Missionary Letters Research Articles

Periodikas avoti kā liecība par pirmo Latvijas sieviešu misionāru darbu

Mission work in the 19th century was one of the rare opportunities that gave women the possibility to respond to God’s call. The archive of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (ELCL) was destroyed in 1944, and its collection have been lost. Many missionary letters are in archives in Germany. However, evidence of the mission work of the first women has been preserved in printed sources published in the territory of Latvia. The article aims to review the printed sources in the territory of Latvia as evidence of the work of the first Latvian women missionaries, especially the work of Hildegard Prozell (1898–1909), Auguste Weetneek (1899–1910) and Anna Irbe (1924–1940), about whom there are significant testimonies both in Latvian and German languages – Rigasches Kirchenblatt, Misions-Flugblatt, Jaunākās Ziņas, Ārmisija and other sources. The National Library of Latvia, the ELCL library, and the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu are the main repositories for the sources used for this paper. The article analyses the content of these sources and the evidence of whether and how this missionary work left an impression on the society in the homeland. The first printed sources on the territory of Latvia about mission work in the 19th century are examined to provide the historical context. The study concludes that there is an expansive amount of information about Prozell, the first missionary from the territory of Latvia, and Irbe, the first ELCL missionary. They describe their service and trips to mission places, nature, geography, folk customs, etc. Also, these sources testify to the increase in support for mission work in the homeland. Missionaries who could be considered a minority, for example, Latvian women who went to serve through an unpopular mission society in Latvia, received much less or almost no attention from the printed press. This research enables discovering and preserving information about these women’s experiences at mission work, journeys, descriptions of nature and geography, folk customs and other important aspects. It not only contributes to and promotes understanding of the role of women in the mission work of the Latvian Church but also broadens the understanding of how this work affected society at home. Thus, this important cultural aspect is preserved and respected by researching and documenting periodical sources, supplementing and enriching Latvia’s national heritage.

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Reviewed by: The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes Erik R. Seeman Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Jennifer Scheper Hughes breathes new life into an important topic: the relationship between the devastating toll of disease on Indigenous communities in sixteenth-century Mexico and the Christian affiliation of many Native Mexicans in that same time span. Readers of this journal will be most impressed by Hughes's theological readings of her primary sources. Though she does not sustain some of her claims, Hughes succeeds in categorizing colonial Catholicism as a church of the dead. Hughes focuses on an epidemic that began in 1576 and lasted roughly five years. The epidemic is not well-known outside specialist circles, perhaps because the disease itself remains unidentified. Marked by grim symptoms, including hemorrhages from the nose, the disease may have been caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica, Hughes speculates (13). Instead of getting bogged down in medical guesswork, Hughes wisely refers to the illness by its Nahuatl name: cocoliztli. The 1576 epidemic caused such widespread death that Spanish observers defined the period as one marked by mortandad, which can be translated as "mortality," but which also connotes "carnage" and "slaughter" (16). Faced with this mortandad and the demise of so many Indigenous Christians, some missionaries despaired for the future of the Mexican Church. Hughes analyzes this [End Page 116] moment of despair with great sensitivity, focusing on (but not limiting herself to) 135 unpublished missionary letters written from 1576 to 1581. Relying on these sources, Hughes argues that Mexican Catholicism became a church of the dead, meaning that "every aspect of [it] was in some way defined by or responsive to the fact of cataclysmic death" (99). When describing the church of the dead, Hughes uses language that sometimes seems hyperbolic, as when she states that this "spectral church" was an "ecclesial body absent of living persons" (95). In other places, her poetic writing suggests that such characterizations are not meant to be taken literally but are rather attempts to describe the essence or spirit of colonial Mexican Catholicism: the church "breathed in death; it exhaled death; it dwelled in death" (99). Hughes supports these claims in four vigorously analytical chapters. The first focuses on the intimate bodily and spiritual care missionaries offered sick Natives. Serving as healers, priests infused their ministrations with theological significance. Healing was "a religious rite"; indeed, it was "a kind of sacrament" that helped "transform Indigenous bodies into Christian flesh" (37–38). Unlike in English North America, where (following Joyce Chaplin's interpretation) Native susceptibility to illness led colonists to believe in their own racial superiority, missionary encounters with Native illness in Mexico led to "the mystical incorporation of Indigenous persons into a larger, encompassing Christian body" (39). Chapter two continues the analysis of Indigenous bodies, emphasizing their relation to the corpus mysticum, a medieval phrase that conjures both the mystical body of the church and the literal flesh of Christ. Even as missionaries incorporated Indigenous bodies into the colonial corpus mysticum, the mortandad threatened that project: the mystical body was "injured and at risk" (66). To remedy this, priests turned to the healing power of blood. They urged Indigenous Catholics to shed their own blood in scourging penitential processions, and they performed bloodletting on their dying Native parishioners. The result was not racial othering but mystical union: Mexico's sanguinary theology "was often more about assimilating and erasing difference than about drawing ever sharper lines of division and distinction" (84). The next two chapters take spatial relations as their organizing principle: the third from the perspective of the missionaries, and the fourth based on Indigenous sources. Whereas the mortandad led some priests to fear that the Mexican church was failing, others took up the challenge of ministering to a dying population. To do so, Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras walked 800 leagues (perhaps some 2,000 miles). According to Hughes, Moya and other missionaries "resanctified the landscape by walking" (106), expanding the...

