“Where the spirit of wisdom lies”: Inculturation,self-determination and the authority of First Nations

By the 1970s, Christian missions to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were enthusiastic supporters of Indigenous self-determination, even as they sought to maintain a missionary presence in Aboriginal communities. This article asks how missions continued to seek to influence and direct Aboriginal churches and communities through espousing self-determination, and how Aboriginal leaders engaged with and exploited this apparent contradiction. Focusing on contributions to the missiological publication Nelen Yubu from Deacon Boniface Pedjert, Patrick Dodson, Miram Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Dyiniyini Gondarra and Alice Kelly this article considers how Aboriginal leaders and thinkers managed and challenged non-Indigenous expectations set for them around how their decolonisation was to proceed. Self-determination, for missionaries, could be achieved by a new, supposedly more enlightened mission to “inculturate” the gospel. Whereas missionaries presumed Aboriginal church leaders' authority rested in their cultural authenticity, these Aboriginal leaders were also asserting other sources of authority including their culture, but especially the authority that arises from Country itself.     

The Soul of the Luba: W.F.P. Burton,Missionary Ethnography and Belgian Colonial Science

This article examines the motivations, institutions and processes involved in colonial knowledge formation through a study of the missionary William Burton. It considers Burton’s work on the Luba of Katanga in relation to the practices of Belgian colonial science and Anglo‐Saxon social anthropology. The essay discusses why missionaries engaged in ethnographic research when they were so intent on changing the customs and beliefs they described and why Burton in particular did not get the recognition he deserved as an authority on his subject. The article charts Burton’s shifting attitude toward the Luba, showing how he moved from an aggressive intrusive mode of research to a position of greater sympathy as he came to consider their cultural riches through study of language, proverb and folklore. Consideration of the second phase of Burton’s research opens up discussion of the missionary origins of the disciplines of African theology and African religious studies.     

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity

"Cultural imperialism" has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term "cultural imperialism" has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term "colonization of consciousness" used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non–Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization.     

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.     

Introduction: New Directions in the History of Missionsin Africa

This short article introduces a selection of papers originally presented at the conference, "Africans Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters," held at the University of Minnesota in May 1997. Until quite recently much of the scholarship on missions in Africa tended to reproduce early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the colossal, all-powerful missionary. Whether celebrated as an heroic, civilizing agent in mission accounts or branded as a cultural imperialist in nationalist-era scholarship, the European missionary remained an actor scarcely soiled by the cultural commerce of the people on whom he worked. In short, African religious or political initiatives were seldom taken seriously. The papers which make up this collection give voice to and extend current debates surrounding the contested history (and future) of the missionary enterprise in Africa.     

"Religion" and Christian Conversionin African History: A New Model

This article reviews recent scholarship on African religion and argues that, while much has been accomplished, historians have inherited a problematic view of the processes that they have investigated. They have unknowingly adopted evangelical ideas, in the form of written words and concepts that they wrongly assume have maintained consistent meanings down through the decades. Because missionaries' translations have been taken in this way as accurate guides for understanding what gave rise to them, much of Africa's intellectual history appears religious. The article focuses on the example of tui-qua, a term used by Khoikhoi and translated as "God," and suggests a model for understanding evangelism and conversion that does not rely on the supposed ubiquity of religion. It is argued that missionaries used Christian notions to accommodate the falsity of analogous practices, which although often unrelated in their original setting, together became a single entity (religion) as a result.     

“Like Barnabas and Saul”: Malagasy Converts in Britain, 1839–1841

In 1839, six Malagasy Christians arrived in Britain under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. The group had been persecuted in Madagascar for their faith. They were introduced to the British evangelical community as saints and martyrs who were dependent on the missionary society, but their decision to undertake the long journey was shaped by their spiritual beliefs, their desire to develop their education, and their wish to eventually become evangelical missionaries in Madagascar. At public meetings around the country, the Malagasy used a Christian frame of reference to describe their personal stories and their hopes for the future of Christianity in Madagascar. As speaking subjects, not merely objects of spectacle and display, they communicated to British audiences their credibility as fellow Christians, educated individuals, and civilised human beings.     

