Article ID: CBB518281777

Rethinking Savagery: Slavery Experiences and the Role of Emotions in Oldendorp’s Mission Ethnography (2019)

unapi

By the late 18th century, the Moravian mission project had grown into a global enterprise. Moravian missionaries’ personal and emotional engagements with the people they sought to convert impacted not only on their understanding of Christianity, but also caused them to rethink the nature of civilization and humanity in light of their frontier experiences. In this article I discuss the construction of ‘savagery’ in the mission ethnography of C. G. A. Oldendorp (1721–87). Oldendorp’s journey to slave-holding societies in the Danish West Indies, where Moravian missions had been established in the 1730s, and his own experiences of the violence of these societies had such an impact on him that his proto-ethnographic descriptions of all the inhabitants of the Danish West Indies – from slaves to slaveholders – broke with traditional representations of savagery. He suggested two different paths for emotional transformation: one for slaves, and another for slaveholders. His views aligned with those of the later abolitionists, yet he was writing sixty years before those movements first gained public momentum in Great Britain. In many ways, therefore, this early mission ethnography reshaped contemporary understandings of ‘savagery’. I consider how Oldendorp did this in relation to a Moravian theology of the heart and love of Christ, the emerging Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of ‘love of humanity’ and its use in colonial encounters between missionaries and local people, and especially the emotions that were provoked by the extreme violence of the slavery system in this colonial contact zone.

...More
Included in

Article Bruce Buchan; Linda Andersson Burnett (2019) Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-7). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB518281777/

Similar Citations

Book Stephen Snelders; (2017)
Leprosy and Colonialism: Suriname Under Dutch Rule, 1750-1950 (/isis/citation/CBB424179135/)

Chapter Livingstone, David N.; (2005)
Scientific Inquiry and the Missionary Enterprise (/isis/citation/CBB001022831/)

Book Storey, William Kelleher; (2008)
Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (/isis/citation/CBB000954010/)

Chapter Fleischer, Alette; (2010)
(Ex)Changing Knowledge and Nature at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1652--1700 (/isis/citation/CBB001031669/)

Article Costa, Kelerson Semerene; (2007)
Natureza, colonização e utopia na obra de João Daniel (/isis/citation/CBB000831580/)

Book Julius Sherrard Scott; (2018)
The Common Wind: Afro-American currents in the age of the Haitian Revolution (/isis/citation/CBB631076423/)

Book Abrams, Jeanne E.; (2013)
Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health (/isis/citation/CBB001420192/)

Book Russo, Jean Burrell; Russo, J. Elliott; (2012)
Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America (/isis/citation/CBB001421809/)

Article Weaver, Karol K.; (2012)
Surgery, Slavery and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Caribbean (/isis/citation/CBB001251768/)

Article Rafael de Bivar Marquese; (2022)
A Tale of Two Coffee Colonies: Environment and Slavery in Suriname and Saint-Domingue, ca. 1750–1790 (/isis/citation/CBB450823002/)

Authors & Contributors
Marquese, Rafael de Bivar
Julius Sherrard Scott
Tavolacci, Laura
Irving-Stonebraker, Sarah
Dizon, Mark
Sen, Sudipta
Journals
Journal of Jesuit Studies
Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Imago Mundi: A Review of Early Cartography
History of Meteorology
History and Technology
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Publishers
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Davis
McMaster University (Canada)
Verso
New York University Press
Manchester University Press
Concepts
Colonialism
Missionaries and missions
Slavery
Netherlands, colonies
Science and religion
Christianity
People
Cacho de Villegas, Alejandro
Washington, George
Madison, James
João Daniel
Jefferson, Thomas
Adams, John
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century
16th century
Places
South America
Suriname
Netherlands
South Africa
North America
Caribbean
Institutions
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
Dutch East India Company
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment