First Nations
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange
In the series
First Nations and the Colonial Encounter
Patrica Grimshaw is a leading historian of women’s history in Australia and author of Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii (1989).
Andrew May is Associate Professor in Australian History in the School of Historical Studies at The University of Melbourne.
This book brings together fresh insights into
the relationships between missions and indigenous peoples, and the
outcomes of mission activities in the processes of imperial conquest
and colonisation. Bringing together the work of leading international
scholars of mission and empire, the focus is on missions across
the British Empire (including India, Africa, Asia, the Pacific),
within ransnational and comparative perspectives.
Themes throughout the contributions include collusion or
opposition to colonial authorities, intercultural exchanges, the
work of indigenous and local Christians in new churches, native
evangelism and education, clashes between variant views of domesticity
and parenting roles, and the place of gender in these transformations.
Missionaries could be both implicated in the plot of colonial control,
in ways seemingly contrary to Christian norms, or else play active
roles as proponents of the social, economic and political rights
of their native brethren. Indigenous Christians themselves often
had a liminal status, negotiating as they did the needs and desires
of the colonial state as well as those of their own peoples. In
some mission zones where white missionaries were seen to be constrained
by their particular views of race and respectability, black evangelical
preachers had far greater success as agents of Christianity.
Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange
contains contributions by historians from Australasia and North
America who observe the fine grain of everyday life on mission stations,
and present broader insights on questions of race, culture and religion.
The volume makes a timely intervention into continuing debates about
the relationship between mission and empire.
| Hardback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-308-9 |
| Hardback Price: | £55.00 / $79.95 |
| Release Date: | January 2010 |
| Page Extent / Format: | 240 pp. / 246 x 171 mm |
| Illustrated: | No |
1 Reappraisals of Mission
History: An Introduction
Patricia Grimshaw & Andrew May
2 Mother’s Milk: Gender, Power and Anxiety on a South
African Mission Station, 1839-1840
Elizabeth Elbourne
3 “The Natives Uncivilize Me”: Missionaries
and Interracial Intimacy in Early New Zealand
Angela Wanhalla
4 Contested Conversions: Missionary Women’s
Religious Encounters in Early Colonial Uganda
Elizabeth E. Prevost
5 “It is No Soft Job to be Performed”:
Missionaries and Imperial Manhood in Canada, 1880-1920
Myra Rutherdale
6 An Indigenous View of Missionaries: Arthur
Wellington Clah and Missionaries on the North-west Coast of
Canada
Peggy Brock
7 The Promise of a Book: Missionaries and Native
Evangelists in North-east India
Andrew May
8 Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders,
and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific
Jane Samson
9 Practising Christianity, Writing Anthropology:
Missionary Anthropologists and their Informants
Helen Gardner
10 Missionaries, Africans and the State in the
Development of Education in Colonial Natal, 1836-1910
Norman Etherington
11 Colonial Agents: German Moravian Missionaries in the English-Speaking World Felicity Jensz
12 “A Matter of No Small Importance to
the Colony”: Moravian Missionaries on Cape York Peninsula,
Queensland, 1891-1919
Joanna Cruickshank & Patricia Grimshaw
13 Mission Dormitories: Intergenerational Implications
for Kalumburu and Balgo, Kimberley, Western Australia
Christine Choo & Brian F. McCoy
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew
May take a fresh look at the missions and the interaction
between missionaries and the indigenous peoples of Oceania.
This volume eschews both an institutional approach and an
older triumphalist account of missionary evangelisation, aiming
rather at the deconstruction of missions, mission activities
and outcomes in the British Empire of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. It represents newer trends in religious
history that focus on how the mission functioned, and missionaries
acted ‘on the ground’, emphasizing acts and outcomes
as well as discourse, rather than missionaries’ and
governments’ expressed good intentions. There was often
a wide gulf that separated intent and outcomes, and, as the
several essays attest, such differences were parsed further
by regional and cultural diversity. These original essays
provide yet another reminder that the frontier encounter was
characterized above all by diversity of peoples, relationships,
cultures, and outcomes.
From the Preface by First
Nations Series Editor, David Cahill, University of New South
Wales
Historians Grimshaw and May offer a dozen essays that
provide close readings of missionaries encountering African, Oceanic,
Native American, and Asian communities from the early 19th century
to the 1960s. All of the contributors recognize the complicated
gendered relationships that emerged between foreign evangelists,
local communities, and colonial governments. Topics include the
cultural encounters brought about by translating Oceanic languages,
debates over English missionary nursing practices in South Africa,
tensions raised by interracial intimate relations, and the challenges
Moravian Protestant missionaries faced in Australia. The authors
link together disparate regions of the globe with common concerns
regarding cultural change in which indigenous peoples were active
participants rather than passive victims. For example, Jane Samson’s
essay exposes how missionaries learned to value Pacific collaborators
in their language studies, even as they tried to overcome local
cultural practices. The co-option of missions for the aims of colonial
regimes also is highlighted. An important addition to the burgeoning
literature on cultural exchanges and missionary experiences. Recommended.
Choice
The central aim of this collection of 12 studies ‘is
the deconstruction of missions, mission activities and outcomes
in the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the first decades
of the twentieth.’ Key themes that emerge are the explanatory
power of intimate relations and gender; day-to-day interactions
between missionaries, indigenous groups, and other groups of people;
the role of indigenous Christians in the spread of faith and the
creation of religious communities; and the socio-political and geographic
contexts of missions in the British Empire. Examples of specific
topics include missionaries and interracial intimacy in early New
Zealand; missionaries and imperial manhood in Canada from 1880 to
1920; missionaries, islanders, and the reduction of language in
the Pacific; missionary anthropologists and their informants; and
missionaries, Africans, and the state in the development of education
in colonial Natal, 1836–1910.
Reference & Research
Book News
This volume's two introductions and twelve
case studies present a variegated blend of approaches that bear
on central
problems related to mission history. Considering the aims of its
parent series on encounters between indigenous and colonizing cultures,
this blend is apropos though disparate and scattered. Moments of
contact were themselves impromptu and sudden, and the format here
lends well to the syncopated intrusions of colonizers on the status
quo of indigenous societies. Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and
Cultural Exchange positions itself as a deconstructive piece in
the debate over how to compose a history related to colonialism.
It gives a dual response: one, to earlier narratives that projected
a triumphalist or Whiggish interpretation of Christian mission
and the other to more recent critiques of mission that have highlighted
missionaries' complicity in advancing colonies and empire. The
editors seek to call attention to the complexities of the interplays
between missionaries and missionized. Far from rejecting postcolonial critique – in fact, most authors demonstrate awareness,
and in some cases directly apply the criticisms raised by postcolonialists
– this book nonetheless checks against assuming the worst of the
colonial encounter between missionaries and indigenous peoples.
Too many streams of action converge at the intersection of cultural
exchange to prejudge the actors involved as inherently conscious
of violence or inherently motivated by power. This book provides
much needed nuance in the discussion on historicizing colonialism
and mission.
... The title of the volume gives an accurate priority of what the
othr essays treat as their subjects: missionaries come first,
with attention given to indigenous peoples and the cultural exchange
between the two. Readers persuaded by postcolonial critique may
still call for more inclusion of the indigenous voice, but as a
contribution to mission history, the conclusions drawn here are
valuable and needed if we are to approximate a more balanced assessment
of colonial encounters involving mission and missionaries.
David
Golding, Claremont Graduate University, Anglican
and Episcopal History
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