Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission EncounterAcross much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories. |
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Page 5
... persons within those same traditions. Some recurrent para- doxes arise amid the resulting efforts to distinguish persons from the mate- riality of both words and things. The specific circumstances involving Calvinism, the colonial ...
... persons within those same traditions. Some recurrent para- doxes arise amid the resulting efforts to distinguish persons from the mate- riality of both words and things. The specific circumstances involving Calvinism, the colonial ...
Page 9
... person and their implications for human agency. This was as much the case in debates about family, wealth, and death as in debates about ritual. Now the foreign missionaries have mostly left; Sumbanese are converting other Sumbanese ...
... person and their implications for human agency. This was as much the case in debates about family, wealth, and death as in debates about ritual. Now the foreign missionaries have mostly left; Sumbanese are converting other Sumbanese ...
Page 10
... persons from the results of their activity. For Heidegger, it includes a denial of temporality, and the taking of the world as so many objects from which we stand apart. Despite their profound differences, these two stories share this ...
... persons from the results of their activity. For Heidegger, it includes a denial of temporality, and the taking of the world as so many objects from which we stand apart. Despite their profound differences, these two stories share this ...
Page 14
... persons is therefore not just a problem for the observer and the theoretician but is often a recur- rent instigation within action itself. In their modality as objective semiotic forms, signifying practices can, in some circumstances ...
... persons is therefore not just a problem for the observer and the theoretician but is often a recur- rent instigation within action itself. In their modality as objective semiotic forms, signifying practices can, in some circumstances ...
Page 15
... person to another. Words should be sub- ject to the agency of a speaker who stands apart from the words he or she masters (see chapter 7). The important point is that these are not just ideas about language. They are about people ...
... person to another. Words should be sub- ject to the agency of a speaker who stands apart from the words he or she masters (see chapter 7). The important point is that these are not just ideas about language. They are about people ...
Contents
1 | |
Part I Locating Protestantism | 35 |
Part II Fetishisms | 147 |
Part III Purifications | 253 |
References | 291 |
Index | 315 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract actions adat agency agents Anakalang Anakalangese ancestral Anthropology belief Calvinism Calvinists Catholic century chapter Christian claims colonial Comaroff concept context contrast conversion creed culture discourse discussion distinction divine doctrine Dutch effects efforts encounter ethnographic evangelical example exchange expression fetishism freedom function Gereja Kristen Sumba global iconoclasm idea immaterial implications inculturation individual Indonesian instance Keane Kerk Kruyt Kuyper language ideology linguistic marapu followers marapu ritual material means meat mediation mission missionaries moral narrative narrative of modernity neo-orthodox Netherlands objectification objects one’s Onvlee pagan past Pentecostal people’s persistence persons Pietist political practices prayer Princeton problem Protestant Protestant Reformation Protestantism purification Reformed Churches religion religious religious conversion representational economy ritual speech role scriptural secular semiotic form semiotic ideology sense sincerity social society speak speaker spirits Sumbanese tion tradition transformation Umbu Neka University Press Waingapu West Sumba Wielenga Zending
Popular passages
Page 70 - APOSTLES' CREED I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord...
Page 70 - I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, Amen.
Page 93 - CIVILIZATION, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Page 37 - Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass, authors to themselves in all, Both what they judge and what they choose...
Page 70 - Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose from the dead ; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
Page 95 - It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.
Page 76 - The first set of practices, by "translation," creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by "purification," creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.