Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Religion and Politics. Edited by Heather J. Sharkey. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013. xiv + 328 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia . Religion and Politics. Edited by Heather J. Sharkey . Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press , 2013. xiv + 328 pp. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesProfessor Heather Sharkey presents here a selection of essays drawn from a conference on Christian Missions and National Identities, held at her home institution, the University of Pennsylvania. They represent critical thought and research in a field she has done much to help advance: the social history of missions. As colonial and post-colonial studies develop and mature, at least some of their practitioners are discovering the dynamic roles that religious agents and institutions played in these dramas. And the more one investigates the role of missions, the more complex and interesting the questions become. Who is a missionary? What does it mean to be converted? What kinds of social, economic and political changes did missions set in motion? What happens to the religious ecology of a region when a new religion is introduced? Where does one look for sources to answer these questions?The essays in this book amply illustrate the richness of this field of inquiry. Chandra Mallampalli focuses on a court case in India in the 1860s, in which relatives contested the estate of an Indian businessman who was a convert to Christianity. The case hinged on whether this convert and the larger community of Christians practiced a western, form of family life and customs of inheritance, or whether Hindu norms and patterns persisted. One could not ask for a more exhaustive examination of what it meant, in daily practice, to be an Indian than what Mallampalli found in the court transcripts and in the public press.What forces were set loose by the presence of Christianity and agencies in places where it did not exist before? Here too we have some intriguing glimpses, notably one provided by Stephen Berkwitz, who presents several Buddhist polemical and practical responses to missions in Sri Lanka. With a religious and social competitor in town, Buddhist leaders scrambled to respond, both via some contemptuous critiques of the new religion and with a reformist movement that introduced some novel, Protestantizing features, such as new preaching on moral self-restraint and new agencies to serve the poor. …