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History and Theory 41 (October 2002), 301-325
© Wesleyan University 2002 ISSN: 0018-2656
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM: CULTURAL THEORY,
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS, AND GLOBAL MODERNITY1
RYAN DUNCH
ABSTRACT
“Cultural imperialism” has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and
draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative
ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay
surveys the ways in which the term “cultural imperialism” has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The
second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term “colonization of consciousness” used by Jean and
John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China,
showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have
marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement
must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies
as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of
modern cultural globalization.
The term “cultural imperialism” is wonderfully versatile. It emerged in critical
scholarship on U.S. media influence in Latin America in the early 1970s; indeed,
media studies, in which it refers to the alleged global dominance of American
entertainment commodities and cultural images, remains the principal frame of
reference for the term.2 However, it has also been employed in academic and
popular writing in a wide array of fields, with reference both to historical and to
contemporary issues. To cite a few recent examples: “cultural imperialism” has
been invoked to explain (and attack) the universalistic claims of Western mathematics (the seductive “secret weapon” of cultural imperialism, “imposed” by
colonial powers at the expense of indigenous conceptual systems); the world currency of the English language; the social definition of physical “disability” as a
1. For input on these ideas, I thank the editors and reviewers for History and Theory, students in
my “Topics in Comparative History” seminar at the University of Alberta in 1998 and 1999, and the
participants in “Representations and Misrepresentations of the Missionary Movement,” the tenth
meeting of the Yale–Edinburgh Colloquium on the History of the Missionary Movement and NonWestern Christianity, University of Edinburgh, July 6-8, 2000.
2. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, “From Cultural Imperialists to Takeover Victims?
Questions on Hollywood’s Buyouts from the Critical Tradition,” Communication Research 19, no. 6
(1992), 724-748.
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deviation from “normal” human physicality (the cultural imperialism of
“ableism”); the de facto medical definition of permanent loss of consciousness
(“brain death”) as equivalent to death; the appeal of Elvis Presley and his
American peers in 1950s Britain; or the popularity of soccer in Brazil or cricket
in India.3
Such invocations of the term are generally fueled by an understandable
impulse to critique some form of cultural dominance. That critical impulse does
not in itself make the term a convincing one, however. The concern of this article is not with the application of the term to particular fields, but rather with the
merits and deficiencies of the term “cultural imperialism” as an analytical tool
for understanding cultural intercourse in general, and with reference to the missionary movement in modern history in particular. Viewing “cultural imperialism” as a conceptual model rather than a “reality,” the article examines the term’s
utility, what it highlights and obscures in processes of cultural interaction.4 In this
regard the essay argues that the term suffers from two chief defects: it is inseparable from essentializing discourses of national or cultural authenticity; and it
reduces complex interactions to a dichotomy between actor and acted upon, leaving too little place for the agency of the latter. These problems are illustrated by
looking at how “cultural imperialism” and cognate terms have been used with
reference to Christian missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in
general and in the specific case of China. The paper concludes by sketching an
alternative model to “cultural imperialism” for conceptualizing the role of missionaries in modern history.
I. “CULTURAL IMPERIALISM” AND ITS PROBLEMS
Few discussions of cultural imperialism devote much attention to defining it.
Broadly, however, most academic uses of the term contain an implicit definition
along the following lines: certain cultural products (for example, socially-accepted beliefs, ideologies, entertainment commodities) have attained a position of
dominance in a foreign culture through a process of coercive imposition, usually through their ties to political or economic power. The effect on another culture
and the coercive nature of the process are thus the key issues.
Underlying academic discussions of “cultural imperialism” is the recognition
developed over recent decades of the connections between knowledge and
3. Alan J. Bishop, “Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism,” Race and
Class 32, no. 2 (1990), 51-65; Lennard J. Davis, “J’accuse! Cultural Imperialism—Ableist Style,”
Social Alternatives 18, no. 1 (1999), 36-40; Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, “Revising Brain Death: Cultural
Imperialism?” Linacre Quarterly (1998), abstracted in Issues in Law and Medicine 14, no. 2 (1998),
225-226; Laura E. Cooper and B. Lee Cooper, “The Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism: Popular
Music Interchanges between the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Popular Culture 27, no.
3 (1993), 61-78; Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
4. For a parallel argument about “civil society,” see Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, “The
Ambiguous Challenge of Civil Society,” in Civil Society in China, ed. Timothy Brook and B. Michael
Frolic (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 8.
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power, which connects cultural imperialism to questions of post-colonialism and
orientalism (although the term predates the emergence of those debates). As is
well known, Edward Said’s Orientalism was a milestone in the development of
this line of scholarship. The book’s influence came from Said’s ability to apply
the insights of Foucault and Gramsci (among others) to one relatively concrete
and international phenomenon. Said argued that the supposedly abstract and apolitical intellectual pursuits of nineteenth-century scholars and novelists were
actually complicit in the extension of colonial power. Their writings about the
“Orient,” he argued, constituted a discourse which conflated distinct societies
and imputed to them a set of negative attributes contrasting to corresponding
positive qualities attributed to the “West.” This discourse thus constructed both
“Self” and “Other” in ways that made the West’s political dominance over the
“Orient” seem both natural and inevitable.5
Said’s work has been deservedly influential, particularly in demolishing the
supposed “neutrality” of modern knowledge systems. Few would now claim, for
instance, that Western medicine is simply “true” and indigenous healing traditions “false,” or that Western mathematics is not a cultural product. In the
abstract, we must acknowledge that the more or less global influence of Western
cultural forms has come about historically through a coercive process (leaving
aside for the moment the question of who or what is exercising that coercion).
Clearly, also, the transformation of the world in the modern era has involved the
global extension not only of political relations, industrial production, and trade,
but also of cultural forms, nation-states, rationalism and science, secularism in
politics, constitutional government, and mass education (in certain forms and
emphasizing certain subjects), and these changes have been intimately related to
structures of power and dominance, and to colonialism in particular.
On the other hand, critics have identified several problems in the use of “cultural imperialism” as an analytical term, problems that call its basic utility into
question.
Most straightforwardly, many of the less convincing discussions of cultural
imperialism replace the “myth of cultural neutrality” of knowledge systems or
other cultural products with an equally naive cultural determinism in which cultural products simply “bear” certain values, intrinsically, values which are then
“imposed” on a target population conceived as unwitting and passive. Thus, for
one author, “western mathematics presents a dehumanized, objectified, ideological world-view which will emerge necessarily through mathematics teaching of
the traditional colonial kind.”6 Not coincidentally, such discussions often dodge
the question of historical agency—precisely how, and by and to whom, these
alleged values are conveyed—by using the passive voice (“the need was felt to
educate the indigenous people only in order to enable them to function adequately in the European-dominated . . . structures”), or by attributing an imag5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
6. Bishop, “Western Mathematics,” 58 (emphasis added).
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inary intentionality to abstract forces (“United States cultural imperialism has
two major goals, one economic and one political . . .”).7
In actuality, of course, establishing the audience perception of and response to
a given cultural product is very difficult to do, and it is a quite different problem
from analyzing the product itself, as critics of the “cultural imperialism” model
in media studies have pointed out.8 In other words, for example, analyzing the
attributes of mathematics as a cognitive system does not necessarily tell us anything about the response side of the equation: how it was understood, interpreted, reshaped, employed, or rejected by learners in colonial school systems.
Similarly, scholars in post-colonial studies have recognized that the study of
“colonial discourse,” that is, the discourse within the colonizer societies about
the colonized, of which Said’s work was a pioneering example, is quite different
from the study of the cultural experience[s] of the colonized themselves.9 No
amount of study of Western portrayals of the “other” for Western audiences can
uncover, therefore, how individuals in those “other” societies experienced their
exposure to European societies. We cannot even safely make the more limited
assumption that the representatives of colonizer societies abroad actually held
the attitudes portrayed in the colonial discourse or were governed by those attitudes in their day-to-day interactions with the “other” in their host societies.
