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Combining history, ethnography, and culture theory, this book explores how residents in northwestern Malawi have responded over time to the early missionary assertion that local religious and healing practices were incompatible with Christianity and western medicine. It details how local agents, in the past and today, have constructed new cultural forms that weave facets of ancestral spiritualism and divination with Christianity and biomedicine. Alongside a rich historical review of the late-19th century encounter between Tumbuka-speakers and the Scottish Presbyterians of the Livingstonia Mission, the book explores the contemporary therapeutic dance complex known as Vimbuza and considers two case studies, each the story of a man confronting illness and struggling to understand the roots and meaning of his affliction. In the process, the book considers the enduring missiological and anthropological topics of conversion and syncretism, and questions the assertion by some scholars that Western missionaries in Africa have been successful agents of religious hegemony.
Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa aims to explore the ways Christianity and colonialism acted as hegemonic or counter hegemonic forces in the making of African societies. As Western interventionist forces, Christianity and colonialism were crucial in establishing and maintaining political, cultural, and economic domination. Indeed, both elements of Africa’s encounter with the West played pivotal roles in shaping African societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume uses a wide range of perspectives to address the intersection between missions, evangelism, and colonial expansion across Africa. The contributors address several issues, including mission...
Well before the creation of the United States, the Cherokee people administered their own social policy—a form of what today might be called social welfare—based on matrilineal descent, egalitarian relations, kinship obligations, and communal landholding. The ethic of gadugi, or work coordinated for the social good, was at the heart of this system. Serving the Nation explores the role of such traditions in shaping the alternative social welfare system of the Cherokee Nation, as well as their influence on the U.S. government’s social policies. Faced with removal and civil war in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation asserted its right to build institutions administer...
This volume comprises a genealogical index to historical county records of Williamson County.
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Protestants entering Africa in the nineteenth century sought to learn from earlier Jesuit presence in Ethiopia and southern Africa. The nineteenth century was itself a century of missionary scramble for Africa during which the Jesuits encountered their Protestant counterparts as both sought to evangelize the African native. Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Africa, edited by Robert Alexander Maryks and Festo Mkenda, S.J., presents critical reflections on the nature of those encounters in southern Africa and in Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Fernando Po. Though largely marked by mutual suspicion and outright competition, the encounters also reveal personal appreciations and support across denominational boundaries and thus manifest salient lessons for ecumenical encounters even in our own time. This volume is the result of the second Boston College International Symposium on Jesuit Studies held at the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa (Nairobi, Kenya) in 2016. Thanks to generous support of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, it is available in Open Access.