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98 books about Missions
An 1860 English-Hopi Vocabulary Written in the Deseret Alphabet
Kenneth R. Beesley
University of Utah Press, 2014
In 1859 Brigham Young sent two Mormon missionaries to live among the Hopi, “reduce their dialect to a written language,” and then teach it to the Hopi so that they would be able to read the Book of Mormon in their own tongue. Young instructed the men to teach the Hopi to write in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonemic system that he was promoting in place of the traditional Latin alphabet. While the Deseret Alphabet faded out of use in just over twenty years, the manuscript penned in Deseret by one of the missionaries has remained in existence. For decades it sat unidentified in the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake Citya mystery document having no title, author, or date. But authors Beesley and Elzinga have now traced the manuscript’s origin to the missionaries of 1859-60 and decoded its Hopi-English vocabulary written in the short-lived Deseret Alphabet. The resulting book offers a fascinating mix of linguistics, Mormon history, and Native American studies.
The volume reproduces all 486 vocabulary entries of the original manuscript, presenting the Deseret and the modern English and Hopi translations. It explains the history of the Deseret Alphabet as well as that of the Mormon missions to the Hopi, while fleshing out the background of the two missionaries, Marion Jackson Shelton, who wrote the manuscript, and his companion, Thales Hastings Haskell. The book will be of interest to linguists, historians, ethnographers, and others who are curious about the unique combination of topics this work connects.
The volume reproduces all 486 vocabulary entries of the original manuscript, presenting the Deseret and the modern English and Hopi translations. It explains the history of the Deseret Alphabet as well as that of the Mormon missions to the Hopi, while fleshing out the background of the two missionaries, Marion Jackson Shelton, who wrote the manuscript, and his companion, Thales Hastings Haskell. The book will be of interest to linguists, historians, ethnographers, and others who are curious about the unique combination of topics this work connects.
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Across the Shaman's River
John Muir, the Tlingit Stronghold, and the Opening of the North
Daniel Lee Henry
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Across the Shaman’s River is the story of one of Alaska’s last Native American strongholds, a Tlingit community closed off for a century until a fateful encounter between a shaman, a preacher, and John Muir.
Tucked in the corner of Southeast Alaska, the Tlingits had successfully warded off the Anglo influences that had swept into other corners of the territory. This tribe was viewed by European and American outsiders as the last wild tribe and a frustrating impediment to access. Missionaries and prospectors alike had widely failed to bring the Tlingit into their power. Yet, when John Muir arrived in 1879, accompanied by a fiery preacher, it only took a speech about “brotherhood”—and some encouragement from the revered local shaman Skandoo’o—to finally transform these “hostile heathens.”
Using Muir’s original journal entries, as well as historic writings of explorers juxtaposed with insights from contemporary tribal descendants, Across the Shaman’s River reveals how Muir’s famous canoe journey changed the course of history and had profound consequences on the region’s Native Americans.
Tucked in the corner of Southeast Alaska, the Tlingits had successfully warded off the Anglo influences that had swept into other corners of the territory. This tribe was viewed by European and American outsiders as the last wild tribe and a frustrating impediment to access. Missionaries and prospectors alike had widely failed to bring the Tlingit into their power. Yet, when John Muir arrived in 1879, accompanied by a fiery preacher, it only took a speech about “brotherhood”—and some encouragement from the revered local shaman Skandoo’o—to finally transform these “hostile heathens.”
Using Muir’s original journal entries, as well as historic writings of explorers juxtaposed with insights from contemporary tribal descendants, Across the Shaman’s River reveals how Muir’s famous canoe journey changed the course of history and had profound consequences on the region’s Native Americans.
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American Catholic Hospitals
A Century of Changing Markets and Missions
Wall, Barbra Mann
Rutgers University Press, 2016
“Wall traces the nursing and management roles of nuns and brothers in church-related US health care institutions. This well-documented volume will be a useful addition for collections supporting academic programs in public health, hospital administration, bioethics, and divinity, and for comprehensive collections in the history of medicine. Recommended.” —Choice
“American Catholic Hospitals is fair, balanced, insightful, and intriguing. The story Wall tells—a story about a significant segment of the US health care system—is meticulously documented. Readers will find her study to be illuminating, even inspirational.” —Journal of the American Medical Association
“In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Hall traces the ways Catholic hospitals have accommodated changes both within the church and in society over the last century. Her book is well researched and a fascinating read.” —Health Progress
“Wall presents a compelling and well-documented narrative of the dynamic transformation of Catholic hospitals in twentieth-century America. Drawing on records from Catholic congregations throughout the United States, she reveals an admirable perseverance of religious caregivers, demonstrated by their willingness to adapt to socioeconomic forces often inimical to charitable care.” —American Catholic Studies
“American Catholic Hospitals is meticulously researched and well written. Although it is certainly appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students, general readers also will find it to be an excellent overview of the history of the changes that Catholic health-care institutions have undergone in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” —Catholic Historical Review
“American Catholic Hospitals offers a tremendous amount of new material and refreshing perspectives on current health care system challenges in the United States.” —Sioban Nelson, Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto
“Wall provides solid scholarship and engaging insight into the historic and contemporary contributions of American Catholic hospitals and their ability to adapt and serve amid the changing landscapes of church and state, culture wars, and healthcare reforms of the 20th century.” —Carol K. Coburn, author of Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920
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American Indians and Christian Missions
Studies in Cultural Conflict
Henry Warner Bowden
University of Chicago Press, 1985
In this absorbing history, Henry Warner Bowden chronicles the encounters between native Americans and the evangelizing whites from the period of exploration and colonization to the present. He writes with a balanced perspective that pleads no special case for native separatism or Christian uniqueness. Ultimately, he broadens our understanding of both intercultural exchanges and the continuing strength of American Indian spirituality, expressed today in Christian forms as well as in revitalized folkways.
"Bowden makes a radical departure from the traditional approach. Drawing on the theories and findings of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, he presents Indian-missionary relations as a series of cultural encounters, the outcomes of which were determined by the content of native beliefs, the structure of native religious institutions, and external factors such as epidemic diseases and military conflicts, as well as by the missionaries' own resources and abilities. The result is a provocative, insightful historical essay that liberates a complex subject from the narrow perimeters of past discussions and accords it an appropriate richness and complexity. . . . For anyone with an interest in Indian-missionary relations, from the most casual to the most specialized, this book is the place to begin."—Neal Salisbury, Theology Today
"If one wishes to read a concise, thought-provoking ethnohistory of Indian missions, 1540-1980, this is it. Henry Warner Bowden's history, perhaps for the first time, places the sweep of Christian evangelism fully in the context of vigorous, believable, native religions."—Robert H. Keller, Jr., American Historical Review
"Bowden makes a radical departure from the traditional approach. Drawing on the theories and findings of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, he presents Indian-missionary relations as a series of cultural encounters, the outcomes of which were determined by the content of native beliefs, the structure of native religious institutions, and external factors such as epidemic diseases and military conflicts, as well as by the missionaries' own resources and abilities. The result is a provocative, insightful historical essay that liberates a complex subject from the narrow perimeters of past discussions and accords it an appropriate richness and complexity. . . . For anyone with an interest in Indian-missionary relations, from the most casual to the most specialized, this book is the place to begin."—Neal Salisbury, Theology Today
"If one wishes to read a concise, thought-provoking ethnohistory of Indian missions, 1540-1980, this is it. Henry Warner Bowden's history, perhaps for the first time, places the sweep of Christian evangelism fully in the context of vigorous, believable, native religions."—Robert H. Keller, Jr., American Historical Review
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Among the Mescalero Apaches
The Story of Father Albert Braun, O.F.M.
Dorothy Emerson
University of Arizona Press, 1973
Anatomy of a Massacre
The Destruction of Gnadenhutten, 1782
Eric Sterner
Westholme Publishing, 2020
An Act of Unfathomable Cruelty that Presaged Post-Revolutionary America’s Treatment of Native Americans
On March 8, 1782, a group of western settlers killed nearly one hundred unarmed and peaceful Indians who had converted to Christianity under the tutelage of missionaries from the Church of the United Brethren. The murders were cold-blooded and heartless; roughly two-thirds of those executed were women and children. Its brutality stunned Benjamin Franklin in far-away France. He wrote: “the abominable Murders committed by some of the frontier People on the poor Moravian Indians, has given me infinite Pain and Vexation. The Dispensations of Providence in this World puzzle my weak Reason. I cannot comprehend why cruel Men should have been permitted thus to destroy their Fellow Creatures.” Since that maelstrom of violence struck the small Indian village of Gnadenhutten, history has treated the episode as a simple morality tale. While there were ample incidents of good and evil on March 8, that summation does not explain what brought murderers and victims together on the banks of the Muskingum River in today’s Ohio. It was actually the culmination of a series of events among different Indian tribes, the British, Congressional authorities at Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania militia, and key individuals, all of which are lost in contemporary explanations of the massacre.
Anatomy of a Massacre: The Destruction of Gnadenhutten, 1782 fills that void by examining the political maneuvering among white settlers, Continental officials, British officers, western Indian tribes, missionaries, and the Indians practicing Christianity that culminated in the massacre. Uniquely, it follows the developing story from each perspective, using first-person accounts from each group to understand how they saw and experienced the changes on the American frontier. Along the way it profiles some of the key individuals responsible for the way the war unfolded. It is a fresh look at an often mentioned, but seldom understood, episode in the American Revolution.
On March 8, 1782, a group of western settlers killed nearly one hundred unarmed and peaceful Indians who had converted to Christianity under the tutelage of missionaries from the Church of the United Brethren. The murders were cold-blooded and heartless; roughly two-thirds of those executed were women and children. Its brutality stunned Benjamin Franklin in far-away France. He wrote: “the abominable Murders committed by some of the frontier People on the poor Moravian Indians, has given me infinite Pain and Vexation. The Dispensations of Providence in this World puzzle my weak Reason. I cannot comprehend why cruel Men should have been permitted thus to destroy their Fellow Creatures.” Since that maelstrom of violence struck the small Indian village of Gnadenhutten, history has treated the episode as a simple morality tale. While there were ample incidents of good and evil on March 8, that summation does not explain what brought murderers and victims together on the banks of the Muskingum River in today’s Ohio. It was actually the culmination of a series of events among different Indian tribes, the British, Congressional authorities at Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania militia, and key individuals, all of which are lost in contemporary explanations of the massacre.
Anatomy of a Massacre: The Destruction of Gnadenhutten, 1782 fills that void by examining the political maneuvering among white settlers, Continental officials, British officers, western Indian tribes, missionaries, and the Indians practicing Christianity that culminated in the massacre. Uniquely, it follows the developing story from each perspective, using first-person accounts from each group to understand how they saw and experienced the changes on the American frontier. Along the way it profiles some of the key individuals responsible for the way the war unfolded. It is a fresh look at an often mentioned, but seldom understood, episode in the American Revolution.
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Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past
Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia
Diane J. Austin-Broos
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years.
Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.
Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.
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The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions
By Jacinto Quirarte
University of Texas Press, 2002
Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas
Built to bring Christianity and European civilization to the northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...secularized and left to decay in the nineteenth century...and restored in the twentieth century, the Spanish missions still standing in Texas are really only shadows of their original selves. The mission churches, once beautifully adorned with carvings and sculptures on their façades and furnished inside with elaborate altarpieces and paintings, today only hint at their colonial-era glory through the vestiges of art and architectural decoration that remain.
To paint a more complete portrait of the missions as they once were, Jacinto Quirarte here draws on decades of on-site and archival research to offer the most comprehensive reconstruction and description of the original art and architecture of the six remaining Texas missions—San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio and Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo in Goliad. Using church records and other historical accounts, as well as old photographs, drawings, and paintings, Quirarte describes the mission churches and related buildings, their decorated surfaces, and the (now missing) altarpieces, whose iconography he extensively analyzes. He sets his material within the context of the mission era in Texas and the Southwest, so that the book also serves as a general introduction to the Spanish missionary program and to Indian life in Texas.
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Battle for the Soul
Mètis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823-1837
Keith R. Widder
Michigan State University Press, 1999
In 1823 William and Amanda Ferry opened a boarding school for Métis children on Mackinac Island, Michigan Territory, setting in motion an intense spiritual battle to win the souls and change the lives of the children, their parents, and all others living at Mackinac. Battle for the Soul demonstrates how a group of enthusiastic missionaries, empowered by an uncompromising religious motivation, served as agents of Americanization. The Ferrys' high hopes crumbled, however, as they watched their work bring about a revival of Catholicism and their students refuse to abandon the fur trade as a way of life. The story of the Mackinaw Mission is that of people who held differing world views negotiating to create a "middle-ground," a society with room for all.
Widder's study is a welcome addition to the literature on American frontier missions. Using Richard White's "middle ground" paradigm, it focuses on the cultural interaction between French, British, American, and various native groups at the Mackinac mission in Michigan during the early 19th century. The author draws on materials from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions archives, as well as other manuscript sources, to trace not only the missionaries' efforts to Christianize and Americanize the native peoples, but the religious, social, and cultural conflicts between Protestant missionaries and Catholic priests in the region. Much attention has been given to the missionaries to the Indians in other areas of the US, but little to this region.
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Biocultural Histories in La Florida
A Bioarchaeological Perspective
Christopher Stojanowski
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Examines the effects of the Spanish mission system on population structure and genetic variability in indigenous communities living in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the 16th and 17th centuries
This book examines the effects of the Spanish mission system on population structure and genetic variability in indigenous communities living in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the 16th and 17th centuries. Data on tooth size were collected from 26 archaeological samples representing three time periods: Late Precontact (~1200-1500), Early Mission (~1600-1650), and Late Mission (~1650-1700) and were subjected to a series of statistical tests evaluating genetic variability. Predicted changes in phenotypic population variability are related to models of group interaction, population demo-graphy, and genetic admixture as suggested by ethnohistoric and archaeological data.
Results suggest considerable differences in diachronic responses to the mission environment for each cultural province. The Apalachee demonstrate a marked increase in variability while the Guale demonstrate a decline in variability. Demographic models of population collapse are therefore inconsistent with predicted changes based on population geneticsl, and the determinants of population structure seem largely local in nature. This book highlights the specificity with which indigenous communities responded to European contact and the resulting transformations in their social worlds.
"Stojanowski's work is like man's DNA, the structure of a lifeform, but here it is the structure or glue that holds together the historic puzzle with its Apalachee, Timucua, Guale, and Spanish pieces that other scholars have been trying to put together."--Keith P. Jacobi, author of Last Rites for the Tipu Maya
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Black Indians and Freedmen
The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816-1916
Christina Dickerson-Cousin
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Often seen as ethnically monolithic, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in fact successfully pursued evangelism among diverse communities of indigenous peoples and Black Indians. Christina Dickerson-Cousin tells the little-known story of the AME Church’s work in Indian Territory, where African Methodists engaged with people from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) and Black Indians from various ethnic backgrounds. These converts proved receptive to the historically Black church due to its traditions of self-government and resistance to white hegemony, and its strong support of their interests. The ministers, guided by the vision of a racially and ethnically inclusive Methodist institution, believed their denomination the best option for the marginalized people. Dickerson-Cousin also argues that the religious opportunities opened up by the AME Church throughout the West provided another impetus for Black migration.
Insightful and richly detailed, Black Indians and Freedmen illuminates how faith and empathy encouraged the unique interactions between two peoples.