A related problem is that many alleged manifestations of “cultural imperialism” actually occur through market forces, raising the issue of demand for cultural commodities. In less subtle discussions this is beside the point; market
demand for the products of (usually) American culture merely demonstrates the
power of cultural imperialism to shape global tastes to profit U.S. corporations.
Again, this conceptualization attributes coordinated intent and coercive power to
“capitalism” or “imperialism,” and little or no autonomy to the people on the
receiving end. Youth fashion is a particular focus of this literature, young people
being, according to some, “most susceptible to the consumerist-individualist propaganda.”10 There is no doubt that young people in many societies wear Nikes
and listen to Michael Jackson, but assessing the meaning of the phenomenon is
more complicated than many of these writings allow. Some have seen the global
consumption of American cultural products as the new opiate of the masses, the
sign of an emerging homogenized world culture of capitalist consumption, controlled by Western media corporations and undermining class solidarity and third
world revolutionary potential.11 Critics of such a conception, on the other hand,
7. Ibid., 55; James Petras, “Cultural Imperialism in the Late 20th Century,” Journal of
Contemporary Asia 23, no. 2 (1993), 139; cf. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical
Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 104-108. An example of this kind of
heavy-handed determinism applied to China is E. Richard Brown, “Rockefeller Medicine in China:
Professionalism and Imperialism,” in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at
Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).
8. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 51-64; McAnany and Wilkinson, “From Cultural Imperialists
to Takeover Victims?”
9. For example, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 16-17.
10. Petras, “Cultural Imperialism,” 139.
11. For example, Petras, “Cultural Imperialism.”
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have argued persuasively that American-derived slogans and images do not have
a fixed meaning, in either cultural or class terms, but have become free-floating
signifiers, continually recombined and recontextualized in new settings.
“American icons have become the staple of a visual lingua franca that is understood anywhere in the world, yet their use can no longer be dictated solely from
America,” asserts one European scholar regarding youth fashion in contemporary
Europe.12 The same author also notes that an elitist disdain for popular culture
drives some of the European invective against American cultural imperialism;
those who decry the popularity of Madonna among French youth would be quite
happy for them to listen to the alien musical imports of Beethoven or Bartok.
An additional problem is raised when we consider that the term “cultural
imperialism” is applied both to Christian missions in the age of imperialism and
to cultural interchanges among the wealthy industrial societies of North America
and western Europe in the post-World War II era. These usages make no distinction between the kind of “power” exercised in the cultural marketplace by U.S.
pop music in pre-Beatles Britain or by U.S. brand logos in 1990s Europe and the
much more direct and coercive kinds of power exercised by the imperialist
nations in their colonies or in politically weakened societies like China before
World War II. Did American popular music really “colonize the European subconscious” in the 1950s, and, if so, how do we compare such a cultural change
with the cultural changes in African tribal societies in the colonial period?13 A
term so generic that it can be applied to such widely different situations may not
be very useful.
The problem of definition has been discussed at length in the literature on cultural imperialism. The term ties together “culture” and “imperialism,” both of
which are notoriously difficult to define.14 Many attempted or implicit definitions, such as my loose one at the beginning of this section, simply beg further
questions: how do we measure something like “cultural dominance,” for
instance? Related to the problem of definition is that of essentialism, of cultures
and of nations. The positing of cultural imperialism as foreign cultural domination of a particular culture implies that a cultural status quo ante can be identified, and moreover that that cultural system was not subject to internal contestation and was thus likely to remain unchanged in the absence of foreign contact.
Put this way, the fallacies of such a position are obvious, and the impossibility of
retrieving any “authentic” pre-colonial cultural voice has been widely recognized
within subaltern studies.15 Yet such a conceptualization is embedded in many dis12. Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End,”
Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (1999), 475; see also Francis X. Rocca, “America’s Multicultural
Imperialism,” American Spectator 33, no. 1 (2000), 34-38.
13. Cooper and Cooper, “Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism.”
14. Andrew N. Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise,” Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997), 372-374; Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 2-8;
Guttmann, Games and Empires, chap. 9.
15. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” reprinted in
Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 66-111.
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cussions of cultural imperialism. It is especially evident in attacks on alien cultural elements in the name of nationalism, which overlook the constructed and
hegemonic nature of modern national identities themselves.16 Recent scholarship
on nationalism has shown that the legitimacy of modern nation-states is bound
up with their claim to represent an “authentic” national community or culture,
defined in contrast both to “foreign” and to regional or other sub-national elements; it is not surprising, therefore, that the literature attacking cultural imperialism is riddled with the rhetoric of national authenticity that undergirds the
nation-state.17
A further problem is the question of perspective: how to delineate not only an
epistemological standpoint from which to identify cultural imperialism, but also
a moral standpoint from which to critique it. Inconsistency on this score is one
of the charges leveled at Said, most notably by the late Ernest Gellner, who
sparked a firestorm in the Times Literary Supplement in part by asserting that
Said had no solid foundation for his moral judgments. Said “simply makes himself a present of a stance from which he can pass moral judgement and tell us
how things really stand, without facing the difficulties of validating it,” Gellner
wrote.18 Said and his supporters rejected Gellner’s criticisms, but the general
problem has been acknowledged within post-colonial studies. If all discourses
exercise power by constructing and categorizing their objects, and if some precolonial state of “authenticity” is unattainable, how can one claim any validity
for the discourses produced by the post-colonial project? In a telling acknowledgement of this problem, the editors of an influential compilation on post-colonialism could only express “hope” that scholars aware of the “mutual implication of power and knowledge” would produce “other knowledge, better knowledge . . . responsive to Said’s central question: ‘How can we know and respect
the Other?’”19 Such epistemological modesty is not always evident in the less
nuanced writings around these issues, in which “better knowledge” seems to boil
down to knowledge that the guild of “progressive” intellectuals defines as emancipatory rather than repressive. In some such works the luminaries of recent critical scholarship—“Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, bell hooks,
Helene Cixous, and others”—are constituted as a new canon, familiar to “progressives throughout the world,” as one such author put it with striking offhandedness.20 One is tempted to compare this list to the use of Mao, Che, Castro, and
Ho as an alternative canon by an earlier generation—a list equally self-referential, but at least more international!
16. The danger of essentialism inherent in using nativism and/or nationalism to attack colonial discourses has been recognized within post-colonial studies; see Williams and Chrisman, Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 15-16, 23.
17. Prasenjit Duara, “Response to Philip Huang’s ‘Biculturality in Modern China and in Chinese
Studies,’” Modern China 26, no. 1 (2000), 36; Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, chap. 3.
18. Ernest Gellner, “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-Out
Colonialism,” Times Literary Supplement 4690 (February 19, 1993), 3.
19. Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 8; see also Santiago
Castro-Gomez, “Latin American Postcolonial Theories,” Peace Review 10, no. 1 (1998), 27-33.
20. Davis, “J’accuse!” 36.
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
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The last problem with the term “cultural imperialism” in general is raised by the
breadth of usage of the term as shown by the examples at the beginning of this article. As we have noted, behind all those uses lies the idea that alien cultural products
are accepted because they have been imposed. Implicit here is a model of culture
as a field of ideological domination, in which cultural change comes about through
coercion by outside forces. However, if the sum of angles in a triangle, ideas of
“normal” human physicality, youth fashions, and medical definitions of death are
all products of cultural imperialism, then surely every definition is an exercise of
power, and every change of mind a succumbing to domination—within as well as
across cultures. Where, then, does imposition end? Since we all inhabit cultures and
accept in some measure the cultural products that come with them, have we all been
“colonized?” Even if we acknowledge (as I would not hesitate to) that abstract
social forces like capitalism, industrial society, and/or modernity have significantly
restructured human subjective experience, to view that restructuring simply as a
process of imposition in which individuals play no active role would be a profoundly determinist conception of human social life. Moreover, with reference to
cross-cultural exchanges in particular, a view that sees cultural change as the result
of external impositions leads ultimately to a conception of modern world history in
which the West has wielded a determining influence on global culture, in which
modernity reduces to Westernization.21 Thus, the discourse of cultural imperialism,
originating in opposition to Western cultural hegemony, can ironically lead to a conclusion which is profoundly Eurocentric in its denial of agency or autonomy to nonWestern populations.
II. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS, INDIGENOUS AGENCY, AND COLONIZED CONSCIOUSNESS
If there were a single group most commonly held to exemplify the operation of
cultural imperialism in modern history, it would have to be Christian missionaries. The assertion that missionaries were implicated in imperialist expansion precedes the more recent theoretical discussions of cultural imperialism by several
decades, extending back to attacks on the missionary enterprise by nationalist
critics in China and elsewhere in the 1920s.22 Missionaries are routinely portrayed in both literature and scholarship as narrow-minded chauvinists whose
presence and preaching destroyed indigenous cultures and opened the way for
the extension of colonial rule.23 Few of those portrayals reflect carefully on the
21. The fallacy is discussed in Nicos Mouzelis, “Modernity: A Non-Eurocentric Conceptualization,” British Journal of Sociology 50, no. 1 (1999), 141-159, and exemplified in Theodore H.
von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
22. I have not been able to trace any direct links between the nationalist critiques of missionary imperialism and discussions of cultural imperialism in media studies since the 1970s, nor have I found the precise term “cultural imperialism” in Chinese nationalist and communist attacks on missions before 1949.
23. A recent bestseller, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (New York:
HarperCollins, 1998), is a typical example. An older novel often read along these lines is Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, [1958]), although Achebe himself holds a more
nuanced view of the missionary/Igbo encounter; see note 40 below.
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usefulness of the cultural imperialism model for understanding the impact of
missionaries on non-Western societies, however.24
As one would expect, applications of cultural imperialism to Christian missions are prone to the pitfalls that apply to the term in general, with two important additional qualifications. The first reflects the fact that most discussions of
missionary cultural imperialism refer to the century between the mid-nineteenth
and the mid-twentieth centuries, that is, the period of modern imperialism. This
means that cultural imperialism, which in the literature about more recent times
most often refers to a process of cultural domination in the absence of direct
political control, with regard to missionaries often degenerates into arguments
about whether missionaries had direct ties to political or economic forces of
imperialism. That is to say, some discussions of missions and cultural imperialism work with an implicit model of imperialism as a coordinated intentional
endeavor with three interrelated manifestations—political, economic, and cultural—and seek to demonstrate that missionaries were agents of cultural imperialism by showing their direct links to political and economic imperialism.25 Others
simply assert it, as in a recent textbook which presents the missionary presence
in China as one of “imperialism’s three ‘M’s’: merchants, missionaries, and the
military,” all “propelled by a missionary-like urge to spread the gospel of
Western capitalism, Western religious truth, and Western state power.”26
The problem here is that the ties between missionaries and government or
commercial interests is a more limited and empirical question than the impact of
missionaries on indigenous cultures, which is at the core of how the term “cultural imperialism” is used in other fields. It is also a distraction from it. While
particular exceptions can be found, generally speaking neither mission societies
nor missionaries as individuals were directly influential with their home governments or their colonial representatives, nor were they directly linked to the
traders and economic interests of their home countries.27 In fact, the interests of
missions were often diametrically opposed to those of their compatriots in government or commerce, and the relationships on the ground between missionaries,
consular/colonial officials, and traders were as often cool or antagonistic as warm
or cooperative.28 Recognizing this does not absolve missionaries from the charge
of cultural imperialism, but it reminds us that we need to be clear in defining the
24. E.g., Yunseong Kim, “Protestant Missions as Cultural Imperialism in Early Modern Korea:
Hegemony and its Discontents,” Korea Journal 39, no. 4(1999), 205-233.
25. E.g., the works of Lewis Pyenson on imperialism and Western science, which define “cultural
imperialism” as direct ties to the political and economic interests of empire; see his Cultural
Imperialism and the Exact Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 312-316.
26. R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002), 45; see also 58-62.
27. See the careful discussion in Jean and John Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism in South
Africa,” American Ethnologist 13 (1986), 1-22.
28. Examples of this for China are legion; for one case in which the British consul agreed with
Chinese officials to get the British missionaries out of the city in return for approval to build a racecourse, see Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: East
Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974), 140, 163.
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term to mean not simply manifestations of imperialism in the cultural sphere, but
an impact of one culture on another.
It is worth noting in this regard that work on the missionary connection to
imperialism has been influenced by a seminal early article that provided an inadequate and ambiguous definition of cultural imperialism. Writing in the early
1970s, the prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. surveyed the
principal theoretical models of imperialism and the place accorded to missionaries in each of them. Having shown that the missionary enterprise could not convincingly be explained as a function of imperialist economic or political interests, Schlesinger proposed that the then-new works of Frantz Fanon and others
on the cultural and psychological impact of imperialism might provide a key to
unlocking the role of missions that sociological and economic theories of imperialism could not. His exploration of these issues was nuanced and suggestive;
however, he defined “cultural imperialism” in passing as “purposeful aggression
by one culture against the ideas and values of another.” The problems of agency
and abstraction in this definition should be obvious: Whose “purpose,” and are
we talking about intentions or effects? What precisely constitutes “aggression”
against “ideas and values”? Are the two “cultures” as unitary and distinct from
each other as the definition implies?29 Such a definition is absolutely dependent
on the vantage point adopted, and it distracts from the question of impact, which,
I argue, is a different and potentially more fruitful focus than trying to discern
missionary motivations or the degree of “aggression” inherent in ideas.30
The second qualification we need to address is that in practice many references
to the “cultural imperialism” of missionaries mean simply that some missionaries
held condescending or racist attitudes towards the people among whom they
lived. Anyone who has read missionary publications or worked in missionary
archives can testify to the accuracy of this observation. Not all were as narrow in
their vision as Erastus Wentworth, an American Methodist missionary in Fuzhou
around 1860 who hankered after burnt johnny cakes and raw coffee in place of the
“villainous preparations” of Fuzhou cuisine, and waxed eloquent on “the demand
there would be for steel and silver if the Celestials were to be so far Christianized
as to eat with knives and forks like the rest of the world.”31 Many crossed the cultural divide better than Wentworth, depending on their personalities, theology, circumstances, adaptability, and, crucially, language facility. It is often quite evident
from the way particular missionaries are remembered in church sources in the
29. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism,” in The
Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1974), 363.
30. Recognizing the problems with Schlesinger’s discussion, Paul W. Harris has tried to make the
definition of missionary cultural imperialism more rigorous, in part by arguing for an “expanded definition of force and aggression;” see his “Cultural Imperialism and American Protestant Missionaries:
Collaboration and Dependency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China,” Pacific Historical Review 60, no.
3(1991), 309-338; quote from 313.
31. Wentworth letter quoted in R. S. Maclay, Life among the Chinese, with Characteristic Sketches
and Incidents of Missionary Operations and Prospects in China (New York: Carlton and Porter,
1861), 278.
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indigenous languages which ones did and did not earn the respect of their indigenous associates. Nevertheless, in general, missionaries in the imperialist era came
to their fields convinced of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual superiority of what
they thought of, not as their “culture,” but as “Civilization.” Some were also convinced of the superiority of their “race,” as social Darwinist concepts penetrated
Western culture late in the nineteenth century.32
Missionary paternalism is historically significant, but not because it was “cultural imperialism.” Being on the receiving end of missionary condescension was
often a galling experience for indigenous Christians or mission school students,
and it is critically important for understanding the emergence of Christian
nationalism, independent and indigenous church movements, and anti-Christian
movements in the twentieth century in China and elsewhere.33 However, the
attitudes of missionaries are beside the point when it comes to the crucial question of their effects on indigenous cultures. The distinction is not always kept as
clear as it should be in literature criticizing the missionary impact on culture, in
which the intent of missionaries to change a culture is frequently confused with
the actuality of doing so.