The Intimate Frontier: Friendship and Civil Society in Northern New Spain

The Intimate Frontier: Friendship and Civil Society in Northern New Spain

프랑스 선교사제의 서한을 통해 본 기해교옥과 조선대목구의 실상 - 모방 신부·샤스탕 신부·앵베르 주교의 서한을 중심으로 -

앵베르 주교, 모방 신부, 샤스탕 신부가 남긴 서한들은 선교사제의 시각 에서 1839년(기해) 교옥(敎獄)의 원인, 경과 등을 살펴볼 수 있는 중요한 자료이다. 특히 앵베르 주교와 모방 신부가 작성한 ‘박해 보고서’는 1839 년 교옥 당시의 생생한 현장을 전해주고 있다. 1830년대 후반 선교사제의 노력과 신자들의 열성에 의해 조선천주교 의 교세는 확장되었지만, 그 이면에는 신자들 사이에 배교자들도 존재했 고 포졸들의 약탈과 체포가 이어졌다. 기근이 들었던 1838년에는 신자 체 포 사건들이 서울 인근과 지방에서 연이어 나타났는데, 선교사제 사이에는 안동 김씨가 주도하는 조선 정부가 박해를 확산시키지 않을 것이라는 기대와 대규모 박해가 일어날 수 있다는 불안이 교차하고 있었다. 앵베르 주교와 모방 신부의 보고서에 의하면, 1838년과 1839년 초에 산발적으로 발생했던 신자 체포 사건이 1839년 4월 7일 사건을 계기로 본 격적인 천주교 교옥으로 비화되었다. 서양인 선교사제의 존재가 탄로나고 척사여론이 거세지면서 천주교에 적대적인 풍양 조씨 세력이 정국의 주도 권을 잡았다. 4월 18일 사학토치령(邪學討治令)이 반포되고 공식적인 옥 사로 전환되었다. 조선 정부는 처형보다는 배교를 시키는데 중점을 두고 고문과 회유 방 법을 동원했다. ‘유다스’라 불리는 일부 배교자들은 다른 신자들이나 선교 사제의 체포에 앞장섰다. 박해가 치열할수록 신앙을 지킨 순교자가 늘어 났고 그와 함께 배교자도 늘어났다. 피신 중이던 조선대목구장 앵베르 주교는 선교사제들이 나서야 한다 는 일부 신자들의 생각에 동의하면서 자신은 순교하는 대신 다른 동료 사 제들을 해외로 탈출시키려 했다. 그러나 모방·샤스탕 신부는 그 계획의 위 험성을 지적하고 계속 조선에 남기로 했다. 더 이상 피신할 수 없는 상황에 서 앵베르 주교는 스스로 나가 붙잡혔고, 박해를 중단시키기 위해서는 다 른 선교사제의 희생이 필요하다고 판단했다. 이러한 주교의 지시에 순종 한 모방·샤스탕 신부는 스스로 나가 잡혔고, 결국 세 선교사제의 순교를 계기로 1839년의 교옥은 가라앉게 되었다.