‘To unite their strength with ours’

The history of evangelical activity in northern Aotearoa/New Zealand in the early‐19th century is deeply marked by the presence of missionaries. Positioned in an auxiliary role, missionary women as wives and mothers were incorporated into the work of the mission station which primarily involved responsibility for domestic and familial tasks. In the period 1827–45, there were three distinct phases of women's contribution to the public work of the Paihia mission. In the first phase, educated middle‐class women established and taught in the Native Girls' school and English Girls' school. In the second phase and in response to the growing demands of the mission community, unmarried daughters of resident missionaries were recruited as pupil assistants. For three of these girls in particular, this work provided a form of apprenticeship as they were subsequently appointed and registered as missionaries. By the early 1830s, the recruitment of women missionaries entered its third phase when the CMS sent a number of single women from England. This paper reports on the three phases of women's involvement in missionary endeavours and ways in which this increasing level of involvement helped in the development of mission work as a professional occupation for women.     

The Consorts of King Wu and King Wen in the Bronze Inscriptions of Early Chou

Abstract

Daodejing is an essential text in Chinese culture. The number of its English translations exceeds a total of 112 editions. The first one was produced by John Chalmers, who was a Scottish missionary from London Missionary Society stationed in Hong Kong and Canton for a long period of time. Chalmers's close missionary colleague, James Legge, who was subsequently the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, produced another translation. This paper aims at revealing the socio-cultural and intellectual processes behind the making of these two translations. In so doing, it discusses the differences in the two texts and explores the reasons for their differences.

Christian missionaries in China were the agents for the cultural interactions between China and the West. Not only did they bring the Christian message to China, but they also introduced the Chinese ideas through their translations and writings to their Western audience. This should be a fruitful and important topic for serious scholarship in both the studies in Sinology and in the history of translation.     

The Polygamy Question: Missions,Marriage, and Assimilation

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.     

‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa,c. 1940–60

During the era of colonial development, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) revitalised their work by taking advantage of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act to uplift British Africa. These evangelical organisations did not simply appropriate governmental ideas of development, but formulated their own concepts based on the incarnational theology of the ‘whole man’ with body and soul. In implementing their developmental policies, these evangelicals promoted Christ's example of a ‘servant’ to guide missionary conduct as they encountered increased African criticism of colonialism following the Second World War. Both organisations shifted to focusing more closely on souls rather than bodies when African independence movements strengthened during the mid and late 1950s in hopes that Christian ideology would steer Africans towards Christian democracies. By 1960, the CMS and LMS stressed their relationship within the ecumenical Church in their efforts to emancipate themselves from their colonial ties. Through examining missionary discourse on colonial development, this article reveals not only the complexity of development discourse, but also the various ways in which evangelical missionary organisations sought relevance within the context of the Cold War, the rise of the welfare and expert state, and decolonisation.     

Celebrating the Ordinary: Church,Empire and Gender in the Life of Mère Marie‐Michelle Dédié(Senegal,Congo, 1882–1931)

Member of the congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, Mère Marie‐Michelle Dédié worked within a highly gendered institution, the Catholic church and within a highly gendered colonial society. Although at considerable personal cost, she successfully achieved her goals – the training of African girls and women in the Christian life – by working within prescribed boundaries rather than contesting them. She was lauded by churchmen for her dedication and fortitude, and celebrated by colonial men, who found and imagined in her the kinder face of the imperial enterprise. Mère Marie's life suggests a study of the lives of missionary nuns in the outposts of empire may add to our understanding of the contradictions of empire and the complexities of colonial society, as well as the predicaments and successes of religious women.     

Claiming Their Own Space: Australian Women Missionaries in Korea, 1891–1900

The first group of Australian women missionaries arrived in Korea in 1891, representing the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria. Their pioneering work was soon hindered by tensions that arose between themselves and a male cleric authority in the field. The article investigates this dispute, which lasted for several years and eventually entangled not only the individual Australian missionaries but also their home organisations as well as North American missionaries. It argues that Australian women missionaries’ involvement in this public dispute is a rare but significant example of a paradox in the foreign missionary enterprise, which imposed patriarchal order and at the same time established conditions that helped women enter the public space and even challenge the male-centred gender order. The article goes on to identify some distinctive characteristics of the Australian women’s missionary work.     

Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu dictionaries—one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a Presbyterian missionary some ten years later—this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth-century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not "mistakes"; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin, mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship contended, but were profoundly shaped bycontemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.     

