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Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. By Patrick Harries. Athens: Ohio University Press; Oxford: James Currey, 2007. Pp. xvii, 286; 30 illustrations. $26.95 paper.
Patrick Harries explores the relationship between Swiss missionaries (hailing from a noncolonial power) and their African counterparts in southeastern Africa, in what is now modern-day South Africa and Mozambique. In doing so, he illuminates the role that knowledge about Africans, their landscape, and their biota played in fashioning a Swiss identity, particularly vis-à-vis France. At the same time Harries illuminates the ways in which that knowledge helped to create languages, ethnicities, and understandings of Africanness. His linking of the study of anthropology with other scientific fields is one of the more interesting aspects of this work.
The main historical figures, Henri-Alexandre Junod and Henri Berthoud, were members of Swiss Free Churches, born of political and religious ferment in nineteenthcentury western Swiss cantons. These churches had a strong sense of mission and their missionaries carried the recent controversies with them to Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hoping to found a new, homogenous congregation in Africa. The Swiss people gave these missions their...