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A church that is rich in symbolic associations conveys a strong sense of sacrality—the presence of the holy within the sacred. Different forms of symbolic association in the classic sacramental tradition are discussed in connection with Santa Maria Novella at Florence. Orientation (planning a church with the altar at the east end), legends of foundation, and ceremonies of consecration are all seen as ways of cultivating symbolic resonance. The “Cathedral of Huts” at Maciene in Mozambique is seen as one example of how churches reflect a process of indigenization in Africa.

The historiography of witchcraft tends to see confessions to diabolical sex as clear examples that accused witches were forced to adopt the ‘demonological script’. However, a close reading of the trials indicates that accused witches sought to minimize their sexual contact with devils, and emphasized that such contact was painful and unpleasant due to the devil’s ‘cold member’. This suggests that accused witches tried to maintain some control of their stories: they might be quarrelsome and spiteful, but they were not promiscuous—might be imagined as witches, but not as whores. However, some confessions ‘indigenized’ diabolical sex, assimilating it to the folkloric figure of the latawiec—part unbaptized infant, part treasure-hauling demon, part erotic fairy-youth.

The growth of pentecostalism in South Korea since the 1950s, fueled largely by divine healing practices, is symbolized by the Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world’s largest Christian congregation, founded by David Yonggi Cho. Korea is second only to the United States in number of overseas missionaries. Ironically, divine healing first emerged in Presbyterian churches founded by “cessationist” Western missionaries who believed miracles had ended. Despite the “disenchantment” of the Western worldview, because missionaries emphasized native initiative in church planting, Korean evangelists were able to use divine healing and exorcism in conversion. In 1923, the Korean Presbyterian Church abandoned the doctrine of cessationism. Pentecostalism was appealing because it drew on traditional Korean cosmology of spirits and the supernatural and also presented Christianity as more effective than other religions in meeting this-worldly needs. It is misleading to reduce Korean pentecostal healing to “shamanism”; healing is better understood as indigenization of Christianity.

This chapter describes the process of indigenization within peer support groups for Haitian women living with the physical impairment of lymphatic filariasis. The groups developed a distinctive style characterized by minimal interest in talking about the illness and a strong interest in religion and spirituality, artistic and expressive components, acquisition of practical skills, and microenterprise activities. The context of indigenous traditions of mutual aid, material needs of families, and political and economic insecurity is discussed. Results are framed within a theoretical discussion of factors that lead self-help groups into social action. The findings counterbalance traditional approaches to culturally competent health program planning by highlighting the active role of participants in tailoring an intervention to the local cultural context.

This chapter considers the Cold War as the most important background against which there emerged a cultural and political imagery about a diasporic Chinese nation. It analyses the connections of currents of thought manifested in notions such as Overseas China or in intellectual currents such as Neo-Confucianism, with the controversial Cold War cultural infrastructure revealing how the latter pre-conditioned the materialization of a distinct type of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong identity, as it is now known. It observes that there is a common belief that the rise of Hong Kong identity in the 1970s is attributable to the political awakening of Hong Kong's postwar baby-boomer generation to colonial oppression. It considers the indigenization of colonial power as the main motif informing and underlying the writings and the other practices of some of the latest members of the colonial intelligentsia.

This chapter focuses on the indigenization, deportation, and return of Chechens during the discourse of history, and its sociopolitical effects. Traditionally in anthropology, cultural phenomena are explained as part of a historical continuum, and the Chechen national revolution and war elicited a plethora of interpretations involving the entire recorded and mythic history of Chechens, and their relationship to Russia and the rest of the USSR. Evidence from Chechen citizens, mainly those from ethnic Chechen backgrounds, makes clear that strides were made toward modernization during the Soviet period. Though the regime's repression, particularly the 1944 deportation, dealt a heavy blow to the social and demographic structure of Chechnya, it was preceded and followed by a policy of encouraging Chechen culture and the economic potential of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Republic as a constituent unit of the Russian Federation under the USSR. But while Chechnya remained a dynamic society moving at the pace of the modern world, contradictory state policies would eventually contribute to the outbreak of war.

