Colonizing Language? Missionaries and Gikuyu Dictionaries, 1904 and 1914
Colonizing Language? Missionaries and Gikuyu Dictionaries, 1904 and 1914
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殖民语言？
DOI：
10.2307/3172029
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发表时间：
1997
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
D. Peterson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Peterson
受文明化使命的语言和物质需求的驱使，20世纪初的英国传教士试图将吉库尤语（肯尼亚中部大部分地区使用的语言）简化为一种系统的单词和短语代码。其中两个是A.R.巴洛，一个有时叛逆的长老会门外汉，和A.W.麦格雷戈，一个保守的英国圣公会制作的吉库尤语法，麦格雷戈形容为一个“试探性”的努力，以改善欧洲定居者和基督教福音传教士的语言困难。本文试图将这两部词典作为历史文本来解读，强调它们体现殖民霸权的复杂性和偶然性的方式。首先，我认为字典是殖民权力的功能性工具。正如约翰和让·科马罗夫（John and Jean Comaroff）所表明的，传教士的语言干预是殖民控制分类计划的一个组成部分：通过坚持理性的辩论模式，并通过定义辩论形成的语言，传教士巧妙地将霸权化的轨迹强加于文化交流。继科马罗夫之后，我概述了这些语法通过字典创造和强加语言意义来殖民吉库尤主体语言的方式。与此同时，我认为这些词典不仅仅是传教事业的功能工具。这些词典令人不安地处于传教士的语言权力和吉库尤语话语之间的接触点上：如果词典要对传教士有用，那么它的作者就必须进入当地关于权力、财产和财富的对话的惯用词汇。
Driven by the linguistic and material imperatives of the civilizing mission, early twentieth-century British missionaries sought to reduce Gikuyu, a language spoken in much of central Kenya, to a systematic code of words and phrases. Two of them—A.R. Barlow, a sometime renegade Presbyterian layman, and A.W. MacGregor, a conservative Anglican—produced Gikuyu grammars in what MacGregor described as a “tentative” effort to ameliorate the linguistic difficulties of European settlers and Christian evangelists. This essay is an attempt to read these two dictionaries as historical texts, highlighting the ways in which they embodied the complexities and contingencies built into colonial hegemony. In the first instance, I argue that the dictionaries were functional tools of colonizing power. As John and Jean Comaroff have shown, missionaries' linguistic interventions were an integral part of the classifying project of colonial control: by insisting on rational modes of debate, and by defining the language in which the debate took shape, missionaries coercively imposed a hegemonizing trajectory onto cultural exchange. Following the Comaroffs, I outline the ways in which these grammars worked to colonize the language of Gikuyu subjects by creating and imposing linguistic meaning through the dictionary. At the same time, I suggest that these dictionaries were more than functional tools of missionary enterprise. The dictionaries sit uncomfortably at the point of contact between missionary linguistic power and Gikuyu discourse: if the dictionary was to be useful for missionary purposes, then its authors were necessarily compelled to enter into the idiomatic lexicon of local conversations over power, property, and wealth.