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Bread, Wine, and Money
The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral
Jane Welch Williams
University of Chicago Press, 1993
At Chartres Cathedral, for the first time in medieval art, the lowest register of stained-glass windows depicts working artisans and merchants instead of noble and clerical donors. Jane Welch Williams challenges the prevailing view that pious town tradesmen donated these windows. In Bread, Wine, and Money, she uncovers a deep antagonism between the trades and the cathedral clergy in Chartres; the windows, she argues, portray not town tradesmen but trusted individuals that the fearful clergy had taken into the cloister as their own serfs.
Williams weaves a tight net of historical circumstances, iconographic traditions, exegetical implications, political motivations, and liturgical functions to explain the imagery in the windows of the trades. Her account of changing social relationships in thirteenth-century Chartres focuses on the bakers, tavern keepers, and money changers whose bread, wine, and money were used as means of exchange, tithing, and offering throughout medieval society. Drawing on a wide variety of original documents and scholarly work, this book makes important new contributions to our knowledge of one of the great monuments of Western culture.
Williams weaves a tight net of historical circumstances, iconographic traditions, exegetical implications, political motivations, and liturgical functions to explain the imagery in the windows of the trades. Her account of changing social relationships in thirteenth-century Chartres focuses on the bakers, tavern keepers, and money changers whose bread, wine, and money were used as means of exchange, tithing, and offering throughout medieval society. Drawing on a wide variety of original documents and scholarly work, this book makes important new contributions to our knowledge of one of the great monuments of Western culture.
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Californio Voices
The Oral Memoirs of Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara
Gregorio Mora-Torres
University of North Texas Press, 2005
Capture These Indians for the Lord
Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844-1939
Tash Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2014
In 1844, on the heels of the final wave of the forced removal of thousands of Indians from the southern United States to what is now Oklahoma, the Southern Methodist Church created a separate organization known as the Indian Mission Conference to oversee its missionary efforts among the Native communities of Indian Territory. Initially, the Church conducted missions as part of the era’s push toward assimilation. But what the primarily white missionaries quickly encountered was a population who exerted more autonomy than they expected and who used Christianity to protect their culture, both of which frustrated those eager to bring Indian Territory into what they felt was mainstream American society.
In Capture These Indians for the Lord, Tash Smith traces the trajectory of the Southern Methodist Church in Oklahoma when it was at the frontlines of the relentless push toward western expansion. Although many Native people accepted the missionaries’ religious practices, Smith shows how individuals found ways to reconcile the Methodist force with their traditional cultural practices. When the white population of Indian Territory increased and Native sovereignty came under siege during the allotment era of the 1890s, white communities marginalized Indians within the Church and exploited elements of mission work for their own benefit.
Later, with white indifference toward Indian missions peaking in the early twentieth century, Smith explains that as the remnants of the Methodist power weakened, Indian membership regained control and used the Church to regenerate their culture. Throughout, Smith explores the complex relationships between white and Indian community members and how these phenomena shaped Methodist churches in the twentieth century.
In Capture These Indians for the Lord, Tash Smith traces the trajectory of the Southern Methodist Church in Oklahoma when it was at the frontlines of the relentless push toward western expansion. Although many Native people accepted the missionaries’ religious practices, Smith shows how individuals found ways to reconcile the Methodist force with their traditional cultural practices. When the white population of Indian Territory increased and Native sovereignty came under siege during the allotment era of the 1890s, white communities marginalized Indians within the Church and exploited elements of mission work for their own benefit.
Later, with white indifference toward Indian missions peaking in the early twentieth century, Smith explains that as the remnants of the Methodist power weakened, Indian membership regained control and used the Church to regenerate their culture. Throughout, Smith explores the complex relationships between white and Indian community members and how these phenomena shaped Methodist churches in the twentieth century.
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The Center is Jesus Christ Himself
Essays on Revelation, Salvation, and Evangelization in Honor of Robert P. Imbelli
Andrew Meszaros
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The polarization in the Church today can be traced back to a more fundamental crisis in theology, one which has failed to connect our mundane experiences and the mysteries of the Christian faith with the person of Jesus Christ. Ecclesial discourse on the so-called ‘hot- button issues’ of the day too often take place without considering the foundation and goal of the Church. And this is unfortunately due to a similar tendency in the academic theology that informs that ecclesial discourse. In short, much of post-conciliar Catholic theology is adrift, floating aimlessly away from the center of the Christian faith, who is Christ.
The Center is Jesus Christ Himself is a collection of essays which anchor theological reflection in Jesus Christ. These diverse essays share a unified focal point, but engage with a variety of theological subdisciplines (e.g., dogmatic, moral, Biblical, etc.), areas (e.g., Christology, Pneumatology, missiology, etc.), and periods (e.g., patristic, medieval, and modern). Given the different combinations of sub-disciplines, areas, and periods, theology is susceptible to fragmentation when it is not held together by some principle of unity. A theology in which the person of Jesus Christ serves as that principle of unity is a Christocentric theology. Together, the essays illustrate not only what Christocentric theology looks like, but also what the consequences are when Christ is dislodged from the center, whether by a conspicuous silence on, or by a relativization of, his unique salvific mission.
The volume is published in honor of Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston College, Rev. Dr. Robert P. Imbelli, who dedicated his teaching and writing to bringing Christ back to the center of Catholic theological discourse.
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The Chaco Mission Frontier
The Guaycuruan Experience
James Schofield Saeger
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Spanish missions in the New World usually pacified sedentary peoples accustomed to the agricultural mode of mission life, prompting many scholars to generalize about mission history. James Saeger now reconsiders the effectiveness of the missions by examining how Guaycuruan peoples of South America's Gran Chaco adapted to them during the eighteenth century. Because the Guaycuruans were hunter-gatherers less suited to an agricultural lifestyle, their attitudes and behaviors can provide new insight about the impact of missions on native peoples.
Responding to recent syntheses of the mission system, Saeger proposes that missions in the Gran Chaco did not fit the usual pattern. Through research in colonial documents, he reveals the Guaycuruan perspective on the missions, thereby presenting an alternative view of Guaycuruan history and the development of the mission system. He investigates Guaycuruan social, economic, political, and religious life before the missions and analyzes subsequent changes; he then traces Guaycuruan history into the modern era and offers an assessment of what Catholic missions meant to these peoples.
Saeger's research into Spanish documents is unique for its elicitation of the Indian point of view. He not only reconstructs Guaycuruan life independent of Spanish contact but also shows how these Indians negotiated the conditions under which they would adapt to the mission way of life, thereby retaining much of their independence.
By showing that the Guaycuruans were not as restricted in missions as has been assumed, Saeger demonstrates that there is a distinct difference between the establishment of missions and conquest. The Chaco Mission Frontier helps redefine mission studies by correcting overgeneralization about their role in Latin America.
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A Colonial Lexicon
Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
Nancy Rose Hunt
Duke University Press, 1999
A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire.
Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa.
With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.
Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa.
With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.
[more]
Colonial Rosary
The Spanish and Indian Missions of California
Alison Lake
Ohio University Press, 2006
California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.
In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.
With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.
By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.
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Competing Kingdoms
Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960
Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women’s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural histories about the global expansion of American culture and American Protestantism.
An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire.
Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead
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Conversionary Sites
Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota
Britt Halvorson
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Drawing on more than two years of participant observation in the American Midwest and in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, volunteer laborers, healers, evangelists, and former missionaries, Conversionary Sites investigates the role of religion in the globalization of medicine. Based on immersive research of a transnational Christian medical aid program, Britt Halvorson tells the story of a thirty-year-old initiative that aimed to professionalize and modernize colonial-era evangelism. Creatively blending perspectives on humanitarianism, global medicine, and the anthropology of Christianity, she argues that the cultural spaces created by these programs operate as multistranded “conversionary sites,” where questions of global inequality, transnational religious fellowship, and postcolonial cultural and economic forces are negotiated.
A nuanced critique of the ambivalent relationships among religion, capitalism, and humanitarian aid, Conversionary Sites draws important connections between religion and science, capitalism and charity, and the US and the Global South.
A nuanced critique of the ambivalent relationships among religion, capitalism, and humanitarian aid, Conversionary Sites draws important connections between religion and science, capitalism and charity, and the US and the Global South.
[more]
Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America
Edited by Linda Newson
University of London Press, 2020
The Jesuits’ colonial legacy in Latin America is well-known. They pioneered an interest in indigenous languages and cultures, compiling dictionaries and writing some of the earliest ethnographies of the region. They also explored the region’s natural history and made significant contributions to the development of science and medicine. On their estates and in the missions they introduced new plants, livestock, and agricultural techniques, such as irrigation. In addition, they left a lasting legacy on the region’s architecture, art, and music. The volume demonstrates the diversity of Jesuit contributions to Latin American culture. This volume is unique in considering not only the range of Jesuit activities but also the diversity of perspectives from which they may be approached. It includes papers from scholars of history, linguistics, religion, art, architecture, cartography, music, medicine and science.
[more]
Cultures Colliding
American Missionaries, Chinese Resistance, and the Rise of Modern Institutions in China
John R. Haddad
Temple University Press, 2023
As incredible as it may seem, the American missionaries who journeyed to China in 1860 planning solely to spread the Gospel ultimately reinvented their entire enterprise. By 1900, they were modernizing China with schools, colleges, hospitals, museums, and even YMCA chapters. In Cultures Colliding, John R. Haddad nimbly recounts this transformative institution-building—how and why it happened—and its consequences.
When missionaries first traveled to rural towns atop mules, they confronted populations with entrenched systems of belief that embraced Confucius and rejected Christ. Conflict ensued as these Chinese viewed missionaries as unwanted disruptors. So how did this failing movement eventually change minds and win hearts? Many missionaries chose to innovate. They built hospitals and established educational institutions offering science and math. A second wave of missionaries opened YMCA chapters, coached sports, and taught college. Crucially, missionaries also started listening to Chinese citizens, who exerted surprising influence over the preaching, teaching, and caregiving, eventually running some organizations themselves. They embraced new American ideals while remaining thoroughly Chinese.
In Cultures Colliding, Haddad recounts the unexpected origins and rapid rise of American institutions in China by telling the stories of the Americans who established these institutions and the Chinese who changed them from within. Today, the impact of this untold history continues to resonate in China.
[more]
The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs
Emma Anderson
Harvard University Press, 2013
In the 1640s, eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men became North America's first saints. Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, she also seeks to comprehend the motivations of those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs.
In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored andpreserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination. As rival shrines rose on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.
[more]
Dispelling the Darkness
A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet
Donald S. Lopez
Harvard University Press, 2017
In a remote Himalayan village in 1721, the Jesuit priest Ippolito Desideri wrote a treatise in classical Tibetan intended to refute key Buddhist doctrines and dispel the darkness of idolatry from Tibet. Dispelling the Darkness provides extended excerpts from this unfinished masterpiece and a full translation of a companion work.
[more]
Doctor Mary in Arabia
Memoirs
By Mary Bruins Allison
University of Texas Press, 1994
Until fairly recently, Arab women rarely received professional health care, since few women doctors had ever practiced in Arabia and their culture forbade them from consulting male doctors. Not surprisingly, Dr. Mary Bruins Allison faced an overwhelming demand when she arrived in Kuwait in 1934 as a medical missionary of the Reformed Church of America. Over the next forty years, "Dr. Mary" treated thousands of women and children, faithfully performing the duties that seemed required of her as a Christian—to heal the sick and seek converts.
These memoirs record a fascinating life. Dr. Allison briefly describes her upbringing and her professional training at Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She then focuses on her experiences in Kuwait, where women of all classes, including royalty, flocked to her care. In addition to describing many of her cases, Dr. Allison paints a richly detailed picture of life in Kuwait both before and after the discovery of oil transformed the country. Her recollections include invaluable details of women's lives in the Middle East during the early and mid-twentieth century. They add a valuable chapter to the story of modern medicine, to the largely unsuccessful efforts of the Christian church to win converts in the Middle East, and to the opportunities and limitations that faced American women of the period.
Dr. Allison also worked briefly in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and India, and she includes material on each country. The introduction situates her experiences in the context of Middle Eastern and medical developments of the period.
[more]
Domestic Frontiers
Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East
Barbara Reeves-Ellington
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Protestant missionaries attempted to export their religious beliefs and cultural ideals to the Ottoman Empire. Seeking to attract Orthodox Christians and even Muslims to their faith, they promoted the paradigm of the "Christian home" as the foundation of national progress. Yet the missionaries' efforts not only failed to win many converts but also produced some unexpected results.
Drawing on a broad range of sources—Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English—Barbara Reeves-Ellington tracks the transnational history of this little-known episode of American cultural expansion. She shows how issues of gender and race influenced the missionaries' efforts as well as the complex responses of Ottoman subjects to American intrusions into their everyday lives. Women missionaries—married and single—employed the language of Christian domesticity and female moral authority to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of missionary society and to forge bonds of feminist internationalism. At the same time, Orthodox Christians adapted the missionaries' ideology to their own purposes in developing a new strain of nationalism that undermined Ottoman efforts to stem growing sectarianism within their empire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as some missionaries began to promote international understanding rather than Protestantism, they also paved the way for future expansion of American political and commercial interests.
Drawing on a broad range of sources—Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English—Barbara Reeves-Ellington tracks the transnational history of this little-known episode of American cultural expansion. She shows how issues of gender and race influenced the missionaries' efforts as well as the complex responses of Ottoman subjects to American intrusions into their everyday lives. Women missionaries—married and single—employed the language of Christian domesticity and female moral authority to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of missionary society and to forge bonds of feminist internationalism. At the same time, Orthodox Christians adapted the missionaries' ideology to their own purposes in developing a new strain of nationalism that undermined Ottoman efforts to stem growing sectarianism within their empire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as some missionaries began to promote international understanding rather than Protestantism, they also paved the way for future expansion of American political and commercial interests.
[more]
Encompassing Others
The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia
Edward LiPuma
University of Michigan Press, 2001
An engaging, beautifully written account by an ethnographer who lived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, Encompassing Others is at once a history of the encounter of two cultures and an attempt to challenge theoretically the main concepts that have informed the study of modernity. Going beyond accounts that grasp modernity solely in terms of domination, imperialism, and local resistance, it explores how capitalism, Christianity, and mass commercial culture enchant the senses, create a carnival of new goods, and open up new possibilities for thought and action.
Focusing on the Maring people of Highland New Guinea and on the Westerners who interacted with them, Edward LiPuma presents issues from the perspectives of both sides. We hear the voice of the Anglican priest from San Francisco as well as the most powerful Maring shamans. Further, the book seeks to develop a theory of generations that helps explain how change accelerates and societies take on new directions across generations.
Theoretical, descriptive, but almost entirely free of jargon, this book is intended for all those who are interested in how the West's encompassment of other peoples influences how these others conceive of their past, imagine their future, and experience the present. It will have wide appeal for anthropologists and others concerned with colonialism, globalization, and the formation of the nation-state.
Edward LiPuma is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Miami.
Focusing on the Maring people of Highland New Guinea and on the Westerners who interacted with them, Edward LiPuma presents issues from the perspectives of both sides. We hear the voice of the Anglican priest from San Francisco as well as the most powerful Maring shamans. Further, the book seeks to develop a theory of generations that helps explain how change accelerates and societies take on new directions across generations.
Theoretical, descriptive, but almost entirely free of jargon, this book is intended for all those who are interested in how the West's encompassment of other peoples influences how these others conceive of their past, imagine their future, and experience the present. It will have wide appeal for anthropologists and others concerned with colonialism, globalization, and the formation of the nation-state.
