This wonderful, complex study of missionary thought in action is probably best described as an extended meditation on the intricacies of cultural encounter on the imperial frontier. Adopting an uncompromising constructivist perspective, Harries illuminates the extent to which the production of knowledge in and about early colonial Africa was the fruit of a drawn-out process of interchange between European and African cognitive systems. In this sense, and despite the author disavowing any aim to write a comprehensive history of ‘subaltern experience’ (p. 2), Butterflies & Barbarians is no less a celebration of African ‘agency in tight corners’ than was Harries's earlier study of Mozambican migrant labourers at the outset of southern Africa's mining revolution.

Not the least arresting feature of this breathtakingly erudite volume is the author's command of the nineteenth-century intellectual history of French-speaking western Switzerland, whence the missionaries of the Swiss Romande Mission to south-eastern Africa originated and to which the book's first two chapters are dedicated. While Chapter 1 traces the Mission's origins in the revivalist movement that swept across western Switzerland in the first part of the century, Chapter 2 is especially concerned with the influence of missionary images of Africa on the metropole's social life. Through a painstaking analysis of an impressive array of missionary publications, Harries is able to establish a convincing correlation between the popularity of the Mission's African propaganda and the divided Swiss people's quest for unity and identity. But early missionary portrayals of Africans were not monochromatic. To be sure, the depiction of the evil, dark forces confronted by the missionaries provided home supporters with a ‘measure of their own level of evolution and civilization’ (p. 40). Yet missionary imagery also embodied the germ of an anti-modernist critique. The Africans of missionary propaganda were thus both the ‘contemporary ancestors’ whose very existence confirmed Europe's position ‘at the summit of an ineluctable line of progress’ (p. 48) and the simple, naive souls whom missionaries felt duty-bound to protect against the vices and materialism of capitalist modernity.

The book's overarching theme – the discursive interaction between knowledge systems – begins to unravel in Chapter 3, which takes the reader to the Swiss Mission's field of operation in north-eastern Transvaal and southern Mozambique. By examining the missionaries' efforts to rein in an African-led Christian revival in the Delagoa Bay area in the mid-1880s, the chapter presents Christianity in Africa as a site of negotiation between imported and autochthonous forms of spirituality. The operations of this process of intellectual hybridization are most easily discernible in the scientific, linguistic and anthropological travails of the Swiss missionaries and, especially, Henri-Alexandre Junod, the polymath whose towering figure dominates the book's last six chapters. Throughout his career, Junod willfully drew on African expertise and knowledge. Yet Harries does not turn this all-important culture broker into a relativist ante litteram; and neither does he shy away from expounding on the racialized, evolutionist intellectual environment out of which his prodigious scholarly output emerged. In his botanical and entomological work (the subject of Chapter 5), Junod praised and drew on African understandings of the natural world, but, because of their utilitarian and animistic connotations, he still viewed them as falling far short of the standards set by European scientific rationality and organizing logic. At times, Junod's faith in the superiority of European science slid into an open justification of imperialism.

Similarly convoluted intellectual dynamics underlay the Swiss missionaries' efforts to construct and diffuse written vehicular languages for their African charges (Chapters 6 and 7). Even though he recognized the richness of oral languages, Junod was convinced that only their reduction to writing could discipline ‘the “Bantu mind”’ and enable both Christian morality and analytical rationality to replace the ‘flexibility, impermanence and instability associated with orality’ (p. 186). But the missionaries found it impossible to control the consequences of the process of social engineering they had set in motion. Not only was literacy often used by Africans to subvert the very reforming purposes that the missionaries had invested it with, but the ‘discovery’ and standardization of the ‘Thonga’ and ‘Ronga’ languages also gave an emerging African elite the opportunity to call into being new social communities whose future political significance the missionary could hardly fathom. Junod's ‘salvage anthropology’, discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, also made a decisive contribution to the ethnic streamlining of the region. His emphasis on fieldwork notwithstanding, Junod's taxonomic anxiety and evolutionist ideas led him to disregard the socioeconomic changes taking place around him (a failing for which he would soon be called to task by professional, university-based social anthropologists) and to view Africans as ‘naturally tribal peoples fixed at an inferior level of evolution’ (p. 218).

Harries stops short of presenting his ‘microstudy’ (p. 2) as paradigmatic, but there is little doubt that his approach to the construction of knowledge about Africa will prove a source of inspiration to countless social and cultural historians of the continent. Harries, however, might have seen fit to tackle head-on the question of the typicality of the experience of the Swiss Romande Mission. This reviewer, in particular, felt that the absence of comparative perspectives detracted somewhat from Harries's otherwise excellent discussion of the relationships between missionary propaganda and Romande politics of identity. Surely, I found myself wondering, French-speaking Swiss cannot have been the only European people whose sense of self owed something to missionary exploits in faraway lands. What, for instance, of Norway and the other Scandinavian countries that, like Switzerland, spawned significant missionary movements despite lacking any imperial possessions? Also puzzling is the very limited space that Butterflies & Barbarians allocates to missionary medicine, where, conceivably, the tensions between European and African ideas may have been even more pronounced than they were in the field of anthropology or the natural sciences. It is not clear whether the book's almost complete silence on the subject implies that the Swiss attributed comparatively little value to medical knowledge and the forms of engagement with African societies that it brought in its wake. Despite these minor reservations, this lavishly illustrated volume remains a towering achievement that lifts mission studies to a level of sophistication rarely achieved in the past.