A House is not a Home: Gender,Space and Marquesan Encounter, 1833–34

In August 1833, a party of American missionaries with their wives and children took up residence at Taiohae on Nukuhiva, one of the three islands that comprise the northern group of the Marquesas, only to abandon their station eight months later in April 1834. This paper looks at the journal records of those few months and considers the pressure that cross-cultural encounter placed on American notions of gender and the domestic ideology that underwrites it. Desperate to make a home in an alien land, the missionaries oversaw the construction of a residential compound but, as the months progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the walls they built were not secure. Far from being a place of respite, the compound was continuous with the native landscape and an indigenous sexual culture the missionaries could only register with disgust. Despite the best efforts of the female missionaries to model Christian family life, the peculiar domestic architecture of the mission dwellings formed not the desired proscenium between savage and civil but a more disorienting hall of mirrors in which Marquesan concepts of sexuality and space dissolved the distinction between public and private on which American notions of gender depended. Accordingly, the fate of the Marquesan mission allows us to revisit many of the critical commonplaces that circulate around women and Pacific missionary endeavour.     

Bridgeheads of Empire? Liberated African Missionaries in West Africa

Sierra Leone's ‘New Christian Evangelists’ have sometimes been seen as a ‘bridgehead’ of imperial expansion in Nigeria, tying into the literature that sees missionaries as natural agents of empire. However, the expansion of a similar group into the Cameroons did not result in the expansion of the British Empire. This article argues that the ability to tie missionary and commercial interests to a perceived humanitarian cause—ending the slave trade—was crucial in creating the differences between Liberated African experiences of expansion in Nigeria and Cameroon.     

Negotiating for Space and Autonomy: Strategies of Finnish Missionary Women in Japan, 1900-1941

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the strategies Finnish women used to influence their status and the missionary practices in the Japan mission of the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland during the early part of the 20th century. Women had a head-start in the mission compared to men but lost this later as the organization developed. However, the early years demonstrate how women were able to gain a foothold simply by exceptional circumstances, such as a political turmoil. The crisis years of the Finnish mission in the early 1910s illustrate how organizational rigidity was created at the cost of women's status, but also that everyday work carried out separately from the men's work offered women satisfactory roles regardless of the patriarchal structure. An additional strategy is introduced by the career of one missionary, Siiri Uusitalo. A lifelong career in the mission and a pioneer's status enabled Siiri Uusitalo to carve out an independent position inside the Finnish mission which can be defined as matriarchal. Through the Finnish female missionaries, the contested male control of the mission in the Japanese context is discussed. The article presents one historically unique case that nevertheless points to certain patterns in contesting and redefining the gendered hierarchy in a religious community amidst a foreign culture.     

Missionary Critiques of Empire, 1920–1932: Between Interventionism and Anti-imperialism

This article investigates the activism of North American evangelical and Christian pacifist missionaries, specifically the leadership of the Committee of Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), who took direct action to oppose US foreign policy toward Latin America prior to the promulgation of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1933. These historical actors were struggling to articulate a moral and Christian-based anti-imperialism that would bring Latin Americans and North Americans together. They were doing so at a critical historical moment of high US interventionism. Their respective missionary agendas demanded that they articulate non-violent, ethical and spiritual forms of anti-imperialist dissent as a way to salvage the Western Hemisphere from excessive materialism and unfair governance as well as to bolster the legitimacy of their missionary work abroad. A distinctive feature of the CCLA and the FOR's missionary work was their attempts to forge relationships with sectors of the Latin American anti-imperialist left. Their critiques of empire thus emerged in dialogue with anti-imperialist ideas that came from outside the United States, as they allowed themselves to be instructed by the vision and philosophies of the Latin American thinkers themselves.     

Tourists,sailors and labourers: A survey of early labour recruiting in Southern Melanesia

Abstract

This essay explores missionary allegations about slave‐dealing in Fiji, and their acceptance by British officials, as cultural responses to sexual relationships between indigenous women and white men. It also examines the imperial implications of ‘the culture of anti‐slavery’, whereby rhetoric about the enslavement of non‐European women became a rationale for attempted legal intervention in the mixed‐race community of Levuka. Finally, it considers how humanitarian rep resentations were contested, then appropriated, by one of the objects of their disapproval: a ‘lawless’ white man from Levuka. William Nimmo's response to the anti‐slavery proclamation gives us valuable information about Levuka's growing self‐definition as a community, and its attempts to control behaviour within its ranks. Using the ‘Christianisation and civilisation’ argument as successfully as the missionaries had, Nimmo and his friends sought recognition and respect from British authorities who seemed biased toward the missionary point of view, while making their own bid for official support in Fiji.