Abstract
Inculturation, one of several terms that describe how Christianity adapts to a plurality of cultures, is generally used in a unidirectional sense, emanating from centers of power to peripheral regions through activities such as missionary work. Antonio Sison seeks to reverse this flow, showing how indigenous cultures incorporate the Christian religion into their own cultural matrices. He does so by means of three case studies from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, respectively. S.’s originality lies in his use of visual materials, which he treats as genuine expressions of indigenous popular theology. His interpretive strategy is to pursue three hermeneutical paths that tie the case studies together. They are: (1) suspicion, by placing the expressions in the context of colonialism and the imposition of Western notions; (2) appreciation of the distinctiveness of the indigenous cultures themselves; and (3) serendipity, or the accidental or unintended insights along the way.
S.’s first study centers on the Cameroonian artist and theologian Engelbert Mveng, whose mosaics and altarpieces replicate the composition of Christian medieval art, but with African masks. His 1988 resurrection mural has Christ ascending over the skyscrapers and slums of Nairobi. Mveng’s theological writings contain searing critiques of missionary attempts to destroy indigenous images.
The Latin American piece is set partly in Chicago and depicts the wall murals on apartment buildings in Hispanic neighborhoods. One triptych shows the Virgin of Guadalupe watching over the migrants as they cross the Rio Grande on the right; the center portrays the rising Mexican workforce; and the left features a woman with a college degree. Unlike the African case, the notion of Mary as protector of the oppressed draws from a variety of cultural sources, from the Magnificat of Scripture to the Spanish virgin of Extremadura to the apparition to the humble peasant Juan Diego outside Mexico City. This is elaborated with references to liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor.
The Asian section draws from the author’s personal journey as a Filipino Christian now teaching in the US. The focal artwork is a statue of a Black Jesus carrying the cross on his shoulder in a huge annual procession through the streets of Manila. Such processions functioned both as a survival of precolonial Filipino style ritual and as an act of resistance to Spanish colonialism.
While it could be argued that such indigenous inculturation is hardly unique to postcolonial situations, S.’s concrete analyses lend vividness and vitality to his theme.