梅花和蜡梅被西方世界认识的历史考证

文中收集、整理了自17世纪至20世纪共22位西方学者(包括西方化的日本学者)认识、命名、收集、培育梅花Prunus mume、蜡梅Chimonanthus praecox的文献资料及其历史贡献,并比较两种植物被西方世界认识的历史差异,分析成因。最后探讨梅花、蜡梅在世界范围内推广的困境及原因。     

German Missionaries and Australian Anthropology

ABSTRACT

In their primary task of converting Indigenous Australians to Christianity, German missions active in various parts of Australia through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century recorded relatively few successes. On the other hand, their endeavours in observing and recording Aboriginal languages and cultures have left a rich – and yet frequently overlooked – anthropological legacy. A common element in that legacy is their work in the area of linguistics, which they understood to be a necessary foundation for their evangelical work. Nonetheless, caution must be exercised in evaluating the German missionary contribution to Australian anthropology according to either national or religious paradigms. German anthropology, as practised within the community of missionaries and outside, evinces a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Moreover German anthropologists, including missionaries, were by the late nineteenth century connected into international knowledge networks.     

Erhard Eylmann’s Missionary Position

ABSTRACT

The German anthropologist Erhard Eylmann relied heavily on assistance provided by missionaries when he undertook fieldwork in Australia. During two periods at the Hermannsburg mission he developed a strained relationship with Carl Strehlow. In his major work Eylmann wrote a damning critique of missionaries. While there was a level of personal animosity between Eylmann and Strehlow, at the heart of the antagonism were fundamental differences concerning the nature and function of the discipline of anthropology. The missionaries sought anthropological knowledge to promote mutual understanding, above all through language, as a prelude to conversion to Christianity. They proceeded from the assumption that the future of Indigenous Australians would be within the context of the adoption of Christian belief systems. Eylmann in contrast took the view that the differences between Europeans and Indigenous Australians were physical, essential and insuperable. Sceptical about the possibility of achieving mutual understanding, he devoted his fieldwork primarily to describing, recording and collecting for the purpose of assembling a detailed record of a population he believed destined for extinction. Eylmann and German missionary anthropologists such as Strehlow had in common that they stood outside the paradigm of British social evolutionistic thinking which dominated Australian anthropology around the turn of the century at the time. At the same time, the differences in the anthropological endeavours of Eylmann and Strehlow indicate the great breadth of approaches opening up within German anthropology. In particular they point to the emergence of an ‘antihumanist’ turn at the end of the nineteenth century.     

‘Anthropological Investigation has Very Little Interest for Me’: Notes from Moravian Missionaries in Australia

ABSTRACT

As some of the first people to spend extended amounts of time with Indigenous peoples, missionaries were well placed to provide information to European and colonial audiences on non-European peoples. Moravian missionaries arrived in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century and over the next six decades worked amongst numerous Indigenous groups in the south-eastern part of Australia, in the interior, and in northern Queensland. This paper will trace the contributions made by German Moravian missionaries to anthropological and ethnographical knowledge both in the colonies as well as in Germany. It will particularly focus upon the connections forged in religious and scientific networks through anthropological work. The paper contends that a unified German identity was forged through scientific work that transcended denominational boundaries. Moreover, the ability to disseminate ethnographical knowledge within secular circles, both in the colonies and in Germany, provided legitimisation to missionary work and embedded missionaries within global knowledge networks. Through examining the work of one individual missionary, Friedrich Hagenauer, the fragility of these global knowledge networks is explored.     

‘Black and white,a significant contrast’: Race,humanism and missionary photography in the Pacific

Taking the example of ‘Studies in black and white’, a genre of photographs taken around the end of the nineteenth century by Methodist missionaries in the Pacific, this article seeks to go beyond conventional analyses that scrutinize colonial photography for forms of domination. I argue that these photographs, and the context in which some of them were published, reveal a complex interplay between two contradictory principles: on the one hand, a Christian humanism, articulating a vision of commonality and equality, and on the other, paternalism, articulating a vision of superiority and inequality .