Anglican Mission Research Articles

Land, Politics and Benevolent Shamanism: The Enxet Indians in a Democratic Paraguay

AbstractOnly in the last century has the territory of the Enxet Indians of Paraguay been colonised by non-Indians, led initially by Anglican missionaries. This article examines the Enxet in the contemporary political context of Paraguay giving special attention to their claim for 160,000 hectares of their traditional territory. It also considers the development of a mythically expressed autochthonous political discourse and the relationship of the Indians to professional politicians. Despite significant legal backing, the Enxet land claims are strongly opposed by powerful landowners and their best chance for success will be to gain international support.

Bishops and Brookes: The Anglican Mission and the Brooke Raj in Sarawak, 1848–1941. By Graham Saunders. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xvii, 290 pp. $49.95.

Bishops and Brookes: The Anglican Mission and the Brooke Raj in Sarawak, 1848–1941. By Graham Saunders. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xvii, 290 pp. $49.95.

The Ven. Charles Theophilus Hahn, a hitherto unknown Edwardian botanical illustrator in Natal, 1908—1916

A brief biographical sketch is given of the Rev. C.T. Hahn, an English-born, Oxford-educated Anglican missionary in Zululand who painted some 235 watercolours of Natal flora between 1908 and 1913. Hahn (who later changed his name to Headley) was one of the most productive of the early botanical illustrators in Natal but as a collection of his paintings has only recently been discovered, his work has until hitherto remained unknown.

ENCOUNTERS WITH EVIL: CHRISTIANITY AND THE RESPONSE TO SORCERY AMONG THE MAISIN OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Scholars writing about Melanesian societies often assume that sorcery and Christianity are incompatible. When I began my research among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea, who have long been Christians, I was a little surprised that they accepted sorcery as a reality. I was most surprised, however, that many Maisin thought Europeans shared their commonsense notions about sorcery. As proof, I was told of how European doctors at town hospitals could recognize 'village sickness' and send those inflicted with it back to be cared for by local healers (Barker 1989). Village elders also said that in the past the missionaries had taught them ways to control sorcery and the discord in the village that gave rise to it. My contention in this paper is that Maisin have good reason to think Europeans know something about sorcery, for Europeans, especially missionaries, played a major if indirect role in forming present-day attitudes towards sorcery in Maisin society. During the high period of missionary activity, between 1901 and 1950, Anglican missionaries and the Maisin collaborated against sorcerers on several occasions. Despite their agreement that sorcerers represented evil, the two parties arrived with very different notions of evil and its treatment, and so these dramatic occasions did not lead to sustained cooperation. But there was an important exception to this. In 1932, a man called Maikin travelled to the village of Wanigela, the seat of the district mission station, to detect and expose sorcerers. Maikin claimed that his amazing ability was a gift of the Christian God, although he had not been baptized. The missionary likened him to an apostle of Christ. The elder Maisin today remember him as a mixture of saviour and sorcerer. Maikin has come to epitomize for Maisin the ambiguous nature of sorcery in a Christian age. This paper examines these encounters, especially those involving Maikin. It studies how through such encounters Maisin and their missionaries gradually reshaped the Maisin's understanding of sorcery and, beyond that, the nature and justification of evil (cf . Burridge 1985; Parkin 1985). I begin by examining sorcery ideology in Maisin society at the time of my fieldwork in the early 1980s, and the stories that surrounded Maikin some fifty years after his mission to Wanigela. I then turn to the historical record to show how these memories developed as a mutual construction of the Maisin and missionaries as they, separately and together, battled the evil of sorcery. The essay concludes with some observations on the relation between the experience of sorcery and Christianity in Maisin society.

A Parting Gift

One evening a young man and his elderly father appeared at my door. The young man, thirtyish, handed me a crumpled letter and several x-ray films enclosed in a faded yellow folder. The letter, from a physician-friend of mine from the northern mountains of Pakistan, asked me to take care of the young man. The films confirmed that he indeed had a growth causing a near-total blockage of his lower esophagus. I asked the two to meet me at the local mission hospital the next day. Despite my initial refusal, they presented me with a small basket of fresh eggs as a token of their appreciation. The Afghan Mission Hospital was built by Anglican missionaries in the 19th century. As its name suggests, it catered to the Afghan tribes who lived in the no-man's-land between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The tribal people came down from the mountains to the hospital, accepting

Stone-Faced Ancestors: The Spatial Anchoring of Myth in Wamira, Papua New Guinea

A village of about 450 inhabitants, Wamira lies on the northeast coast of Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea.1 Immediately behind the hamlets, which are scattered under trees along a stony beach, a grassy plain extends to the base of the mountains that begin their ascent a few kilometers inland. About two kilometers to the west of Wamira, perched on top of a lofty plateau, is Dogura, the headquarters of the Anglican Mission in Papua New Guinea.