Edward LiPuma is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Miami.
[more]
Entanglements of Empire
Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body
Tony Ballantyne
Duke University Press, 2015
The first Protestant mission was established in New Zealand in 1814, initiating complex political, cultural, and economic entanglements with Māori. Tony Ballantyne shows how interest in missionary Christianity among influential Māori chiefs had far-reaching consequences for both groups. Deftly reconstructing cross-cultural translations and struggles over such concepts and practices as civilization, work, time and space, and gender, he identifies the physical body as the most contentious site of cultural engagement, with Māori and missionaries struggling over hygiene, tattooing, clothing, and sexual morality. Entanglements of Empire is particularly concerned with how, as a result of their encounters in the classroom, chapel, kitchen, and farmyard, Māori and the English mutually influenced each other’s worldviews. Concluding in 1840 with New Zealand’s formal colonization, this book offers an important contribution to debates over religion and empire.
[more]
Essays on American Indian and Mormon History
Edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink
University of Utah Press, 2019
American Indians have long played a central role in Mormon history and its narratives. Their roles, however, have often been cast in support of traditional Mormon beliefs and as a reaffirmation of colonial discourses.
This collection of essays, many the result of a seminar hosted by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, explores the historical and cultural complexities of this narrative from a decolonizing perspective. Essays cover the historical construction of the “Lamanite,” settler colonialism and the Book of Mormon, and connections between the Seneca leader Handsome Lake and Joseph Smith. Authors also address American Indian Mormon tribal identities, Navajo and Mormon participation at the dedication of Glen Canyon Dam, the impact of Mormon Polynesian missionaries in Diné Bikéyah, the ISPP, and other topics. Prominent American Indian Mormon voices lend their creative work and personal experiences to the book.
With the aim of avoiding familiar narrative patterns of settler colonialism, contributors seek to make American Indians the subjects rather than the objects of discussion in relation to Mormons, presenting new ways to explore and reframe these relationships.
This collection of essays, many the result of a seminar hosted by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, explores the historical and cultural complexities of this narrative from a decolonizing perspective. Essays cover the historical construction of the “Lamanite,” settler colonialism and the Book of Mormon, and connections between the Seneca leader Handsome Lake and Joseph Smith. Authors also address American Indian Mormon tribal identities, Navajo and Mormon participation at the dedication of Glen Canyon Dam, the impact of Mormon Polynesian missionaries in Diné Bikéyah, the ISPP, and other topics. Prominent American Indian Mormon voices lend their creative work and personal experiences to the book.
With the aim of avoiding familiar narrative patterns of settler colonialism, contributors seek to make American Indians the subjects rather than the objects of discussion in relation to Mormons, presenting new ways to explore and reframe these relationships.
[more]
Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree
Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949
Erick D. Langer
Duke University Press, 2009
Missions played a vital role in frontier development in Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were key to the penetration of national societies into the regions and indigenous lands that the nascent republics claimed as their jurisdictions. In Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree, Erick D. Langer examines one of the most important Catholic mission systems in republican-era Latin America, the Franciscan missions among the Chiriguano Indians in southeastern Bolivia. Using that mission system as a model for understanding the relationship between indigenous peoples and missionaries in the post-independence period, Langer explains how the missions changed over their lifespan and how power shifted between indigenous leaders and the missionaries in an ongoing process of negotiation.
Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is based on twenty years of research, including visits to the sites of nearly every mission discussed and interviews with descendants of mission Indians, Indian chiefs, Franciscan friars, mestizo settlers, and teachers. Langer chronicles how, beginning in the 1840s, the establishment of missions fundamentally changed the relationship between the Chiriguano villages and national society. He looks at the Franciscan missionaries’ motives, their visions of ideal missions, and the realities they faced. He also examines mission life from the Chiriguano point of view, considering their reasons for joining missions and their resistance to conversion, as well as the interrelated issues of Indian acculturation and the development of the mission economy, particularly in light of the relatively high rates of Indian mortality and outmigration. Expanding his focus, Langer delves into the complex interplay of Indians, missionaries, frontier society, and the national government until the last remaining missions were secularized in 1949. He concludes with a comparative analysis between colonial and republican-era missions throughout Latin America.
[more]
Experience Mayhew's Indian Converts
A Cultural Edition
Laura Arnold Leibman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
First published in 1727 under the title Indian Converts, or Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard, in New-England, Experience Mayhew's history of the Wampanoag Indians on Martha's Vineyard provides a rare look at the lives and culture of four generations of Native Americans in colonial America. Dividing his treatment into four sections—Indian Ministers, Good Men, Religious Women, and Pious Children—Mayhew details the books that different age groups were reading, provides insights into early New England pedagogy and childrearing practices, and describes each individual in terms of genealogy, religious practice, way of life, and place of residence. In addition to drawing on his own firsthand knowledge of the community and transcriptions of oral testimony he and others collected, Mayhew inserts translations of Wampanoag texts that have since been lost. Although the book has been out of print since the early nineteenth century, scholars have long recognized its importance for understanding the history of New England's Native communities. In an extensive introduction to this new scholarly edition, Laura Arnold Leibman places Indian Converts in a broader cultural context and explores its significance. She shows how Mayhew's biographies illuminate the theological upheavals that rocked early eighteenth-century New England on the eve of the Great Awakening, shifts that altered not only the character of Puritanism but also the landscape of Wampanoag religious and cultural life. An accompanying online archive that includes over 600 images and documents further contextualizes Mayhew's work and provide suggestions for students' investigations of the text.
[more]
"For the Good of Their Souls"
Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country
William B. Hart
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
In 1712, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts opened its mission near present-day Albany, New York, and began baptizing residents of the nearby Mohawk village Tiononderoge, the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Within three years, about one-fifth of the Mohawks in the area began attending services. They even adapted versions of the service for use in private spaces, which potentially opened a door to an imagined faith community with the Protestants.
Using the lens of performance theory to explain the ways in which the Mohawks considered converting and participating in Christian rituals, historian William B. Hart contends that Mohawks who prayed, sang hymns, submitted to baptism, took communion, and acquired literacy did so to protect their nation's sovereignty, fulfill their responsibility of reciprocity, serve their communities, and reinvent themselves. Performing Christianity was a means of "survivance," a strategy for sustaining Mohawk life and culture on their terms in a changing world.
Using the lens of performance theory to explain the ways in which the Mohawks considered converting and participating in Christian rituals, historian William B. Hart contends that Mohawks who prayed, sang hymns, submitted to baptism, took communion, and acquired literacy did so to protect their nation's sovereignty, fulfill their responsibility of reciprocity, serve their communities, and reinvent themselves. Performing Christianity was a means of "survivance," a strategy for sustaining Mohawk life and culture on their terms in a changing world.
[more]
The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home
Explorations in North American Cultural History
Edited by Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker
University of Alabama Press, 2010
This volume is the first to examine at length and in detail the impact of the missionary experience on American cultural, political, and religious history.
This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways. Missions provided many Americans with their first significant exposure to non-Western cultures and religions. They helped to establish a variety of new academic disciplines in home universities—linguistics, anthropology, and comparative religion among them. Missionary women helped redefine gender roles in North America, and missions have vitalized tiny local churches as well as entire denominations, causing them to rethink their roles and priorities, both here and abroad. In fact, missionaries have helped define our own national identity by influencing our foreign, trade, military, and immigration policies over the last two centuries.
Topics in the collection range from John Saillant's essay on the missions of free African Americans to Liberia in the 19th century to Grant Wacker's essay on the eventual disillusionment of noted writer Pearl S. Buck. Kathryn T. Long’s essay on the “Auca martyrs” offers a sobering case study of the missionary establishment's power to, in tandem with the evangelical and secular press, create and record the stories of our time. William L. Svelmoe documents the improbable friendship between fundamentalist Bible translator William Cameron Townsend and Mexico’s secular socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas. And Anne Blue Wills details the ways many American groups—black, Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon—sought to convert one another, stead-
fastly envisioning “others” as every bit as “heathen” as those in far-off lands.
The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home is an insightful, provocative collection that will stimulate much discussion and debate. It is valuable for academic libraries and seminaries, scholars of religious history and American studies, missionary groups, cultural historians and ethnographers, and political scientists.
[more]
Foundational Arts
Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain
Michael K. Schuessler
University of Arizona Press, 2013
The languages of two hemispheres collided when Spain conquered Mexico, and as a result, a dynamic expression of visual and dramatic arts emerged. Mural painting and missionary theater quickly became the media to explain and comprehend the encounter of indigenous peoples with Christ and the crucifixion, as well as with heaven and hell.
In Foundational Arts Michael K. Schuessler asserts that the literature of New Spain begins with missionary theater and its intimate relationship to mural painting. In particular, he examines the relationships between texts and visual images that emerged in Mexico at two Augustinian monasteries in Hidalgo, Mexico, during the century following the Spanish Conquest. The forced combination of the ideographical tradition of Nahuatl with Latin-based language alphabets led to a fascinating array of new cultural expressions.
Missionary theater was organized by ingenious friars with the intent to convert and catechize indigenous populations. Often performed in Nahuatl or other local languages, the actors combined Latin-based language texts with visual contexts that corresponded to indigenous ways of knowing: murals, architectural ornamentation, statuary, altars, and other modes of visual representation. By concentrating on the interrelationship between mural painting and missionary theater, Foundational Arts explores the artistic and ideological origins of Mexican plastic arts and literature.
In Foundational Arts Michael K. Schuessler asserts that the literature of New Spain begins with missionary theater and its intimate relationship to mural painting. In particular, he examines the relationships between texts and visual images that emerged in Mexico at two Augustinian monasteries in Hidalgo, Mexico, during the century following the Spanish Conquest. The forced combination of the ideographical tradition of Nahuatl with Latin-based language alphabets led to a fascinating array of new cultural expressions.
Missionary theater was organized by ingenious friars with the intent to convert and catechize indigenous populations. Often performed in Nahuatl or other local languages, the actors combined Latin-based language texts with visual contexts that corresponded to indigenous ways of knowing: murals, architectural ornamentation, statuary, altars, and other modes of visual representation. By concentrating on the interrelationship between mural painting and missionary theater, Foundational Arts explores the artistic and ideological origins of Mexican plastic arts and literature.
[more]
Friar Bringas Reports to the King
Methods of Indoctrination on the Frontier of New Spain, 1796–97
Translated and Edited by Daniel S. Matson and Bernard L. Fontana
University of Arizona Press, 1977
When Friar Diego Bringas penned his 1796–97 report on conditions in northwestern New Spain, he was imbued with an enthusiastic drive for reform. Hoping to gain the King of Spain’s support in improving the missionary program, Bringas set down a detailed history of all that had happened in the region since Father Kino’s day. His writings offer a valuable study of Spanish attempts to bring about cultural change among the Piman Indians.
Daniel S. Matson and Bernard L. Fontana have translated the Bringas document and added an informative introduction, notes, and references. They analyze Spanish methods of indoctrination and examine the implications in terms of the modern world.
Friar Bringas carefully explained various missionary and secular policies, laws, and regulations. He pointed out why, in his opinion, Spanish efforts to convert the Piman Indians had failed. He also provided a report of the orders establishing the ill-fated Yuma missions. His fascinating account of the Gila River Pimas is one of the most complete ethnographic descriptions from that era.
Friar Bringas Reports to the King is an important study of Spain’s attempts to assimilate the Indians. It offers a deeper understanding of the history of the Pimería Alta.
Daniel S. Matson and Bernard L. Fontana have translated the Bringas document and added an informative introduction, notes, and references. They analyze Spanish methods of indoctrination and examine the implications in terms of the modern world.
Friar Bringas carefully explained various missionary and secular policies, laws, and regulations. He pointed out why, in his opinion, Spanish efforts to convert the Piman Indians had failed. He also provided a report of the orders establishing the ill-fated Yuma missions. His fascinating account of the Gila River Pimas is one of the most complete ethnographic descriptions from that era.
Friar Bringas Reports to the King is an important study of Spain’s attempts to assimilate the Indians. It offers a deeper understanding of the history of the Pimería Alta.
[more]
Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers
Hispanic Arizona and the Sonora Mission Frontier, 1767–1856
John L. Kessell
University of Arizona Press, 1976
The Franciscan mission San José de Tumacácori and the perennially undermanned presidio Tubac become John L. Kessell's windows on the Arizona–Sonora frontier in this colorful documentary history. His fascinating view extends from the Jesuit expulsion to the coming of the U.S. Army.
Kessell provides exciting accounts of the explorations of Francisco Garcés, de Anza's expeditions, and the Yuma massacre. Drawing from widely scattered archival materials, he vividly describes the epic struggle between Bishop Reyes and Father President Barbastro, the missionary scandals of 1815–18, and the bloody victory of Mexican civilian volunteers over Apaches in Arivaipa Canyon in 1832. Numerous missionaries, presidials, and bureaucrats—nameless in histories until now—emerge as living, swearing, praying, individuals.
This authoritative chronicle offers an engrossing picture of the continually threatened mission frontier. Reformers championing civil rights for mission Indians time and again challenged the friars' "tight-fisted paternalistic control" over their wards. Expansionists repeatedly saw their plans dashed by Indian raids, uncooperative military officials, or lack of financial support.
Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers brings into sharp focus the long, blurry period between Jesuit Sonora and Territorial Arizona.
Kessell provides exciting accounts of the explorations of Francisco Garcés, de Anza's expeditions, and the Yuma massacre. Drawing from widely scattered archival materials, he vividly describes the epic struggle between Bishop Reyes and Father President Barbastro, the missionary scandals of 1815–18, and the bloody victory of Mexican civilian volunteers over Apaches in Arivaipa Canyon in 1832. Numerous missionaries, presidials, and bureaucrats—nameless in histories until now—emerge as living, swearing, praying, individuals.
This authoritative chronicle offers an engrossing picture of the continually threatened mission frontier. Reformers championing civil rights for mission Indians time and again challenged the friars' "tight-fisted paternalistic control" over their wards. Expansionists repeatedly saw their plans dashed by Indian raids, uncooperative military officials, or lack of financial support.
Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers brings into sharp focus the long, blurry period between Jesuit Sonora and Territorial Arizona.
[more]
A Frontier Documentary
Sonora and Tucson, 1821–1848
Edited by Kieran McCarty
University of Arizona Press, 1997
When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, citizens and missionaries in the northwestern reaches of the new nation were without the protection of Spanish military forces for the first time. Beset by hostile Apaches and the uncertainties of life in a desert wilderness, these early Mexican families forged a way of life that continues into the present day. This era in the history of southern Arizona and northern Sonora is now recalled in a series of historical documents that offer eyewitness accounts of daily life in the missions and towns of the region.
These documents give a sense of immediacy to the military operations, Indian activities, and missionary work going on in Tucson and the surrounding areas. They also demonstrate that Hispanic families maintained continuity in military and political control on the frontier, and clearly show that the frontier was not beset by anarchy in spite of the change in national government. In the forty chapters of translated documents in this collection, the voices of those who lived in what is now the Arizona-Sonora border region provide firsthand accounts of the people and events that shaped their era. These documents record such events as the arrival of the first Americans, the reconstruction of Tucson’s presidio wall, and conflict between Tohono O’odham villagers and Mexicans. All are set against the backdrop of an unrelenting Apache offensive that heightened after the departure of the Spanish military but that was held in check by civilian militias. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction in which historian Kieran McCarty provides background on the documents’ context and authorship. Taken together, they offer a fascinating look at this little-known period and provide a unique panorama of southwestern history.
