the Mainland Southeast Asian massif. The writers under scrutiny are Catholic priests from the Soci t des Missions trang res de Paris. Their texts from the Upper-Tonkin vicariate, in today's northern Vietnam, are paid special attention, notably through its major contributor, F.M. Savina. The author locates this ethnographic heritage against its historical, political and intellectual background. A comparison is conducted with French missionaries-cum-ethnographers who worked among the 'natives' in New France (Canada) in the 17th century, yielding the unexpected conclusion that practically nothing from this early period of experimentation was remembered.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9004139966
• ISBN13: 9789004139961
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Brill
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.4"