Society
Of The Divine Word

The anthology contains selected articles that the editors deemed most representative of the various stages in the development of both journals. Above all, however, they attest to the Divine Word Missionaries’ commitment to scholarly activity in the fields of Cultural Anthropology, Linguistics, Sinology, and Oriental Studies over the past 150 years. These texts are accompanied by critical and analytical “re-study” articles written by the editors. The text that opens the anthology is “Invitation to Contribute to and Subscribe to ‘Anthropos’: International Journal of Ethnology and Linguistics” [1905], by Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954). This is the “founding document” of the Anthropos journal, in which the author presents his project for scientific application of missionaries’ knowledge of indigenous cultures and languages, and proposes a detailed questionnaire for conducting methodical field research.

Schmidt’s article is followed by the report of Martin Gusinde SVD (1886-1969) – today one of the most recognizable SVD ethnologists – concerning his fourth research trip to Tierra del Fuego (1923-1924). During this expedition, the Chilean church authorities entrusted him – as he himself writes – “with the particularly honorable task of making every effort to save the peoples of Tierra del Fuego from cultural extinction.” The section of the book devoted to Anthropos also includes a text by Paul Schebesta SVD (1887–1967) on his first expedition to short-stature peoples of the Congo (1930), followed by an article by Matthias Hermanns SVD (1899–1972) on polyandry in Tibet (1953); and a detailed critique of W. Schmidt’s methodological assumptions, written in 1983 by Henryk Zimoń, SVD (1940-2022). The last two contributions in the Anthropos section were authored by non-SVD anthropologists, namely: Anna Meiser (on the “logic of cultural appropriation among the missionized Indigenous and ‘indigenized” missionaries,” concerning the work of the Salesians among the Achuar of Ecuador – 2011), and Jean Michaud who presents the personality and work of François-Marie Savina (1876-1941), the French missionary in colonial Vietnam – “priest, rebel, and scholar” – as an example of the radical transformation that some missionaries undergo when coming into contact with indigenous cultures (2024).

The second part of the anthology contains an opening article by Zbigniew Wesołowski and five representative texts published in Monumenta Serica between 1935 and 2015 by: Henri Bernard, SJ (1935 – about the role of the Catholic Church in the development of the Chinese civilization in the 17th and 18th century); Harrie van der Stappen SVD, whom I personally met during his retirement years in Techny (1956 – Chinese painting during the Ming dynasty); Henry Serruys CICM (1957 – remnants of Mongol customs in Chinese culture); Irene Eber (1968 – Chinese vision of history), as well as the article by Jia Jinhua devoted to longevity techniques in Daoist medicine (2015).