The same point applies to missionary publications for home consumption, which
(being more accessible than publications for readers in the mission fields in their
native languages) are often used to show the condescending or violent or
Orientalist views of missionaries towards their host societies. These discussions are
not always undertaken with sufficient awareness of the context and purpose of the
texts in question, or their relationship to actual missionary practice on the ground
(remembering that, unlike Said’s Orientalists, missionaries immersed themselves
for decades in their host societies, and were often changed by their exposure to
them).34 Ironically, missionaries of the “social gospel” stamp emerging around the
turn of the twentieth century, who considered themselves more sympathetic to their
host cultures than their forebears but who were theologically disposed to seeking a
total social transformation, were generally more culturally invasive than the more
theologically conservative missionaries (of earlier or later periods) who explicitly
sought to separate evangelism from political or cultural concerns.
We have seen that many critiques of the term “cultural imperialism” focus on
the failure of its proponents to credit the recipient population with any autonomy
32. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, Eng.: Apollos, 1990), chap. 7.
33. See Daniel H. Bays, “The Growth of Independent Christianity in China, 1900–1937,” in
Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996); Jessie G. Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions: The AntiChristian Movements of 1920–1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Cross-Cultural Publications, 1988); Susan
Billington Harper, “Ironies of Indigenization: Some Cultural Repercussions of Mission in South
India,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19, no. 1 (1995), 13-20; Lamin Sanneh,
Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (New York: Orbis, 1989), 167-172, 182190.
34. Some such analyses include Stuart Creighton Miller, “Ends and Means: Missionary
Justification of Force in Nineteenth-Century China,” in Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in
China and America, 249-282; James L. Hevia, “Leaving a Brand on China: Missionary Discourse in
the Wake of the Boxer Movement,” Modern China 18, no. 3 (1992), 304-332.
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in the process of cultural change. In response to this, scholars have pointed out
that the consumers of “imperial” culture play an active role in resisting, selecting, and reshaping the cultural products they absorb, as noted above with regard
to media and youth culture. An analogous emphasis on indigenous agency has
also characterized much recent work on Christianity in the non-Western world,
which has shifted the focus of much scholarship on missions away from the missionaries themselves as participants in a metropolitan culture of empire and onto
the indigenous side of the missionary encounter.35 It is perhaps ironic that scholars of missions have moved in the same directions as subaltern studies and postcolonial studies, tracing irony, resistance, hybridity, and selectivity in nonWestern appropriations of Christianity.36
However, the recognition that non-Western converts exercised agency in their
encounters with Western missionaries may not resolve the problem of cultural
imperialism. In their influential works on the long-term interaction (since the
1820s) between the Tswana people of southern Africa and British Protestant
(mainly Wesleyan and Congregationalist) missionaries, Jean and John Comaroff
argue that indigenous agency can be exercised even as the cultural frame of reference is being reshaped irrevocably. The Comaroffs treat the encounter dialectically, giving full play to the dynamic role played by the Tswana in their interactions with the missionaries, and they criticize previous scholarship for overlooking this dimension.37 However, they also argue that even in rejecting the
Christian message of the missionaries, the Tswana were required to enter into
conversation with them, and that that “long conversation” itself altered the way
the Tswana thought about the self, culture, language, work, the land, time, and
many other elements of their lives. They focus in particular on two dimensions
of the missionary encounter that they regard as having been too little emphasized
in previous scholarship: the mastery of symbols, and the importance of everyday
mundane practices in the colonial reshaping of culture. Looking at such matters
as competing claims about rain-making, the use of the plow in farming, forms
and functions of clothing and architecture, clock time, and written language, the
Comaroffs argue that “the mission, by its very presence, engaged all Tshidi in an
inescapable dialogue on its own terms.” Furthermore, they argue (drawing on a
rather reductionist portrayal of Wesleyanism as an ideological expression of capitalist individualism), that dialogue “cast them as citizens in a world of rational
35. Norman Etherington, “Missions and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed.
Robin Winks, vol. 5, Historiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998–), 309ff.; Andrew F.
Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); J. D. Y. Peel, “For Who Hath Despised
the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995), 581-607; Harper, “Ironies of Indigenization.”
36. Piers M. Larson applies insights from subaltern studies to missions and converts in
“‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking’: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early
History of Malagasy Christianity,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997), 966-1002.
37. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism,” 1-2; Jean Comaroff and John
Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South
Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6-11.
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RYAN DUNCH
individualism . . . [in which] personal achievement would be rewarded by the
accumulation of goods and moral worth,” a shift in consciousness that led ultimately to the proletarianization of the Tswana and other black Africans in the
capitalist colonial order.38
Echoing earlier critiques of colonialism going back to Fanon, the Comaroffs
label this process the “colonization of consciousness.” Unlike Fanon, however,
and certainly unlike more reductionist recent uses of the term, they do not view
this colonization as a kind of cultural strip-mining which leaves the colonized
culturally bereft and psychologically demoralized.39 Such discussions imply that
cultures are solid objects that collide like billiard balls, displacing one in favor of
another; in other words, that colonialism leaves in its wake not a changed or
hybrid culture, but the absence of culture.40 With a great deal more subtlety and
insight, the Comaroffs give full play to the active engagement of the colonized
in the cultural encounter with the forces of colonization. They also recognize that
missionaries were not agents of colonization in any direct political sense; indeed,
their political role was “necessarily indeterminate,” the Comaroffs argue, due
largely due to the separation between religion and politics in the missionaries’
own theology.41 However, for the Comaroffs, “quotidian practices” rather than
political authority were the primary vector of colonization anyway—“the seeds
of cultural imperialism were most effectively sown along the contours of everyday life”—and on that score “the ideological onslaught on the part of Christian
missionaries, self-styled bearers of European civilization,” was the very essence
of colonization.42
The Comaroffs’ work is perceptive and groundbreaking, and it is easy to see
the appeal of a phrase as concise and evocative as “the colonization of consciousness.” In the end, however, this conception of the missionary/indigenous
encounter only raises in a different guise the question of how we understand the
nature of modern culture. The changes described by the Comaroffs were not just
experienced by the Tswana. The introduction of clock time; the ideology of private property, individual labor, and wealth accumulation (whether on settled
farms or in factories and mines); certain forms of architecture and domestic
arrangement; rationality; the medicalized body; the nation-state; economic
development; the desirability of literacy and so on are all aspects of a new world
38. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism,” 15-16; idem, Of Revelation and
Revolution; John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and Historical Imagination (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), 258-260. The Tshidi are a sub-group of the Tswana.
39. Readings on the psychology of colonization and a critical discussion of the issue are found in
Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Part One.
40. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart tends to give this impression; Achebe himself does not see the
novel as a straightforward account of the destruction of Igbo culture by the encounter with the British,
emphasizing instead that cultures, even those under great external challenge, are fluid and adaptable,
as he sought to convey in the sequel No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, [1960]); see
Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1997), 66-67, 118.
41. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism,” 17.
42. Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and Historical Imagination, 293, 258.