História e historiografia do trabalho indígena em São Paulo colonial

O objetivo central do presente artigo é discutir o papel fundante e estrutural que a exploração do trabalho indígena desempenhou na formação histórica da região de São Paulo, fronteira colonial da América Portuguesa. Partindo de um balanço historiográfico sobre o problema, cinco episódios históricos concretos (extraídos de documentos tais como cartas de missionários, pleitos judiciais e registros parlamentares) serão expostos e apresentados como representativos de uma variedade de situações conjunturais peculiares que, não obstante, podem ser lidos como momentos de um mesmo processo de longa duração: a proliferação e permanência do trabalho compulsório indígena nos mecanismos regionais de reprodução social. Com base em uma demarcação conceitual até agora não explorada pela historiografia americanista (a qual procura distinguir as categorias de “regime”, “sistema” e “modalidade” de trabalho), sugere-se uma periodização da história colonial paulista tendo como critério privilegiado os diferentes padrões de emprego do braço indígena. Conclui-se que a escravidão indígena em São Paulo teria sido uma espécie de instituição “elástica” que, ao longo de quatro séculos de história, sofreu inúmeras transformações de ordem jurídica, política e social, mas que nunca deixou de apresentar-se como parte integrante das relações hegemônicas de sociabilidade na região.

미국 남장로회 선교사 김기수(Keith R. Crim)의 한국선교: 대전스테이션 활동(1954 -1965)을 중심으로

This paper investigates the missionary work of Keith R. Crim at the Daejeon Station of the Korea Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the Southern Presbyterian Church) by examining primary sources such as the minutes of the Korea Mission, missionary letters, and other historical materials. It aims at reviewing his role in establishing the Daejeon Station and his educational work at the Taejon Presbyterian College while clarifying his mission theology. This paper historically reconsiders the significances of the missionary work of the Korea Mission of the Southern Presbyterian church in the 1950s and the 1960s while reviewing Crim’s distinctive theological positions – accepting historical criticism of the Bible, avoiding theological fundamentalism, and emphasizing ecumenical movements – within a theologically conservative tradition of the Southern Presbyterian mission. It seeks to interpret the significance and limitation of the Southern Presbyterian missionary works to the Korean church and society in the 1950s and the 1960s – at the time of a radical social change of Korea and the great schism in the Presbyterian church.<BR> Keith R. Crim emphasized the necessity of evangelical work comforting and caring for laborers suffered from the poor working conditions in the rapid industrial development of Korea. For the Korean Church, he highlighted a scholarly interpretation of the Bible while avoiding the fundamentalist literalism, and emphasized the biblical inspiration as well as staying away from theological liberalism. He prescribed ecumenicalism to treat the great schism of the Korean Presbyterian Church while maintaining love and unity in Christ.

“But what silence! No more gazelles…”: Occurrence and extinction of fauna in Lesotho, southern Africa, since the late Pleistocene

