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<jr724@cabrini.edu> I am putting together a panel on missionaries and colonial ethnography in Africa for ASA this fall. I'd like to invite people to join as panel participants. As many of us know, missionary writings have long provided anthropologists, historians, and others interested in colonial Africa with an important set of sources. What this panel seeks to explore is how missionaries worked as anthropologists in their own right - constructing discourses of cultural identity and historical narratives, conducting fieldwork through interviews and observation, and providing material that often would be appropriated by different African communities for vary different uses than their missionary authors had planned. My paper will examine how Catholic missionaries developed often sharply different views of Gabonese groups - especially Fang-speaking clans in coastal Gabon - even though they used the same means and fieldwork strategies to develop their research. In particular, I will be constrating the works of three missionaries - prolific French writer Maurice Briault, African researcher Andre Raponda Walker, and future Catholic traditionalist leader Marcel Lefebvre. John Cinnamon, an anthropologist at Miami of Ohio, will examine how contemporary Fang communities have used the work of colonial ethnographers to construct narratives of Fang identity. We welcome people working on missionaries as producers of knowledge in any area of Africa from the mid-19th century to the present. Please contact me directly if you are interested. All the best, Jeremy
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