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
313
order which has defined the experience of modernity in Western societies just as
surely as it did for the Tswana. That world order can quite reasonably be characterized as hegemonic, that is, at once dominant and subtly coercive, yet also
simultaneously embraced, contested, and subverted by the human agents within
it.43 With regard to missionaries, the missionary movement was peaking just as
secular rationalism, which effectively relegated religion to the evolutionary past,
was claiming the high ground in public discourse in their home societies; indeed,
the missionary movement itself (and missionary discourse about Christian civilization and “heathen” societies) can be seen as part of the Christian attempt to
preserve a place of cultural pre-eminence at home. From this perspective, the
question becomes, have we all been colonized? Or, remembering again that we
are discussing the usefulness of certain abstract concepts as intellectual tools, we
must ask whether the notion of the “colonization of consciousness” gives us a
useful analytical lever for understanding the cultural changes brought about by
modernity.
To put this question another way, we need to view the missionary encounter
with non-Western societies, and the colonial transformation of those societies,
not as sui generis but as part of the broader global transformation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The problem is to find adequate language to grapple with a complex, multi-faceted, wholesale transformation of conceptual universes. From what to what? Can we understand it simply in terms of imposition
and subjugation? Are the hybrid societies of modern Africa, for example, simply
evidence of a successful “conditioning process” imposed by Western cultural
imperialism, as one scholar puts it?44 What does such an understanding imply?
This is not to gloss over the facts of colonial exploitation, hypocrisy, and brutality, or to assert that because all hegemonies are coercive there is no difference in
kind or degree between the coercion in colonial states and that inherent in all
modern states and modern discourse. Clearly, it also raises other intractable
debates—for example, how to define modernity, or to define it in a way that is
not inherently capitalist, inherently Eurocentric, inherently teleological. But it
does serve to put the question of cultural imperialism and/or the colonization of
consciousness into a broader context.45
III. MISSIONS, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND MODERNITY IN CHINA
These issues can be illuminated by turning to the particular case of Christian missions and modernity in China. Of course, there are fundamental differences
between Tswana society and a large-scale bureaucratic state like China in the
nineteenth century. Many of the elements identified by the Comaroffs as part of
43. Guttmann distinguishes between imposition and hegemony in his Games and Empires,
Introduction.
44. G. K. Kieh Jr., “The Roots of Western Influence in Africa: An Analysis of the Conditioning
Process,” Social Science Journal 29, no. 1 (1992), 7-19.
45. On modernity and cultural imperialism, see Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, chap. 5; on
modernity more generally, see Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory, 130, 181-189 (excerpting from Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity
[Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1990]).
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the package of capitalist modernity introduced by the missionaries—the plow,
literacy, money, property, long-distance commerce, household accumulation, a
myth of individual attainment through formal education, taxation, contractual
labor, urban life—had already long existed in China. Moreover, while it certainly felt the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, China was never colonized. Also, unlike the British missionaries who played a decisive role (according to the Comaroffs) in mediating modernity to the Tswana, the influence of the
(much more diverse) missionary body in China can seldom be separated from
other avenues—commerce, publishing, officialdom, contacts with Japan—by
which foreign ideas and institutions were being filtered into the empire.
Nevertheless, the changes undergone by Chinese society between the midnineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries were no less momentous in their own
way than those experienced by the Tswana. In general, older historiography narrated those changes as a transition from “tradition” to “modernity” and attributed
a decisive role in the process, for good or ill, to the Western impact. This has been
reflected in treatments of the role of Christian missions in modern Chinese history. In the first half of the twentieth century, works written by missionaries and
their supporters claimed for the missions a great deal of the “credit” for jolting a
moribund China into the modern world. On the other side of the coin, nationalist critiques from the 1920s, influenced by the introduction of the Leninist theory of imperialism into China after 1919, charged missionaries with imperialism
or “cultural invasion,” usually meaning that Christian conversion and missionary
education were intended to facilitate imperialist economic and political control
by making the Chinese people docile.46 Whereas critiques of missions in some
other societies (for example, that of Gandhi in India) distinguished between proselytism and “beneficial” efforts in education and healthcare, the tendency in
China was to view mission education and medicine as simply more subtle forms
of aggression; the appearance of altruism merely showed superior deceptiveness.47 Mao Zedong encapsulated this outlook with characteristic directness in
1949, singling out the United States, which had been politically less aggressive
towards China than Japan or the European powers: “For a very long period, U.S.
imperialism laid greater stress than other imperialist countries on activities in the
sphere of spiritual aggression, extending from religious to ‘philanthropic’ and
cultural undertakings.”48
Beneath their diametrically opposed assessments of the missionary role, missionary accounts of the “uplift of China” and nationalist or communist critiques
46. As noted above, Chinese nationalist attacks on the missionary movement in the 1920s
employed the concept of cultural imperialism, but not the precise wording. Cognate terms like “cultural invasion” and “spiritual aggression” were used, and many discussions simply linked missionaries to “imperialism.” For some 1920s examples see Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (Historical
Materials on the Educational System of Modern China), ed. Zhu Youxian and Gao Shiliang, vol. 4
(Wuhan: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1993), 705-712, 742-761; the period is discussed in detail
in Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions.
47. On Gandhi’s views see Schlesinger, “The Missionary Enterprise,” 366-367.
48. Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), “‘Friendship’ or Aggression?” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
vol. 4 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), 448.
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
315
of missionary imperialism shared a common frame of reference: a modernist narrative of world history, according to which “China,” imagined as a unitary historical subject, had to be “liberated” from its past and take its place in a world
order of nation-states through a process of political, economic, technological,
and social “development.”49 They also shared a perception that, for good or ill,
the missionary movement’s impact on modern Chinese history had been considerable. Thus, unlike earlier attacks on missionary work based on maintaining the
status quo in late imperial Chinese society, the nationalist critique of missionary
imperialism from the 1920s was just as much a product of the modern transformation of Chinese consciousness as missionaries and their converts were.
Western historical scholarship in the last thirty years or so has challenged these
assumptions in a number of ways: by developing a more dynamic picture of late
imperial China, undercutting older portrayals of a static “traditional” society; by
showing the diversity within China through regional studies; by emphasizing
endogenous causes of change rather than external pressures like the Western
presence; and recently by destabilizing the image of the nation as a natural order
through careful attention to the construction of Chinese ideas of nationalism, citizenship, and representation since the late nineteenth century.50 In breaking open
the tradition/modernity dichotomy, this scholarship has opened up new avenues
for assessing the place of Christian missions in Chinese history. At the same time,
however, most of the new scholarship has paid little attention to missionaries or
their Chinese associates, due in part to a reaction against the previous undue
emphasis on “the Western impact” and a related perception that missionaries
have “been done,” and perhaps also in part to a residual embarrassment about the
pieties of another age. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization:
useful case studies of particular missions, two prize-winning monographs on the
Boxer Uprising (which assess the missionary role in that event in quite different
ways), and an important recent symposium volume.51 For instance, in a rich
essay suggestive of the kind of interactive interpretation that can be done, Roger
Thompson shows how the missionary presence in the Shaanxi countryside from
1861 set precedents that were taken up and used by modernizing Chinese officials after 1900 to close temples and appropriate their revenues for state use.52
Overall, however, the prevailing consensus in the field is that the missionary
49. Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Queston of Orientalism,” History and Theory, Theme
Issue 35 (1996), 107-108; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning
Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
50. Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent
Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
51. For example, Kathleen L. Lodwick, Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret
Moninger in China, 1915–1942 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Lawrence D.
Kessler, The Jiangyin Mission Station: An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1951
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer
Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The
Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Bays,
Christianity in China.
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RYAN DUNCH
movement played a relatively minor role in modern Chinese history; certainly we
can say that a synthesis that engages with recent theory and historiography to
place the missionaries fully within modern Chinese history has yet to be written.