These documents give a sense of immediacy to the military operations, Indian activities, and missionary work going on in Tucson and the surrounding areas. They also demonstrate that Hispanic families maintained continuity in military and political control on the frontier, and clearly show that the frontier was not beset by anarchy in spite of the change in national government. In the forty chapters of translated documents in this collection, the voices of those who lived in what is now the Arizona-Sonora border region provide firsthand accounts of the people and events that shaped their era. These documents record such events as the arrival of the first Americans, the reconstruction of Tucson’s presidio wall, and conflict between Tohono O’odham villagers and Mexicans. All are set against the backdrop of an unrelenting Apache offensive that heightened after the departure of the Spanish military but that was held in check by civilian militias. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction in which historian Kieran McCarty provides background on the documents’ context and authorship. Taken together, they offer a fascinating look at this little-known period and provide a unique panorama of southwestern history.
[more]
A Frontier Life
Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary
Todd M. Compton
University of Utah Press, 2013
Winner of the Juanita Brooks Prize in Mormon Studies
Frontiersman, colonizer, missionary to the Indians, and explorer of the American West, Jacob Hamblin has long been one of the most enigmatic figures in Mormon history. In this defining biography, Todd Compton examines and disentangles many of the myths and controversies surrounding Hamblin. His Grand Canyon adventures and explorations as a guide alongside John Wesley Powell are well documented, as are his roles as a missionary, cultural liaison, and negotiator to the Indian tribes of southern Utah and Arizona. Hamblin struggled in this latter role, sometimes unable to bridge the gulf between Mormonism and Indian culture. He disavowed violent conflict and ceaselessly sought peaceful resolutions where others resorted to punitive action. He strove above all for mutual understanding in the absence of conversion.
A Frontier Life provides a rich narrative that fleshes out a picture of a sometimes vilified figure, particularly in regard to his connection to the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Compton provides nuanced discussion clarifying Hamblin’s post-massacre role—he was not present at the massacre, but reported on it to both Brigham Young and military investigators. Compton’s engagement with Mormon historiography and previous Hamblin portrayals will make this work of particular interest to both scholars and students. The casual reader will take pleasure in learning of a true pioneer who lived life at the geographical, cultural, and spiritual boundaries of his era. This dramatic, entertaining biography is a truly significant contribution to Mormon history.
Winner of the Evans Biography Award, the John Whitmer Historical Society Best Biography Award, and the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award.
Frontiersman, colonizer, missionary to the Indians, and explorer of the American West, Jacob Hamblin has long been one of the most enigmatic figures in Mormon history. In this defining biography, Todd Compton examines and disentangles many of the myths and controversies surrounding Hamblin. His Grand Canyon adventures and explorations as a guide alongside John Wesley Powell are well documented, as are his roles as a missionary, cultural liaison, and negotiator to the Indian tribes of southern Utah and Arizona. Hamblin struggled in this latter role, sometimes unable to bridge the gulf between Mormonism and Indian culture. He disavowed violent conflict and ceaselessly sought peaceful resolutions where others resorted to punitive action. He strove above all for mutual understanding in the absence of conversion.
A Frontier Life provides a rich narrative that fleshes out a picture of a sometimes vilified figure, particularly in regard to his connection to the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Compton provides nuanced discussion clarifying Hamblin’s post-massacre role—he was not present at the massacre, but reported on it to both Brigham Young and military investigators. Compton’s engagement with Mormon historiography and previous Hamblin portrayals will make this work of particular interest to both scholars and students. The casual reader will take pleasure in learning of a true pioneer who lived life at the geographical, cultural, and spiritual boundaries of his era. This dramatic, entertaining biography is a truly significant contribution to Mormon history.
Winner of the Evans Biography Award, the John Whitmer Historical Society Best Biography Award, and the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award.
[more]
Gendered Missions
Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice
Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Throughout the age of Western colonial expansion, Christian missionaries were important participants in the encounter between the West and peoples throughout the rest of the world. Mission schools, health services, and other cultural technologies helped secure Western colonialism, and in some cases transformed or even undermined colonialism's effect. The very breadth of missionaries's focus, however, made the involvement of women in missionary work both possible and necessary.
Missionary groups thus faced more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men. Examining the changing prospects for professional women in the missions, the contributors to Gendered Missions ask how these shaped, and were shaped by, crucial practical, political, and religious developments at home and abroad. While the focus is on the tumultuous period that historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "The Age of Empire" (1875-1914), attention also is paid to how gender has been debated in later colonial and post-colonial missions.
Scholars from any field concerned with colonial and postcolonial societies or with gender and women's history should find this book of special interest. In addition, Gendered Missions should appeal to readers in church history, mission studies, and the sociology of religion.
Mary Taylor Huber is Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nancy C. Lutkehaus is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California.
Missionary groups thus faced more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men. Examining the changing prospects for professional women in the missions, the contributors to Gendered Missions ask how these shaped, and were shaped by, crucial practical, political, and religious developments at home and abroad. While the focus is on the tumultuous period that historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "The Age of Empire" (1875-1914), attention also is paid to how gender has been debated in later colonial and post-colonial missions.
Scholars from any field concerned with colonial and postcolonial societies or with gender and women's history should find this book of special interest. In addition, Gendered Missions should appeal to readers in church history, mission studies, and the sociology of religion.
Mary Taylor Huber is Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nancy C. Lutkehaus is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California.
[more]
Hedstroms and the Bethel Ship Saga
Methodist Influence on Swedish Religious Life
Henry C. Whyman. Foreword by Kenneth E. Rowe
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
The first book-length biographical treatment of Olof Gustaf Hedstrom and his brother Jonas documents their work in spreading Methodism among Swedish immigrants to America. Henry C. Whyman discusses the Bethel Ship Saga, a ministry unique in American immigrant history, and examines the larger picture of the role of religion in nineteenth-century European immigration to the United States.
The Bethel Ship, a floating chapel in New York Harbor, was the vehicle and headquarters for an effective ministry to immigrants arriving in America. Olof Hedstrom, a Methodist minister serving in the Catskill Mountain area, was called to New York to organize and lead this endeavor.
[more]
History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World
Andrés Pérez de Ribas; Translated by Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford; Annotated and with a Critical Introduction by Daniel T. Reff
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Considered by historian Herbert E. Bolton to be one of the greatest books ever written in the West, Andrés Pérez de Ribas's history of the Jesuit missions provides unusual insight into Spanish and Indian relations during the colonial period in Northern New Spain. First published in Madrid in 1645, it traces the history of the missions from 1591 to 1643 and includes letters from Jesuit annual reports and other correspondence, much of which has never been found or cataloged in historical archives. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford have now prepared the first complete, scholarly, and fully annotated edition of this important work in English.
Pérez de Ribas was the first permanent missionary to the Ahome, Zuaque, and Yaqui Indians. After fifteen years on the mission frontier he was recalled to Mexico City, where he held various posts, including Jesuit Provincial. Addressed to novitiates ignorant of the challenges they would face in the field, his Historia was a virtual textbook on missionary work in the New World. Also written to encourage ongoing support of the Jesuit missions, it reflected the author's deep grasp of what rhetorically soothed and moved Church and Crown officials.
Perhaps of greatest interest to the modern reader are Pérez de Ribas's often detailed comments on indigenous beliefs and practices. These firsthand observations provide a rich resource of ethnographic and historical data concerning everything from native subsistence, settlement patterns, and myths to the dynamics of Jesuit-Indian relations. The many cases of conversion that Pérez de Ribas describes are especially rich in ethnographic data, clarifying the values and beliefs from which the Indians were "rescued."
History of the Triumphs is a primary document of great importance, made more valuable here by an exceptionally fluid translation and painstaking annotations. It will be a standard reference for all engaged in research on New Spain and a captivating read for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.
Pérez de Ribas was the first permanent missionary to the Ahome, Zuaque, and Yaqui Indians. After fifteen years on the mission frontier he was recalled to Mexico City, where he held various posts, including Jesuit Provincial. Addressed to novitiates ignorant of the challenges they would face in the field, his Historia was a virtual textbook on missionary work in the New World. Also written to encourage ongoing support of the Jesuit missions, it reflected the author's deep grasp of what rhetorically soothed and moved Church and Crown officials.
Perhaps of greatest interest to the modern reader are Pérez de Ribas's often detailed comments on indigenous beliefs and practices. These firsthand observations provide a rich resource of ethnographic and historical data concerning everything from native subsistence, settlement patterns, and myths to the dynamics of Jesuit-Indian relations. The many cases of conversion that Pérez de Ribas describes are especially rich in ethnographic data, clarifying the values and beliefs from which the Indians were "rescued."
History of the Triumphs is a primary document of great importance, made more valuable here by an exceptionally fluid translation and painstaking annotations. It will be a standard reference for all engaged in research on New Spain and a captivating read for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.
[more]
Imprints on Native Lands
The Miskito-Moravian Settlement Landscape in Honduras
Benjamin F. Tillman
University of Arizona Press, 2011
More than one hundred fifty years ago, Moravian missionaries first landed along a so-called isolated stretch of Honduras’s Mosquito Coast bordering the western Caribbean Sea. The missionaries were sent, with the strong encouragement of German political leaders and in the context of German attempts at colonization, to “spread the word” of Protestantism in Central America. Upon their arrival, the missionaries employed a three-pronged approach consisting of proselytizing, medical treatment, and education to convert the majority of the indigenous population.
Much like the Spanish and English attempts before them, German colonizing efforts in the region never completely took hold. Still, as Benjamin Tillman shows, for the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the Miskito people, the arrival of the Moravian missionaries marked the beginning of an important cultural interface.
Imprints on Native Lands documents Moravian contributions to the Miskito settlement landscape in sixty four villages of eastern Honduras through field observations of material culture, interviews with village residents, and research in primary sources in the Moravian Church archives. Tillman employs the resulting data to map a hierarchy of Moravian centers, illustrating spatially varying degrees of Moravian influence on the Miskito settlement landscape.
Tillman reinforces Miskito claims to ancestral lands by identifying and mapping their created ethnic landscape, as well as supporting earlier efforts at land-use mapping in the region. This book has broad implications, providing a methodology that will be of help to those with an interest in geography, anthropology, or Latin American studies, and to anyone interested in documenting and strengthening indigenous land claims.
Much like the Spanish and English attempts before them, German colonizing efforts in the region never completely took hold. Still, as Benjamin Tillman shows, for the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the Miskito people, the arrival of the Moravian missionaries marked the beginning of an important cultural interface.
Imprints on Native Lands documents Moravian contributions to the Miskito settlement landscape in sixty four villages of eastern Honduras through field observations of material culture, interviews with village residents, and research in primary sources in the Moravian Church archives. Tillman employs the resulting data to map a hierarchy of Moravian centers, illustrating spatially varying degrees of Moravian influence on the Miskito settlement landscape.
Tillman reinforces Miskito claims to ancestral lands by identifying and mapping their created ethnic landscape, as well as supporting earlier efforts at land-use mapping in the region. This book has broad implications, providing a methodology that will be of help to those with an interest in geography, anthropology, or Latin American studies, and to anyone interested in documenting and strengthening indigenous land claims.
[more]
In Africa's Forest and Jungle
Six Years Among the Yorubas
Richard Henry Stone, edited by Betty Finklea Florey
University of Alabama Press, 2009
In Africa's Forest and Jungle is the memoir of Richard Henry Stone, a Civil War era Southern Baptist missionary, who served in what is now Nigeria during the late 1850s and again during the first years of the American Civil War. Stone published this work in 1899, when it became clear that age would prevent him from returning to Africa.
Stone served in Africa with his wife and successfully learned the Yoruba language. He was an intelligent, self-reflective, and reliable observer, making his works important sources of information on Yoruba society before the intervention of European colonialism. In Africa's Forest and Jungle is a rare account of West African culture, made all the more complete by the additional journal entries, letters, and photographs collected in this edition.
Stone served in Africa with his wife and successfully learned the Yoruba language. He was an intelligent, self-reflective, and reliable observer, making his works important sources of information on Yoruba society before the intervention of European colonialism. In Africa's Forest and Jungle is a rare account of West African culture, made all the more complete by the additional journal entries, letters, and photographs collected in this edition.
[more]
Indian Assimilation in the Franciscan Area of Nueva Vizcaya
William B. Griffen
University of Arizona Press, 1979
Examines the processes of disappearance during the late 16th and 17th centuries--through assimilation or extermination--of the native Indians encountered by Spaniards in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico.
[more]
Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions
New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory
Edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Spanish missions in North America were once viewed as confining and stagnant communities, with native peoples on the margins of the colonial enterprise. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research challenges that notion. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions considers how native peoples actively incorporated the mission system into their own dynamic existence. The book, written by diverse scholars and edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, covers missions in the Spanish borderlands from California to Texas to Georgia.
Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources.
Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions.
Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources.
Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions.
[more]
Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ
Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru
Carolyn Dean
Duke University Press, 1999
In Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ Carolyn Dean investigates the multiple meanings of the Roman Catholic feast of Corpus Christi as it was performed in the Andean city of Cuzco after the Spanish conquest. By concentrating on the era’s paintings and its historical archives, Dean explores how the festival celebrated the victory of the Christian God over sin and death, the triumph of Christian orthodoxy over the imperial Inka patron (the Sun), and Spain’s conquest of Peruvian society.
As Dean clearly illustrates, the central rite of the festival—the taking of the Eucharist—symbolized both the acceptance of Christ and the power of the colonizers over the colonized. The most remarkable of Andean celebrants were those who appeared costumed as the vanquished Inka kings of Peru’s pagan past. Despite the subjugation of the indigenous population, Dean shows how these and other Andean nobles used the occasion of Corpus Christi as an opportunity to construct new identities through tinkuy, a native term used to describe the conjoining of opposites. By mediating the chasms between the Andean region and Europe, pagans and Christians, and the past and the present, these Andean elites negotiated a new sense of themselves. Dean moves beyond the colonial period to examine how these hybrid forms of Inka identity are still evident in the festive life of modern Cuzco.
Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ offers the first in-depth analysis of the culture and paintings of colonial Cuzco. This volume will be welcomed by historians of Peruvian culture, art, and politics. It will also interest those engaged in performance studies, religion, and postcolonial and Latin American studies.
As Dean clearly illustrates, the central rite of the festival—the taking of the Eucharist—symbolized both the acceptance of Christ and the power of the colonizers over the colonized. The most remarkable of Andean celebrants were those who appeared costumed as the vanquished Inka kings of Peru’s pagan past. Despite the subjugation of the indigenous population, Dean shows how these and other Andean nobles used the occasion of Corpus Christi as an opportunity to construct new identities through tinkuy, a native term used to describe the conjoining of opposites. By mediating the chasms between the Andean region and Europe, pagans and Christians, and the past and the present, these Andean elites negotiated a new sense of themselves. Dean moves beyond the colonial period to examine how these hybrid forms of Inka identity are still evident in the festive life of modern Cuzco.
Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ offers the first in-depth analysis of the culture and paintings of colonial Cuzco. This volume will be welcomed by historians of Peruvian culture, art, and politics. It will also interest those engaged in performance studies, religion, and postcolonial and Latin American studies.
[more]
Into Africa
A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change
Wall, Barbra Mann
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing
Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category
The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.
Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category
The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.
