Colonial Refractions of a Malakulan Chief

During the early 20th century, Western adventurers sought encounters with and images of Pacific people to entertain white audiences. But they were often reliant on resident European missionaries to facilitate their access to the glamorous Other. Missionaries were themselves also creators of Indigenous representations intended for Western consumption, to raise support for their enterprise. This paper examines the uneasy relationship between these groups by bringing together archival resources from disparate disciplines – colonial-era adventure-travelogue and mission history – to uncover an unacknowledged relationship between the American film-maker and photographer Martin Johnson and Australian Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in Vanuatu between 1917 and 1920. My focus is a Big Nambas village on Malakula, Vanuatu, which found itself the nexus of conflicting colonial gazes. Representations of its headman Nihapat, refracted through the lenses of a travelogue-adventurer and the narratives of missionaries, highlight Indigenous agency as he and his people contended with their predicament under colonialism.     

Wading into the stream of Chinese life: the life and missionary career of Roderick Scott in China, 1916–1949

The legacy of Western Christian missionaries to China during the early twentieth century has often been debated by historians, being judged both positively and negatively. Yet, the truth is usually more complex. In examining the lives of Roderick and Agnes Scott, two American missionaries and educators who were active in Fuzhou from 1916–1949, the historian can see how the interaction between Western Christianity and Chinese culture played out in at least one instance, and observe how one American couple developed a growing affinity for the Chinese people and their culture, which gradually led them to the role of interpreters and advocates on behalf of the Chinese during and following World War II. Yet the papers of Roderick Scott also provide examples of the complex relationship between the Chinese and resident foreigners during these years. They document the rise of anti-foreigner sentiment in the 1920s, the debates over the Sinicization of western institutions in the years that followed, the solidarity displayed by foreign missionaries toward the Chinese during the years of the Sino–Japanese War, and their great reluctance to leave China following the revolution of 1949.     

The Meaning Of Pepe: God's Law and The Western Arrernte

Using both ethnography and textual material, this paper describes the way in which Western Arrernte people in central Australia interpreted the Christianity brought to them by Lutheran missionaries. The mission became an isolated domestic economy, a context that allowed the Arrernte to interpret its teachings in terms of a "law." This Christian law was often referred to as pepe, the Western Arrernte word for "paper." It involved a particular rendering of literacy and rested on a highly localized order. These conditions of mission Christianity would change with the coming of land rights and a cash economy.     

The Second Conquest: Religious Conversion and the Erosion of the Cultural Ecological Core among the Mopan Maya

This paper discusses how Protestant missionaries have affected the core cultural ecological activities among the Mopan Maya, specifically focusing on the maintenance of maize diversity and stingless beekeeping. Although seemingly unrelated to activities such as maize farming and beekeeping, foreign Protestant missionaries disrupt the traditional relationship with and perception of the natural world held by the Mopan Maya. Core cultural ecological activities have declined in importance and frequency as the spiritual landscape changes. This paper will demonstrate that in the traditional Mopan Maya world, religion, environment, and land use activities are often interwoven. When change occurs in one area, the ramifications of this change are often seen in other areas of the Mopan Maya cultural ecological landscape. The Mopan interweave objects in the natural world with those in the spiritual world.     

American Presbyterians,Freedmen's Missions,and the Nile Valley: Missionary History,Racial Orders,and Church Politics on the World Stage

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American Presbyterian “home” and “foreign” missions developed parallel and mutually reinforcing policies towards freed slaves in Egypt, Sudan, and the U.S.A. as well as towards Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts. Yet the racial ideologies and social hierarchies of these three countries reflected distinct historical trajectories of migration and conquest. In the Nile Valley, American missionaries struggled to understand, address, and sometimes revise Egyptian and Sudanese social hierarchies, which they found alternately idiosyncratic or unjust. This essay conjectures that these interactions, in the long run, induced the Nile Valley missionaries to confront the lingering injustices and incongruities in American social hierarchies, particularly in the mid‐ to late twentieth century. In this way, the “foreign” mission experience had a backflow for missionaries and their church by raising questions about American racial orders and by strengthening a commitment to civil rights and social justice agendas.     

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.     

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.     

Criminalising commercial surrogacy in Canada and Australia: the political construction of ‘national consensus’

This article examines the language used to justify a criminal prohibition on commercial surrogacy in Canada and Australia. I demonstrate that legislators in each country framed commercial surrogacy as an area over which there was national ‘consensus’ because of uniquely Canadian and Australian values. This was an effective political strategy, but for different reasons in each country: in Canada, because it fit with frames surrounding healthcare and anti-commercialisation, and in Australia, because the distinction between ‘altruistic’ and ‘commercial’ surrogacy mapped onto broader themes of altruism in Australian society. This suggests that the political use of national frames is especially successful when it taps into pre-existing narratives of what constitutes unacceptable behaviour in a given polity, and when it is attached to criminal prohibitions.     

