Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.
Since the emergence of a new land law in Cambodia, “indigenous minorities” have recurrently substantiated their rights claims by referring to the powerful spirit‐gods that live in their territories. This appearance of spirits on the official stage can be read as “provincializing” a Euro‐modern ontology that does not take nonhumans seriously as political actors. But when spirits come to be integrated into a politics of recognition, questions arise about the effects that such a politicized ontology might have on those who do not appear to conform to it. This is the case for Protestant Bunong, who have long repudiated local spirit‐gods as evil. During the struggle for their rights, they not only faced Cambodian authorities attempting to delegitimize their claims to qualify as an “indigenous minority,” but also had to reconsider their ways of seeing the world and relating to those who inhabit it. [political ontology, indigeneity, Christianization, politics of recognition, nonhumans, moral struggles, Cambodia, Southeast Asia]
The two-fold aim of this paper is to outline a hitherto largely unknown history of evangelical Christianity among the Cambodian Bunong and to reflect upon aspects that may have been relevant in the encounters between Protestant missionaries and this minority population living in the highlands bordering with Vietnam. Relying on historical missionary accounts and on Bunong narratives gathered during fieldwork in Mondulkiri province, I will explore three moments of this meeting of different " thought-worlds"-from the lack of success of early evangelisation efforts during the colonial and post-independence era, over the first conversions during the Vietnam War, to the installation and limited spread of Christianity in liberated Cambodia from the 1980s to the 1990s. In these various political and socio-environmental contexts, particular attention is given to the part of ritual practice in the dynamic of conversion, as it appeared to be a topic shared by the animist highlanders and the evangelical emissaries.
Conversion to Christianity among Southeast Asian highland minorities has been recurrently interpreted as a way of joining a valorised religion that distinguishes converts from often-Buddhist ruling majorities and sometimes as a means of adopting a ‘modern’ way of life. Neither of these explanations, however, seems to appropriately describe the situation of Bunong highlanders who turned to Christianity in Cambodia’s capital in the early 1970s. Under the pro-American regime of Lon Nol (1970–75), these spirit-practising inhabitants of the margins were brought to Phnom Penh to enrol in the national army. Khmer majority preachers visited them and led them to integrate themselves into the Khmer Evangelical Church. As light is shed on the astonishing trajectories of these Bunong recruits, it becomes possible to reflect upon what ‘entering Christianity’ meant for them. They were few in number, but the particularities of their experiences highlight the importance of an unprejudiced approach to Southeast Asian highlanders’ conversions.
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