By contrast, historians within the People’s Republic of China have devoted
considerable attention in the last twenty years to the role of missionaries in
Chinese history, and are probably more ready than Western scholars to acknowledge their historical significance, and more likely even to discuss it in positive
terms. The downplaying of imperialism and class struggle and the official
endorsement of “modernization” since 1979 have opened up ideological space
for a more favorable appraisal of the missionary movement than that which prevailed in the Maoist decades. For example, one of the best recent works, Wang
Lixin’s Meiguo chuanjiaoshi yu wan Qing Zhongguo xiandaihua (American missionaries and the modernization of China in the late Qing), argues that American
missionaries, rather than being tools of cultural or other imperialism, were actually engaged in “cultural exchange,” making a significant contribution to China’s
modernization in the late Qing period. His major criticism of the missionaries is
that their evangelistic aims made them selective to the point of dishonesty in the
way they presented Western civilization to the Chinese, for example, by downplaying the significance of the French Revolution or Darwinian evolution.53
Wang’s book is based on careful scholarship, and it has deservedly been seen
as a significant milestone in the historiography of missions within China. With
earlier work, it adopts a modernizationist and nationalist framework as the standard of historical evaluation: missionaries are evaluated positively because of
their contributions to a process of “modernization” seen as both inevitable and
unidirectional; they are criticized for trying to lead that modernization in the
“wrong” directions. Just as interesting for our discussion is the implicit definition
of “imperialism” in Wang’s work and other recent Chinese scholarship, compared to that in Western discussions of cultural imperialism. Chinese scholarship
has tended to juxtapose (bad) cultural imperialism to (benign or at least neutral)
cultural exchange, with the trend toward viewing missionaries increasingly in the
latter category. Underlying this shift is the recognition that most missionaries had
good intentions towards China, and did not have direct ties to foreign governments or economic interests. However, as we have already noted, from a broader definition of cultural imperialism, neither intentions nor direct political ties
have any bearing on the question, and the distinction between cultural imperial52. Roger R. Thompson, “Twilight of the Gods in the Chinese Countryside: Christians,
Confucians, and the Modernizing State, 1861–1911,” in Bays, Christianity in China. The links
between state extension and the discourse of secular modernity are also explored in Prasenjit Duara,
“Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in
Early Twentieth-Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (1991), 67-83.
53. Wang Lixin, Meiguo chuanjiaoshi yu wan Qing Zhongguo xiandaihua (American missionaries and the modernization of China in the late Qing) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1997).
Writing in a similar framework in English, Dan Cui advances an even more positive argument for
British missionaries in The Cultural Contribution of British Protestant Missionaries and BritishAmerican Cooperation to China’s National Development During the 1920s (Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America, 1998).
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
317
ism and cultural exchange vanishes in the Comaroffs’ usage (as it does also in
Mao’s). Behind these different evaluations lie different definitions of imperialism: as the political expansion of Western powers in a particular period of history, which is how the historiography in Chinese tends to use it, or as an ongoing
process of “the globalisation of the capitalist mode of production, its penetration
of previously non-capitalist regions of the world, and destruction of pre- or noncapitalist forms of social organisation,” as the editors of a postcolonial reader put
it.54 If the former definition is clearly too narrow, the latter is very broad indeed
(yet oddly narrow in making the “capitalist mode of production” the sole axis of
the definition)—its breadth is one reason why the term “cultural imperialism” is
used in so many ways and in so many contexts.
The historiography examined here demonstrates how inseparable the assessment of the missionary impact is from broader questions of how to historicize
nationalism and modernity. The historiography of modern China has been deeply
colored by developmental thinking and by what Prasenjit Duara has called the
“ideological construction of the nation-state,” and both have left their imprint on
the placement of missionaries in modern Chinese history.55 Changes in China
parallel to those identified by the Comaroffs as part of the colonization of consciousness, such as the introduction of Western medicine; campaigns against
footbinding (in the name of the “natural” foot), opium consumption, and “superstition;” the adoption of rationalist, graduated, and (in theory) universal education; individual choice in marriage; demands for political representation—all of
which involved missionaries to some degree—have long been identified in
nationalist historiography as part of a history of national emancipation and
“awakening.”56 Arif Dirlik has suggested that the embracing of developmentalism by Chinese intellectuals be seen as a kind of “self-Orientalization,” noting
that Said’s work gives too little place to the participation of Asian actors in the
construction of Orientalism.57 This approach raises the same dilemma as “colonization of consciousness,” however, and gives present-day intellectuals the
power to define the meaning of a transformation that its contemporary participants articulated as liberating. Certainly we can see that if transformations so
closely associated with the emergence of the modern nation-state as these are to
be viewed in terms of a “colonization of consciousness,” then we must see the
“colonization of consciousness” as a universal experience.
IV. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS AND GLOBAL MODERNITY
The transformation of world societies over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
was profound and inescapable, and we in the present are all caught up inextrica54. Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 2.
55. Duara, “Response to Philip Huang,” 36.
56. John Fitzgerald discusses the discourse of national “awakening” in Awakening China: Politics,
Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
57. Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism.”
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bly in it, complicating immeasurably the task of historical assessment. It was
once common to view that transformation as “Westernization,” a ripple effect
expanding inexorably in concentric circles out from Europe. Clearly, however, to
picture the transformation thus is to miss entirely the infinite variety of local
manifestations and mutations of Western-derived institutional forms and symbolic practices.58 Still, however we conceptualize the process, there is no disputing that the Christian missionary movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an important medium for the dissemination of Western concepts and
institutions into non-Western societies (more so in some settings than others). In
assessing the missionary role, however, we need to get beyond the polarized
praise and blame tendencies of earlier scholarship, recognizing the dependency
of both on the twin teleologies of developmentalism and nationalism.
In doing so we need to move beyond the notion of cultural imperialism, which,
I have argued, is an unsatisfactory model for analyzing either cultural interaction
in general or the missionary movement in world history in particular. The problems with the model boil down to three: it is intertwined with essentializing discourses of an imagined national or cultural authenticity; it disregards or slights
the agency of the “acted upon”; and, by conceptualizing cultural transitions in
terms of coercion, it reduces a complex set of interactions to a dichotomy
between actor and acted upon, and skews our gaze too much towards looking for
subjugation, collaboration, or resistance, or, even less usefully, towards fruitless
debates about motives and unsupportable distinctions between cultural exchange
and cultural imposition. Notwithstanding the richness of the Comaroffs’ work,
their application of the term “colonization of consciousness” to the transition
they describe has the same drawbacks. In view of the global nature of the
changes over the last two centuries that the Comaroffs trace for the Tswana, the
reductio ad absurdum of either term is that the “colonized consciousness”
becomes a universal experience.
If cultural imperialism and the colonization of consciousness are not adequate
frameworks for understanding the place of missionaries in the emergence of the
modern world order, what alternatives might we draw upon? The starting place
is to understand missionaries in the context of a globalizing modernity that
altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; missionaries, in other words, were simultaneously agents of the
spread of modernity vis-à-vis non-Western societies, and products of its emerging hegemony. The emerging consensus in recent work on the cultural dimension
of globalization since the nineteenth century recognizes that, while standardization and homogenization—through the construction of supposed “universal”
standards and normative categories from Greenwich Mean Time to human
rights—have been one aspect of globalization, cultural differentiation and het58. Recent work questioning earlier assumptions that globalization is a culturally homogenizing
force is summarized in J. Boli and F. J. Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture” in International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), vol. 9, 6261-6266.
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
319
erogeneity have not only persisted in the face of globalization, they have actually been produced by it. Indeed, Arjun Appadurai has asserted that “cultural differentiation tends to outpace homogenization, even in this most interactive of
economic epochs.”59
This insight provides a foundation for bringing together macro/global and
micro/particular perspectives on the missionary movement as a factor in modern
world history. On the macro level, can we trace a general missionary role in disseminating some of the categories claiming normative validity in the modern
order on the basis of their “universality”—the nation, rationality, science and
technology, the autonomous individual, religion itself—from European to nonWestern societies? On the micro level, might there be ways in which missionaries generated cultural differentiation within and between societies, whether
through appropriations of parts of their message or through reactions against
them? The first question points us towards the global picture and the role of
Christian missionaries relative to other vectors of change in non-Western societies; the second points us towards questions of translation and to indigenous
agency in the reception, local expression, transformation, and/or rejection of missionary teachings in local settings. While much work remains to be done, recent
scholarship on modern missions suggests affirmative answers to both questions.