Social images through visual images: the use of drawings and photographs in the Western representation of the aborigines of Tierra del Fuego (southern South America)

Abstract

This paper analyses the creation of social images (culturally biased representations) about Fuegian aborigines through the production of visual images (drawings and photographs) by European voyagers, missionaries and ethnographers. The images are evaluated as records that offer rich and complex information about both the recorder and the recorded subjects through a consideration of the context in which they were published and the prevailing socio-historical situation. The creation and manipulation of visual records by Western agents has dual elements, in which the representation of the social ‘other’ (the Fuegians) bears a clear relation to the representation of the social ‘self’ (the Europeans). However, the Fuegians themselves were not necessarily passive subjects, but could act as active agents, negotiating who was photographed and in what situations. Over time, the prevailing representation of Fuegians changes from an initial idealization of their status as aboriginals, to a population of potential religious converts, and finally to their portrayal as ‘unpolluted’ aborigines in ethnographic photography. The paper concludes by considering how Fuegian societies and the impact of Western people have been re-considered through a re-contextualization of these same images within a recent museum display in Argentina.     

A Vision of Mount Holyoke in the Ottoman Balkans: American Cultural Transfer,Bulgarian Nation‐Building and Women's Educational Reform, 1858–1870

American missionaries introduced a project of female educational reform among Bulgarian Orthodox Christians in their attempt to promote a Protestant reformation in the Ottoman Balkans. This case study of American‐Bulgarian interactions in the town of Eski Zaǧora (Stara Zagora) illuminates a hitherto unexplored projection of American culture abroad and highlights the connections between women's education, religion, and national identity. In the face of Ottoman secular reform and American religious reform, Bulgarian women appropriated American educational ideals to demand improved schooling for Orthodox girls in the name of national progress. Ironically, by promoting female education, missionaries ensured the failure of their Protestant reformation and inadvertently contributed to shaping a Bulgarian national discourse during a period of increasing Balkan nationalism.     

西方传教士对中国地理学的影响

西方宗教在传入中国的过程中不可避免地产生了中西文化的碰撞与交流,而地理学是其中比较激烈的部分。西方传教士作为基督教传播的主要媒介,理所当然地在中西文化交流的过程中起到了穿针引线的作用,其中对中国地理学的影响也是相当巨大的。本文结合传教士在中国发展的兴衰过程,相应地对西方传教士对中国地理学的影响的研究分三个时期来进行描述:唐元时期、明末清初时期以及鸦片战争以后。最后,本文用辨证的观点评价了西方传教士对中国地理学的影响:它在促进了中国地理学的发展的同时又造成中国对地理科学认识的误导。     

美国基督教长老会在江苏的传教活动

美国长老会是美国基督教在华传教的三大差会之一,江苏是长老会尤其是南长老会传教的主要区域,其传教活动对江苏近现代社会生活和文化生活都产生过重大影响。从检索史料入手,首次对长老会在江苏100多年的传教活动进行了梳理。     

Majority versus minority religious status and diasporic nationalism: Indian American advocacy organisations

Studies of the homeland-oriented activism of diasporic groups focus on cases where those who share national origins also share common political interests. But other literature indicates that ethnic majority and minority groups may have different attitudes towards their homelands. This paper examines how majority and minority religious status in the homeland affects the foreign policy activism of immigrant organisations. It also examines how competing groups mobilising around foreign policy concerns frame their issues in such a way as to resonate with their Western audiences. Using examples of the mobilisation of Indian American groups around religious issues in India, it demonstrates that there are fundamental differences in the concerns and goals of Hindu American organisations and those representing Muslims, Sikhs and Christian Americans of Indian ancestry. These differences often result in opposing patterns of mobilisation around homeland issues.     

