Enlightenment ethnography on the global periphery : the case of the Duff missionary voyage to the South Pacific, 1796-1798

This article contributes to the recent scholarly efforts to take seriously the kinds of scientific work undertaken by missionaries to the South Pacific in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world. It explores the ethnographic and natural historical work undertaken by Captain Wilson and his missionaries on the Duff voyage to the South Pacific in the 1790s. It argues that not only was Wilson practicing science in the form of ethnography and natural history, but that his theology was, in fact, central to his scientific work. Wilson put the theological concept of idolatry to new ethnographic use on the colonial periphery, against the backdrop of the increasingly global exchange of people, goods, and ideas.