We are hampered in considering missionaries as transmitters of global modernity by the long-standing assumption that religion and modernity stand in opposition to each other, with the former belonging to the world of “tradition,” destined to be superseded by “modern” rationality, the secular nation-state, and the
individual-as-consumer. This assumption has been called increasingly into question in the last decade, particularly in works examining the connections between
religious identities and modern nationalism. Gauri Viswanathan has argued that
conversions to minority religions in Britain and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be read as challenges to the twin logics of secular modernity and national identity, and she herself has challenged the scholarly language
that relegates religious identities to the premodern and pre-national.60
Viswanathan draws in part on the work of Talal Asad, who contends that religion
itself, posited as a universal attribute of human societies in the comparative
social sciences, is a product of modern Western discourse.61 Along similar lines,
Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann have called on scholars to recognize
that the “dichotomy between religion and nationalism is an ideological element
in the Western discourse of modernity.” By contrast, they assert that “the location of religion in the modern world should . . . be addressed in relation to the
59. Arjun Appadurai, “Globalization, Anthropology of,” in Smelser and Baltes, International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 9, 6269; see also Boli and Lechner,
“Globalization and World Culture.”
60. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998).
61. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
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historical emergence of the modern idea of the nation and its spread over the
world.”62
These points have many implications for the study of Christian missions in
modern history. Clearly missionaries of all Christian traditions saw themselves
as inducting indigenous converts into a transnational religious communion that
was explicitly and in the fullest sense universal, spanning space and time. In the
Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and denominational Protestant missions this was
symbolized by the extension of ecclesiastical governance and representation to
the developing churches in the mission fields (this proceeded at different paces
and took different forms depending on the denomination). Inter-denominational
Protestant missions like the China Inland Mission or anti-ecclesiastical movements like the Brethren assemblies had different ways of expressing it institutionally, but were no less dedicated in principle to the idea of a single universal
Christian church transcending national boundaries. This internationalism mirrored (on an ontologically grander scale) the modern international order of
autonomous yet related nation-states. Indeed, it overlapped with it, for the
“awakening” of heathen peoples to Christianity was routinely imagined in
hymnody and elsewhere as also a national “awakening” bringing the heathen into
a world brotherhood of Christian nations.63 These considerations suggest that
missionary internationalism may have played a role (along with the more secular international non-governmental organizations that took shape from the midnineteenth century64) in generating the mental prerequisites for secular internationalism.
More concretely, missions were uniquely placed as conduits for intercultural
communication by virtue of their institutional structures. Missionaries were the
most widely diffused Westerners in most non-Western societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they were heavily invested in cross-cultural communication by the very nature of their endeavor. Protestant and Roman
Catholic missions recruited personnel who had been shaped by a certain cultural, educational, and religious milieu. Once in the field, they interacted with the
host society and with missionaries from other missions and countries working
there, through personal contacts and correspondence, periodical literature, and
conferences. Through their orders or mission boards, they remained connected to
their home countries and churches, and to missionaries of their own denomination or order working all over the world, connections in the form of, again, correspondence, periodical literature, and conferences. The influences on each missionary were thus diverse and highly international, and these multiple connec62. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, “Introduction,” in Nation and Religion:
Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Van der Veer and Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 3-4.
63. See John Fitzgerald, “‘Lands of the East Awake!’ Christian Motifs in Early Chinese
Nationalism,” in Gong yu si: Jindai Zhongguo geti yu qunti zhi chongjian (Public and private: reconstructing individual and collective bodies in modern China), ed. Huang Kewu and Zhang Zhejia
(Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academica Sinica, 2000), 389ff.
64. See Boli and Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture,” 6261.
BEYOND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
321
tions probably facilitated comparison and standardization across denominations
and between national settings, at least within the respective worlds of Roman
Catholic and Protestant missions.
Specifically, missionaries presented to their audiences, readers, and students
many features of what became the modern global order, through their preaching
and teaching or through their publications. In China, for example, missionary
geographies and histories removed the Chinese empire from its unique spatial
and temporal position as the origin and center of civilization, placing it instead
within a world of nations, each with its own history. Missionaries coined many
new terms in Chinese to convey Western religious or scientific ideas, ranging
from relatively concrete lexical items like “carbon” or “locomotive” to more
abstract concepts like “democracy,” “duty,” or “news.”65 In many other societies
missionaries created the very scripts as well as the vocabulary for key terms in
their printed materials, an act with far-reaching implications.66 Concerning
China, most of the scholarly attention to date has gone to the missionaries’ publications on secular subjects, and relatively little to the Bible and other religious
literature, yet the choices of terminology in the religious publications may also
have had important implications for Chinese readers which have yet to be
brought to light.
As the Comaroffs’ stress on “quotidian practices” reminds us, symbols could
be as significant as texts in communicating elements of the modern world order.
I have argued elsewhere that missionaries and Chinese Protestants were one conduit for the constitution of politics as a public domain in the Fuzhou region of
China between roughly 1895 and 1920, in part through their use of national flags
(foreign and Chinese) and proto-national anthems.67 Of course, the very presence
of missionaries created an awareness of difference and an external perspective on
indigenous social life that could have profound implications. As noted above,
Roger Thompson has traced how a distinction between legitimate “religion” and
wasteful “superstition,” which first entered Chinese state discourse through dealings with missionaries, later provided the rhetorical justification for modernizing
Chinese officials to close community temples and expropriate their revenues.68
Another issue related to the missionary role in transmitting global universals
is whether conversion by its nature—or at least conversion of the Protestant
evangelical variety typical of most modern Protestant missions—requires and
constructs the modern notion of the autonomous individual. Another conference
volume edited by Peter van der Veer, provocatively entitled Conversion to
Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, addresses this question directly.
65. Many of these are listed in Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture,
and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), appendix; Liu also shows the crucial role of Japan as an intermediary for the translation of Western terms
into Chinese.
66. Norma Diamond explores the implications of a missionary script for ethnic identity and
empowerment in “Christianity and the Hua Miao: Writing and Power,” in Bays, Christianity in China.
67. Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 4.
68. Thompson, “Twilight of the Gods.”
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In his introduction to the volume, van der Veer states that “the modern conception of the individual person, essential to both capitalism and Protestantism,” was
bound up with the “missionary project of conversion.”69 Again, this view
requires us to question the long habit of viewing modernity and religion antithetically. The same issue is raised in current scholarship on the spread of
Pentecostal movements in non-Western societies in recent decades. Once routinely presented as a reaction against modernity, Pentecostal Christianity is now
being seen as quintessentially modern precisely in its stress on individual experience.70
It seems probable, then, that missionaries were significant intermediaries in
the construction of global modernity in its universalizing dimension. Their influence was significant in the corresponding process of cultural differentiation, also.
To understand why this is so, we must consider how missionaries actually related to the cultures in which they worked, and here again we must address some
popular stereotypes. By the nature of their work, even the most inflexible and
churlish missionaries had to develop sustainable working relationships with people in their host society. As a practical matter, therefore, they could not afford to
adopt a wholly negative attitude towards it. The popular image of the finger-wagging missionary condemning a host culture wholesale and seeking to replace it
in its entirety is, to say the least, implausible as a general type; such a person
would soon have proved useless as a missionary and been recalled.
