Missionaries/Evangelism

Abstract

The study of missionary children has recently become an important aspect of mission and colonial history. Both as a topic in its own right, and as a lens through which to explore issues of identity, difference, professionalism, and agency, the missionary family with children at its heart has become a site of extended interest and study. After all, missionaries were prolific reproducers, and their lives on the geographical edges but at the conceptual and ideological heart of empire, certainly warrant extended scrutiny. Meanwhile, their proclivities for documenting, writing about, and introspectively examining their experiences provide rich seams of evidence for scholars of colonialism, religion, identity, and family in the global-colonial context of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The children of missionaries lived exceptional lives and in many ways their experiences defy generalizations. Nonetheless, certain themes emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular: social and cultural liminality; illness, death and disability; cultural hybridity on the one hand, and strict social conformity on the other; separation from family and home through education; and the politics of return to natal spaces having undergone considerable personal, social, and cultural transformation. The children of missionaries often found it difficult to fit into strictly policed social categories, and were thus typically configured as problematic, deviant, or in need of intense moral scrutiny by missionary parents who through their own vocation sought to transform the social, cultural, and spiritual lives of their converts, but with variable levels of success. As such, missionary children are fascinating subjects of historical study not only in the lives that they led and the experiences they had, but also through the social conventions and cultural mentalities that their presence elicited and illuminated. The following bibliographic article attempts to both navigate the emergence of the existing historiography surrounding the lives and experiences of missionary children, while also paying attention to the themes of their existence that can be useful categories of scholarly analysis. The study of missionary children has emerged from a complex reimagining of mission history away from contemporary hagiographies toward a more analytical approach to the historical phenomenon of Christian mission expansion. Inspired by postcolonial approaches to imperial history, the importance of the everyday, domestic, and quotidian brought alive by both feminism and historical anthropology, as well as more critical engagements with biography, histories of religion, and histories of domestic social formation, the history of children in the mission-evangelical context has flowered into an area of considerable and innovative historical practice. I hope that the following bibliographic essay can offer an effective taste of a vibrant and exciting area of historical and sociological academic endeavor.