Landscape and Mission in Madagascar and Wales in the Early Nineteenth Century: 'Sowing the Seeds of Knowledge'

Abstract

The missionary encounter provides an exemplary case-study for studying social change. Diaries and letters written before departure and on the journey to the mission field describe missionary plans and hopes for the mission. The choice of books and equipment purchased reveals their expectations of the land and people they will encounter. On arrival these expectations are met with unanticipated ways of life and often radically different social formations to which missionaries must adjust.This article considers the ways in which missionary expectations are structured by their past experiences. I explore the ways in which their adjustments to the new places and practices of the mission field grow out of the interaction between missionaries' remembered understandings of place and their ongoing embodied experience 'in-place'. Looking at the first missionaries to highland Madagascar, I outline their rural upbringing in Welsh-speaking Wales and the ways in which this shaped their landscape perceptions. I argue that this rural upbringing, in combination with the highly cultivated and socially stratified world that they encountered, influenced their assessment of the landscapes of Madagascar, contributing to a more ready acceptance of the social and political conditions there than was found among other missionaries to Madagascar from a more urban background, or indeed among London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries to other parts of Africa.

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