The translation of cultures

Abstract

of 'the missionary type' or of a 'missionary attitude'. The range of 'missionary occasions', to appropriate the title of Burridge's thoughtful essay,1 is broad, so broad that it is no easy matter to decide what essential set of orientations to culture change and to the religious life may be said to unite the intentions and experiences of a list like the following: fire and brimstone fundamentalists, con tributors to Missiology, intrepid young Mormons, medical technicians, aiders and abettors of national liberation movements, back-country hermits, Billy Graham-style revivalists, and so on. In a post-colonial world the ail too familiar sharp silhouette of the evangelist has blurred. But was it in fact ever sharp? Alongside the 'man of God' ?unbending extirpator of the devil in the bush, in Colin Turnbull's unforgettable and venomous portrait ?has always stood tlje romantic 'Father Lobo', also painted by Turnbull, whose church in the jungle is built by Christians, Moslems, and Pagans, and whose joyous service of dedication is attended by dancing pygmies trailing vines.2 Between these poles, historians investigating 'typical' missionary discourse may, in fact, discover in common words like 'god', 'adultery', 'holy spirit', 'devil', 'the Word', 'conversion', and so on, a spectrum of local renderings, in ventions, and heterodox interpretations. The historian of missions must be prepared to discover intransigence coexisting in unexpected ways with what Burridge calls 'mutual metanoia', an unpublicized other conversion process that Maurice Leenhardt some time ago termed 'acculturation in two directions' and recommended to all participants in colonial situations.3 The present case is a contribution to a more nuanced understanding of these processes and to a more adequate portrait of the liberal evangelist. It is an example of how a mis sionary can, perhaps must, be personally involved, and changed, in the com plex productive work of reciprocal translation inadequately glossed by the term 'conversion'.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.