Understanding the historical dynamics of wildlife distribution and abundance is essential to developing appropriate conservation measures. Here we investigate the occurrence and status of medium-to large-sized fauna (excluding avifauna) for the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho and immediate adjoining regions of South Africa, from the late Pleistocene to the present-day. We provide historical timelines and records of reported medium to large faunal taxa based on: data from eight published archaeological excavations, analyses of several hundred unpublished 19th and 20th century historical documents (including missionary letters, diaries, colonial reports and newspapers), and 58 recent oral history interviews. Vegetation and climate changes through the Holocene are also noted, based on archaeo-botanical records. Through these sources, we record 61 medium to large faunal species for Lesotho and surrounding regions over the past ~21 ka, of which only 22 are present today. Some species not previously known to the region are documented (e.g. Temminck's pangolin). Most species were present during the early 19th century, but many regional species extinctions and a major faunal population decline occurred between 1845 and 1850, owing mainly to settler hunting campaigns. Subsequent extinctions have taken place over a wider temporal interval, due to factors including overhunting, human-wildlife conflicts and habitat loss. It seems that some taxa were forced into unsuitable mountain refugia where species eventually succumbed to genetic erosion and/or harsh climatic conditions. Our results increase current understanding of regional faunal and environmental changes, such as the timing of species occurrences and extinction events and processes in Lesotho. Such work adds valuable knowledge to understanding the environmental heritage of the region. Information can be disseminated into wildlife records, national environmental reports, the WWF, the national school environmental educational curriculum and to National Parks and Heritage Sites.

“Everything is scorched by the burning sun”: missionary perspectives and experiences of 19th- and early 20th-century droughts in semi-arid central Namibia

Abstract. Limited research has focussed on historical droughts during the pre-instrumental weather-recording period in semi-arid to arid human-inhabited environments. Here we describe the unique nature of droughts over semi-arid central Namibia (southern Africa) between 1850 and 1920. More particularly, our intention is to establish temporal shifts in influence and impact that historical droughts had on society and the environment during this period. This is achieved through scrutinizing documentary records sourced from a variety of archives and libraries. The primary source of information comes from missionary diaries, letters, and reports. These missionaries were based at a variety of stations across the central Namibian region and thus collectively provide insight into subregional (or site-specific) differences in hydrometeorological conditions and drought impacts and responses. The earliest instrumental rainfall records (1891–1913) from several missionary stations or settlements are used to quantify hydrometeorological conditions and compare them with documentary sources. The work demonstrates strong subregional contrasts in drought conditions during some given drought events and the dire implications of failed rain seasons, the consequences of which lasted for many months to several years. The paper argues that human experience and associated reporting of drought events depends strongly on social, environmental, spatial, and societal developmental situations and perspectives. To this end, the reported experiences, impacts, and responses to drought over this 70-year period portray both common and changeable attributes through time.

La foi des ancêtres: Chrétiens cachés et catholiques dans la société villageoise japonaise XVIIe–XIXe siècles by Martin Nogueira Ramos

