Encounters with Emotions

Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity

Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, Margrit Pernau, Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, Margrit Pernau

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781836950776
  9781789202236
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789202243
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other's emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization.

Chapter 1

Missionaries

False Reverence, Irreverence and the Rethinking of Christian Mission in China and India

Stephen Cummins and Joel Lee

In 1977, Daniel Everett, a Christian missionary, arrived in a remote region of Brazil in order to promote Christianity amongst the Pirahã, a tribe of Amazonians. As he recalls in his autobiographical account of Pirahã language and culture, his first impression was emotional. He wrote that the ‘most striking thing . . . about seeing the Pirahãs for the first time was how happy everyone seemed’. For him this was evidenced by smiles that ‘decorated’ faces. He observed that ‘[n]ot one person looked sullen or withdrawn, as many do in cross-cultural encounters’.¹ Laughter and gentle touches meant he could not have imagined ‘a warmer welcome’.² His pre-existing script of the difficult first encounter was contradicted. But the unexpected familiarity of happiness was soon matched by experiences of alienation. Everett writes that the missionary’s ‘body, mind, emotions, and especially his sense of self are all deeply strained’.³ Some years into his mission, he recounted his testimony of Christian faith to an audience of Pirahãs, recounting how his stepmother had committed suicide, which led him to Jesus and away from drink and drugs:

When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like ‘Praise God!’ with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them.

‘Why are you laughing?’ I asked.

‘She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves’, they answered.⁴

Everett notes that this anecdote, which was meant to be emotionally appealing, had only ‘highlight[ed] our differences’.⁵ Daniel Everett’s experiences amongst the Pirahã eventually led him to reject his faith.⁶ Unexpected emotional reactions, whether welcome or unwelcome, shaped the narration of his mission. Despite Everett’s loss of faith, his account remains marked by the missionary discourse of cross-cultural encounter that developed in the second half of the twentieth century.⁷ Such modern missionary discourse has a notable preoccupation with the opportunities and challenges of emotions in the work of bridging cultures. The genre uses the vocabulary of popular psychology, anthropology and other social theories to define the ‘cross-cultural’. By the end of the twentieth century, then, missions were self-consciously moments of ‘cross-cultural’ encounter in which preparation for difference was a vital part of training and in which bodily experiences and emotions were at the centre of the encounter. Emotions were bridges, but they were obstacles too. Yet this model did not emerge fully formed in the late twentieth century; the roots of such visions go much further back.

One of the paradigmatic figures in the emotional history of cross-cultural encounters must be the missionary. Traversing cultural distance, probing states of feeling on all sides of an encounter and documenting such reflections in laborious detail were not merely incidental pursuits for missionaries but vocational obligations. Missions are therefore fertile ground for both the history of cross-cultural encounters and the history of emotions. The unpredictable effects and inventive usages of imported religious belief have been central to some landmark studies of emotions.⁸ More broadly, the effect of missionary encounters upon internal lives and social relations is a well-investigated field.⁹ In recent years, scholars have opened new lines of enquiry by considering the particular intersection between missionary encounters and emotions.¹⁰ Much of this writing concerns itself with the elusive category of conversion.¹¹ Missions have been argued to be channels for the circulation of emotional practices beyond the narrower category of didactic conversion.¹² Focusing on the perspective of the proselytized, some scholars have considered ways in which aspects of the Christian message appealed as a means to manage or transform emotional life, which in some contexts enabled the acquisition of social capital.¹³ Missionary activity has also been linked to the emergence of certain forms of, or demands upon, ‘interiority’.¹⁴

Christian missionaries of all varieties trafficked in messages about human sin – offences against God – that required forgiveness. In missionary discourse, it was the love of Christ that provided a way out of the wretchedness of sin. In addition to its metaphysical novelties, then, Christianity introduced particular emotional visions of the human condition. Different Christian denominations held different views over which emotional experiences should be cultivated and which emotional practices were to be taught. Any overly schematic divide between a highly emotionally expressive Catholicism and a restrained Protestantism is misleading. But there were significant distinctions. Amongst these there were, on the one hand, those who distrusted tears and cries as potentially false signs of piety and argued instead for the importance of reason and the intellect in conversion.¹⁵ This intellectual apprehension of Christian doctrine was believed to anchor the drama of conversion and other moments of ‘religious feeling’ on solid ground. On the other hand, there were ‘revivalist’ missions characterized by the promotion of emotional expression in worship due to its status as evidence of grace moving through people.¹⁶ Yet anxiety about the authenticity of emotion was present in all forms of missionary activity.

