| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
Were there fluctuating boundaries in his practices as he experienced the conditions of change? What were his ways of expressing himself? Moreover, what functions did he perform in terms of encroaching social changes, contact with cross-cultural ideas, and reactions to the mission’s internal policies? Underlying these questions is the following assumption; the missionaries showed concern for local inhabitants, yet at the heart of this relationship stood the contradictory aspects of social transformation, the “recruit,” and discourses of race and gender that were projected into the colonial environment to increase vulnerability and exploitation.
Beyond the empirical issues within this book, there are some definitions to clarify. This section discusses the key terms used in this research: “practices,” “Home Committee,” “colonial environment,” “gaze,” “gender,” “race,” and “colonial government.” The “Home Committee” is the governing mechanism that produces and implements rules of unequal advantage to create a state of dependency and subservience among missionaries in order to influence the missionary practices in the colonial landscape.58 The “Home Committee” viewed strict control as the ultimate means of extolling moral principles, and was supremely important in giving the BM its religious character as well as imposing its principles.59 “Colonial environment” is defined as landscapes where imaginative reconstruction of religion and Europeanness and images of otherness are enacted to undercut local notions of values and power structures. It touches on issues, which explain the colonial space in stereotypes, boundaries and discourses of improvement or transcultural processes with the attitude of suppressing inner cultural values. Thus, “colonial environment,” by definition, is not only geographical by nature. Rather, it refers to activities that perpetuate and create conditions of power according to racialized lines. “Gazing” is the viewer’s capacity to experience phenomena and to conceptualize them within his / her own predetermined views in order to reach a final interpretation of “reality.”60 Gazing thus represents a fixation on an object that results in presenting a false image of that object. “Gender” is discussed both within the context of biological masculine / feminine sexual roles, and from the perspective of gender as a convenient construct upon which to ground the racial homogeneity that is basic to the patriarchal endeavor.61