Reviewed by: La foi des ancêtres: Chrétiens cachés et catholiques dans la société villageoise japonaise XVIIe–XIXe siècles by Martin Nogueira Ramos Nathalie Kouamé La foi des ancêtres: Chrétiens cachés et catholiques dans la société villageoise japonaise XVIIe–XIXe siècles. By Martin Nogueira Ramos. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2019. 416 pages. Hardcover, €25.00. One of the main attractions of this book is that Martin Nogueira Ramos draws abundantly from two distinct traditions of historiography and succeeds in making them complementary. The first of these traditions is an international one consisting of [End Page 362] research on the first Christians in Japan. This line of inquiry began in the 1870s with Hirai Kishō, was continued by Murakami Naojirō and then Anesaki Masaharu, and then developed further in the 1930s with the emergence of the journal Monumenta Nipponica; it then entered a kind of postwar golden age with the publication of Western-language masterworks such as La Compagnie de Jésus et le Japon by Léon Bourdon, The Christian Century in Japan by Charles Boxer, and Deus Destroyed by George Elison in addition to studies by Okamoto Yoshitomo and Okada Akio in Japan. The second tradition upon which Ramos's work rests, a wholly Japanese one, is the study of the social history of Japanese religions, which has advanced markedly since the 1990s, notably as a result of increasing emphasis on the question of the social status (mibun) of religious persons. Both the content and the style of Ramos's book (a revised version of his doctoral thesis) clearly derive from these two main currents of scholarship. From the first tradition we see the fascination of a number of historians with the Christians of Japan, and from the second, a focus on human relations and the social fabric, particularly the framework of village life in premodern and modern Japan from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Ramos however succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the two traditions. He does not give way to religious sectarianism, instead remaining rigorously objective, and he does not hesitate to take into consideration the spiritual and existential character of the people he is examining, thus enabling himself to go beyond "basic" sociological considerations. Ramos's definition of what constitutes a "hidden Christian" is of particular interest given that he has stripped it of all romance or religious bias. "From the 1630s onward," Ramos writes, "Christians did all they could to hide their religion from view of the authorities. They might be described using the term Crypto-Christian or hidden Christian" (p. 70). And so, finally, we have a Western specialist clearly establishing the true nature of these individuals or groups of individuals, who have all too often been considered invisible. Ramos characterizes hidden Christians not as a population unnoticed by and unknown to those around them but as one whose members concealed and disguised themselves even though their neighbors and superiors might have been perfectly aware of their beliefs and religious practices. On several occasions Ramos emphasizes how Edo-period local authorities turned a blind eye to the existence of these groups, mainly because hidden Christians were almost all peasants, artisans, or fishermen, or in other words a source of tax income that they did not wish to jeopardize. To me, this is doubtless why Christian communities were able to survive over two and a half centuries. Ramos also deserves ample praise for his analytic method, specifically his combination of European sources, including missionary letters and testimonies by religious believers, with Japanese sources such as investigative reports. When Ramos is able to collate these two categories of sources, his findings are stimulating: in examining the question of the internal hierarchy of mid-nineteenth-century Christian communities (pp. 98–103), for example, he tellingly juxtaposes the testimony of Bernard-Thadée Petitjean, a priest of the foreign missions in Paris (Missions [End Page 363] étrangères de Paris) who in March 1865 "discovered" Christians living in Japan, with a report produced some years earlier in 1856 by Japanese investigators during the third "dismantlement" of the hidden Christians of Urakami. The...

The Perils of Published Missionary Letters

Contemporaneous publications of missionary letters often include material written for publicity purposes. These can be letters written by the missionaries themselves, or even fictional letters composed for the purpose and presented as genuine. By analyzing one such fiction and the genuine letter on which it is based, this article identifies criteria for distinguishing actual correspondence from its imitation. The example is drawn from a minor incident in New Zealand in 1840 involving the meeting of a Catholic missionary with a Methodist missionary, both of whom subsequently wrote about the encounter.

Willy-Nilly Baptisms and Chichimeca Freedoms: Missionary Disputes, Indigenous Desires and the 1695 O’odham Revolt

This paper uses the 1695 revolt of the O’odham (Pima) in northern New Spain as a window into ritually inflected encounters between indigenous communities and European evangelists. A careful study of the diverse religious and military reports on the O’odham rebellion reveals a more complex rendering of native participation than the dichotomous options of conversion or rejection. Soldiers’ journals, missionary letters, and official reports not only list possible reasons for the uprising, but also help explain the long periods of relative cooperation that preceded and followed it. Even as several O’odham rejected Christian symbols and rituals in 1695, they also welcomed missionaries with crosses, accepted baptism, celebrated feasts, and constructed churches before and after the revolt. At the same time, the uprising exposed internal Jesuit ambivalence about the authenticity of indigenous sacramental participation. While priests like Eusebio Kino believed in a patient and relatively tolerant approach to existing O’odham practices, others like Francisco Xavier Mora insisted on a more immediate and thoroughgoing transformation to European norms. This disagreement and the ensuing gap between early promises and actual implementation help explain shifting O’odham strategies for negotiating missionary encounters.