This chapter demonstrates that, while scholars have long focused on the economic origins of the middle class, it is crucial to understand the ways in which it fashioned itself. Although the universe of the Indian middle class revolved around contesting colonial categories, the chapter shows that the project of self-fashioning of the Indian middle class was not an instance of alternative modernity, nor did the locality of the middle class in colonial India result in producing some sort of indigenism. This middle class borrowed, adapted, and appropriated the pleasures of modernity and tweaked and subverted it to suit their project of self-fashioning. An area in which such cosmopolitan domesticity can be observed was the culinary culture of colonial Bengal, which utilized both vernacular ingredients and British modes of cooking in order to establish a Bengali bourgeois cuisine. This process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and in the patriarchal agenda of middle-class social reform, and it developed certain social practices, including imagining the act of cooking as a classic feminine practice and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. It was often this hybrid culture that marked the colonial middle classes.

This chapter explores how the foreignness of Western missionaries in China became embodied experiences. It discusses the body problems faces by missionaries and suggests that the most serious problems of inter-cultural interaction were bodily. The most intractable scandal of foreign bodies was the refusal of the missionaries and their converts to bow to the emperor. This chapter also highlights the tensions between the impulse toward the indigenization of the missionaries and their concern that the essential Gospel would be lost or corrupted through careless nativization.

This chapter explores the role and relevance of defence offsets policy in India’s expanding defence industrial environment. It argues that India’s offsets policy will probably fail to realize the long-term benefits it anticipates unless the conditions for ensuring viable and sustainable development are secured, particularly given the relative technological immaturity of India’s defence economy. The hypothesis is examined by exploring the evolving offsets phenomenon against India’s unique defence industrial conditions. The author also seeks to evaluate offsets performance during the early decades of India’s post-Independence defence industrial development. Based on a review of contemporary comparative ‘best’ (offset) practices, several weaknesses of India’s offsets policy are identified. These are weighed against the huge market leverage that India’s burgeoning defence market can bring to ensure progress towards defence industrial self-reliance. Finally, it offers policy recommendations on the Indian offset experience.

This chapter traces the reception of Nicholas Ostrovskii’s socialist-realist classic How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’ stal,’ 1934) in China, from its first appearance in the late 1930s through the ideology-driven first decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) until the present. This chapter further explores the many roles attributed to the novel’s protagonist Pavel Korchagin, from war-hero and popular icon of the Mao era to unlikely role model during the reform period and, finally, symbol of nostalgia in post-socialist China. By illustrating how the novel has been thoroughly indigenized and become inseparable both from China’s revolutionary history as well as its popular culture, this chapter comments on the discursive complexity of this unlikely Red Classic and its afterlife in China.

In theory, the Soviet Union offered all nationalities under its borders, at least in principle, cultural and territorial autonomy, education in one’s native language, the right to self-determination and individual rights which promised equality under Soviet law regardless of religion, nationality, place of origin and language. In reality, they found the Koreans on their eastern borders to be worrisome and problematic. Illegal Korean migrants kept coming across Soviet borders pushing the population of approximately 81,000 in 1917 to nearly 200,000 by 1937. How would the Soviet state offer the Koreans the putative legal, cultural and territorial rights under Soviet socialism? Afanasii A. Kim was one of the first Soviet Korean leaders who had to negotiate between serving the state and his community. In the 1930s, the state, its policies and institutions became more repressive due to geo-political threats (Germany, Poland and Japan) on both the eastern and western Soviet borders. What became of Afanasii A. Kim?

This chapter explores the ways in which the intersection between hip hop and Christianity brings about a recasting of what is assumed to be the norm within Christianity. It provides examples of how contemporary hip hop and Christianity in Kenya interact through a focus on youth, both in their historical roots and in current practices. Although music and Christianity have been regarded as incarnational processes that narrate themselves in lived experiences that document social reality, the chapter argues that hip hop provides Christianity a contested arena for self-expression and indigenization because of its emergence from a socioeconomic context of depressed economies and livelihoods neoliberalism fuels, as well as through multidirectional processes, multiracial identities, and multicultural interactions.

This chapter is about the emplacement of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Singapore and Penang. Through archival and field research the chapter demonstrates the early indigenization of evangelism, through the agency of independent lay missionaries such as the Brethren Movement and their Asian coworkers, and the creation of independent, locally led churches, whose revivalist impact was felt across Southeast Asia. Moreover, the chapter discusses how improved communication and travel facilitated this interconnected world for Christians, even in early modernity. It also pays particular attention to the negotiations between local Christians and missionaries over the education and religious leadership of women, which led to the eventual transformation of gender roles in Asia.

