From Old Testament to New: A. P. Elkin on Christian conversion and cultural assimilation (Exploring the relationship between missionary enterprise and integration among the Australian indigenous people)

The Australian anthropologist A.P. Elkin has attracted recent academic inte rest for his role as simultaneously advocate of Aboriginal assimilation and critic of official assimilationist programs. His promotion of a reformed m issionary policy in Australia in the early 1930s, in line with a worldwide shift toward a cultural integrationist mode of missionary work, has receive d far less scholarly attention. This paper seeks to retrieve Elkin's role a s missionary reformer, and to demonstrate the underlying congruencies betwe en his missionary and his assimilationist policies. In doing so, it adds a vital, but hitherto largely neglected, dimension to our understandings of E lkin as both advocate and critic of assimilation. Beyond that, it extends r ecent scholarship on the complexity of assimilationist discourses and contr ibutes to an appreciation of the shifting, and frequently ambivalent, relat ionship between the missionary enterprise and the assimilation of indigenou s peoples.