Jacqueline Van Gent

In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing Pater Familias in the Letters of William the Silent's Children*

For much of their childhood and adult life, the twelve surviving children of William the Silent were separated linguistically and geographically. Many of the children forged important relationships with male primary carers who were not their biological parents. This paper explores the childrens correspondence with their biological father William and with paternal figures to understand competing forms of familial authority among Williams children. This paper places particular interest on analysis of the gendered negotiation of paternal bonds in the letters of Williams sons and daughters, as they established multiple relationships with father figures during their childhood.

Corresponding affections: Emotional exchange among siblings in the Nassau family

This article examines the nature of emotional exchange among the siblings who were the children of William the Silent, the leader of the nascent Dutch Republic. Using evidence from extensive familial correspondence, it asks how the language of emotions could constitute forms of power within the family, by analyzing how actions and expressions of emotion were presented, discussed, and interpreted in epistolary form, to whom, and with what intention and impact. The article studies social, geographic, linguistic, and other distinctions between siblings in their use of affective discourses in correspondence and argues that attention to affective language can help to elucidate the agentive force of emotions in both reflecting and informing notions of power within the family.

The Burden of Love: Moravian Conversions and Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Labrador

The Moravian Church was a highly successful Protestant mission society which developed very specific emotional registers to create an imagined community across very diverse cultures. This article discusses the social regulation of emotions and the indigenous responses to a Moravian emotional style as part of the conversion process on Moravian missions in the eighteenth century. One of the core elements of Moravian spiritual conversion and identity was the love of Christ and his spiritual sufferings which was expected to be displayed in specific ways by converts. Moravian understandings of Christs love and conversion included a strong somatic component, spiritual states were expressed in attributes and states of the heart, such as a “warm” or a “cold” heart. Tears, which were believed to flow from the heart, are another indicator of spiritual condition and linked to conversion. The historical meaning of this Moravian love was, however, far from being non-ambiguous. A closer reading of the expressions of indigenous converts suggest that emotions associated with conversions, such as love, constituted a complex set of social meanings which reflected the colonial hierarchies, violence, and social power differences in which Moravian conversions took place.

Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional Salience of Conversion Rituals

Every year on 17 August, Moravian congregations around the world remember and celebrate with a special children’s feast the public conversion rituals of a revival movement in south-east Germany in 1727. Here conversions, and their associated emotional performances, became a driver for both personal as well as wider social change as the ecstatic conversion experiences of individual girls soon extended to the whole community. The revival resulted in the social transformation of the population of Herrnhut and Berthelsdorf, two newly founded religious communities belonging to the estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig of Zinzendorf. The conversion ritual, which became foundational for all Moravian congregations across the world, was itself modelled on earlier revival experiences of Protestant religious refugees from Moravia in the Habsburg Empire, who had to flee the violent and enforced Catholic Reformation and who had only very recently arrived in Herrnhut. Most of the key female protagonists came from these families and had experienced existential crises on account of incarceration and the attempts to resist an enforced re-Catholicisation in the Habsburg Empire. This prophetic movement, in which adolescent girls acted as ritual leaders, urged the congregation to repent their sins and to transform their social and spiritual fragmentation into a unified religious community. The emotional intensity of the conversion ritual continued to live on in the individual memories of its participants as well as the collective memory of the Moravian Church as a whole.

Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750-1940

This is the first full-length historical study of indigenous evangelists across a range of societies, geographical regions and colonial regimes and the first to focus on the complex issues of authority surrounding the evangelists

Evangelists as Ethnographers among the ‘Heathen’ Cannibals: Ta’unga and Maretu of Rarotonga and the Sherbroan Wilberforce

Cartoonists of the early twentieth century routinely poked fun at missionaries by picturing them being cooked in an enormous pot while their savage tormentors dance round the fire. In fact, documented encounters between missionaries and cannibals are extremely rare, even rarer substantiated accounts of cannibalism as a cultural practice. Mission journals contributed to the caricature of their agents as frontline warriors in the campaign for the suppression of savage customs by featuring lurid articles on distasteful or revolting rituals. Ethnographic writing by missionaries generally served a dual purpose of advancing knowledge and stirring up supporters to speed the work of civilization through Christianization. Discussions of cannibalism are of exceptional interest when penned by indigenous evangelists writing of their own or closely related societies. This chapter examines ethnographic writing on cannibalism produced in the Pacific and West Africa. Ta’unga (1818–1896) and Maretu (1802–1880) of Rarotonga in the South Pacific lived in a preor proto-colonial situation.1 They had encountered missionaries over an extended period of time, as well as traders and other Europeans who found their way to the South Pacific, but they had not been subjected to formal colonization. R.G. and Marjorie Crocombe, who translated and edited Ta’unga’s writings, point out that during his lifetime societies in the western Pacific experienced major changes due to the impact of two influences. Moving from Tahiti westwards ‘was the increasingly confident army of militant Christianity of which Ta’unga was one small advance party of reconnaissance scouts’ who prepared the ground for missionaries from Europe. From the coast of Australia ‘there were simultaneously moving east the vanguards of commerce, equally confident of success as they developed the trading potentialities of the various island groups, exchanging the products of England’s industrial revolution for salt pork, sandalwood, beche-de-mer and any other island products from which profit might be made.’2 The lives, work and writings

