One of the great gifts and important fields of study during my priestly formation was the study of “Cultural Anthropology”. It was seen as one of the foundation stones for our future missionary life as an SVD. The awareness of what it means to live in a particular culture, that it is ‘like an iceberg with only the tip showing but most of it being not visible’, made us aware of the complexities involved in knowing one’s own culture, let alone learning another culture. And yet, as a missionary that is what we are meant to do. We not only learn another language when one goes overseas, but we make every effort to learn everything we can about the new people we are asked to serve. Their values, their social structure, their customs, their beliefs, their rituals, and yes, their light and darkness.

We have to be grateful to our founding father, St Arnold Janssen, who promoted the study of Anthropology for our members. It was during his lifetime, that this new science of anthropology came into its own.

The Founding of the SVD Anthropos Institute.

In its constitution it states that the “Anthropos Institute is an international network of individual members and member institutes, dedicated to the scientific study of cultures and religions”.

It expresses the specialisation of the Society of the Divine Word (Divine Word Missionaries) in the field of social and religious sciences and binds together SVD scholars and institutes specialised in these fields.

The beginning of this tradition goes back to the Founder of the SVD, Fr Arnold Janssen, who, besides being a man of faith and prayer, was also a man of sciences. In his first major seminary, Sankt Gabriel near Vienna, at the beginning of the last century, he prescribed for the members of his Society not only the usual theological studies but also the then new specialisation of missiology and especially ethnology, sociology, and linguistics.

The one who influenced the Founder in this direction and gave academic form to this tradition was Fr Wilhelm Schmidt whom the Founder had previously sent to the University of Berlin where he studied linguistics.

While lecturing at Sankt Gabriel, the SVD seminary where the future missionaries were trained, Wilhelm Schmidt founded in 1906 the international journal Anthropos. Arnold Janssen decided that the Anthropos journal should be sponsored by the Society. For him the Anthropos journal and what it stood for, namely the study of cultures, languages and religions, was to be a continuous concern of his missionary Society, a hallmark of the same.

Fr Wilhelm Schmidt in 1931 founded the Anthropos Institute in order to secure this anthropological tradition and soon there were branch institutes in India and Brazil. The overall leadership and the publication of the journal and eventually of the book series, remained in the Anthropos Institute in Sankt Gabriel. During the Second World War the Anthropos Institute moved, for safety reasons, from Austria to Switzerland and in 1962 the Generalate of the Society moved it to Sankt Augustin, near Bonn.

The Present Situation

The Institute went through a process of restructuring to adapt itself to the present global situation and it culminated in the approval of new Statutes in 2003. From an institute understood as primarily a centre in Europe, where the director resided and where the council met, it changed to a network of individual members and institutes worldwide, coordinated by a person whose office is not tied to any centre or country and by a coordinating council which meets using modern Internet technologies.

There are now more than 47 members of the Institute working in and/or associated with various institutions including some of the following:

• Anthropos Institute Sankt Augustin: responsible for the publications of the Anthropos journal, the book series Collectanea Instituti Anthropos, Studia Instituti Anthropos, nd Anthropology and Mission.
• Institute of Indian Culture (former Anthropos Institute of India), Mumbai, India
• Sanskriti: North Eastern Institute of Cultural Research, Guwahati, India.
• Melanesian Institute, Goroka, Papua New Guinea
• Tamale Institute of Cross-Cultural Studies, Tamale, Ghana
• Aditya Wacana: Center for Studies of Religion and Culture, Malang, Indonesia
• Nanzan Anthropological Institute, Nagoya, Japan
• Anthropos do Brasil, Brazil
• Sanskruti -- Institute of Dravidian Culture and Research, Hyderabad, India.
• Sanskruti Kendra – Tribal Cultural and Research Centre, Sundargarh, India.

For more than 16 years, I have had the privilege of working at the Melanesian Institute in Goroka, PNG. It has been a gift and a great joy to work so closely with the cultures of the Papua New Guinean people.  I thank them for teaching me to listen and to see in different ways who God is and who God’s people are.

I am encouraged by the words of Pope Francis who last month visited Singapore and spoke to the youth in these words: “All religions are a path to God. They are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all.”

I was not long in PNG when I began to question the notion of “pagan”. To see and to experience the goodness in these people made me question the judgments that were often made by one culture about another culture.

Today too there are still too many multicultural situations all over the world that need help with listening to each other and learning from each other on how to move forward. A human community is never static but continues to grow and become. These need help and guidance from various sciences, including Theology, Anthropology, Sociology and others.

Missiology is the study that combines the fields of Theology and Anthropology. We cannot serve unless we try to understand the people whom we serve. This study takes a lifetime.

Fr Nick de Groot SVD