Prophetism, Pentecostalism and Conflict in Ikenanzizi (1945 and 1972)1

Ikenanzizi is a town of about 50,000 people2 made up of two villages, Alike and Amuzi (each of which is an autonomous community), in Etiti Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigeria. Brought under British rule in 1905,3 the town was visited by Catholic missionaries in 1913.4 Owing to the efforts of these missionaries, Catholicism spread quickly and widely in the town. Before 1945, when this study begins, the only challenge to the Catholic mission in Ikenanzizi came from the Church Missionary Society (CMS), beginning in 1936.5 But the Anglican missionaries were able to win only a very small number of converts in the town and were, thus, no serious threat to the Catholic Church. By 1945, Catholicism had become the dominant of Ikenanzizi. The chiefs and headmen of the town, its literate men and women, the children in the town (save the few who were Anglicans) were all Catholics in 1945. At that time, as of today, the Catholic Church was so important in Ikenanzizi that non-Catholics, traditionalists, as well as Anglicans, contributed in kind (labour) and cash to the development of the church. Catholicism was almost the state religion of Ikenanzizi and two events in its history provide a rare case study in the emergence of the charismatic movement within Roman Catholicism.

Henry George Cook

This profile describes the life of Henry George Cook, sometime Anglican bishop of Henry Cook began his ministry in 1935 in Fort Smith, N.W.T., carrying out clerical duties including teaching school and the study of the Slavey language, used by the Indian population in that area. In 1943 he moved to Toronto and in 1949 became superintendent over the Anglican mission schools in the provinces and the two territories. Bishop retired in 1974 at the age of 68. However, Bishop and Mrs. Cook were not finished with the North. Cook was invited by Commissioner Stuart Hodgson to assist in the setting up of what was to become the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre which was opened in 1979. The later history of the church's life, together with the development of missions down the Mackenzie area, would not be complete witout an acknowledgment of the devotion, commitment and concerned oversight expressed through the life and ministry of Henry George Cook, bishop of Mackenzie.

Cheerful pragmatists:Anglican Missionaries among the Maisin of Collingwood Bay, Northeastern Papua, 1898–1920.∗

tions and evangelizing tactics available to individual missionaries within a sin gle mission. Between 1898 and 1920 five Anglican missionaries in succession laboured hard to bring Christianity to Maisin villages along the shores of Col lingwood Bay in northeastern Papua. They were directed by the first two bishops of the mission, each of whom articulated ideals of evangelism which were, for the time, remarkably tolerant of the indigenous culture. Yet the individual mis sionary's style and ability proved very important in a mission possessing no gener al strategy of evangelization. Anglicans in Australia had expressed casual interest in starting a mission in New Guinea, but it was not until Governor William MacGregor invited them to begin work that they considered the idea seriously.1 In 1890 the Rev. Albert Maclaren arrived in Port Moresby to negotiate a comity agreement, under Mac Gregor's auspices, with representatives of other missions.2 Maclaren pledged the Anglicans to evangelize 480 kilometres of north coast from Cape Ducie to the border of German New Guinea. The following year he led a small party to the high plateau of Dogura, overlooking Bartle Bay. The mission suffered many setbacks. Maclaren died of fever within a few months, leaving the mission disorganized, dispirited and starved of funds. Mac Gregor watched the lack of progress with increasing impatience: he supported the missions in principle, and he depended upon them to maintain order and to initiate education and 'civilization'. His thinly veiled threat to invite Roman Catholics into the area provoked a flurry of activity among the Australian sponsors of the venture. In January 1898 they reorganized the mission as a diocese, and elected Montagu John Stone-Wigg its first bishop.

In Zambia: doing more with less.

