Reproduction of Mission Frontiers: or Why Protestantism Can Climb the Hills of Southeast Asia

Masao Imamura (National University of Singapore)

It has been said that highland groups in Southeast Asia have maintained a high degree of religious autonomy, blocking the influences of the lowland societies. “Civilization can’t climb hills,” as James Scott has put it. In the past two centuries, however, many upland groups—in both the mainland and maritime regions—have converted to Protestant Christianity. The Kachin people in northern Myanmar (Burma) is one of them; a vast majority of them are Protestants today. Although much attention has been paid to the pioneering foreign (especially American) missions, most of the evangelical campaigns to the Kachin region have been actually conducted by “indigenous” peoples themselves: first Karen and later Kachin. The “Karen home missions,” established in the Irrawaddy Delta, carried out long-term and long-distance mission work across and beyond Myanmar in the 19th century. And then such “home missions” were reproduced elsewhere by other groups including the Kachin, who in the 20th century reached even more remote frontiers such as the Naga and Wa areas. The spatial extension of Protestantism to the uplands has been achieved through the indigenous reproduction of evangelical frontier missions. That is, the “indigenization” has required a series of frontiers to be successively identified. Framing frontier as “space of conversion” or “space-to-be-converted,” I identify and analyze the key developments both in doctrine and practice of Protestant evangelism that have enabled the reproduction of mission frontiers.

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