Restituting Church Buildings and Negotiating Church Factions： Missionary Mapmakers and the Making of Local Networks （1712-1716）

At the turn of the 18th century, the Kangxi emperor initiated a large project to map the vast territories of the Qing. The land surveys that ensued were executed by teams of Qing officials and European missionaries, most of them French Jesuits first sent to China in 1685 and actively supported by the French crown. Early 18th century Jesuit publications foster a much-heralded claim that these missionary-mapmakers drew on their status of imperial envoys during the surveys to locally advance the position of the Catholic church. This article strives to explore the format/on of such local networks by these missionaries as they passed through the cities and towns of the Chinese provinces. On the basis of archival material, details emerge of contacts with local Qing administrators and Chinese Christians, and of attempts to purchase and recover local churches. This is then discussed against the background of the Rites Controversy, in an attempt to evaluate how such local networks relate to the rivalry between missionaries of different orders. The article emphasizes that there was （and perhaps is） no such thing as ＂pure science＂ by underscoring that important technical achievements such as the Qing mapping project are often shaped by complex networks and historical contingencies.     

Alcohol and the family in Canada

In the context of the family in Western society, alcohol often has been viewed as a problem. This article traces how the use of beverage alcohol in Canada related to the family in the transition from the preindustrial to late-twentieth-century era. Powerful temperance movements in the nineteenth century, and divisive prohibition policies in the early twentieth, attempted to protect the material and moral health of the family. Although liquor laws and social attitudes became more open starting in the 1930s, the medicalized discourse on alcoholism in the 1940s and 1950s was linked to notions of the family. Liberalization of retail and on - premise sales of alcohol in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to portray moderate drinking by adults as "normal" family activity. In the last quarter of the century, a neotemperance movement, reacting to issue such as impaired and driving and teenage drinking, suggested that alcohol's relationship to the family remained highly ambiguous.     

Island Networks and Missionary Methods: Locating Charles E. Fox and Frederick G. Bowie in the History of Pacific Archaeology

ABSTRACT

‘Missionary’ and ‘archaeology’ may appear incongruous partners within contemporary archaeological practice, but archival, museum and oral sources reveal historical connections. This paper explores two missionaries, active in the western Pacific from 1896 to 1973. Reverends Charles Elliot Fox (Melanesian Mission, Solomon Islands) and Frederick Gatherer Bowie (Free Church of Scotland Mission, Vanuatu) both conducted studies related to the prehistory and migration of Pacific people. Both produced material assemblages, as well as textual and visual documents, and formed ideas influenced by their own networks and self identities. The paper examines their data collection methods and relationships with others, considering particularly how their relationships with Pacific Islanders and with psychologist and ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers influenced the missionary research process. By understanding these aspects of their work, Fox and Bowie can be placed within a broader genealogy of Anglophone missionary archaeology dating back to the late 18th century.     

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.     

清代前期安徽天主教史三题

文章概述了清代前期西洋传教士在安徽布道与天主教堂在安徽的分布、安徽教徒到外省传教和信教活动,以期有助于安徽天主教史的研究。西方传教士成际理、梁弘仁、魏方济、奥地利南怀仁等人在徽州府婺源县、池州府、淮南府、太平府芜湖县、滁州直隶州、泗州五河县等六个府州县建立教堂多所,吸收信众;与西洋传教士配合,徽州信徒姚若翰到江苏海门、池州石埭教徒沈方济各赴湖北谷城传教;有十多名安徽教徒在江苏、北京等地过宗教生活,其中有汪钦一、鲍天衢、汪伊纳小等六名徽州人,参与西方传教士传教活动。作者认为,与各省比较,安徽属于天主教活动相对沉寂的省份;徽州人在外省颇有皈依天主教的,而徽州本地人似乎不感兴趣,是否与这里宗族势力强大、理学观念深入人心有关,需要深入研讨。     

Missionization and Economic Change in the Pimería Alta: The Zooarchaeology of San Agustín de Tucson

Spanish missions were important support bases for colonization; Native American labor provided both food and commodities to support regional colonial expansion. Zooarchaeological remains from Mission San Agustín, located in present-day southern Arizona, offer a unique perspective on livestock use at missions, and engagement with regional economic networks through secondary animal products. Despite decades of resistance to livestock, the O’odham became the primary labor force in an economic system based on livestock ranching, particularly of cattle. The transition to cattle ranching was likely influenced by a number of factors including pressure from missionaries, population growth, and, perhaps most importantly, the regional demand for secondary livestock commodities such as hide and tallow.     

文明话语与帝国文化——关于义和团运动后传教士参与劫掠北京的一场争论

1901年义和团战争以后,美国社会围绕传教士参与对华劫掠兴起了一场争论,对这场争论的考察揭示出无论是马克.吐温和一些反帝国主义者,还是美国海外传教团体,争论双方都利用了当时流行的文明话语来论证自己的观点。这一文明话语为美国的扩张和海外非正式帝国的建立提供了支持和合法性,因而构成了一种帝国文化。