Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff

Elbourne, Elizabeth

doi:10.1086/533242

Cited by 29 publications

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“…Elizabeth Elbourne remarks that a dialectic model does not explain why Christianity rapidly moved 'out of the hands of the missionaries and settlers who brought it', and that 'it is not always wise to take missionaries at their word'. 45 The printed reports of missionary societies typically minimised the role that Indigenous evangelists played in spreading Christianity. In rejecting the dialectic model, historians working with the concept of entanglement have instead examined multidirectional forms of interaction, the interweaving of 'diverse historical subjects such as the body, health, religion, trade, and exchange with each other and with the material world'.…”

Section: Entangled Histories Of Mission and Religious Changementioning

confidence: 99%

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“Entanglement” as a concept in recent research on Christian missions in the South Pacific and Africa

Tilson

2024

History Compass

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This article provides a short overview of ‘entanglement’ in recent histories of mission, examining what distinguishes it from earlier conceptualisations of cross‐cultural encounters. This article locates the emergence of the term in the social sciences and global histories of empire, and explores its current influence in studies of Christian evangelism in imperial and colonial contexts. This article shows the strengths of recent works on entanglement, while indicating some new research avenues for scholars of mission. The discussion primarily focuses on research on Africa and the South Pacific.

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Section: Entangled Histories Of Mission and Religious Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…45 45 Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff’, The American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 444. …”

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confidence: 99%

“Entanglement” as a concept in recent research on Christian missions in the South Pacific and Africa

Tilson

2024

History Compass

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“…However they have also come to be criticized for overplaying the efficacy of the mission regime (e.g., Elbourne 2003), while in a more general sense, some historians have recently questioned the extent to which missions operated in concert with other colonial institutions, practices and movements (e.g., Etherington 2005). Nonetheless, in Australasia their influence has been evident in the persisting concern with hegemony, and the multiple role of missions as places of refuge as well as of coercion, of survival as well as transformation, and as spaces of exchange (e.g., Attwood 1989;Brock 1993;Trigger 1986Trigger , 1992.…”

Section: Missions Identity and Cultural Exchangementioning

confidence: 99%

The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction

Lydon

Ash

2010

Int J Histor Archaeol

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Missions have long been recognized as spaces of colonial contact and cultural exchange, and they are significant places in Indigenous landscapes today. However, archaeologists have only recently begun to explore such places across Australasia. This collection canvasses a range of approaches to this dynamic field.Keywords Missions . Australasia . Colonialism . ExchangeMissions have long been recognized as spaces of colonial contact and cultural exchange, and they are significant places in Indigenous landscapes today. However, archaeologists in Australasia have been slow to explore these important sites. This special issue addresses the archaeology of Indigenous missions in Australasia, and canvasses new archaeological approaches that have begun to emerge in Australasia, toward understanding the role of missions and reserves within colonialism. The collection has its origin in a session from 'New Ground'; a conference of the major Australian archaeological associations held in Sydney 2007, and has been supplemented by three solicited papers (see Birmingham and Wilson, Ireland, and Smith). We believe that the research represented here is relevant to debates about colonialism and archaeology and deserves a wider audience.Missions are key places in the history of the "colonial encounter" in many settlersocieties. From the earliest decades of invasion, colonists sought to confine Indigenous peoples within defined and secluded bounds. Although this process of segregation varied across colonies and time period, it became a central element in antipodean Aboriginal policy. Missions as archaeological sites are particularly revealing of the dynamics of power relations, and the role of space in controlling and Int

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“…The ability of conversion to take on independent meaning is evident in the fear that the authority to evangelize would escape the control of the white missionaries. 55 Such fears were well founded. Throughout the colonial world, indigenous Christian movements erupted that were either ambivalent or hostile to the Western missionaries, and that usually involved a theologically contrived circumvention of missionary authority.…”

Section: Conversion and The Converted: Missionaries And Convert Comentioning

confidence: 99%

HEGEMONY, IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA¹

Dubois¹

2005

History and Theory

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Edward Said's concept of Orientalism portrays the high tide of nineteenth-century imperialism as the defining moment in the establishment of a global discursive hegemony, in which European attitudes and concepts gained a universal validity. The idea of "religion" was central to the civilizing mission of imperialism, and was shaped by the interests of a number of colonial actors in a way that remains visibly relevant today. In East and Southeast Asia, however, many of the concerns that statecraft, law, scholarship, and conversion had for religion transcended the European impact. Both before and after the period of European imperialism, states used religion to engineer social ethics and legitimate rule, scholars elaborated and enforced state theologies, and the missionary faithful voiced the need for and nature of religious conversion. The real impact of this period was to integrate pre-existing concerns into larger discourses, transforming them in the process. The ideals of national citizenship and of legal and scholarly impartiality recast the state and its institutions with a modernist sacrality, which had the effect of banishing the religious from the public space. At the same time, the missionary discourse of transformative conversion located it in the very personal realm of sincerity and belief. The evolution of colonial-era discourses of religion and society in Asia since the departure of European imperial power demonstrates both their lasting power and the degree of agency that remains implicit in the idea of hegemony.

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Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff

Cited by 29 publications

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“Entanglement” as a concept in recent research on Christian missions in the South Pacific and Africa

“Entanglement” as a concept in recent research on Christian missions in the South Pacific and Africa

The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction

HEGEMONY, IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA¹

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Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff

Cited by 29 publications

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“Entanglement” as a concept in recent research on Christian missions in the South Pacific and Africa

“Entanglement” as a concept in recent research on Christian missions in the South Pacific and Africa

The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction

HEGEMONY, IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA1

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HEGEMONY, IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA¹