This chapter explains how the confidence that permeated the missions field in the middle of the nineteenth century quickly dissipated and how missionaries responded to perceptions of their failures. The rapid missionary expansion in the nineteenth century inspired violent response, particularly in China, which continued to outlaw Christian evangelization. Not just in China, but worldwide, Christian missions faced slow growth, and missionary leaders grew impatient. This chapter examines the participation of German missionaries at a series of international conferences held in Liverpool, Shanghai, and the Vatican in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spurred by these conferences, German missionary leaders argued that creating a Chinese church was a crucial component of missionary work. The chapter also examines how national rivalries prevented missionaries from creating a united front in China.

This chapter focuses on German missionary work in China, in particular the work of the Berlin Missionary Society and the Society of the Divine Word in the decades before and after 1900. It examines how the missionaries responded to a new political and social landscape after the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The first decade of the twentieth century was a moment of missionary optimism for the BMS and the SVD. The cataclysmic events of the Boxer Uprising convinced German missionaries that Christianity was going to replace Confucianism. At the same time, German missionaries began to introduce new initiatives for more Chinese church independence, even though they continued to evince anti-Confucian attitudes and beliefs.

This chapter asks: If by the 1920s, both German missionary societies had embraced the impetus to transfer control to Chinese church leaders, why did independence still remain such a slow and arduous process? The chapter argues that persistent political, social, and economic instability hindered the missionaries from giving their Chinese Christian leaders more power. The Chinese themselves also thought that they were not ready for church independence. Ultimately, a series of catastrophic political events—the escalation of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933—catalyzed the Germans to relinquish their power.

In 1919, Benedict XV issued a pronouncement on Catholic missions, Maximum illud. It was a searing criticism of existing practice and was apparently inspired importantly by reports to the Vatican by the dissident priests in China. It castigated missionary bishops for neglecting the proper education of indigenous priests and for not installing indigenous bishops. It criticized foreign missionaries for their national chauvinism and their inadequate language skills. There was evidence of much resentment at these charges by China missionaries. Lebbe, who had been dispatched to Europe by the apostolic visitor in early 1920 to minister to Chinese students there, went to Rome and was warmly received by the pope and other leaders of the church. In 1922, a new pope sent a resident apostolic delegate to represent him in China: Celso Costantini, who convened the first all-China council of bishops and began appointing Chinese priests as bishops.

Chapter I examines the relationship between Mudimbe’s intellectual training among the Benedictines and his subsequent critique of the colonial and neo-colonial orders. What is at issue here is his ability to mobilise creatively the ‘old’ knowledge of the ‘colonial library’ – biblical exegesis, religious and missionary/Christian history, ethnography (Baluba mythology), and Greco-Latin philology and mythology – to challenge (via Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, and Herodotus) the historical and political myths and ideological ‘fables’ which have since the Renaissance contributed to African evangelisation and historiography, the idea of Africa, the construction of sectarian identity politics in contemporary Congo-Zaire, and the indigenization of the Bible by clerics such as Placide Tempels. Main texts under discussion: L’Autre Face du royaume (1973), Entre les eaux (1973), The Invention of Africa (1988), Shaba II (1989), Parables and Fables (1991), The Idea of Africa (1994), Les Corps glorieux (1994), Tales of Faith (1997) and Carnets de Berlin (2006).

The Scottish diaspora in Australasia exhibits many of the characteristics of colonialism and post-colonialism. Initially the Presbyterian churches reflected their largely Free Church origins, with its Calvinism, memories of the Disruption, and evangelical churchmanship. In the Victorian period it again mirrored the Scottish Church’s opening up to mission, biblical criticism, and evolution. Two World Wars both strengthened the links to Scottish theology and encouraged a transition to ecumenism, especially in the Uniting Church of Australia, and to indigenization, with growing attention to Asian and to aboriginal and Maori theology. American influences became increasingly evident in pastoral theology. However, the personal and institutional links to all four Scottish theological faculties, Aberdeen, St Andrews, Edinburgh, and Glasgow remained and remain creative and strong.