Excerpt An Anglican Mission Hospital sits on the high plateau of Zambia's eastern province. A vestige of British rule, it maintains a distinctly colonial atmosphere. The over 30 acres of meticulous...

Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa "Dini" Conversion and Rejection in Central Malawi

Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa "Dini" Conversion and Rejection in Central Malawi

Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa Dini Conversion and Rejection in Central Malawi

Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa Dini Conversion and Rejection in Central Malawi

African Economic Experiments in Colonial Natal 1845-1880

Recent investigations of African economic life in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony have opened the way for the destruction of much conventional wisdom concerning the course of South African development.1 The emerging story of the rise and fall of black peasant communities challenges the deeply entrenched belief that Africans were hide-bound traditionalists slow to adapt to a dynamic settler economy which they neither liked nor understood--that they were late starters in a race they were bound to lose. This challenge can be strengthened by a review of African economic initiatives in the early decades of the Natal Colony.2 By the time of the Zulu War, African Christian communities had not only established a flourishing peasant economy but had also embarked upon entrepreneurial capitalist ventures on a significant scale. Their story suggests that the well-known curbs placed by white legislators upon African economic activity after the Zulu War were not so much designed to safeguard whites against potential black competition but aimed rather to undo progress which had already been made.3 Moreover, it is at least arguable that the rise of political activism and religious separatism at the end of the nineteenth century owed more to the loss of valued economic opportunities than to a newly-awakened desire to compete on equal terms in the dominant society. Christian missions in Natal provided a favorable setting for African economic experiments. Well-financed operations by nine different missionary societies made Natal one of the most heavily evangelised territories in the world.4 Because Congregational, Methodist, and Anglican missionaries had easy access to influential officials in the early years of the colony, missions benefitted greatly from the land arrangements made by the locations commissigns of the eighteen forties and by Sir George Grey's scheme of Mission Reserves. In addition, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican missions purchased extensive farms when land was cheap which served the needs of their converts adequately until about the time of the Zulu War.6 From these bases where the small black Christian population (between eight and ten thousand by 1880) enjoyed a privileged status, missionaries moved immediately to effect an economic revolution. The clothing which missionaries recommended for the sake of modesty was for many of their converts an introduction to a new system of production and exchange. Whether the convert earned his new clothes by wage labor or fabricated them with European looms and needles, he was entering into new kinds of economic relationships. The upright which rose on all mission stations embodied materials and demanded the use of tools unknown in the pre-colonial period. Indeed, on the assumption that the builders of such houses had become importers of dutiable goods, African Christians won exemption from Natal's hut tax.7 Missionaries knew what they were doing when they sought to accelerate the transition to a capitalist economy. Very much under the influence of T. F. Buxton and David Livingstone, missionaries of all denominations agreed that Civilisation and Christianisation would reinforce each other.8 By 1861, a pioneer American missionary could cite facts to support his theory:

Late Nineteenth-Century Anglican Missionary Expansion: A Consideration of some Non-Anglican Sources of Inspiration

More than a decade ago, Max Warren suggested that the nature of protestant missionary expansion in the last quarter of the nineteenth century presented ‘some of the most perplexing features in the history of the modern missionary movement’; but the extensive ‘painstaking research’ which he called for into the metropolitan roots of that movement has hardly yet been forthcoming. Historians have more usually preferred to direct their attention to the impact of western missions outside Europe, and to consider their contribution to the modernisation of the non-European world. This growing body of published research unquestionably aids the would-be historian of metropolitan motives, but—for reasons requiring too much space for elucidation here—also makes his own work the more necessary if the expansive forces within western society are to be clearly understood and placed in perspective.

The Achilles Heel of Anglican Mission: The Selwyn Legacy in New Zealand

Historical case studies can be painful. The editorial question must be: does the pain bring forth usable insights? In this analysis, historian Pinnington looks beyond overt, oft-cited problems like “the land issue” and focuses on the unresolved root problems of isolation, individualism — and even rivalry — which wracked the missionary force, depriving them of desperately-needed mutual support, and blunting the cutting edge of their mission. “They were not enough a community in love … The Maoris had already too great a sense of their own community to be built into the Body of Christ by mere missionary committees.” For Western missions in the late 20th Century, relevant insights indeed!