The Reverend Tiyo Soga: Negotiating Culture, Race and Nationality among the Embattled Xhosa of South Africa

Born of a father who served as an adviser to an important chief, Tiyo Soga became a Christian through the agency of his mother, who welcomed his education at a mission school, and later in Scotland, where he married a Scotswoman and became the first black South African ordained as a minister of the Presbyterian Church. He returned to his native land as a missionary to a people ground down by decades of warfare with an advancing tide of white settlement. During his fifteen-year ministry he sought to reconcile what he regarded as the best features of Xhosa culture with the commandments of his Christian faith. In a long document written for his children as tuberculosis tightened its grip on his fragile body, Soga laid out a programme for the preservation of the Xhosa as a Christian nation in defiance of white settlers’ claims of racial superiority and the alleged doom of his people. His texts exemplify the difficulties of reconciling the conflicting authorities he had to accommodate as a Xhosa man and a Christian minister. This conflict increased, particularly from the 1860s onwards, when circumstances in the Cape Colony fuelled his growing opposition to settler depredations and colonial rule. Although his early biographer Donovan Williams saw him as a proto-nationalist, this probably exaggerates his commitment to national independence for the Xhosa.1 In fact he better exemplifies the ways in which indigenous Christians in the colonial period straddled several contradictory positions and these continue to be reflected in the ways they are represented by competing groups in the modern period. Tiyo Soga remains a hero of the standard contemporary histories of Christianity in South Africa which emphasize his commitment to the conversion and modernization of his people. But for other contemporary commentators he exemplifies collusion with colonization. His conversion set him against the more resistant figures of his time who engaged in direct action through warfare and who refused to adapt to the new ways. Neither view does justice to the complex story told by the texts he left behind.

Voraussetzungen und Folgen eines Kolonialmassakers

Margaret Wieners exzellentes Buch ist die anthropologische Geschichte eines Massakers auf Bali im Jahre 1908. Der Herrscher der Provinz Klungkung und mehr als einhundert Mitglieder seiner Familie und seines Hofes wurden von Soldaten der niederländischen Kolonialarmee ohne Gegenwehr erschossen. Für Balinesen war dies jedoch ein puputan, ein ritueller Selbstmord, der ein letztes Mal zeremoniell die Macht der Herrschenden ausdrückte. Wieners Studien sind ein Beitrag zu einer Geschichtsschreibung, welche das Aufeinandertreffen von Europäern und indigenen Gesellschaften neu beleuchtet. Marshall Sahlins richtungsweisende Arbeiten haben Wieners Studien dahingehend beeinflußt, daß sie ebenfalls mit der Mikrogeschichte eines Ereignisses beginnt und ihre Perspektive dann auf eine umfassende anthropologische Geschichte ausweitet. Dieser erweiterte Blick erfaßt sowohl die koloniale wie auch die indigene Rezeption der sozialen Veränderungen. Bereits mit den Arbeiten von Jean und John Comaroff zur indigenen Interpretation des Christentums in Südafrika wurde dieses dialogische Prinzip zur Hauptmethode einer ethnohistorischen Kritik am kolonialen Geschichtsdiskurs. Einige der interessantesten Arbeiten entstanden durch ein Umschreiben der Missionsgeschichte in der Kolonialperiode. Im Gegensatz zu der Fülle der neueren postkolonialen Literatur zu Missionierung sind Kolonialmassaker bisher kaum ethnohistorisch aufgearbeitet worden.

Generational religious change among the Arrernte at Hermannsburg, central Australia

This paper traces the introduction of Christian ideas to the Arrernte at Hermannsburg and how Arrernte attitudes towards Christianity changed over a generation from the 1890s to the 1920s. It compares the first generation of Arrernte to encounter Christianity with their childrens generation, a number of whom became Christian evangelists. Under the guidance of these evangelists many Arrernte were baptised. We consider why these evangelists succeeded in bringing an acceptance of Christianity to the wider mission community where earlier Lutheran missionaries had only influenced children, young adults and very few mature adults.