Thursday 29 May 2014

Telling the "divinely mandated success story"

Today gave a talk at the Language@Leeds seminar on how 19th century missionary correspondence from Yorubaland worked as an instrument of discursive power. The group gives an opportunity to researchers across all disciplines to present their research on linguistic topics and get valuable feedback from their peers. Below you can find the abstract to my talk, which also forms the basis for my next thesis chapter.

The source material of my interdisciplinary research consists of letters, journals and reports from 19th century Yorubaland (Western Nigeria), written by European and African missionaries from the Church Missionary Society (CMS). In these documents I look for evidence of how language was used to (re-)construct 'reality' of missionaries' life and work.
This correspondence was not private, but was used to inform CMS policy decisions and fed into the CMS periodicals, telling the Christian audience 'at home' and abroad about missionary work, conversions, and life in 'exotic' West Africa. The content of a missionary's letters and journals did reflect on his own work and on the writer's fellow missionary on the field and the missionary effort as a whole. We have to ask ourselves how this affected the writing itself, the reliability of the documents, and the selection of journal extracts and stories to share with their audience.
The second question I address is whose perspectives and interpretations of events the audience found represented in these documents. The authors of the majority of the correspondence were male Christians employed by the mission. Members of the non-Christian native population and converts with no direct involvement in the mission had virtually no access to this discourse channel; their perspectives and interpretations of events, where they can access the discourse, tend to be critical and divergent of those in missionary writing. Equally, despite the fact that most missionaries were married, their wives do not feature largely in the agents' correspondence and with a few notable exceptions did not correspond with the CMS themselves. The “divinely mandated success story” (Peel, 2003: 17) which most of my source material tells is therefore far from comprehensive.
I argue that, following Diamond's insight that power  “[involves] the ability to interpret events and reality, and have this interpretation accepted by others” (Diamond 1996: 13), missionary correspondence can be seen as an instrument of discursive power, which necessarily resulted in an androcentric and Christian-focussed picture of missionary activity.   

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Diamond, J. (1996): Status and power in verbal interaction. A study of discourse in a close-knit social network. Amsterdam, Benjamins.
Peel, J. (2003): Religious encounter and the making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

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