Missionaries,Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia: A Scottish Evangelist in Ambrym Island,Vanuatu

Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of men's ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.     

Teachers All: Samoan, Fijian, and Queensland Melanesian Missionaries in Papua, 1884–1914

Pacific Islands mission teachers were powerful agents of culture change in Oceania, and the Christianity they taught is part of the ideological and constitutional under-pinnings of several independent Pacific Island states. Their fullest impact was felt in the period between the 1880s and 1914, when vast distances were being crossed and diverse populations reached by evangelists from half a dozen Pacific nationalities. Below the common religious motivations professed by the Islands teachers there were sharp contrasts in expectations and behaviour. This paper compares the Samoan, Fijian, and Queensland Melanesian missionaries in Papua, a colony where Islanders were concentrated in larger numbers than elsewhere. The Samoans are given the greater balance of analysis in the paper, because the 187 male Samoans outnumbered both the Fijians (110 males) and Queensland Melanesians (46), and because the Samoans' expectations diverged more sharply from those of their Euro-pean colleagues than was the case with their Fijian and Queensland Melanesian contemporaries.     

1917年前俄国在华东正教传教士与天主教和新教传教士

1917年前来华的东正教传教士与天主教和新教传教士经历了两个世纪的共存共生过程。东正教传教士对后者的态度和对策反映了俄国政府对于侵华利益的现实追求。19世纪中期以前,俄国传教士刻意淡化教派差异,维持与留京天主教传教士的和睦关系,在获取中国情报、汉学研究、宗教文献翻译以及来华人员构成方面利用后者的影响或经验。俄国尽管通过《中俄天津条约》获得在华传教特权,但慑于中国人民对其侵华行径的愤怒,没有在传教方面积极跟进英、美等国。直到清廷推行联俄政策以及《中俄密约》签订之后,俄国政府才决定推动在华教务。庚子之变后,俄国在华设立主教区,进入全面效仿天主教和新教传教士,积极扩大在华宗教影响的时期。     

Suppressing the Mad Elephant: Missionaries,Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands

The late-nineteenth century was a time of Protestant missionary enthusiasm for the “great closed land” of Tibet. Their prodigious, oftentimes proto-ethnographic, writings continue to provide scholars with archives that document missionary perspectives on Inner Asian society and religion, but few sources have yet emerged that allow for these to be read alongside Tibetan accounts of Christian-Buddhist encounters. This article undertakes such a parallel reading of four accounts of an unsuccessful attempt by the British missionary Cecil Polhill to convert an eastern Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Māyang Pa??ita, in late 1889. Understanding these texts as conflicting sacred historiographies, we note that these Christian and Buddhist writers shared a commitment to writing and to particular modes of emotional, material, and logical mediation as the “correct” path to religious certainty. Differences in genre, however, lead more to mockery and misunderstanding than to each side’s desired transformation of the other..     

Proselytizing Nationalism: Protestant Missionaries and the Arab Awakening Debate

This article examines the historiographical debate concerning the origins of Arab nationalism as postulated by George Antonius in his book, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement and the theory of historical construction. After establishing the theoretical framework of the study with an overview of Hayden White's views on how history is written, it progresses into a study of the historiography of Arab nationalism. Here, the scholars Sylvia G. Haim, C. Ernest Dawn, Rashid Khalidi, and Fruma Zachs and their writings are chronologically dissected, with each academic analyzed via White's theories of historical construction. Through studying their respective positions, it is shown that these texts are culturally relative according to the era in which they were written. It is argued that no work of scholarship can be fully removed from outside influences. Specifically, politicization of academics and the consequences of such endeavors are shown as inextricable from the created narrative. Because of the need for culturally relative knowledge so that it can be applicable to audiences outside of academia, scholars who write for an express purpose (such as answering a question for the benefit of others) should not be considered inherently biased. This article poses that academics have a moral obligation to disseminate knowledge to their respective societies due to their assumed removed status as academics. By doing so, human error is acknowledged and room is made for improvement within the field of history. Knowledge does not need to be created for its own sake, but rather so that it might be utilized by society at large. It is suggested that to foster a deeper understanding of a scholar's relationship with society, there should be an increase in academics' civic engagement. This additionally requires serious reflection and enquiry into the standards that would consequently need to be implemented to maintain the integrity of the produced scholarship.     

Land,Labour and Ambivalence: Lutheran Missionaries Managing Land Disputes at Cape Bedford Mission

This article provides a close reading of a land dispute between Lutheran missionaries at Cape Bedford mission during the 1920s and 1930s in order to extrapolate understandings of missionary ambivalence, power, and privilege within colonial processes of dispossession. The main contention is that missionaries felt compelled to promote Aboriginal engagement in agricultural labour in order to ensure that they could visibly demonstrate the land's productivity, and then maintain access to it. It also contributes to understandings about missionary power and privilege within the colonial context and how at times the authority of missionaries was undermined by bureaucracy. It points to the discrepancies between settler and humanitarian discourses around Indigenous land use in Queensland's north during this period, and the relationships between missions and the state.     

Place, Culture and Identity: Summer Music in Upper Galilee

The Kfar Blum festival is an annual chamber music festival at a kibbutz in northern Israel involving three public bodies. Soon after its inauguration, it was dominated by audiences of élite groups who gave it a specific character and made it a highly desirable social event. The demand created for participation caused the festival to change in character, and what had been an artistic celebration became a cultural commodity. This challenged the overall purpose of the festival and brought changes in artistic direction, as new audiences were sought through programmes with wider appeal. The Kfar Blum festival is an example of a contested arena reflecting social trends in Israel. Place becomes a metaphor for social trends.