[more]
Islam on the Move
The Tablighi Jama'at in Southeast Asia
Farish A. Noor
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
In this exhaustive examination of the rise and spread of the Tablighi Jama’at, which is arguably the world’s largest lay Islamic missionary movement, Farish Ahmad-Noor provides extensive research on the group as well as several conversion narratives from Tablighi members in a number of Asian countries. A key study of an important and complex movement, this volume locates the spiritual framework of the sect in the context of the national and political climate of the countries in which its followers live. Moreover, Ahmad-Noor analyzes the way in which Tablighi followers themselves see the movement, and he traces the way in which internal and external perspectives shape the religion. Islam on the Move seeks to create a more nuanced and variegated portrait of Islam than the reductivist narrative of the religion that became commonplace in the mainstream Western media after the events of September 11th.
[more]
The Jesuit and the Incas
The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J.
Sabine Hyland
University of Michigan Press, 2004
In the spirit of justice Blas Valera broke all the rules-and paid with his life. Hundreds of years later, his ghost has returned to haunt the official story. But is it the truth, and will it set the record straight?
This is the tale of Father Blas Valera, the child of a native Incan woman and Spanish father, caught between the ancient world of the Incas and the conquistadors of Spain. Valera, a Jesuit in sixteenth-century Peru, believed in what to his superiors was pure heresy: that the Incan culture, religion, and language were equal to their Christian counterparts.
As punishment for his beliefs he was imprisoned, beaten, and, finally, exiled to Spain, where he died at the hands of English pirates in 1597.
Four centuries later, this Incan chronicler had been all but forgotten, until an Italian anthropologist discovered some startling documents in a private Neapolitan collection. The documents claimed, among other things, that Valera's death had been faked by the Jesuits; that he had returned to Peru; and, intriguingly, while there had taught his followers that the Incas used a secret phonetic quipu-a record-keeping device of the Inca empire-to record history.
Far from settling anything, the documents created an international sensation among scholars and led to bitter disputes over how they should be assessed. Are they forgeries, authentic documents, or something in between? If genuine, they will radically reform our view of Inca culture and Valera. The author insightfully examines the evidence, showing how fact and fiction intertwine, and brings the dimly understood history of this author-priest to light.
This is the tale of Father Blas Valera, the child of a native Incan woman and Spanish father, caught between the ancient world of the Incas and the conquistadors of Spain. Valera, a Jesuit in sixteenth-century Peru, believed in what to his superiors was pure heresy: that the Incan culture, religion, and language were equal to their Christian counterparts.
As punishment for his beliefs he was imprisoned, beaten, and, finally, exiled to Spain, where he died at the hands of English pirates in 1597.
Four centuries later, this Incan chronicler had been all but forgotten, until an Italian anthropologist discovered some startling documents in a private Neapolitan collection. The documents claimed, among other things, that Valera's death had been faked by the Jesuits; that he had returned to Peru; and, intriguingly, while there had taught his followers that the Incas used a secret phonetic quipu-a record-keeping device of the Inca empire-to record history.
Far from settling anything, the documents created an international sensation among scholars and led to bitter disputes over how they should be assessed. Are they forgeries, authentic documents, or something in between? If genuine, they will radically reform our view of Inca culture and Valera. The author insightfully examines the evidence, showing how fact and fiction intertwine, and brings the dimly understood history of this author-priest to light.
Sabine Hyland is Co-director of a multidisciplinary project studying the Chanka people of Peru. She holds a doctoral degree in anthropology from Yale, and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Norbert College.
[more]
John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War
Richard W. Cogley
Harvard University Press, 1999
No previous work on John Eliot's mission to the Indians has told such a comprehensive and engaging story. Richard Cogley takes a dual approach: he delves deeply into Eliot's theological writings and describes the historical development of Eliot's missionary work. By relating the two, he presents fresh perspectives that challenge widely accepted assessments of the Puritan mission.
Cogley incorporates Eliot's eschatology into the history of the mission, takes into account the biographies of the proselytes (the "praying Indians") and the individual histories of the Christian Indian settlements (the "praying towns"), and corrects misperceptions about the mission's role in English expansion. He also addresses other interpretive problems in Eliot's mission, such as why the Puritans postponed their evangelizing mission until 1646, why Indians accepted or rejected the mission, and whether the mission played a role in causing King Philip's War.
This book makes signal contributions to New England history, Native American history, and religious studies.
[more]
Journey to the East
The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724
Liam Matthew Brockey
Harvard University Press, 2008
It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first time in the modern era. This “journey to the East” is explored by Liam Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China, believing that, with little more than firm conviction and divine assistance, they could convert the Chinese to Christianity. Moving beyond the image of Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how these priests, in the first concerted European effort to engage with Chinese language and thought, translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts.
The first narrative history of the Jesuits’ mission from 1579 until the proscription of Christianity in China in 1724, this study is also the first to use extensive documentation of the enterprise found in Lisbon and Rome. The peril of travel in the premodern world, the danger of entering a foreign land alone and unarmed, and the challenge of understanding a radically different culture result in episodes of high drama set against such backdrops as the imperial court of Peking, the villages of Shanxi Province, and the bustling cities of the Yangzi Delta region. Further scenes show how the Jesuits claimed conversions and molded their Christian communities into outposts of Baroque Catholicism in the vastness of China. In the retelling, this story reaches across continents and centuries to reveal the deep political, cultural, scientific, linguistic, and religious complexities of a true early engagement between East and West.
[more]
Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860–1913
The Breakdown of a Moral Order
Jelmer Vos
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
This richly documented account of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm is told from the perspective of the kingdom's inhabitants. Jelmer Vos shows that both Africans and Europeans were able to forward differing social, political, and economic agendas as Kongo's sacred city of São Salvador became a vital site for the expansion of European imperialism in Central Africa. Kongo people, he argues, built on the kingdom's long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and cultures to become avid intermediaries in a new system of colonial trade and mission schools.
Vos underlines that Kongo's incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo's royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power.
Vos underlines that Kongo's incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo's royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power.
[more]
Landscapes of Fraud
Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’odham
Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 2006
From the actions of Europeans in the seventeenth century to the real estate deals of the modern era, people making a living off the land in southern Arizona have been repeatedly robbed of their way of life. History has recorded more than three centuries of speculative failures that never amounted to much but left dispossessed people in their wake. This book seeks to excavate those failures, to examine the new social spaces the schemers struggled to create and the existing social spaces they destroyed.
Landscapes of Fraud explores how the penetration of the evolving capitalist world-system created and destroyed communities in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Thomas Sheridan has melded history, anthropology, and critical geography to create a penetrating view of greed and power and their lasting effect on those left powerless.
Sheridan first examines how O’odham culture was fragmented by the arrival of the Spanish, telling how autonomous communities moving across landscapes in seasonal rounds were reduced to a mission world of subordination. Sheridan then considers the fate of the Tumacácori grant and Baca Float No. 3, another land grant. He tells the unbroken story of land fraud from Manuel María Gándara’s purchase of the “abandoned” Tumacácori grant at public auction in 1844 through the bankruptcy of the shady real estate developers who had fraudulently promoted housing projects at Rio Rico during the 1960s and ’70s.
As the Upper Santa Cruz Valley underwent a wrenching transition from a landscape of community to a landscape of fraud, the betrayal of the O’odham became complete when land, that most elemental form of human space, was transformed from a communal resource into a commodity bought and sold for its future value. Today, Mission Tumacácori stands as a romantic icon of the past while the landscapes that supported it lay buried under speculative schemes that continue to haunt our history.
Landscapes of Fraud explores how the penetration of the evolving capitalist world-system created and destroyed communities in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Thomas Sheridan has melded history, anthropology, and critical geography to create a penetrating view of greed and power and their lasting effect on those left powerless.
Sheridan first examines how O’odham culture was fragmented by the arrival of the Spanish, telling how autonomous communities moving across landscapes in seasonal rounds were reduced to a mission world of subordination. Sheridan then considers the fate of the Tumacácori grant and Baca Float No. 3, another land grant. He tells the unbroken story of land fraud from Manuel María Gándara’s purchase of the “abandoned” Tumacácori grant at public auction in 1844 through the bankruptcy of the shady real estate developers who had fraudulently promoted housing projects at Rio Rico during the 1960s and ’70s.
As the Upper Santa Cruz Valley underwent a wrenching transition from a landscape of community to a landscape of fraud, the betrayal of the O’odham became complete when land, that most elemental form of human space, was transformed from a communal resource into a commodity bought and sold for its future value. Today, Mission Tumacácori stands as a romantic icon of the past while the landscapes that supported it lay buried under speculative schemes that continue to haunt our history.
[more]
Life and Death in a Venetian Convent
The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395-1436
Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni
University of Chicago Press, 2000
These works by Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni offer an intimate portrait of the women who inhabited the Venetian convent of Corpus Domini, where they shared a religious life bounded physically by the convent wall and organized temporally by the rhythms of work and worship. At the same time, they show how this cloistered community vibrated with news of the great ecclesiastical events of the day, such as the Great Western Schism and the Council of Constance.
While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of nearly fifty women who died in the convent between 1395 and 1436. We follow the fascinating stories that led these women, from adolescent girls to elderly widows, to join the convent; and we learn of their cultural backgrounds and intellectual accomplishments, their ascetic practices and mystical visions, their charity and devotion to each other and their fortitude in the face of illness and death.
The personal and social meaning of religious devotion comes alive in these texts, the first of their kind to be translated into English.
While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of nearly fifty women who died in the convent between 1395 and 1436. We follow the fascinating stories that led these women, from adolescent girls to elderly widows, to join the convent; and we learn of their cultural backgrounds and intellectual accomplishments, their ascetic practices and mystical visions, their charity and devotion to each other and their fortitude in the face of illness and death.
The personal and social meaning of religious devotion comes alive in these texts, the first of their kind to be translated into English.
[more]
Making Men, Making Class
The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920
Thomas Winter
University of Chicago Press, 2002
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States transformed from an essentially agrarian society into an urban, industrialized economy. In Making Men, Making Class, Thomas Winter explores the impact of these profound changes on constructions of manhood, using the YMCA's new efforts to reach out to railroad and industrial workers as a case study.
Starting in the 1870s, the leaders ("secretaries") of the YMCA sought to reduce political radicalism and labor unrest by instilling new ideals of manliness among workers. By involving workingmen in a range of activities on the job and off, the YMCA hoped to foster team spirit, moral conduct, and new standards of manhood that would avoid conflict and instead encourage cooperation along the lines of a Christian, pious manliness. In their efforts to make better men, the secretaries of the YMCA also crafted new ideals of middle-class manliness for themselves that involved a sense of mission and social purpose. In doing so, they ended up "making" class, too, as they began to speak a language of manhood structured by class differences.
Starting in the 1870s, the leaders ("secretaries") of the YMCA sought to reduce political radicalism and labor unrest by instilling new ideals of manliness among workers. By involving workingmen in a range of activities on the job and off, the YMCA hoped to foster team spirit, moral conduct, and new standards of manhood that would avoid conflict and instead encourage cooperation along the lines of a Christian, pious manliness. In their efforts to make better men, the secretaries of the YMCA also crafted new ideals of middle-class manliness for themselves that involved a sense of mission and social purpose. In doing so, they ended up "making" class, too, as they began to speak a language of manhood structured by class differences.
[more]
Making War and Minting Christians
Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early New England
R. Romero
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
In this book, R. Todd Romero traces the interaction of notions of gender, the practice of religion, and the conduct of warfare in colonial America. He shows how Native and Anglo-American ideas of manhood developed in counterpoint, in the context of Christian evangelization, colonial expansion, and recurrent armed conflict.
For the English, the cultivation of manliness became an important aspect of missionary efforts. Conversion demanded that the English "make men" of the Indians before they could "make them Christians," a process that involved reshaping Native masculinity according to English patriarchal ideals that the colonists themselves rarely matched. For their part, Native Americans held on to older ways of understanding the divine and defining gender even as they entered English "praying towns" and negotiated the steep demands of the missionaries.
Evolving ideas of masculinity resonated with religious significance and shaped the meaning of warfare for Natives and colonists alike. Just as the English believed that their territorial expansion was divinely sanctioned, Indians attributed a string of victories in King Philip's War to "the Great God" and the perception that their enemies "were like women." Trusting that war and manliness were necessarily linked, both groups engaged in ritual preparations for battle, believed deeply in the efficacy of the supernatural to affect the outcome of combat, and comprehended the meaning of war in distinctly religious ways.
For the English, the cultivation of manliness became an important aspect of missionary efforts. Conversion demanded that the English "make men" of the Indians before they could "make them Christians," a process that involved reshaping Native masculinity according to English patriarchal ideals that the colonists themselves rarely matched. For their part, Native Americans held on to older ways of understanding the divine and defining gender even as they entered English "praying towns" and negotiated the steep demands of the missionaries.
Evolving ideas of masculinity resonated with religious significance and shaped the meaning of warfare for Natives and colonists alike. Just as the English believed that their territorial expansion was divinely sanctioned, Indians attributed a string of victories in King Philip's War to "the Great God" and the perception that their enemies "were like women." Trusting that war and manliness were necessarily linked, both groups engaged in ritual preparations for battle, believed deeply in the efficacy of the supernatural to affect the outcome of combat, and comprehended the meaning of war in distinctly religious ways.
[more]
Mapping Identity
The Creation of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation, 1805-1902
Laura Woodworth-Ney
University Press of Colorado, 2004
Mapping Identity traces the formation of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in northern Idaho from the introduction of the Jesuit notion of "reduction" in the 1840s to the finalization of reservation boundaries in the 1890s. Using Indian Agency records, congressional documents, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) records, Jesuit missionary reports, and tribal accounts, historian Laura Woodworth-Ney argues that the reservation-making process for the Coeur d'Alenes reflected more than just BIA policy objectives. It was also the result of a complex interplay of Jesuit mission goals, the Schitsu'umsh chief Andrew Seltice's assimilationist policy, and political pressure from local non-Indians. Woodworth-Ney concludes that in creating the reservation, BIA officials and tribal leaders mapped boundaries not only of territory, but also of tribal identity.
Mapping Identity builds on the growing body of literature that presents a more complex picture of federal policy, native identity, and the creation of Indian reservations in the western United States. It will be important to readers interested in western U.S. history, legal and administrative history, Native American history, and interior Northwest history.
[more]
Massacre at the Yuma Crossing
Spanish Relations with the Quechans, 1779-1782
Mark Santiago
University of Arizona Press, 1998
The quiet of the dawn was rent by the screams of war. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Quechan and Mohave warriors leaped from concealment, rushing the plaza from all sides. Painted for battle and brandishing lances, bows, and war clubs, the Indians killed every Spaniard they could catch.
The route from the Spanish presidial settlements in upper Sonora to the Colorado River was called the Camino del Diablo, the "Road of the Devil." Running through the harshest of deserts, this route was the only way for the Spanish to transport goods overland to their settlements in California. At the end of the route lay the only passable part of the lower Colorado, and the people who lived around the river, the Yumas or Quechans, initially joined into a peaceful union with the Spanish. When the relationship soured and the Yumas revolted in 1781, it essentially ended Spanish settlement in the area, dashed the dreams of the mission builders, and limited Spanish expansion into California and beyond.
In Massacre at the Yuma Crossing, Mark Santiago introduces us to the important and colorful actors involved in the dramatic revolt of 1781: Padre Francisco Garcés, who discovered a path from Sonora to California, made contact with the Yumas and eventually became their priest; Salvador Palma, the informal leader of the Yuman people, whose decision to negotiate with the Spanish earned him a reputation as a peacebuilder in the region, which eventually caused his downfall; and Teodoro de Croix, the Spanish commandant-general, who, breaking with traditional settlement practice, established two pueblos among the Quechans without an adequate garrison or mission, thereby leaving the settlers without any sort of defense when the revolt finally took place.
