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Indigenous Encounters with Christian Missionaries in China and West Africa, 1800–1920: A Comparative Study
DAVID LINDENFELD
Louisiana State University
| "To put it simply, world history is the story of connections within the global human community. The world historian's work is to portray the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past." Thus begins Patrick Manning's recent survey of the field.1 Pioneered by such figures as William McNeill, Philip Curtin, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others, world history has become the focus of a rich and active research program. As most will admit, however, the program presently emphasizes certain kinds of connections at the expense of others. Trade patterns, technological diffusion, itinerant foodstuffs, and germs comprise much of its material. Of course, world historians also recognize the importance of less tangible sorts of encounters, such as the sharing of knowledge and the meeting of ideologies and of religious beliefs and practices. Yet the vocabulary and conceptual framework for talking about these types of interactions in any depth lags behind what is available for discussing the more material ones.2 |
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The present essay grew out of the belief that a comparative study of religious encounters, one that would highlight cultural and intellectual factors while showing their interconnections to political, economic, and social ones, would provide a means for addressing this deficit. Encounters of diverse peoples with Christian missionaries, who in the nineteenth century reached virtually all parts of the world that had not been previously proselytized, offer an appropriate basis for such comparisons. While making allowances for changes in missionaries' motives and messages over the course of the century and for differences between Catholics and Protestants, one can nevertheless discern a more-or-less common global context against which a great variety of indigenous responses can be compared with one another.3 The literature on missionaries has turned its attention increasingly, in the past thirty years, to the indigenes—both as targets of missionaries and as missionaries themselves.4 Much work remains to be done here, but there is a sufficient amount of literature for a comparativist to ask such questions as: Under what circumstances did people resist missionary penetration? Under what circumstances did they convert? More importantly, how did they assimilate the beliefs and practices brought by missionaries into their own systems, regardless of whether or not they converted? Do any cross-cultural patterns or broader historical trends emerge from such investigations? The present paper attempts some preliminary answers to these questions, based on a comparison of two complex cases: China and West Africa. |
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