As doenças como exempla: epidemias e mortes nas cartas do jesuíta José de Anchieta

&lt;p&gt;Este estudo objetiva examinar as interpretações e as construções retóricas desenvolvidas pelo jesuíta José de Anchieta em suas descrições a respeito de casos de doenças que acometeram os Tupinambá da costa atlântica. Para isto, utiliza trechos de correspondências escritas pelo missionário entre os anos de 1556 e 1563. A partir de uma análise discursiva, constata-se que esses relatos, apesar de unânimes em destacar esses fenômenos como manifestações da Providência Divina, diferenciavam-se de acordo com as inclinações que os enfermos apresentavam em receber e praticar os ensinamentos cristãos. Foi possível ainda apontar que a tópica das doenças desenvolvia funções de &lt;em&gt;exemplum &lt;/em&gt;nas cartas do missionário, o que lhe permitia exaltar a atuação dos inacianos e, por consequência, realizar a propaganda da missão jesuítica. O estudo permite compreender como, mesmo tratando de temas funestos, Anchieta logrou construir relatos capazes de gerar experiências devocionais em seus leitores.&lt;/p&gt;

Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body by Tony Ballantyne

Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body, by Tony Ballantyne. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xii, 360 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). Missionary histories were once rather sleepy and specialized works, often draped in denominational garb. No more. Over the past two decades, and especially as a consequence of the cultural turn, a growing number of historians have turned their attention to the encounters between missionaries and Indigenous peoples on the frontiers of empire. Jeffrey Cox, Elizabeth Elbourne, Catherine Hall, and many others have contributed to this now vibrant field of study. With his new book on the Protestant missionaries who established a first foothold in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, Tony Ballantyne joins them. While others have written about this subject, Ballantyne pushes against those who portray the Maori as mere victims of cultural imperialism by British missionaries. Instead, he stresses Maori agency and argues that their encounter with missionaries had mutually entangling effects that were especially evident in bodily practices. He focuses mainly on the first two decades of the Christian Missionary Society mission in the Bay of Islands, founded by Samuel Marsden in 1814. Combining a close reading of missionary letters and reports with a nuanced understanding of Maori cultural practices, Ballantyne highlights the vulnerability of the missionaries and the accommodations they made to their Indigenous hosts. In chapter two (Making Place, Reordering Space), Ballantyne shows that Maori authorities determined the locations of mission stations and that Maori models and materials were used to construct mission dwellings. Missionaries erected stockade-like fences to keep the Maori at a distance, but their stations became culturally mixed spaces nonetheless. The next chapter (Economics, Labor, and Time) argues that missionaries failed to instill in the Maori the sense of work discipline or industriousness that they considered crucial to the civilizing mission. Their access to Maori labour occurred on Maori terms and they became enmeshed in a Maori political economy that relied heavily on slaves. Yet the violence that Maori masters meted out on their slaves shocked the missionaries, who were imbued with an evangelical view of death that stood in stark contrast with Maori attitudes. This is the subject of chapter five (Cultures of Death), which argues that Maori death rituals and burial practices became one of the principal ways missionaries sought to make sense of these people's spiritual beliefs. At the same time, missionaries' own burial practices underwent modification as a result of their engagements with the Maori. Ballantyne also acknowledges that the Maori underwent changes as a result of their encounters with missionaries. He notes, for example, that they were quick to embrace literacy--one of several European technologies that changed their lives--and accepted the Sabbath once it was framed in terms of their traditional tapu. …

The Missionary Letters of Vincent Donovan: 1957–1973, written by John P. Bowen

The Missionary Letters of Vincent Donovan: 1957–1973, written by John P. Bowen

“By means of tigers”: Jaguars as Agents of Conversion in Jesuit Mission Records of Paraguay and the Moxos, 1600–1768

In the mid-1600s, the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya reported that man-eating jaguars were helping to convert Guaraní Indians to Catholicism. This article tests his claim by aggregating multiple mentions of jaguars found in the accounts and letters of Jesuit missionaries in the reductions of Paraguay and the Moxos from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the writing of Jesuits Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, François-Xavier Eder, Alonso Messia, and Martín Dobrizhoffer. Cumulatively, their predator sightings and references suggest that, indeed, the actions of real jaguars were transforming local religious beliefs. The presence of jaguars in Jesuit records also reveals the complexity of missionary and indigenous attitudes towards animals. Jesuits often associated jaguars with pre-Christian jaguar-shaman rituals, but also considered them to be divine instruments. Indigenous peoples sometimes preserved older practices, but also occasionally took real jaguars as an impetus to convert to Christianity. Both Jesuits and indigenous peoples reacted to jaguar incursions with violence as well as spiritual reflection. Most importantly, the prominence of active jaguars on this contested religious frontier suggests that animals should be viewed as more than symbols in Christian history. Jesuit records indicate that jaguars were key third players in zones where Europeans and indigenous populations met.

