Efficacy, Truth, and Silence:Language Ideologies in Fijian Christian Conversions

摘要

Scholarship on Christian conversion in indigenous societies has highlighted thenways in which many missionaries have considered their effectiveness to derivenfrom their representation of universal truth. Claiming to speak for the univer-nsally true God, and teaching people how to read about God as well as speaknto him in prayer, missionaries have often justified their efforts and explainedntheir success with reference to truth versus falsehood. Local audiences,nhowever, have not always correlated truth and efficacy in the same way, asnshown in recent work on Christian conversion in colonial and neocolonial con-ntexts (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; 1997; Keane 2007; Rafael 1988; Robbinsn2004). Indeed, for missionized subjects, distinguishing between truth and effi-ncacy, and evaluating their alignment, can be critical tasks whose executionnshapes the mission encounter.