Mary Hancock

Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India

This paper investigates the late colonial origins of Home Science in British India. It deals most intensively with the institutionalization of Home Science in Madras Presidency and attends to the roles played by both the colonial state and Indian womens organizations in its establishment. Though the focus is on Madras because the efforts of those based there influenced the later course of Home Science education, the activities of Madras educators, policy makers and reformers are also situated within a wider frame of transregional and imperial relations forged through reform projects, missionization, travel and education. Consideration of Home Science education in this wider context reveals the socio-political constraints an opportunities of, as well as the ideological interests at work in, its establishment. The paper finds that, at its inception, Home Science was the product of strategic alliances among colonial authorities, Indian social reformers, and Indian nationalists — all of whom, despite other differences, considered the home a site of and symbol for nationalist modernity. Home Science is shown to have relied on and helped shape a set of discourses that can be deemed ‘feminist nationalist’ in that they were engaged dialectically with anti-colonial nationalisms and with internationalist feminisms. Using Home Science as a lens, this paper provides a window on a set of late colonial debates that, informed by nationalist struggles and goals, sought to reshape the meaning and scope of both female agency and domesticity.

“The crusade is the vision”: branding charisma in a global pentecostal ministry

This paper explores the rhetorical properties of mass-mediated revival spectacles staged by Reinhard Bonnke, a German-born evangelist who has long worked in Sub-Saharan Africa and claims to have converted millions of Africans to Christianity. The swooping pans of these massive African crusades, which form the establishing shots in proselytic videos, model Bonnkes particular Pentecostal visual ideology. In doing so, these images bear material witness to Bonnkes reputation as a global, itinerant missionary-preacher. Stills extracted from video footage condense the transformative energy of the event into portable icons which, recirculated as book inserts, posters and Website banners, work as identifying logos for his ministry. Bonnkes particular success, we argue, lies in the ways that the visual reconstitutes the charismatic core of Pentecostalism in connection with his development of a “brand scenario” that works both to distinguish his ministry within the corporate Christian world and to foster the growth of corporate Christianity as capitalist enterprise. This convergence of branding and theology provides a compelling example of how moving image, graphic image and word-text work together intertextually to promote a visual pedagogy that is at once distinctive and familiar to Charismatics worldwide: a disciplining of vision toward Pentecostal ideas, objects and histories.

Unmaking the ‘great tradition’: Ethnography, national culture and area studies

This essay contextualizes and interrogates Milton Singers When a Great Tradition Modernizes, an influential study of Sanskritic Hinduism and its elite exponents in urban south India. Singers fieldwork (1954–1964) depended heavily on the assistance of an Indian Sanskritist, V. Raghavan. I focus on their collaboration as it is represented in the published works of both, and consider its implications for South Asia area studies in the US. In their reliance on ethnographic methods, area studies projects offered transnational sites for the consolidation of nationalist discourses—for while Raghavan strategically used ethnographic interactions to fashion and disseminate elite nationalism in India, Singer used India (as mediated by Raghavan) as a “case” in the formulation of civilizational studies and theories of modernization. Analysis of this case illuminates the current contradictions generated by area studies’ reliance on paradigms of nationhood. Deconstruction of the “nation” is coupled with reconstruction...

Short-term youth mission practice and the visualization of global christianity

ABSTRACT This article examines the visual mediation of evangelical short-term mission and the theologically inflected global imaginary that these forms engender. Recent decades have seen the resurgence of long-term mission and the emergence of short-term mission among US Christians. The latter, combining evangelization, service, and tourism, is a staple within evangelical youth culture. I argue that it is used by Christians to constitute themselves as global formations, while also offering theological frames for global Christianity. Central to this global theological imaginary are visual representations of mission encounters with ethnic, sectarian, and racial Others, which illustrate the global scope of mission and missionaries’ understandings of their own efforts to engage and overcome those differences. Through an analysis of the visual content of four short-term mission agencies’ websites, I examine the mediation of global Christianity in contemporary mission and its recruitment of global Christian subjects.

Subjects of Heritage in Urban Southern India

In this paper I deal with a recent effort, conducted jointly by corporate and voluntary bodies, to create a themed cultural environment in Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital city of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This project, not yet completed, fuses craft center with architectural reconstruction, and is the work of upper-caste, globally connected elites. The site, Dakshina Chitra, envisions southern Indian culture and history in ways that are tied to consumerism and to elite perceptions of regional and national heritage. This effort departs from and poses a critique of the versions of culture, history, and identity that have been inscribed by the state in urban public space during the second half of the 20th century—the statues, monuments, and memorials that celebrate Tamil ethnicity as promulgated in the Dravidianist sociopolitical movement. This movement, which originated in the late 19th century, provided a platform for anticolonial and subaltern social movements. It continues in the hands of the political parties who have controlled, at different times, the government of Tamil Nadu since 1967. The competing discourses on heritage posed by these different projects are indicative of political, economic, and cultural transformations associated with liberalization that are now reconfiguring the relations between state and society in southern India. The constructions of locality and history that became visible during the anticolonial struggle of the first half of the 20th century are being challenged by alternative formulations as heritage becomes a marketable good and consumption becomes a vehicle of political participation. With this case I consider the ways that themed urban environments serve not only as indices of the changing political economy, but also as markers of changes in the cultural mediation of political subjectivity.

Short-Term Mission Voluntarism and the Postsecular Imaginary

This chapter examines the spiritual motivations and impacts of voluntarism in the USA through an investigation of international short-term mission (STM), a paradigm involving 1–2-week trips that amalgamate leisure tourism, evangelism, and voluntary development work and are carried out among Christian and non-Christian communities. Mainline and nondenominational bodies sponsor STM, but it is most popular among evangelical Christians. I argue that STM’s effects, while partially explicable in terms of the social capital that it may (or may not) engender at home and in mission fields, include challenges to secular norms and institutions. STM, especially as carried out among non-Christian communities, provides (1) experiential contexts for imagining a world in which divinity is reckoned as immanently and sensorially present, and (2) communicative tools for enacting that world. It thus may rework the categorical boundaries between secular and religious practices and spaces at home, as well as on mission sites. As such, STM can be understood as an artifact of an emergent postsecular imaginary—a characterization that signals the limits of the secularization thesis and the recognition of significance of plural religiosities, spiritual orientations, and faith commitments in social action and institutions. This chapter is based on ethnographic research in southern California conducted from 2009 to 2012.

Encountering Islam in Short-Term Mission:

This article documents short-term mission’s engagement with Islam by showing how Islam is represented by sending agencies and how volunteers interact with Muslims. I relate the different styles of representing and engaging with Islam to differences of theological orientation as well as to the particular contexts and practices of short-term mission. This article is based on research in Southern California between 2009 and 2012, including visual and textual content analyses of sending agencies’ websites and guidebooks, and interviews with 57 short-term mission participants