Conclusion
Margaret
Graham, one of David Crockett Graham's children, came back to
To posit D.C. Graham as a mere Orientalist would deny this profoundly human element of the encounter between those entities we continue to call "East" and "West." Graham was not an imperialist, nor an Orientalist, nor even a missionary or scientist. He was a human being who existed at an intersection of all of these lines, among them Western imperialism, academic Orientalism, liberal Protestantism, the institution of Christian missions, the discipline of anthropology, and numerous others. As we have seen, Graham actively contributed to the West China Border Research Society, an institution of what Edward Said called "academic Orientalism." The Society was a distinctive entity in its own right, synthesizing missionary sensibilities and Western science into a unique mission of research: romantic, pragmatic and humanist. Although more skeptical and judicious than some of his peers, Graham remained situated in the group's Orientalist discourse; his work served to objectify the Oriental "Other" and produced representations meant to aid in the expansion of Western culture and the transformation of the objectified culture. Of course, Graham's humanist and liberal values served to soften the oppressive nature of this project, as he embraced the Chinese and their culture at least as much as he rejected them.
In a sense, though, the liberal Protestantism that was so influential during D.C. Graham's career proved essential to the Orientalist objective of the West China Border Research Society. The group's research aimed to gather knowledge of the local culture that would be useful in converting the Other to Christianity; central to this project was an effort to identify valuable or useful elements in the culture, which could be retained even as Christianity replaced lesser beliefs and practices. A more inclusive, embracing view of foreign cultures - popular during Graham's days at Colgate Seminary - was actually a precondition for such a project. Missionaries had to believe that other cultures could have value before they could generate pragmatic analyses and representations of the Other. In this sense, the humanism and Orientalism that we have discerned in Graham's work functioned together.
Such
a juncture is only one of many intersections where David Crockett Graham
existed. T.O. Beidelman
encouraged historians to look at specific missionaries in specific settings,
rather than treating "missionaries" as a single, uniform subject of
discussion. In a sense, we should avoid
approaching Western figures in the way that Orientalist
scholars treated "Orientals" - as belonging to a simple category of
being. I have wished not to reduce D.C.
Graham to a flat "type" of person, instead representing the
complexity of his encounter with