Table Of ContentConversion to Modernities:
The Globalization of Christianity
Series:
ZONES OF RELIGION
Edited by
Peter van derVeer
Conversion to Modernities:
The Globalization of Christianity
Edited by
Peter van derVeer
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
New York London
Published in 1996 by
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
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New York, NY 10017
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
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Copyright © 1996 Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conversion to modernities : the globalization of Christianity
/ edited by Peter van derVeer.
p. cm.
Papers presented at a conference held at the Research Centre
Religion and Society of the University of Amsterdam, June 1994.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-91273-3. — ISBN 0-415-91274-1 (alk. paper)
1. Conversion—History—Congresses. 2. Church history—Modern
period, 1500—Congresses. 3. Indigenous peoples—Religious life—
Congresses. I. Veer, Peter van der.
BV4916.C68 1995
306.6*4824—dc20 95-11009
CIP
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Peter van der Veer
1. The Politics of Protestant Conversion to
Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century France 23
Keith P. Luria
2. A Different Road to God: The Protestant
Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century 47
Judith Pollmann
3. Nineteenth-Century Representations of
Missionary Conversion and the
Transformation of Western Christianity 65
Peter van Rooden
4. Religious Conversion and the Politics of Dissent 89
Gauri Viswanathan
5. The Conversion of Caste: Location,
Translation, and Appropriation 115
Nicholas B. Dirks
6. Materialism, Missionaries, and Modern Subjects
in Colonial Indonesia 137
Webb Keane
7. Serial Conversion/Conversion to Seriality: Religion,
State, and Number in Aru, Eastern Indonesia 171
Patricia Spyer
8. Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the
Devil in Popular African Christianity 199
Birgit Meyer
9. Devils, Holy Spirits, and the Swollen God: Translation,
Conversion and Colonial Power in the Marist Mission,
Vanuatu, 1887-1934 231
Margaret Jolly
10. Comments on Conversion 263
Talal Asad
Contributors 275
Index 279
PREFACE
T
his volume is the result of a conference on conversion, held at the
Research Centre of Religion and Society of the University of Ams-
terdam in June 1994. The conference was organized by Ton Otto, Jose van
Santen, and Peter van derVeer. It received financial support from the Uni
versities of Amsterdam, Leiden, and Nijmegen as well as from the Royal
Dutch Academy of Sciences and the International Institute for Asian Stud
ies, for which I am very grateful. A great number of papers (25), ranging
from conversion to Islam to conversion in Japanese religions, were pre
sented over three days. The initial idea had been to look comparatively at
conversion in a number of religions; however, an overwhelming number of
contributions focused on conversion to Christianity, so it has become the
subject of the present volume.
The conference on conversion was the first of a series of conferences to
be held at the Research Centre of Religion and Society. The next confer
ence will be in November 1995, on Religion and Nationalism in Europe
and Asia. A third conference will be in December 1995, on Border
Fetishisms. It is the mission of the Research Centre to give a new impetus
to the anthropological, historical, and political understanding of religion in
the contemporary world. Its approach is interdisciplinary and comparative.
I would like to thank Ton Otto and Jose van Santen for their organiza
tional and intellectual contribution to the shaping of the conference on
conversion. I also thank Ingrid van den Broek for her detailed attention to
the needs of the conference and to the preparation of the manuscript. Fi
nally, at Routledge I owe special thanks to Marlie Wasserman for her strong
support of this project.
Peter van derVeer
Amsterdam, March 1995
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INTRODUCTION
Peter van der Veer
/ N THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, a man with the un
usual name of George Psalmanazar presented himself to British society
as a Formosan pagan converted to Christianity. In 1704 he published A
Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Em
peror of Japan. Psalmanazar s account was highly successful, but after a num
ber of years he was discovered to be a forger and impostor who had never
been to Formosa. Most of what we know about his “true” identity is de
rived from his own posthumously published memoirs, but of course there
is a paradox in looking for the “true” identity of a self-professed impostor
in his own work.
In a brilliant analysis of both Psalmanazar s description of Formosa and
his memoirs, Susan Stewart argues that they contain an interplay between
description/testimony and confession/conversion: “These two gestures—
one reaching out to the world within a stance of distance and objectivity,
the other reaching inward in a claim of transformation that in itself asserts
or posits the very subjectivity that is its ‘motivating’ cause—run in an ob
vious course from the halted narrative and ensuing lyricism of Augustine’s
‘confessions’ to the paired volumes of ethnographic description and per
sonal memoirs produced by anthropologists even today.” (Stewart 1994, 56,
57). The description of the “old” religion that one has left is often a part
of the conversion narrative, but Psalmanazar s description is even more in
teresting than usual, since it describes his “old” religion as that of a cultural
Other, totally unknown to his British audience.1 Religion is the real sign
of difference between Formosa and Britain, and the “description” of For
mosa begins with “an account of the religion, customs, manners, etcetera,