Church and Education in the Lake Nyasa Region of Tanganyika

Although in undeveloped countries a major educational problem is the shortage of teachers and schools, in one remote district of Tanganyika on the shores of Lake Nyasa the local problem was very different-a concentration of primary schools with an embarrassingly high proportion of empty places, managed by two competing voluntary agencies, the University Mission to Central Africa and the Roman Catholic Order of St. Benedict. The U.M.C.A. was formed as a result of Livingstone's famous address at Cambridge in 1852.1 This Anglican mission returned to Nyasaland in 18822 from Zanzibar and started schools in 1886.2 Shortly afterwards the Order of St. Benedict began work in Tanganyika, starting at Dar es Salaam in 1888,4 and eventually arrived in the Songea District, beginning their work from their base at Peramiho. In the early years of the first decade of the twentieth century they began to establish missions in the lake shore area on a place already penetrated by the U.M.C.A., albeit not very much earlier. It is not surprising that the German Benedictines were in Tanganyika which was then known as German East Africa.

The Mataco of Northern Argentina

When the first Spanish missionaries penetrated the Chaco early in the seventeenth century, they discovered a whole group of linguisticallyrelated tribes whose existence had gone unsuspected for a century. The most important of them, the Mataco, numbered about 30,000, and lived in numerous villages along the banks of the Bermejo, Paraguay, and Pilcomayo rivers. Pushed down off the Bolivian highlands by the more warlike Chiriguanos, the Mataco lived a peaceful, if primitive, life, hunting, fishing, and collecting carob pods, cactus figs, wild squash, and hearts of palm. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Argentina exterminated most of her Indian population, the Mataco were left practically undisturbed; their lands were simply not valuable enough to be worth the white man's taking. Except for a few Anglican missions and an occasional trading post, the Chaco remained sealed off from the rest of Argentina.

Bishops and Societies. A Study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850. By Hans Cnattingius. London, S.P.C.K., 1952. xii+248.

Bishops and Societies. A Study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850. By Hans Cnattingius. London, S.P.C.K., 1952. xii+248.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Books Reviewed in this article:THE THEOLOGY OF CULTURE: Christ and Culture. By H. Richard Niebuhr.THE SCIENCE OF MISSIONS: P. Robert Streit, o.m.i., ein Pionier der katholischen Missionswissenschaft. By Johannes Pietsch, o.m.i.THE SCIENCE OF MISSIONS: Introduction à la Missiologie. By André V. Seumois, o.m.i.GESTURES AND ATTITUDES IN PRAYER: Die Gebetsgebärden der Völker und das Christentum. By Thomas Ohm, o.s.b.WOMEN IN THE CHURCH: The Service and Status of Women in the Churches. By Kathleen Bliss.ANGLICAN MISSIONS AND THE EPISCOPATE: Bishops and Societies: A study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850. By Hans Cnattingius.THE GOSPEL IN THE LANGUAGE OF MODERN MAN: The Communication of the Gospel. By David H. C. Read.THEOLOGY FOR THE LAYMAN: Foundations of Christian Teaching (Základy učení krest'anského). By M. Bič, J. L. Hromadka, R. Říčan, J. B. SoučekTHE BIBLE TRANSLATORS' CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: God's Word in Man's Language. By Eugene A. Nida.THE CHURCH AND THE HEALING ART: The Church and Healing. By Carl J. Scherzer.A PORTRAIT: Father Douglass of Behala. By Some of his Friends.PEOPLES AND CULTURES: Notes and Queries on Anthropology. Sixth Edition, revised and rewritten by a committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandTHE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST: Near East Culture and Society: A Symposium on the Meeting of East and West. Edited by T. Cuyler Young.INTRODUCTION TO AFRICA: This is Africa. By Franklin Mack.INTRODUCTION TO AFRICA: Africans on Safari. By Leslie C. Sayre.INTRODUCTION TO AFRICA: Jungles Ahead. By Esther D. Horner.INTRODUCTION TO AFRICA: African Heritage. By Emory Ross.INTRODUCTION TO AFRICA: Introduction to Africa: A selective guide to background reading. Prepared in the Library of Congress by Helen F. Conover under the direction of Harry J. Krould.

Book Review: Bishops and Societies. A Study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion 1698–1850

Book Review: <scp>Bishops and Societies</scp>. A Study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion 1698–1850