America's God and the World: Questioning the Protestant Consensus

Like many historians, I am working on a ghost story. This one begins in 1813, the beginning of the American Baptist mission to Burma. Like those told by John Modern and Mark Noll, this story is contoured by war—the American Civil War and a series of Anglo-Burmese Wars waged between 1824 and 1885. Its specters appear in missionary letters and diaries, newspapers reports, illustrated travelogues, and concurrently produced Burmese royal chronicles and ritual networks. As I chase these ghosts, I am continually haunted by a bellow I hear coming from historians who have reclaimed evangelicalism as the determining subject of American religious history.

"Calling for Wind and Rain" Rituals: Environment, Emotion, and Governance in Nguyen Vietnam, 1802-1883

The “calling for wind and rain” ritual, known as cầu đảo, was a key means through which the Nguyễn court in nineteenth-century Vietnam sought to regulate rainfall and alleviate the effects of natural disasters. Despite their prevalence and importance, cầu đảo rituals have received little scholarly attention, and the court’s engagement with the environment has not figured prominently in previous understandings of the Nguyễn dynasty. Drawing on a range of sources, including official court histories, the letters of French missionaries and provincial gazetteers, this article examines cầu đảo practices in Vietnam between 1802 and 1883 and explores the complex relationship between the environment, emotion, and royal governance.

The Hominy Foodway of the Historic Native Eastern Woodlands

The Hominy Foodway of the Historic Native Eastern Woodlands Rachel V. Briggs (bio) As long as the Indian can eat and drink osafki, he will not go dead. —Creek saying Made from boiled maize kernels exposed to an alkaline solution, hominy has been regarded as one of a number of maize dishes within the culinary repertoire of the Native cook. However, this article proposes that hominy was not a singular dish but rather the life-sustaining staple foodway for Native groups in the Eastern Woodlands and that it served as the basis for a number of resulting foods. The importance of this foodway, practiced well into the twentieth century by many groups, is not just in its chemical alteration of maize but also in the elements of sociality that envelop it, which helped perpetuate the culinary, nixtamalizing practices involved long after they were no longer biologically essential. This sociality includes those domestic and community-wide practices that established a particular taste for lye and ash, important elements of the foodway, as well as the role of the hominy foodway within a broader social context. Food plays a central role in our lives. It is not simply that we eat every day up to several times a day. Food is much more than nourishment—enveloping it are a number of activities, ones that involve procurement, preparation, serving, and even disposal. As such, food is surrounded by a number of cultural rules and guidelines that facilitate this process, telling us what is good to eat and what is not, when it is good to eat and when it is not, how we should eat, where we should eat, even, at times, why we should eat.1 These rules are constantly reinforced on a daily basis, [End Page 112] cementing them as “the original social glue that forms the bonds of family and society while creating the individual.”2 Thus, food is also shrouded in meaning, and this meaning constructs and interprets our lives and experiences. At this point, though, we are no longer talking about just food. We are talking about foodways, or the activities, rules, and meanings that surround not only food but cuisines (or the manner in which food is prepared).3 Unlike studies of food, foodways studies encompass the social activities that surround a specific food or dish, providing a means to discuss shared, common culinary and social practices related to specific foods and dishes. Thus, the distinct advantage of foodways studies is that they are holistic, broadening the focus from the plant or animal exclusively to also incorporate those practices surrounding their preparation and consumption, as well as the social and cultural contexts enveloping them. An example of the important difference between these two approaches would be the study of maize versus the study of foodways in which maize is the central foodstuff. Studies of the maize plant have long stressed its versatility as a food product and its productivity as a dietary staple. Ubiquitous throughout the New World at the time of European contact, maize is heralded as a plant full of possibilities, serving as the backbone for the rise of complex societies in the Americas, as a dietary staple of European peasants from the seventeenth century on, and now as the third most utilized human food source in the world (first for ruminant fodder). There is no question that maize was a staple among the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands. From the chroniclers of Hernando de Soto’s entrada to the letters of Jesuit missionaries to the journals of the naturalist William Bartram, the prevalence of maize was noted throughout the region. In addition, explorers and colonists commented on the numerous, diverse ways Natives prepared the plant.4 Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny is often cited to the effect that among the Natchez there were at least forty-two different ways of preparing maize, each with a different name.5 From a food studies perspective, this statement is understood to indicate that there were many unique and varied dishes that could be made with maize. However, from a foodways perspective, we begin to understand that this statement may have another meaning. Instead of...

