Abstract
Race and Redemption, a volume in the Studies in the History of Christian Missions series, makes a very significant contribution to understanding “the complex interactions and apparent contradictions of western Christianity’s encounter with indigenous peoples” (8). The book, focused on the interaction of British missionaries with people and cultures of the Pacific Islands, is not a chronological investigation of the links between race and redemption in the time frame and geography indicated in the title. Author Jane Samson, professor of history at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, acknowledges that this approach “might strike readers as puzzling” (10). She states that she has chosen “[a] thematic rather than a chronological approach” because it has “proved useful in organizing . . . research findings, enabling [her] to underline the ongoing symbiosis of othering and brothering across a broad range of themes, concluding with that of gender” (9–10).
For Samson, “othering and brothering”—”the fundamental paradox in missionary accounts of Pacific peoples” (8)—provides the integrative framework of the themes of the book, which draws on “ethnography, material culture, and other sources of analysis produced by a variety of mission societies, time periods, locations and individuals” (10). The seven chapters of the book are preceded by a helpful and well-written introduction (1–11) and followed by a succinct conclusion (245–48). They are organized in two parts. Part 1 comprises three chapters: “Anthropologies,” “Networks,” and “Othering and Brothering.” Part 2 has four chapters: “Translations,” “Contemporary Ancestors?,” “Religion,” and “Engendering Difference.” The two-part structure does not have a clearly articulated rationale in this very engaging study, which has the theme of othering and brothering “at the heart of each of the . . . chapters” (8). Indeed, keeping this theme in mind is the best approach to reading the work.
In a sense, this book offers a fuller treatment of the author’s idea that “missionaries were as interested in integration as separation,” as expressed in her chapter “Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth-Century Mission Dilemmas in the South Pacific” (in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley [Eerdmans, 2001], 104). Here, in Race and Redemption, Samson has masterfully demonstrated that “across the Pacific world from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, . . . theological anthropology shaped [missionaries’] conceptions of Pacific peoples and cultures” (246). This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the encounter between Christians and “others.”