More importantly, their calling demanded that missionaries learn to express
their message in the language of their host society. Translation, therefore, was at
the heart of the missionary enterprise. It is now well recognized that the process
of translation is much more complex than transferring the “meaning” of a text
from one language into another, as if the inner essence of a text can somehow be
separated from the particulars of language in which it is expressed. In the act of
translation, missionaries had to employ already-existing terminology or coin new
terms to express concepts, theological or otherwise, not found in the indigenous
language. Either choice brought problems: the first meant using terms that were
already laden with meanings in that culture; the second risked incomprehension,
and did not rescue the missionary from the need to explain the unfamiliar term
in language familiar to the hearers. Moreover, the best efforts at translation
would make no difference if missionaries did not learn to present their message
orally in ways that would capture and hold the interest of their hearers, and in
print in a style and format that would appeal to readers. The latter task was probably more difficult in societies where other reading material was already abun69. Peter van der Veer, “Introduction,” 9, in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of
Christianity, ed. van der Veer (New York: Routledge 1996). John Fitzgerald has presented a similar
argument for China in “Lands of the East Awake.”
70. Andrew Walker, “Thoroughly Modern: Sociological Reflections on the Charismatic Movement
from the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Charismatic Christianity: Sociological Perspectives, edited Stephen Hunt, Malcolm Hamilton, and Tony Walter (London: Macmillan, 1997), 36; cf. Martin
Percy, “The City on a Beach: Future Prospects for Charismatic Movements at the End of the
Twentieth Century,” in ibid.; David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin
America (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
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323
dant, although mitigated by the fact that those societies had established reading
practices. In China, for instance, which had a particularly difficult written language and a discerning popular readership, missionaries usually collaborated
with Chinese coworkers in writing works for publication. In all these matters,
missionary efforts at communication were constrained and directed in significant
ways by the host society.
The other key point about communication is that speakers or authors cannot
control the meanings their work takes on for its audience, especially in cross-cultural communication in which the speakers/authors may have a very imperfect
grasp of the audience’s cultural framework and how their words will be perceived in it. This brings us back to the agency of the audience in intercultural
exchange, the slighting of which was discussed above as one of the key criticisms of the cultural imperialism model. Recognition of the agency exercised by
the recipient society is a major reason why cultural differentiation is now seen as
part of globalization along with homogenization, because every claimed “universal” is translated into existing cultural matrices in which it can take on different meanings or be employed in different ways.71
Placing primary emphasis on the agency of indigenous people in interpreting
the missionary message and its meanings in their cultural terms raises our awareness that foreign cultural pressures can bring creative potential as well as dangers
of cultural loss or subjugation, for at least some members of a given society.72
Since, as we have seen, there is no viable external standard of authenticity
against which to measure them, we must put primary weight in assessing particular cultural changes on the self-understanding of those undergoing them, realizing that culture is fluid and giving historical actors credit for recognizing and
working with the tensions in their situation. This may require us to shake off
labels that are legacies of the exclusionary discourse of the nation-state (for
example, Chinese Christians as “running dogs” of imperialism, or other labels
that deny minority groups a “legitimate” place in the nation). In the case of
China, for instance, recent work is taking us well beyond the one-dimensional
images of Chinese Christians found in official documents of the late Qing,
nationalist polemics of the twentieth century, and a good deal of earlier scholarship. Sociologists and anthropologists working on contemporary society have
demonstrated that it is entirely possible for Christianity to be a fundamental element in the identity of particular Chinese communities, from rural Catholics in
north China to Hakka Protestants in the New Territories of Hong Kong and
Chinese immigrants in the United States.73 Behind this new understanding is the
71. Boli and Lechner, “Globalization and World Culture.”
72. Relevant here is Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1993), usefully applied to China in Dirlik,
“Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism.” For a more sanguine reading of the role of
Western-influenced Chinese intellectuals than Dirlik’s “self-Orientalization” see Philip C. C. Huang,
“Biculturality in Modern China and in Chinese Studies,” Modern China 26, no. 1 (2000), 3-31.
73. Richard A. Madsen, China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Nicole Constable, Christian Souls and Chinese
Spirits: A Hakka Community in Hong Kong (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
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shift away from structuralism towards a more fluid and diachronic model of culture, which makes it possible to transcend straightforward dichotomies between
“Western” Christianity and “Chinese” culture.
The implications of translation for the missionary impact on non-Western cultures have been explored in depth by the Africanist Lamin Sanneh, Professor of
Missions and World Christianity at Yale University. Sanneh has argued that by
translating the Christian scriptures into the vernacular languages of their host
societies, missions of necessity validated the vernacular culture: “scriptural
translation rested on the assumption that the vernacular has a primary affinity
with the gospel, the point being conceded by the adoption of indigenous terms
and concepts for the central categories of the Bible.” Sanneh contrasts this with
Islam; since in Islam only the Arabic original of the Koran can possess scriptural authority, Islam in West Africa has been more suspicious of the religious value
of vernacular cultures than Christianity. Sanneh shows how, for instance, the
missionary translation project resulted not only in dictionaries and grammars, but
also in voluminous and valuable collections of local proverbs, idioms, mythology, and folklore compiled by missionaries in many African cultures. He also
argues that “explicit missionary interest in their language and culture” resulted in
an “increased self-awareness” and a heightened sense of national identity for particular African peoples. Conversion was not “a psychological ‘migration’ out of
the African world, since it was a consequence of encountering the gospel in the
vernacular,” and vernacular translation generated indigenous sectarian religious
movements also, since missionaries could not control the interpretation of the
scriptures once they had been translated and published.74
When we shift our gaze, then, from missionaries as agents of a hegemonic
Western culture to the actual process of intercultural communication, it becomes
evident why the missionary enterprise would foster cultural differentiation in the
very act of disseminating concepts claiming a “universal” validity, whether those
were religious concepts or constituent elements of what would become global
modernity. The host societies exercised agency in their interaction with missionaries in many ways—as language teachers, as collaborators, as hearers and readers, in their comprehension and appropriation within their own cultural context
of missionary communication. Translation was a constant and inescapable
requirement of the missionary endeavor, from mundane routines to the communication of the holiest mysteries, meaning that every “universal,” from the term
for God on down, entered an existing network of meanings that differed for every
language. Moreover, the act of translation imparted value to each vernacular language, and by implication to the culture borne by each. The result could be more
generous to variant cultures than the national state was prepared to be; in China,
Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
74. Sanneh, Translating the Message, esp. chap. 5; quotes from 166, 170, 184. His analysis is continued and extended in Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The
African Dimension (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993).
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325
Protestant missions and churches preached, worshiped, and published in regional dialects later discouraged by the state in favor of the national “common
speech.”
Writing in History and Theory in 1996, Arif Dirlik challenged scholars to
undertake the “historicization of capitalist modernity itself, and the identification
of alternative modernities . . . that have been suppressed by the hegemony of capitalist modernity.”75 This end, I believe, can be served by a fresh appraisal of the
missionary movement as a systemic factor in modern world history. As Wang
Lixin’s book reminds us for China, missionary versions of modernity included
elements that were incorporated and others that were left by the wayside in the
modern order that emerged in the twentieth century.76 What visions of modernity
missionaries articulated, and how those were taken up, contested, and transformed in non-Western cultural contexts, has much to tell us about the process of
cultural globalization. I have argued that the cultural imperialism model is too
blunt an instrument for analyzing this process, and that “colonization of consciousness” does not take us substantially further. Instead, we need a more
dynamic and interactive framework, one that recognizes not just imposition, loss,
and resistance, but multiple possibilities, fluid frontiers, and creative potential in
cultural interaction. Emphasis on the receptors rather than the transmitters, on
indigenous agency in the missionary/indigenous encounter, is a methodological
key to this, and the recognition that homogenization and differentiation are simultaneous and mutually conditioning dimensions of globalization provides useful
leverage. At stake, potentially, is a fuller understanding of roads taken and not
taken in the construction of the modern order read as a global cultural process.
University of Alberta
75. Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” 118.
76. See p. 316 above.