Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. By Webb Keane

Abstract

As the twenty-first century barrels into its second decade, Christianity's global fortunes seem to enlarge without abatement. The best tallies suggest that one-third of the world's population is Christian, with one-third of those Christians living in former colonies. It is then maybe inevitable that the first epochal statement on the history of Christianity would be made by an anthropologist. Straddling the shifting (geographic, institutional, economic, and ethnic) terrain of emergent Christian self-understanding, the ethnographer may occupy an unusually telling vantage to note the abruptions and continuities of a tradition that is, in Webb Keane's rendering, bullying the very idea of tradition with its every swagger, stumble, and regeneration. Christian Moderns is a work of exemplary linguistic anthropology focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch Calvinist missionaries and their overlapping engagement with ancestral marapu on Sumba, an island of eastern Indonesia. Sumba was initially missionized by the neo-orthodox Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, then by the self-governing Christian Church of Sumba. Rather than a more “flamboyant” (and au courant) pentecostal or evangelical denomination, the Reformed Church in its “seeming ordinariness” may, in Keane's description, “help us see that quality of everydayness in which religion can have some of its most important consequences” (30). Traversing colonial and postcolonial contexts, this book offers the effects of momentous historical processes through analysis of the “smallest capillaries of everyday life” (83).