Jane Samson's new book brings a new and welcome edginess to our current understanding of British Protestant missions in the Pacific in the modern era. It serves simultaneously to challenge reductionist thinking, to offer a more cohesive conceptual approach and to break open new ways of understanding the vexed relationship between missionaries and anthropology on the one hand and between missionaries and cultures on the other. As such it sits within a wider body of historical scholarship which, in the last decade or so, has enabled us to comprehend historically missionary-indigenous encounters in ways that are more nuanced and which create further room for creative dialogue. In particular it provides a welcome space for both theology and anthropology to be considered together as mutually constitutive influences.

Samson's intent is to add value to current post-colonial and historical scholarship by taking the religious factor ‘both seriously and critically in order to bring greater nuance to the debate about missionary encounters with indigenous peoples’ (p. 4). Trying to move beyond such binaries as science versus religion or progressive narratives of religion supplanted by science, Samson instead argues for the inclusion of ‘a consideration of theology in academic historical analysis’ (p. 5). As such she adopts and develops ‘Christian theological anthropology’ (p. 4) as a key hermeneutical lens, in critical conversation with a wide range of literature that also engages with this concept. At its heart was the issue of how missionaries might relate to and engage with the Other.

Here Samson's contribution to the debate is at least two-fold. First, she locates the origins of a missionary theology of humanity not in the medieval or early modern eras, nor exclusively in response to the emergence of modern academic anthropology, but right back in the early phases of Christian history, where formative texts and concepts were established. These reveal an ‘ancient and necessarily paradoxical theological anthropology of Christian missions’ (p. 5). Second, and consequently, she focuses on how Protestant missionaries brought ‘all available resources to bear as they struggled to live out the paradox’ of what she terms ‘othering and brothering [emphasis original]’ (p. 5). This was the paradox at the heart of missionary theological anthropology: a ‘basic feature of Christian discourse’ (p. 72) wherein those drawn into the newly emerging Christian community were simultaneously embraced by universal principles of divine love (brothers) and yet still rendered different on a range of socio-cultural scales (others). Samson conceptualises this helpfully in the Pacific context by using a ‘spatial metaphor’ of a grid with two axes, whereby ‘othering’ was used ‘to rank the world's people higher or lower according to various scales’ and ‘brothering, required missionaries as a matter of faith to believe in the unity and equality of human beings’ narrated within a teleological view of history (pp. 8–9). Missionary life and missiological responses were each located within this ongoing tension, resulting in a theological anthropology that was ‘vertical and exclusive, distinguishing Christians from non-Christians, but also horizontal and inclusive, aspiring to equality’ (p. 94). The relationship between othering and brothering was symbiotic and thus ‘mutually dependent’ (p. 8).

This ‘fundamental paradox in missionary accounts of Pacific peoples’ is thus central to Race and redemption in terms of its telling. While the rationale for a two-part structure is not overly clear, introductory chapters provide perspective by tracing out a history of Protestant missions, the development of anthropology and the evolving (and increasingly intricate) relationship between anthropologists and Pacific missionaries especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (‘Anthropologies’ and ‘Networks’). The dedicated chapter on ‘Othering and Brothering’ draws this often tendentious and productive missionary-anthropology relationship further by focusing on specific Pacific examples: debates over race, material objects, cannibalism, family affections, music, literature/literacy and theories about Aryan diffusionism. Missionaries’ encounters, and their ongoing dialogues or disagreements with anthropologists, are then developed further through dedicated chapters on missionary translations, kinship and academic assumptions, religion and gender.

This final chapter (‘Engendering difference’) is critical to the whole book and is an important new contribution to ongoing scholarship on cultural encounters and their modern-day implications. To this point Samson provides a careful exposition of such encounters, across both Polynesian, Melanesian and Australian settings, which rightfully challenges any temptation to take a reductionist approach and which emphasises the many context-specific ways in which missionaries and indigenous peoples interacted, understood, misunderstood, accepted and rejected one another. Yet, Samson argues, issues of gender and sexuality indicate that there was still ‘unfinished business in the radical universalism preached by missionaries’ (p. 194). In particular she focuses on the place of women within emerging Pacific Christianities and the vexed issue of homosexuality (or elements of homosexual practice beyond the bounds of contemporary middle-class British comprehension). She also considers varying conceptions of the body, appropriate dress, circumcision and heterosexual relations. While this was so across many mission contexts a strength of Samson's approach, here, is her attention to particular island groups or cultural settings in which these were played out, and also to the ways in which missionary misperceptions reflected both their theological assumptions and metropolitan cultural expectations. Samson concludes that ‘the otherness here was at times too alien to be embraced. The missionary ethnographies that had transcended race and rank, however paternalistically, consistently privileged matters of gender and sexuality as barriers to full equality and leadership in Christian communities’. As such ‘here lies the unfinished business of Christian theological anthropology in the Pacific world and beyond’ (p. 244).

For all these reasons this book is a valuable addition to current thinking about the Pacific, religious and cultural encounter and missionary history. There were a few questions or gaps. By the 1920s what was the relationship of the increasingly frequent faith or non-denominational missions to ‘othering and brothering’? Here we might think of such groups as the Queensland Kanaka Mission and its derivative South Seas Evangelical Mission. In discussion of universal religious concepts among indigenous peoples, why was there no mention of the vexed issue of Io in Māori cosmology, which became a major focus for colonial scholars from the late nineteenth century? Stylistically, the non-macronisation of the word ‘Māori’ was a surprising omission in the text; and the lack of a ‘road map’ for individual chapters means that the trajectory of the book was not always clear. However, none of these detract from the overall argument or its detailed exposition. This is a significant and rich contribution that deserves wide, close and careful reading.