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Emily J. Manktelow
Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical perspectives By Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena and Karen Vallgårda, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
The flowering of colonial-missions history is increasingly acknowledged and oftmentioned in broader fields of colonial and global history. Mission archives are particularly rich, providing grassroots perspectives on the colonial encounter, and the wider dynamics of the cultural, social and political "contact zone." Mission sources are not without their problems, challenges and difficulties (cultural and racial arrogance being just one of many), but this book once again demonstrates that such sources also provide a unique culture-scape with which to approach modern global and colonial history. One aspect of the mission archive's value is the introspection of its actors, whose personal papers are often so fraught with the ambivalences of the cultural encounter. The emotional lives of missionaries, argue the editors of this collection, are particularly richly documented, and the individual chapters "work from the premise that the prominence of emotions in mission archives during this period is not coincidental, but is related to several factors," including "the importance of emotion in the Christian faith; the intimate nature of the contact required for the achievement of missionary goals; the increasing currency of the notion of individual emotional experience; changes in the political formations within which overseas missionaries operated; and the specific nature of the promotional efforts required to finance and generate support...