Historicizing Christian encounters with the other PDF
Preview Historicizing Christian encounters with the other
HISTORICIZING CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS WITH THE OTHER 1. Lithograph illustration, reprinted from William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: Salvation Army, 1890). Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other Edited by John C. Hawley Associate Professor of English Literature Santa Clara University © Macmillan Press Ltd 1998 Softcover· reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 Ali rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors ha ve asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1998 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-14423-5 ISBN 978-1-349-14421-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-14421-1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper sui table for recycling alld made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 07 06 05 04 03 02 OI 00 99 98 For Mitoko Hirabayashi, Desmond Day, and Richard Perl, SJ. Contents Preface Erick D. Langer ix Contributors xii Making Disciples of All Nations 1 • 1 John C. Hawley "A Wild Shambles of Strange Gods": 2 • The Conversion of Quisara in Fletcher's The Island Princess Andrea Remi Solomon 17 Encounter and Assimilation of the Other 3 • in Arauco domado and La Araucana by Lope de Vega Teresa J. Kirschner 33 4 • The Discourse of the Newly-Converted Christian in the Work ofthe Andean Chronicler, Guaman Poma de Ayala Dolores Clavero 44 5 • The Development of an Englishman: Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller Laura Scavuzzo Wheeler 56 Crusoe's Shadow: Christianity, Colonization 6 • and the Other Andrew Fleck 74 vii viii Contents 7 • Secularism, Satire and Scapegoatism in a Chateaubriand's Itineraire de Paris Jerusalem Syrine C. Hout 90 8 • Remaking "Lawless Lads and Licentious Girls": The Salvation Army and the Regeneration of Empire Troy Boone 103 9 • Cross-Cultural Dress in Victorian British Missionary Narratives: Dressing for Eternity Susan Fleming McAllister 122 10 • "I Did Not Make Myself So ... ": Samson Occom and American Religious Autobiography Eileen Razzari Elrod 135 11 • "Our Glory and Joy": Stephen Riggs and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Mission ary Ethnography Among the Sioux Edwin J. McAllister 150 12 • Encountering Christ in Shusaku Endo's Mudswamp of Japan 166 John T. Netland 13 • Rigoberta Menchu and the Conversion of Consciousness David J. Leigh 182 194 Index Preface After many years in the scholastic wilderness, Christian missions throughout the world are finally getting another look from scholars in various disciplines. They are reexamining the missionary enterprise as an important case study not just in religious domination, but also cul tural contact. Increasingly, as our world has become smaller and we witness the homogenization of culture, scholars have become interested in the forms in which cultural contact has taken place. Historically for the West, Christian missions have played a very important role in this endeavor. In this sense, missions have warranted a reexamination. Moreover, missions are liminal places, where two cultures meet and where often a hybrid emerges that owes much to both its native and European origins. This is a new perspective, for a previous concentra tion on the heroic deeds ofthe missionaries left largely unexamined the actual effects of the missions on the people they presumed to convert. What scholars have found is that conversion as well as cultural assimi lation are not the unproblematic concepts they were previously assumed to be. The complexities of these issues are fascinating and, as in many liminal situations, more clearly highlight the characteristics of both European and, at times, native cultures. The analysis of literature dealing with the missions helps us figure out some of these issues and thus this volume is a welcome addition to the field. Whether examining the discourse of the missionaries them selves, literary accounts of mission experiences, or the expressions of the converted, the discipline of literary studies offers a sensitivity to words and to multiple meanings found only perhaps among cultural anthropologists. Analyzing thesp. words helps establish motivations and insights into relationships between the missionaries and missionized difficult to achieve in any other way. Establishing motivations is very important, for the nature of mission ary Christianity until very recently has made it difficult to fathom the reasons for the actions we can document. After all, Christianity is, with Islam, a monotheistic faith that presumes its natural superiority to the exclusion of all other possible religions. This has meant that Christian missionaries have tried to convert with the absolute certainty that their way of thinking is the only correct one. The motivations ofthe Other (and even that of the missionary) have not merited consideration, since the teaching of the Gospel, it was assumed, was all that the potential convert needed; his or her previous knowledge was to be discarded. ix x Preface Many ofthe best missionaries, especially for the Latin American case that I know best, have realized that one must first know the Other's belief system to be able to truly convert. How else could one know what approach might work best for conversion? How else could one know whether the Indians had truly converted? For this reason we have Fray Bernardino de Sahagun write the most complete description of central Mexican civilization in the sixteenth century, or Fr. Diego de Landa writing one of the best sources on Maya culture. Interestingly enough, many of these missionaries, out in the field for many years, subtly changed their thinking as well, absorbing some con cepts of the people they were trying to convert. Striking in this regard was for example the reaction of Fr. Doroteo Giannecchini, a Franciscan from Italy who became one of the most important missionaries of the Chiriguano people on the southeastern frontiers of nineteenth-century Bolivia and an accomplished linguist in Guarani, the native language. When confronted by the traditional enemy ofthe Chiriguanos, the Tobas and Matacos, he cursed them in Guarani by claiming that they were dirty and untrustworthy. The friar sounded just like the Chiriguanos to whom he had attempted to teach European ways and attitudes! While becoming interpreters of native cultures and even adopting partially a native mindset, missionaries ironically also judge their own neophytes more harshly than those who already are Christians. Diego de Landa, for example, executed various Maya Indians whom he thought had diverged from the path of true orthodoxy. This harsh judgment also manifests itself in other ways. Until very recently, very few indi viduals raised on a mission had the possibility of becoming a priest or pastor themselves. They were seen as inferior in some spiritual way and even their best behavior could not get the missionaries to conceive that these people might be equals in faith. The lack of even eventual equal ity is corroborated by the fact that many of the missions were conceived of as part and parcel of a colonial enterprise. This was as much the case with the sixteenth-century Latin America missions as with those in nine teenth-century Africa. The contradictions between the role of the mis sionaries in the political schemes of the European powers and their as serthms of saving souls for the spiritual good of the natives, while unproblematic in the sixteenth century, has bedeviled the missionary enterprise in the twentieth. After all, there are political consequences to the missionary enterprise, which include the spiritual (and, by implica tion political) immaturity of its inhabitants. In the end, the missions often create Christians who are either com pletely culturally deracinated from both their original and from Euro-
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