‘The Way of Our Fathers’: CMS Missionaries and Yorubá Health in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the conflicts between missionaries and the Yorùbá, regarding health and healing in nineteenth- century Yorùbáland. An indepth analysis into missionary interventions in indigenous medical therapy is reconstructed using the journals and letters of CMS missionaries from 1846- 1890. With Abeokuta as a case study, it is argued that pre- colonial CMS missionaries attempted to abolish indigenous Yorùbá medical practices. However, they were unsuccessful. The reasons for this failure constitute the focus of this article.

&lt;em&gt;Symbioses d'une méémoire. Manifestations religieuses et littééraires de la Caraïïbe&lt;/em&gt;, by Anny Dominique Curtius

an important contribution to Caribbean studies, anny dominique Curtius’s text enriches the concept of the Black atlantic developed by Paul Gilroy as it delves into the relationship between ethnography, Caribbean literature, and Caribbean religions: Rastafarian, Obeah, Quimbois, Santeria, Vodun. Clearly not the first study to focus on the importance of religious practice in the Caribbean—see, for example, Stephan Palmie’s Wizards and Scientists. Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002)—the text is unique in its comparative approach to anglophone and francophone Caribbean social and cultural spaces as well as religious practices. in this regard, the critic uses diverse material—missionary letters, travel narratives, ethnographic and philosophical studies, fiction, and social and political essays— to elucidate a process that began with the forced conversion of african slaves to Christianity and resulted in religious “creolization.” Central to the critic’s study of religious hybridity are the concepts of desontologisme and reontologisme. She defines the first as the annihilation of the Caribbean slave’s identity (37) and the latter as the reaffirmation of Caribbean identity, nourished by African roots and resistance to reification (37). She explains that desontologisme originated in the hold of the slave ship where the african captive became an object to be sold upon arrival. at this point, the process of leaving african ontology behind was initiated. in her view, reontologisme, the process of resistance to reification, to the transformation of a human being into an object as defined by article 44 of the Code Noir, began in the hold of the slave ship as well. adopting the notion of corps-memoire (body-memory) as a contre-monde, a space of resistance (46), she explains that once the slaves reached the plantation their resistance strategies continued to be linked to memory, with slaves clinging to traces of an african past while nourishing new roots in the precarious “new” world. Hence, the Caribbean plantation became a contre-monde in which afro-Caribbean religious expression was to play a key role (51). as Curtius traces the dual process of desontologisme/reontologisme that involves the imposition of the Christian religion upon the african slave, she follows the subversive movement of the new “creolized” religions such as Quimbois in Guadeloupe and Vodun in Haiti. Reflecting Glissant’s concept of detour/retour, the notion of desontologisme/reontologisme initiates a liberating path as the discourses of evangelization and civilization are deconstructed and new texts, new language, new religious structures emerge. Curtius’s text is informative in several ways. First, it examines missionary texts dating from the colonial period as key elements in the process of religious creolization. Second, it argues that religious creolization is an important form of marronage, or cultural resistance in the Caribbean. Third, it is innovative in its comparative approach: it studies religious creolization in both contemporary francophone and anglophone Caribbean literature. in this vein, the analyses of Chauvet’s Amour, in which the protagonist resists Vodun,(263), and Schwarz-Bart’s