The diversity of ideas and practices concerned with emotion norms related to the broader heterogeneity of Christian missions. Missions differed in the social location of their personnel, the structure and ethos of their governing bodies, their relationship with local political structures in their ‘fields’ of operation and their orientation to particular populations within their host societies (whether elite, subaltern or otherwise distinct communities). The link between missions and empire – and the production of ‘imperial emotions’ – has been fruitfully studied.¹⁷ Enmeshed in, and often benefitting from, imperial structures, many missionaries saw themselves as the vanguard of the European ‘civilizing’ mission with its emotional vocabulary of racialized paternalism.¹⁸ Yet there were also missions that were dependent upon powerful non-European sovereigns and were allowed to operate only with the latter’s consent. As Rupa Viswanath points out, a binary imperial sociology of missions – wherein there are only missionaries/colonizers and heathen/natives – distorts our understanding of what were often multipolar power relations.¹⁹ The violent extirpation of ‘traditional religion’ in the early modern Americas – a paradigm of mission work sometimes assumed to have been the global norm – bore little relation to most missions in Asia; for example, the efforts of Protestant missionaries to negotiate between powerful local landlords and the colonial administration over the land or labour rights of Dalit Christians.²⁰

One particularly helpful insight for connecting missions and emotions from the recent literature is that of the ‘affective circuit’. As Claire McLisky persuasively argues, missionaries sought to incite religious emotions in their converts that would, both through face-to-face interaction in ‘the field’ and through discursive representation in missionary writing circulated ‘at home’, redound upon and indeed help constitute an expanding Christian ‘affective community’.²¹ These affective circuits were thus transnational networks through which emotion generated in missionary encounter reverberated beyond the immediate context. Affective circuits relied in part upon discursive techniques – evident in narrative genres like conversion or martyrdom stories – that related emotions produced in the missionary encounter to biblical and other Christian narratives. As Elizabeth Elbourne points out, these scripts privileged certain emotions such as love, pity and gratitude for representation in missionary writing while they concealed others such as frustration and anger that were arguably just as central to missionary experience.²² Moreover, both in their adherence to and departure from the ‘emotional script’, missionaries tended to reproduce, in part, the affective vocabulary of the imperial projects in the context of which their missions operated rather than demonstrate a concern for the fine-grain of the local.

This chapter considers two historical moments in which the face-to-face encounter of missionaries and those they sought to convert compelled a rewriting of the emotional script of Christian mission. In these cases, the emotional habitus of the proselytized or the danger of the mistranslation of emotion across culture threatened to break a given affective circuit – to undermine, sabotage or bring an end to the mission. What resulted, however, was neither simply ‘failure’ or ‘success’ in missionary terms, nor merely an offstage release of frustration that left the onstage performance of Christian emotions intact. Rather, analysis of these two formative moments in the history of European missions in Asia – the papal missionary Matteo Ripa’s mission to the court of the Kangxi Emperor in early eighteenth-century China and the Protestant ‘mass movements’ in colonial India in the late nineteenth century – illuminates how the emotions generated in the missionary encounter reshaped missionary practice.

Both cases occurred at important junctures in the global history of Christianity: Matteo Ripa’s mission was entwined with the ‘Chinese Rites’ controversy that ultimately led to the expulsion of missionaries from Imperial China, a hardening of diplomatic relations between Rome and Beijing, the suspension of the Jesuit order and a rethinking of Catholic mission. A century and a half later, the ‘mass movements’ in which vast numbers of Dalits, or ‘untouchables’, converted to (predominantly) Protestant Christianity in Punjab, Travancore and the Madras Presidency at the height of colonialism produced the largest demographic shift to Christianity in the British Empire. Missionaries in China and India (unlike many of those who operated in the Americas or Oceania) largely acknowledged the societies in which they worked to be highly differentiated; while the category of ‘heathen’ operated in missionary accounts here no less than elsewhere, the pronounced class and caste distinctions within these societies forced missionaries to recognize more complex social fields. The institutional forms of social differentiation in which Ripa in China and the Protestant missionaries in India were necessarily embedded had important implications for their encounters with emotion.

Missions to China: Beijing or Bab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Encountering Feelings – Feeling Encounters
• Chapter 1: Missionaries: False Reverence, Irreverence and the Rethinking of Christian Mission in China and India
• Chapter 2: Travellers: Transformative Journeys and Emotional Contacts
• Chapter 3: Anthropologists: Feelings in the Field
• Chapter 4: Entrepreneurs: Encountering Trust in Business Relations
• Chapter 5: Diplomats: Kneeling and the Protocol of Humiliation
• Chapter 6: Occupiers and Civilians: Facing the Enemy
• Chapter 7: Prisoners: Experiencing the Criminal Other
• Chapter 8: ‘Monsters’: Emotional Incoherence and Familial Murder
• Chapter 9: Performers: From ‘Courtesans’ to Kathakali King Lear
• Chapter 10: Lovers and Friends: Encounters of Hearts and Bodies
• Conclusion: After Encounters with Feelings: Outcomes and Further Issues
• Index of Subject
• Index of Names and Places