Table Of ContentHISTORICIZING 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
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ISBN 978-1-349-14423-5 ISBN 978-1-349-14421-1 (eBook)
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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-