Massacre at the Yuma Crossing not only tells the story of the Yuma Massacre with new details but also gives the reader an understanding of the pressing questions debated in the Spanish Empire at the time: What was the efficacy of the presidios? How extensive should the power of the Catholic mission priests be? And what would be the future of Spain in North America?
The route from the Spanish presidial settlements in upper Sonora to the Colorado River was called the Camino del Diablo, the "Road of the Devil." Running through the harshest of deserts, this route was the only way for the Spanish to transport goods overland to their settlements in California. At the end of the route lay the only passable part of the lower Colorado, and the people who lived around the river, the Yumas or Quechans, initially joined into a peaceful union with the Spanish. When the relationship soured and the Yumas revolted in 1781, it essentially ended Spanish settlement in the area, dashed the dreams of the mission builders, and limited Spanish expansion into California and beyond.
In Massacre at the Yuma Crossing, Mark Santiago introduces us to the important and colorful actors involved in the dramatic revolt of 1781: Padre Francisco Garcés, who discovered a path from Sonora to California, made contact with the Yumas and eventually became their priest; Salvador Palma, the informal leader of the Yuman people, whose decision to negotiate with the Spanish earned him a reputation as a peacebuilder in the region, which eventually caused his downfall; and Teodoro de Croix, the Spanish commandant-general, who, breaking with traditional settlement practice, established two pueblos among the Quechans without an adequate garrison or mission, thereby leaving the settlers without any sort of defense when the revolt finally took place.
Massacre at the Yuma Crossing not only tells the story of the Yuma Massacre with new details but also gives the reader an understanding of the pressing questions debated in the Spanish Empire at the time: What was the efficacy of the presidios? How extensive should the power of the Catholic mission priests be? And what would be the future of Spain in North America?
[more]
Michoacán and Eden
Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico
By Bernardino Verástique
University of Texas Press, 2000
Don Vasco de Quiroga (1477/8–1565) was the first bishop of Michoacán in Western Mexico. Driven by his profound respect for Spanish jurisprudence and the desire to convert the native Purhépecha-Chichimec peoples to a purified form of Christianity, he sought to establish New World Edens in Michoacán by congregating the people into pueblo-hospital communities, where clerics could more easily teach them the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and the values of Spanish culture. In this broadly synthetic study, Bernardino Verástique explores Vasco de Quiroga’s evangelizing project in its full cultural and historical context. He begins by recreating the complex and not wholly incompatible worldviews of the Purhépecha and the Spaniards at the time of their first encounter in 1521. With Quiroga as a focal point, Verástique then traces the uneasy process of assimilation and resistance that occurred on both sides as the Spaniards established political and religious dominance in Michoacán. He describes the syncretisms, or fusions, between Christianity and indigenous beliefs and practices that arose among the Purhépecha and relates these to similar developments in other regions of Mexico. Written especially for students and general readers, this book demonstrates how cultural and geographical environments influence religious experience, while it adds to our understanding of the process of indigenous appropriation of Christian theological concepts in the New World.
[more]
Mission of Change in Southwest Alaska
Conversations with Father René Astruc and Paul Dixon on Their Work with Yup’ik People
Edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan
University of Alaska Press, 2012
Mission of Change is an oral history describing various types of change—political, social, cultural, and religious—as seen through the eyes of Father Astruc and Paul Dixon, non-Natives who dedicated their lives to working with the Yup’ik people. Their stories are framed by the an analytic history of regional changes, together with current anthropological theory on the nature of cultural change and the formation of cultural identity. The book presents a subtle and emotionally moving account of the region and the roles of two men, both of whom view issues from a Catholic perspective yet are closely attuned to and involved with changes in the Yup’ik community.
[more]
Mission of Sorrows
Jesuit Guevavi and the Pimas, 1691–1767
John L. Kessell; Foreword by Ernest J. Burrus, S.J.
University of Arizona Press, 1970
The Mission of Guevavi on the Santa Cruz River in what is now southern Arizona served as a focal point of Jesuit missionary endeavor among the Pima Indians on New Spain's far northwestern frontier.
For three-quarters of a century, from the first visit by the renowned Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1691 until the Jesuit Expulsion in 1767, the difficult process of replacing one culture with another—the heart of the Spanish mission system—went on at Guevavi. Yet all but the initial years presided over by Father Kino have been forgotten.
For three-quarters of a century, from the first visit by the renowned Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1691 until the Jesuit Expulsion in 1767, the difficult process of replacing one culture with another—the heart of the Spanish mission system—went on at Guevavi. Yet all but the initial years presided over by Father Kino have been forgotten.
Drawing upon archival materials in Mexico, Spain, and the United States—including accounts by the missionaries themselves and the surviving pages of the Guevavi record books—Kessell brings to life those forgotten years and forgotten men who struggled to transform a native ranchería into an ordered mission community.
Of the eleven Black Robes who resided at Guevavi between 1701 and 1767, only a few are well known to history. Others—such as Joseph Garrucho, who presided more years at Guevavi than any other Padre; Alexandro Rapicani, son of a favorite of Sweden's Queen Christina; Custodio Zimeno, Guevavi's last Jesuit—have the details of their roles filled in here for the first time.
In this in-depth study of a single missionary center, Kessell describes in detail the daily round of the Padres in their activities as missionaries, educators, governors, and intercessors among the often-indifferent and occassionally hostile Pimas. He discusses the Pima uprising of 1751 and the events that led up to it, concluding that it actually continued sporadically for some ten years.
The growing ferocity of the Apache, the disastrous results of certain government policies—especially the removal of the Sobaípuri Indians from the San Pedro Valley—and the declining native population due to a combination of enforced culture change and epidemics of European diseases are also carefully explored.
The story of Guevavi is one of continuing adversity and triumph. It is the story, finally, of explusion for the Jesuits and, a few short years later, the end of Mission Guevavi at the hands of the Apaches.
In Mission of Sorrows Kessell has projected meticulous research into a highly readable narrative to produce an important contribution to the history of the Spanish Borderlands.
[more]
Missionaries, Miners, and Indians
Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820
Evelyn Hu-DeHart
University of Arizona Press, 1981
The Yaqui Indians managed to avoid assimilation during the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Even when mining interests sought to wrest Yaqui labor from the control of the Jesuits who had organized Indian society into an agricultural system, the Yaqui themselves sought primarily to ensure their continuing existence as a people.
More than a tale of Yaqui Indian resistance, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians documents the history of the Jesuit missions during a period of encroaching secularization. The Yaqui rebellion of 1740, analyzed here in detail, enabled the Yaqui to work for the mines without repudiating the missions; however, the erosion of the mission system ultimately led to the Jesuits’ expulsion from New Spain in 1767, and through their own perseverance, the Yaqui were able to bring their culture intact into the nineteenth century.
More than a tale of Yaqui Indian resistance, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians documents the history of the Jesuit missions during a period of encroaching secularization. The Yaqui rebellion of 1740, analyzed here in detail, enabled the Yaqui to work for the mines without repudiating the missions; however, the erosion of the mission system ultimately led to the Jesuits’ expulsion from New Spain in 1767, and through their own perseverance, the Yaqui were able to bring their culture intact into the nineteenth century.
[more]
Missionary Men in the Early Modern World
German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys
Ulrike Strasser
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis in the formation of the Jesuit missions, as well as the significance of patriarchal dynamics. Focussing on previously neglected German figures, Strasser shows how stories of exemplary male behavior circulated across national boundaries, directing the hearts and feet of men throughout Europe towards Jesuit missions in faraway lands. The sixteenth-century Iberian exemplars of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, disseminated in print and visual media, inspired late seventeenth-century Jesuits from German-speaking lands to bring Catholicism and European gender norms to the Spanish-controlled Pacific. As Strasser demonstrates, the age of global missions hinged on the reproduction of missionary manhood in print and real life.
[more]
The Missions of Northern Sonora
A 1935 Field Documentation
Buford L. Pickens
University of Arizona Press, 1993
The Spanish missions founded by Padre Eusebio Kino in Sonora, Mexico, during the 1690s and early 1700s are historical as well as architectural marvels. Once self-supporting villages with central churches, the missions stand today as monuments to perseverance in the face of a hostile New World.
These "Kino Missions" were surveyed in 1935 by the National Park Service to prepare for the restoration of the mission at Tumacacori, Arizona, then a National Historic Monument. That report, which was never published, provided insights into the missions' history and architecture that remain of lasting relevance. Perhaps more important, it documented these structures in photographs and drawings—the latter including floor plans and sketches of architectural detail—that today are of historic as well as aesthetic interest.
This volume reproduces that 1935 report in its entirety, focusing on sixteen missions and including two maps, 52 drawings, and 76 photographs. With a new introduction and appendixes that place the original study in context, The Missions of Northern Sonora is an invaluable reference for scholars and mission visitors alike.
These "Kino Missions" were surveyed in 1935 by the National Park Service to prepare for the restoration of the mission at Tumacacori, Arizona, then a National Historic Monument. That report, which was never published, provided insights into the missions' history and architecture that remain of lasting relevance. Perhaps more important, it documented these structures in photographs and drawings—the latter including floor plans and sketches of architectural detail—that today are of historic as well as aesthetic interest.
This volume reproduces that 1935 report in its entirety, focusing on sixteen missions and including two maps, 52 drawings, and 76 photographs. With a new introduction and appendixes that place the original study in context, The Missions of Northern Sonora is an invaluable reference for scholars and mission visitors alike.
[more]
More Than God Demands
Politics and Influence of Christian Missions in Northwest Alaska, 1897-1918
Anthony Urvina with Sally Urvina
University of Alaska Press, 2016
Near the turn of the twentieth century, the territorial government of Alaska put its support behind a project led by Christian missionaries to convert Alaska Native peoples—and, along the way, bring them into “civilized” American citizenship. Establishing missions in a number of areas inhabited by Alaska Natives, the program was an explicit attempt to erase ten thousand years of Native culture and replace it with Christianity and an American frontier ethic.
Anthony Urvina, whose mother was an orphan raised at one of the missions established as part of this program, draws on details from her life in order to present the first full history of this missionary effort. Smoothly combining personal and regional history, he tells the story of his mother’s experience amid a fascinating account of Alaska Native life and of the men and women who came to Alaska to spread the word of Christ, confident in their belief and unable to see the power of the ancient traditions they aimed to supplant.
Anthony Urvina, whose mother was an orphan raised at one of the missions established as part of this program, draws on details from her life in order to present the first full history of this missionary effort. Smoothly combining personal and regional history, he tells the story of his mother’s experience amid a fascinating account of Alaska Native life and of the men and women who came to Alaska to spread the word of Christ, confident in their belief and unable to see the power of the ancient traditions they aimed to supplant.
[more]
Native Apostles
Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World
Edward E. Andrews
Harvard University Press, 2013
As Protestantism expanded across the Atlantic, most evangelists were not Anglo-Americans but were members of the groups that missionaries were trying to convert. Native Apostles reveals the way Native Americans, Africans, and black slaves redefined Christianity and addressed the challenges of slavery, dispossession, and European settlement.
[more]
Nurturing Doubt
From Mennonite Missionary to Anthropologist in the Argentine Chaco
Elmer S. Miller
University of Illinois Press, 1995
Unique in ethnography, Nurturing Doubt documents the transforming effects of field experiences on a young Mennonite who went to Argentina to work with the Toba, first as a missionary and later as an anthropologist. Elmer Miller insightfully probes the documents--diaries, field journals, and letters--of both his lives, revealing as he does the ways in which his perceptions of the Toba--and theirs of him--changed when his role changed. Deeply affected by an upbringing in which he had been taught that doubting was "sinful," Miller gradually found that he doubted not only the validity of the missionary mandate but also his ethnographic mandate and the whole practice of anthropology. His exploration of how his doubt was transformed from a negative activity into a positive philosophical attitude underscores the richness of his relationships with the Toba. In depicting the move from theological to anthropological discourse, Miller contributes to current debates over the form and purpose of ethnographic investigation and reporting.
[more]
Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1
Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff
University of Chicago Press, 1991
"Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb....The first volume creates an appetite for the second."—Sally Falk Moore, American Anthropologist
[more]
Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2
The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier
John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions and the Southern Tswana peoples, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II, explores the complex transactions—both epic and ordinary—among the various dramatis personae along this colonial frontier.
The Comaroffs trace many of the major themes of twentieth-century South African history back to these formative encounters. The relationship between the British evangelists and the Southern Tswana engendered complex exchanges of goods, signs, and cultural markers that shaped not only African existence but also bourgeois modernity "back home" in England. We see, in this volume, how the colonial attempt to "civilize" Africa set in motion a dialectical process that refashioned the everyday lives of all those drawn into its purview, creating hybrid cultural forms and potent global forces which persist in the postcolonial age.
This fascinating study shows how the initiatives of the colonial missions collided with local traditions, giving rise to new cultural practices, new patterns of production and consumption, new senses of style and beauty, and new forms of class distinction and ethnicity. As noted by reviewers of the first volume, the Comaroffs have succeeded in providing a model for the study of colonial encounters. By insisting on its dialectical nature, they demonstrate that colonialism can no longer be seen as a one-sided relationship between the conquering and the conquered. It is, rather, a complex system of reciprocal determinations, one whose legacy is very much with us today.
The Comaroffs trace many of the major themes of twentieth-century South African history back to these formative encounters. The relationship between the British evangelists and the Southern Tswana engendered complex exchanges of goods, signs, and cultural markers that shaped not only African existence but also bourgeois modernity "back home" in England. We see, in this volume, how the colonial attempt to "civilize" Africa set in motion a dialectical process that refashioned the everyday lives of all those drawn into its purview, creating hybrid cultural forms and potent global forces which persist in the postcolonial age.
This fascinating study shows how the initiatives of the colonial missions collided with local traditions, giving rise to new cultural practices, new patterns of production and consumption, new senses of style and beauty, and new forms of class distinction and ethnicity. As noted by reviewers of the first volume, the Comaroffs have succeeded in providing a model for the study of colonial encounters. By insisting on its dialectical nature, they demonstrate that colonialism can no longer be seen as a one-sided relationship between the conquering and the conquered. It is, rather, a complex system of reciprocal determinations, one whose legacy is very much with us today.
[more]
The Origins of Mexican Catholicism
Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Osvaldo F. Pardo
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"Pardo's study provides a persuasive criticism of the widespread assumption that the process of Christianization in Mexico can be conceived as the imposition of a complete and fool-proof system that did not accept doubts or compromises. The Origins of Mexican Catholicism will become an invaluable tool for future researchers and enrich future debates on the subject."
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK
"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota
At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.
Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.
For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.
Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK
"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota
At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.
Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.
For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.
Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.
[more]
Pacific Apostle
The 1920-21 Diary of David O. McKay in the Latter-day Saint Island Missions
David O. McKay, Edited by Reid L. Neilson and Carson V. Teuscher
University of Illinois Press, 2020
In 1920, David O. McKay embarked on a journey that forever changed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His visits to the Latter-day Saint missions, schools, and branches in the Pacific solidified the Church leadership's commitment to global outreach. As importantly, the trip inspired McKay's own initiatives when he later became Church president. McKay's account of his odyssey brings to life the story of the Church of Jesus Christ’s transformation into a global faith. Throughout his diary, McKay expressed his humanity, curiosity, and fascination with cultures and places--the Maori hongi, East Asian customs, Australian wildlife, and more. At the same time, he and his travel companion, Hugh J. Cannon, detailed the Latter-day Saint missionary life of the era, closely observing logistical challenges and cultural differences, guiding various church efforts, and listening to followers' impressions and concerns. Reid L. Neilson and Carson V. Teuscher's meticulous notes provide historical, religious, and general context for the reader.Blending travelogue with history, Pacific Apostle illuminates the thought and work of an essential figure in the twentieth-century Church of Jesus Christ.
