Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission EncounterUniversity of California Press, 2007 M01 3 - 336 pages Across 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. |
From inside the book
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Page iv
... Indonesia , ” American Ethnologist 22 ( 1 ) , 1995 : 102–24 , copyright © by the American Anthropological Association ; and chapter 10 as " Money Is No Object : Materiality , Desire , and Modernity in an Indonesian Society , " in The ...
... Indonesia , ” American Ethnologist 22 ( 1 ) , 1995 : 102–24 , copyright © by the American Anthropological Association ; and chapter 10 as " Money Is No Object : Materiality , Desire , and Modernity in an Indonesian Society , " in The ...
Page xiii
... Indonesian , and Dutch are my own unless otherwise noted . Quotations from conversations are from my own field notes when no citation is given . In transcriptions from Anakalangese , sub- scripts indicate implosive consonants ; for ...
... Indonesian , and Dutch are my own unless otherwise noted . Quotations from conversations are from my own field notes when no citation is given . In transcriptions from Anakalangese , sub- scripts indicate implosive consonants ; for ...
Page 2
... Indonesian island of Sumba in the 1990s. Good Protestants pray with their eyes shut. Catholics, by con- trast, do so with open eyes. Why? So they can read the words of their prayer books instead of speaking from within. This, I was ...
... Indonesian island of Sumba in the 1990s. Good Protestants pray with their eyes shut. Catholics, by con- trast, do so with open eyes. Why? So they can read the words of their prayer books instead of speaking from within. This, I was ...
Page 4
... Indonesia, their converts from a system of ancestral ritual, and those who resisted conversion. Their collec- tive story starts as an encounter between two sides, but its postcolonial con- sequences produce a tangle of relations and ...
... Indonesia, their converts from a system of ancestral ritual, and those who resisted conversion. Their collec- tive story starts as an encounter between two sides, but its postcolonial con- sequences produce a tangle of relations and ...
Page 8
... Indonesia. Like all such encounters, this one is complex, and the people involved could take quite different positions toward one another depending on circumstances. But in order to clarify their largely tacit assumptions about words ...
... Indonesia. Like all such encounters, this one is complex, and the people involved could take quite different positions toward one another depending on circumstances. But in order to clarify their largely tacit assumptions about words ...
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.