Author: Annekie Joubert Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004297723 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 1169
Book Description
In Ethnography from the Mission Field: The Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge Joubert et al. offer a translated and annotated edition of the 24 ethnographic articles by Missionary Carl Hoffmann and his local interlocutors between the years 1913 and 1958.
Author: Brian M. Howell Publisher: InterVarsity Press ISBN: 0830863400 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Over the past few decades, short-term mission trips have exploded in popularity. With easy access to affordable air travel, millions of American Christians have journeyed internationally for ministry, service and evangelism. Short-term trips are praised for involving many in global mission but also critiqued for their limitations. Despite the diversity of destinations, certain universal commonalities emerge in how mission trip participants describe their experiences: "My eyes were opened to the world's needs." "They ministered to us more than we ministered to them." "It changed my life." Anthropologist Brian Howell explores the narrative shape of short-term mission (STM). Drawing on the anthropology of tourism and pilgrimage, he shows how STM combines these elements with Christian purposes of mission to create its own distinct narrative. He provides a careful historical survey of the development of STM and then offers an in-depth ethnographic study of a particular mission trip to the Dominican Republic. He explores how participants remember and interpret their experiences, and he unpacks the implications for how North American churches understand mission, grapple with poverty and relate to the larger global church. A groundbreaking book for all who want to understand how and why American Christians undertake short-term mission.
Author: Hillary K. Crane Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0739177885 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 119
Book Description
In this collection of essays, anthropologists of religion examine the special challenges they face when studying populations that proselytize. Conducting fieldwork among these groups may involve attending services, meditating, praying, and making pilgrimages. Anthropologists participating in such research may unwittingly give the impression that their interest is more personal than professional, and inadvertently encourage missionaries to impose conversion upon them. Moreover, anthropologists' attitudes about religion, belief, and faith, as well as their response to conversion pressures, may interfere with their objectivity and cause them to impose their own understandings on the missionaries. Although anthropologists have extensively and fruitfully examined the role of identity in research--particularly gender and ethnic identity--religious identity, which is more fluid and changeable, has been relatively neglected. This volume explores the role of religious identity in fieldwork by examining how researchers respond to participation in religious activities and to the ministrations of missionaries, both academically and personally. Including essays by anthropologists studying the proselytizing religions of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, as well as other religions, this volume provides a range of responses to the question of how anthropologists should approach the gap between belief and disbelief when missionary zeal imposes its interpretations on anthropological curiosity.
Author: Christian Scharen Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1441126260 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
This book is a primary resource in the new and growing field of Christian Ethnography. In response to a variety of critical intellectual currents (post-colonial, post-modern, and post-liberal), scholars in Christian theology and ethics are increasingly taking up the tools of ethnography as a means to ask fundamental moral questions and to make more compelling and credible moral claims. Privileging particularity, rather than the more traditional effort to achieve universal or at least generalizable norms in making claims regarding the Christian life, echoes the most fundamental insight of the Christian tradition - that God is known most fully in Jesus of Nazareth. Echoing this 'scandal of particularity' at the heart of the Christian tradition, theologians and ethicists involved in ethnographic research draw on the particular to seek out answers to core questions of their discipline: who God is and how we become the people we are, how to conceptualize moral agency in relation to God and the world, and how to flesh out the content of conceptual categories such as justice that help direct us in our daily decisions and guiding institutions.
Author: Jean Michaud Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9047420217 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
This book introduces, from an anthropological standpoint, French Catholic missionary colonial ethnographic writing from the highlands of north Vietnam and Yunnan at the turn of the 20th century, and searches for the genealogies of the intellectual influences at play.
Author: Alan R. Tippett Publisher: William Carey Publishing ISBN: 0878085874 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 703
Book Description
Alan Tippett’s publications played a significant role in the development of missiology. The volumes in this series augment his distinguished reputation by bringing to light his many unpublished materials and hard-to-locate printed articles. These books— encompassing theology, anthropology, history, area studies, religion, and ethnohistory— broaden the contours of the discipline. Missionaries and anthropologists have a tenuous relationship. While often critical of missionaries, anthropologists are indebted to missionaries for linguistic and cultural data as well as hospitality and introductions into the local community. In The Ways of the People, Alan Tippett provides a critical history of missionary anthropology and brings together a superb reader of seminal anthropological contributions from missionaries Edwin Smith, R. H. Codrington, Lorimer Fison, Diedrich Westermann, Henri Junod, and many more. Twenty years as a missionary in Fiji, following pastoral ministry in Australia and graduate degrees in history and anthropology, provide the rich database that made Alan R. Tippett a leading missiologist of the twentieth century. Tippett served as Professor of Anthropology and Oceanic Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Author: Elmer S. Miller Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252064555 Category : Ethnologists Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Unique in ethnography, Nurturing Doubt documents the transforming effects of field experiences on a young Mennonite who went to Argentina to work with the Toba, first as a missionary and later as an anthropologist. Elmer Miller insightfully probes the documents--diaries, field journals, and letters--of both his lives, revealing as he does the ways in which his perceptions of the Toba--and theirs of him--changed when his role changed. Deeply affected by an upbringing in which he had been taught that doubting was "sinful," Miller gradually found that he doubted not only the validity of the missionary mandate but also his ethnographic mandate and the whole practice of anthropology. His exploration of how his doubt was transformed from a negative activity into a positive philosophical attitude underscores the richness of his relationships with the Toba. In depicting the move from theological to anthropological discourse, Miller contributes to current debates over the form and purpose of ethnographic investigation and reporting.
Author: Annekie Joubert
Author: Brian M. Howell
Author: Hillary K. Crane
Author: Christian Scharen
Author: Jean Michaud
Author: S. Devasagayam Ponraj
Author: J. Kommers
Author: Alan R. Tippett
Author: Elmer S. Miller
Author: Paul G. Hiebert