[more]
Private Women, Public Lives
Gender and the Missions of the Californias
By Bárbara O. Reyes
University of Texas Press, 2009
Through the lives and works of three women in colonial California, Bárbara O. Reyes examines frontier mission social spaces and their relationship to the creation of gendered colonial relations in the Californias. She explores the function of missions and missionaries in establishing hierarchies of power and in defining gendered spaces and roles, and looks at the ways that women challenged, and attempted to modify, the construction of those hierarchies, roles, and spaces. Reyes studies the criminal inquiry and depositions of Barbara Gandiaga, an Indian woman charged with conspiracy to murder two priests at her mission; the divorce petition of Eulalia Callis, the first lady of colonial California who petitioned for divorce from her adulterous governor-husband; and the testimonio of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at Mission San Gabriel who acquired a position of significant authority and responsibility but whose work has not been properly recognized. These three women’s voices seem to reach across time and place, calling for additional, more complex analysis and questions: Could women have agency in the colonial Californias? Did the social structures or colonial processes in place in the frontier setting of New Spain confine or limit them in particular gendered ways? And, were gender dynamics in colonial California explicitly rigid as a result of the imperatives of the goals of colonization?
[more]
The Pyramid under the Cross
Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth-century Mexico
Viviana Díaz Balsera
University of Arizona Press, 2005
As the driving force in early European expansionism, Spain was concerned not only with the political and economic subordination of the New World native but also with the need to possess his soul. In this book, Viviana Díaz Balsera tells the story of this zealous spiritual endeavor during its first one hundred years in Central Mexico and of how it transformed the European self and the indigenous other in ways sometimes unforeseen for both.
The Pyramid under the Cross looks at the epic project of Christianization as well as the limits of the Spanish spiritual colonizers' power to accomplish it. The book focuses on activities of Franciscan missionaries who, as the first religious order to arrive, occupied the most important political and social centers in the Valley of Mexico and set the strategies of evangelization that others would follow. One such activity, the Nahua theater of evangelization, is represented as an exemplary case of the inevitable cultural negotiation involved in the missionary process. The author explores not only the imposition of a Eurocentric worldview upon the Nahua but also the hybridization of this view as the spiritual colonizer attempted to encompass a new non-Western constituency and the latter interpreted Christianity according to its own cultural paradigms.
The book treats a wide range of texts—the Historia eclesiástica indiana, the Confessionario Mayor, the Coloquios de los Doce, and more—both by renowned Franciscan figures such as Gerónimo de Mendieta, Alonso de Molina, Bernardino de Sahagún, and by Nahua grammarians Antonio Valeriano de Azcapotzalco, Andrés Leonardo de Tlatelolco, and others. Díaz Balsera engages the cultural constraints of all the actors in the episodes she relates in order to show how the exchange between them resulted in the appropriation and/or alteration of the Spanish discourses of spiritual domination—sometimes even in their breakdown—and how it brought about the emergence of Nahua Christian subjects that would never fully leave behind their ancient ways of relating to the gods.
The Pyramid under the Cross will be of interest to readers in the areas of Hispanic literatures, history, religion, anthropology, Latin American and cultural studies, and to those working in the field of colonial studies.
[more]
Religious Entanglements
Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga
David Maxwell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Revival and Awakening
American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism
Adam H. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Most Americans have little understanding of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East. They assume that the two are rooted fundamentally in regional history, not in the history of contact with the broader world. However, as Adam H. Becker shows in this book, Americans—through their missionaries—had a strong hand in the development of a national and modern religious identity among one of the Middle East's most intriguing (and little-known) groups: the modern Assyrians. Detailing the history of the Assyrian Christian minority and the powerful influence American missionaries had on them, he unveils the underlying connection between modern global contact and the retrieval of an ancient identity.
American evangelicals arrived in Iran in the 1830s. Becker examines how these missionaries, working with the “Nestorian” Church of the East—an Aramaic-speaking Christian community in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—catalyzed, over the span of sixty years, a new national identity. Instructed at missionary schools in both Protestant piety and Western science, this indigenous group eventually used its newfound scriptural and archaeological knowledge to link itself to the history of the ancient Assyrians, which in time led to demands for national autonomy. Exploring the unintended results of this American attempt to reform the Orient, Becker paints a larger picture of religion, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the modern era.
American evangelicals arrived in Iran in the 1830s. Becker examines how these missionaries, working with the “Nestorian” Church of the East—an Aramaic-speaking Christian community in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—catalyzed, over the span of sixty years, a new national identity. Instructed at missionary schools in both Protestant piety and Western science, this indigenous group eventually used its newfound scriptural and archaeological knowledge to link itself to the history of the ancient Assyrians, which in time led to demands for national autonomy. Exploring the unintended results of this American attempt to reform the Orient, Becker paints a larger picture of religion, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the modern era.
[more]
Revivals, Awakening and Reform
William G. McLoughlin
University of Chicago Press, 1980
In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, McLoughlin draws on psychohistory, sociology, and anthropology to examine the relationship between America's five great religious awakenings and their influence on five great movements for social reform in the United States. He finds that awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are periods of revitalization born in times of cultural stress and eventuating in drastic social reform. Awakenings are thus the means by which a people or nation creates and sustains its identity in a changing world.
"This book is sensitive, thought-provoking and stimulating. It is 'must' reading for those interested in awakenings, and even though some may not revise their views as a result of McLoughlin's suggestive outline, none can remain unmoved by the insights he has provided on the subject."—Christian Century
"This is one of the best books I have read all year. Professor McLoughlin has again given us a profound analysis of our culture in the midst of revivalistic trends."—Review and Expositor
"This book is sensitive, thought-provoking and stimulating. It is 'must' reading for those interested in awakenings, and even though some may not revise their views as a result of McLoughlin's suggestive outline, none can remain unmoved by the insights he has provided on the subject."—Christian Century
"This is one of the best books I have read all year. Professor McLoughlin has again given us a profound analysis of our culture in the midst of revivalistic trends."—Review and Expositor
[more]
Rim of Christendom
A Biography of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer
Herbert Eugene Bolton; Foreword by John L. Kessell
University of Arizona Press, 1984
"This re-issued biography recounts [Kino's] work with loving detail and with an accuracy that has survived slight amendments. Its accompanying plates, maps, and bibliography enhance a text that should find a place in every serious library."—Religious Studies Review
"This is truly an epic work, an absolute standard for any Southwestern collection."—Book Talk
Select maps from the 1984 edition of Rim of Christendom are now available online through the UA Campus Repository.
"This is truly an epic work, an absolute standard for any Southwestern collection."—Book Talk
Select maps from the 1984 edition of Rim of Christendom are now available online through the UA Campus Repository.
[more]
Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain
Charles W. Polzer
University of Arizona Press, 1976
An exceptionally valuable research tool for scholars. The noted Jesuit historian has translated the rules and precepts that governed the mission expansion in the 1600s and 1700s in northwestern Mexico, and has added authoritative commentary to make this work literally a "manual on the missions."
[more]
The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961
Scholars, Singers, Missionaries
Anna Maria Busse Berger
University of Chicago Press, 2020
This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa.
The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.
The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.
[more]
Seventeen Years in Alaska
A Depiction of Life Among the Indians of Yakutat
Albin Johnson
University of Alaska Press, 2014
Swedish missionary Albin Johnson arrived in Alaska just before the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of miles from home and with just two weeks’ worth of English classes under his belt. While he intended to work among the Tlingit tribes of Yakutat, he found himself in a wave of foreign arrivals as migrants poured into Alaska seeking economic opportunities and the chance at a different life. While Johnson came with pious intentions, others imposed Western values and vices, leaving disease and devastation in their wake.
Seventeen Years in Alaska is Johnson’s eyewitness account of this tumultuous time. It is a captivating narrative of an ancient people facing rapid change and of the missionaries working to stem a corrupting tide. His journals offer a candid look at the beliefs and lives of missionaries, and they ultimately reveal the profound effect that he and other missionaries had on the Tlingit. Tracing nearly two decades of spiritual hopes and earthbound failures, Johnson’s memoir is a fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing world in one of the most far-flung areas of the globe.
Seventeen Years in Alaska is Johnson’s eyewitness account of this tumultuous time. It is a captivating narrative of an ancient people facing rapid change and of the missionaries working to stem a corrupting tide. His journals offer a candid look at the beliefs and lives of missionaries, and they ultimately reveal the profound effect that he and other missionaries had on the Tlingit. Tracing nearly two decades of spiritual hopes and earthbound failures, Johnson’s memoir is a fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing world in one of the most far-flung areas of the globe.
[more]
The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870
Stephen Warren
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Stephen Warren traces the transformation in Shawnee sociopolitical organization over seventy years as it changed from village-centric, multi-tribe kin groups to an institutionalized national government. By analyzing the crucial role that individuals, institutions, and policies played in shaping modern tribal governments, Warren establishes that the form of the modern Shawnee "tribe" was coerced in accordance with the U.S. government's desire for an entity with whom to do business, rather than as a natural development of traditional Shawnee ways.
[more]
Sisters in Spirit
Christianity, Affect, and Community Building in East Africa, 1860–1970
Andreana C. Prichard
Michigan State University Press, 2017
In this pioneering study, historian Andreana Prichard presents an intimate history of a single mission organization, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), told through the rich personal stories of a group of female African lay evangelists. Founded by British Anglican missionaries in the 1860s, the UMCA worked among refugees from the Indian Ocean slave trade on Zanzibar and among disparate communities on the adjacent Tanzanian mainland. Prichard illustrates how the mission’s unique theology and the demographics of its adherents produced cohorts of African Christian women who, in the face of linguistic and cultural dissimilarity, used the daily performance of a certain set of “civilized” Christian values and affective relationships to evangelize to new inquirers. The UMCA’s “sisters in spirit” ultimately forged a united spiritual community that spanned discontiguous mission stations across Tanzania and Zanzibar, incorporated diverse ethnolinguistic communities, and transcended generations. Focusing on the emotional and personal dimensions of their lives and on the relationships of affective spirituality that grew up among them, Prichard tells stories that are vital to our understanding of Tanzanian history, the history of religion and Christian missions in Africa, the development of cultural nationalisms, and the intellectual histories of African women.
[more]
Situating the Andean Colonial Experience
Ayllu Tales of History and Hagiography in the Time of the Spanish
Denise Y. Arnold
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
Re-situating Andean colonial history from the perspective of the local historians of ayllu Qaqachaka, in highland Bolivia, this book draws on regional oral history combined with local and public written archives. Rejecting the binary models in vogue in colonial and postcolonial studies (indigenous/non-indigenous, Andean/Western, conquered/conquering), it explores the complex intercalation of legal pluralism and local history in the negotiations around Spanish demands, resulting in the so-called “Andean pact.”
The Qaqachaka’s point of reference was the preceding Inka occupation, so in fulfilling Spanish demands they sought cultural continuity with this recent past. Spanish colonial administration, with its roots in Roman-Germanic and Islamic law, infiltrated many practices into the newly-conquered territories. Two major cycles of ayllu tales trace local responses to these colonial demands, in the practices for establishing settlements, and the feeding and dressing of the Catholic saints inside the new church, with their forebears in the Inka mummies.
[more]
Sojourners in a Strange Land
Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China
Florence C. Hsia
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise.
Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.
[more]
Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau
The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer
Chad S. Hamill
Oregon State University Press, 2012
Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau explores the role of song as a transformative force in the twentieth century, tracing a cultural, spiritual, and musical encounter that upended notions of indigeneity and the rules of engagement for Indians and priests in the Columbia Plateau.
In Chad Hamill’s narrative, a Jesuit and his two Indian “grandfathers”—one a medicine man, the other a hymn singer—engage in a collective search for the sacred. The priest becomes a student of the medicine man. The medicine man becomes a Catholic. The Indian hymn singer brings indigenous songs to the Catholic mass. Using song as a thread, these men weave together two worlds previously at odds, realizing a promise born two centuries earlier within the prophecies of Circling Raven and Shining Shirt.
Songs of Power and Prayer reveals how song can bridge worlds: between the individual and Spirit, the Jesuits and the Indians. Whether sung in an indigenous ceremony or adapted for Catholic Indian services, song abides as a force that strengthens Native identity and acts as a conduit for power and prayer.
In Chad Hamill’s narrative, a Jesuit and his two Indian “grandfathers”—one a medicine man, the other a hymn singer—engage in a collective search for the sacred. The priest becomes a student of the medicine man. The medicine man becomes a Catholic. The Indian hymn singer brings indigenous songs to the Catholic mass. Using song as a thread, these men weave together two worlds previously at odds, realizing a promise born two centuries earlier within the prophecies of Circling Raven and Shining Shirt.
Songs of Power and Prayer reveals how song can bridge worlds: between the individual and Spirit, the Jesuits and the Indians. Whether sung in an indigenous ceremony or adapted for Catholic Indian services, song abides as a force that strengthens Native identity and acts as a conduit for power and prayer.
A First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies book
[more]
Sonora
A Description of the Province
Ignaz Pfefferkorn; Foreword by Bernard L. Fontana; Translated and Annotated by Theodore E. Treutlein
University of Arizona Press, 1989
"The bloodsucking bat, construction of bows and arrows, the punishment for adultery among the Apaches... all was grist that dropped into the industrious mill of Father Pfefferkorn's eyes, ears, and brain."—Saturday Review
"To be read for enjoyment; nevertheless, the historian will find in it a wealth of information that has been shrewdly appraised, carefully sifted, and creditably related."—Catholic Historical Review
"Of interest not only to the historian but to the geographer and anthropologist."—Pacific Historical Review
"To be read for enjoyment; nevertheless, the historian will find in it a wealth of information that has been shrewdly appraised, carefully sifted, and creditably related."—Catholic Historical Review
"Of interest not only to the historian but to the geographer and anthropologist."—Pacific Historical Review
[more]
The Standard Bearer of the Roman Church
Lawrence of Brindisi and Capuchin Missions in the Holy Roman Empire (1599-1613)
Andrew J.G. Drenas
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
The Standard Bearer of the Roman Church examines the missionary work of the early modern Capuchin friar, and doctor of the Church, Lawrence of Brindisi. Renowned in his own day as a preacher, Bible scholar, missionary, chaplain, and diplomat, as well as vicar general of his order, Lawrence led the first organized, papally-commissioned Capuchin mission among the non-Catholics of Bohemia in the Holy Roman Empire from 1599 to 1602. He returned again under papal mandate, from 1606 to 1613. Andrew Drenas analyzes Lawrence’s evangelistic and polemical strategies in central Europe in order to shed light on some of the ways the Capuchins labored in religiously divided territories to confirm Catholics in their faith and to win over heretics. The introduction explains, principally, the book’s purpose and the historiographical background. After providing a brief biographical sketch of Lawrence’s life followed by details of his afterlife, Drenas examines Lawrence’s leading role in establishing the Capuchins’ new Commissariate of Bohemia-Austria-Styria in 1600, and specifically its first three friaries in Prague, Vienna, and Graz. From there the volume moves on to treat his preaching against heresy, followed by a focus on how Lawrence, while in Prague, involved himself directly in theological disputations with two different Lutheran preachers. The first dispute, with Polycarp Leyser, took place in July 1607, and dealt with good works and justification. The second, with a Lutheran whose identity remains unknown, and which occurred in August 1610, concerned Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. This is followed by an analysis of the Lutheranismi hypotyposis, or The Express Image of Lutheranism, Lawrence’s literary refutation of Lutheranism following additional contact with Polycarp Leyser in 1607. Finally, Drenas considers briefly the effectiveness of Lawrence’s apostolate and closes with a review of the book as a whole.
[more]
Stitches on Time
Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles
Saurabh Dube
Duke University Press, 2004
Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory—including considerations of gender—he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century.
Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a “history without warranty” as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.
[more]
The Sun God and the Savior
The Christianization of the Nahua and Totonac in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico
Guy Stresser-Péan
University Press of Colorado, 2009
The first English translation of Guy Stresser-Péan's tour-de-force presents two decades of fieldwork in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, where native pre-Hispanic pagan beliefs blended with traditional Catholic evangelization from the sixteenth century and the more recent intrusion of modernism.
The Indians of the Sierra Norte de Puebla are deeply devoted to Christianity, but their devotion is seamlessly combined with pagan customs, resulting in a hybrid belief system that is not wholly indigenous, yet not wholly Christian. The syncretism practiced here has led the Totonac and Nahua people to identify Christ with the Sun God, a belief expressed symbolically in ritual practices such as the Dance of the Voladores.
Spanning the four centuries from the earliest systematic campaign against Nahua ritual practices - Zumárraga's idolatry trials of 1536-1540 - to the twentieth century, Stresser-Péan contextualizes Nahua and Totonac ritual practices as a series of responses to Christian evangelization and the social reproduction of traditional ritual practices. The Sun God and the Savior is a monumental work on the ethnographic and historical knowledge of the peoples of the Sierra Norte.
[more]
Taking Christianity to China
Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850–1950
Wayne Flynt and Gerald W. Berkley
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Beginning early in the 19th century, the American missionary movement made slow headway in China. Alabamians became part of that small beachhead. After 1900 both the money and personnel rapidly expanded, peaking in the early 1920s. By the 1930s many American denominations became confused and divided over the appropriateness of the missionary endeavor. Secular American intellectuals began to criticize missionaries as meddling do-gooders trying to impose American Evangelicalism on a proud, ancient culture.
By examining the lives of 47 Alabama missionaries who served in China between 1850 and 1950, Flynt and Berkley reach a different conclusion. Although Alabama missionaries initially fit the negative description of Americans trying to superimpose their own values and beliefs on "heathen," they quickly learned to respect Chinese civilization. The result was a new synthesis, neither entirely southern nor entirely Chinese. Although previous works focus on the failure of Christianity to change China, this book focuses on the degree to which their service in China changed Alabama missionaries. And the change was profound.
In their consideration of 47 missionaries from a single state--their call to missions, preparation for service in China, living, working, contacts back home, cultural clashes, political views, internal conflicts, and gender relations--the authors suggest that the efforts by Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries from Alabama were not the failure judged by many historians. In fact, the seeds sown in the hundred years before the Communist revolution in 1950 seem to be reaping a rich harvest in the declining years of the 20th century, when the number of Chinese Christians is estimated by some to be as high as one hundred million.
[more]
Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You
Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World
By José Rabasa
University of Texas Press, 2011
Folio 46r from Codex Telleriano-Remensis was created in the sixteenth century under the supervision of Spanish missionaries in central Mexico. As an artifact of seismic cultural and political shifts, the manuscript painting is a singular document of indigenous response to Spanish conquest. Examining the ways in which the folio's tlacuilo (indigenous painter/writer) creates a pictorial vocabulary, this book embraces the place "outside" history from which this rich document emerged.
Applying contemporary intellectual perspectives, including aspects of gender, modernity, nation, and visual representation itself, José Rabasa reveals new perspectives on colonial order. Folio 46r becomes a metaphor for reading the totality of the codex and for reflecting on the postcolonial theoretical issues now brought to bear on the past. Ambitious and innovative (such as the invention of the concepts of elsewheres and ethnosuicide, and the emphasis on intuition), Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You embraces the performative force of the native scribe while acknowledging the ineffable traits of 46r—traits that remain untenably foreign to the modern excavator/scholar. Posing provocative questions about the unspoken dialogues between evangelizing friars and their spiritual conquests, this book offers a theoretic-political experiment on the possibility of learning from the tlacuilo ways of seeing the world that dislocate the predominance of the West.
[more]
Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing
Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38
Minnie Vautrin. Edited by Suping Lu
University of Illinois Press, 2007
In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanjing and launched six weeks of carnage that would become known as the Rape of Nanjing. In addition to the deaths of Chinese POWs and civilians, tens of thousands of women were raped, tortured, and killed by Japanese soldiers. In this traumatic environment, both native and foreign-born inhabitants of Nanjing struggled to carry on with their lives.
This volume collects the diaries and correspondence of Minnie Vautrin, a farmgirl from Illinois who had dedicated herself to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College in Nanjing. Faced with the impending Japanese attack, she turned the school into a sanctuary for ten thousand women and girls. Vautrin's firsthand accounts of daily life in Nanjing and the intensifying threat of Japanese invasion reveal the courage of the occupants under siege--Chinese nationals as well as Western missionaries, teachers, surgeons and business people--and the personal costs of violence in wartime.
Thanks to Vautrin's painstaking effort in keeping a day-to-day account, present-day readers are able to examine this episode of history at close range through her eyes. With detailed maps, photographs, and carefully researched in-depth annotations, Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 presents a comprehensive and detailed daily account of the events and of life during the horror-stricken days within the city walls and in particular on the Ginling campus. Through chronologically arranged diaries, letters, reports, documents, and telegrams, Vautrin bears witness to those terrible events and to the magnitude of trauma that the Nanjing Massacre exacted on the populace.
[more]
To Do Justice
The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes
Randall C. Jimerson
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Biography of a civil rights activist who worked tirelessly at the heart of two social and political revolutions
A native Alabamian, Reverend Robert E. Hughes worked full-time in the civil rights movement as executive director of the Alabama Council of Human Relations, where he developed a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After facing backlash from the Ku Klux Klan, spending four days in jail for refusing to disclose ACHR membership lists, and ultimately being forced to leave the state of Alabama, he served as a Methodist missionary in Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe). After two years of organizing Black liberation groups, he was banned as a “prohibited immigrant” by the Ian Smith government. His lifelong commitment to social justice, racial equality, and peaceful resolution of conflicts marks a fascinating career richly documented in this comprehensive biography.
To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes traces the life and career of an admirable and lesser-known civil rights figure who fought injustice on two continents. This account presents valuable new evidence about the civil rights movement in the United States as well as human rights and liberation issues in colonial Southern Rhodesia in the years leading up to independence and self-rule. It provides an intimate portrait of a courageous individual who worked outside of the public spotlight but provided essential support and informational resources to public activists and news reporters
.
Randall C. Jimerson explores the interwoven threads of race relations and religious beliefs on two continents, focusing on the dual themes of the American civil rights movement and the African struggles for decolonization and majority rule. The life and career of Robert Hughes provide insight into the international dimensions of racial prejudice and discrimination that can be viewed in comparative context to similar oppressions in other colonial lands.
A native Alabamian, Reverend Robert E. Hughes worked full-time in the civil rights movement as executive director of the Alabama Council of Human Relations, where he developed a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After facing backlash from the Ku Klux Klan, spending four days in jail for refusing to disclose ACHR membership lists, and ultimately being forced to leave the state of Alabama, he served as a Methodist missionary in Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe). After two years of organizing Black liberation groups, he was banned as a “prohibited immigrant” by the Ian Smith government. His lifelong commitment to social justice, racial equality, and peaceful resolution of conflicts marks a fascinating career richly documented in this comprehensive biography.
To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes traces the life and career of an admirable and lesser-known civil rights figure who fought injustice on two continents. This account presents valuable new evidence about the civil rights movement in the United States as well as human rights and liberation issues in colonial Southern Rhodesia in the years leading up to independence and self-rule. It provides an intimate portrait of a courageous individual who worked outside of the public spotlight but provided essential support and informational resources to public activists and news reporters
.
Randall C. Jimerson explores the interwoven threads of race relations and religious beliefs on two continents, focusing on the dual themes of the American civil rights movement and the African struggles for decolonization and majority rule. The life and career of Robert Hughes provide insight into the international dimensions of racial prejudice and discrimination that can be viewed in comparative context to similar oppressions in other colonial lands.
[more]
Virginia Broughton
The Life and Writings of a Missionary
Tomeiko Ashford Carter
University of Tennessee Press, 2010
For more than half a century, Virginia E. Walker Broughton (1856–1934) worked tirelessly to uplift black communities, and especially black women, throughout Tennessee. Born into an elite African American family in Nashville, she began her professional career as a teacher and later became one of the most prominent domestic missionaries in the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., as well as an accomplished speaker and writer. This annotated collection is the first scholarly work devoted entirely to Broughton’s life and writings.
The book for which Broughton is best known, Twenty Year’s [sic] Experience of a Missionary, was an autobiography first published in 1907 and reprinted in 1988 as part of a scholarly edition of spiritual narratives by black women.Recently, in the archives of Fisk University, Broughton’s alma mater, Tomeiko Ashford Carter discovered an earlier autobiographical work, A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labors of Mrs. V. W. Broughton, Bible Band Missionary, for Middle and West Tennessee, which was distributed at the famous Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895. While both autobiographies portray Broughton as an important religious figure for whom missionary work became a saving grace, Life and Labors is more revealing of key facts about Broughton and her family, and it situates them more clearly among the nation’s black elite. This volume not only brings Life and Labors back into print but also collects various other pieces Broughton produced during her long career.
Among those other writings is a 1904 booklet titled Woman’s Work: As Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, and the Bible Women of Modern Times, which recognizes the prominence of the female in Christian theology and shows how Broughton anticipated the work of present-day feminist and womanist theologians. Several “training course” articles that Broughton wrote for a National Baptist newspaper, covering such topics as the Christian deportment of women and the need for black spiritual literature, are also gathered here, as are a program she devised for systematic Bible study and a brief article, published just a few years before her death, in which she describes some of her missionary field work. Complementing these primary materials are an extensive critical introduction and notes by Carter, a Walker-Broughton family tree, and a chronology of Broughton’s life.
As this collection makes clear, Virginia Broughton was strongly committed to making the work of black religious women an ongoing intellectual enterprise. In these pages, she emerges as both a dedicated missionary and a formidable religious scholar.
Tomeiko Ashford Carter is the author of Powers Divine: Spiritual Autobiography and Black Women’s Writing.
[more]
The Visitor
André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia
Liam Matthew Brockey
Harvard University Press, 2014
In an age when few ventured beyond their birthplace, André Palmeiro left Portugal to inspect Jesuit missions from Mozambique to Japan. A global history in the guise of biography, The Visitor tells the story of a theologian whose travels bore witness to the fruitful contact—and violent collision—of East and West in the early modern era.
[more]
Who Shall Enter Paradise?
Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975
Shobana Shankar
Ohio University Press, 2014
Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms. This book reexamines conversion and religious identification not as fixed phenomena, but as experiences shaped through cross-cultural encounters, experimentation, collaboration, protest, and sympathy.
Shobana Shankar relates how Christian missions and African converts transformed religious practices and politics in Muslim Northern Nigeria during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Although the British colonial authorities prohibited Christian evangelism in Muslim areas and circumscribed missionary activities, a combination of factors—including Mahdist insurrection, the abolition of slavery, migrant labor, and women’s evangelism—brought new converts to the faith. By the 1930s, however, this organic growth of Christianity in the north had given way to an institutionalized culture based around medical facilities established in the Hausa emirates. The end of World War II brought an influx of demobilized soldiers, who integrated themselves into the local Christian communities and reinvigorated the practice of lay evangelism.
In the era of independence, Muslim politicians consolidated their power by adopting many of the methods of missionaries and evangelists. In the process, many Christian men and formerly non-Muslim communities converted to Islam. A vital part of Northern Nigerian Christianity all but vanished, becoming a religion of “outsiders.”
[more]
Woman in the Wilderness
Letters of Harriet Wood Wheeler, Missonary Wife, 1832-1892
Nancy Bunge
Michigan State University Press, 2010
Woman in the Wilderness is a collection of letters written between 1832 and 1892 to and by an American woman, Harriet Wood Wheeler.
Harriet's letters reveal her experiences with actors and institutions that played pivotal roles in the history of American women: the nascent literate female work force at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts; the Ipswich Female Seminary, which was one of the first schools for women teachers; women's associations, especially in churches; and the close and enduring ties that characterized women's relationships in the late nineteenth century.
Harriet's letters also provide an intimate view of the relationships between American Indians and Euro-Americans in the Great Lakes region, where she settled with her Christian missionary husband.
Harriet's letters reveal her experiences with actors and institutions that played pivotal roles in the history of American women: the nascent literate female work force at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts; the Ipswich Female Seminary, which was one of the first schools for women teachers; women's associations, especially in churches; and the close and enduring ties that characterized women's relationships in the late nineteenth century.
Harriet's letters also provide an intimate view of the relationships between American Indians and Euro-Americans in the Great Lakes region, where she settled with her Christian missionary husband.
[more]
Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840
Codes of Silence
Virginia M. Bouvier
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Studies of the Spanish conquest in the Americas traditionally have explained European-Indian encounters in terms of such factors as geography, timing, and the charisma of individual conquistadores. Yet by reconsidering this history from the perspective of gender roles and relations, we see that gender ideology was a key ingredient in the glue that held the conquest together and in turn shaped indigenous behavior toward the conquerors. This book tells the hidden story of women during the missionization of California. It shows what it was like for women to live and work on that frontier—and how race, religion, age, and ethnicity shaped female experiences. It explores the suppression of women's experiences and cultural resistance to domination, and reveals the many codes of silence regarding the use of force at the missions, the treatment of women, indigenous ceremonies, sexuality, and dreams.
Virginia Bouvier has combed a vast array of sources— including mission records, journals of explorers and missionaries, novels of chivalry, and oral histories— and has discovered that female participation in the colonization of California was greater and earlier than most historians have recognized. Viewing the conquest through the prism of gender, Bouvier gives new meaning to the settling of new lands and attempts to convert indigenous peoples. By analyzing the participation of women— both Hispanic and Indian— in the maintenance of or resistance to the mission system, Bouvier restores them to the narrative of the conquest, colonization, and evangelization of California. And by bringing these voices into the chorus of history, she creates new harmonies and dissonances that alter and enhance our understanding of both the experience and meaning of conquest.
Virginia Bouvier has combed a vast array of sources— including mission records, journals of explorers and missionaries, novels of chivalry, and oral histories— and has discovered that female participation in the colonization of California was greater and earlier than most historians have recognized. Viewing the conquest through the prism of gender, Bouvier gives new meaning to the settling of new lands and attempts to convert indigenous peoples. By analyzing the participation of women— both Hispanic and Indian— in the maintenance of or resistance to the mission system, Bouvier restores them to the narrative of the conquest, colonization, and evangelization of California. And by bringing these voices into the chorus of history, she creates new harmonies and dissonances that alter and enhance our understanding of both the experience and meaning of conquest.
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