IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB265422705

The Anatomical Perspective: Epistemology and Ethics in a Colonial Missionary Clinic (2016)

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume: 58
Issue: 1
Pages: 211-241
Publication date: 2016
Language: English

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/anatomical-perspective-epistemology-and-ethics-in-a-colonial-missionary-clinic/950D1D9E2C0928FD5939FED4D9DD226F

DOI: 10.1017/S0010417515000626

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Anatomy Epistemology Medicine and ethics Hospitals and clinics Philosophy of medicine Human body Netherlands, colonies Missionaries and missions Calvinism 19th century Java (Indonesia)

For Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Central Java, two events bookended the radically transformative decade of the 1890s. The first, at the start of the decade, was the severing of relations with a charismatic Javanese leader named Sadrach, a decision that marked a redoubled commitment to suppress local Christian syncretism and to promote Calvinist orthodoxy in its stead. The second, at the decade's end, was the establishment of a modern clinic to serve as the flagship institution of a reformulated and reinvigorated missionary project. This article considers how these two seemingly disparate events are related. It suggests that much of what was troubling to missionaries about Sadrach and his indigenous Christian movement involved their understandings and uses of the body. I then consider how the mission attempted to use modern clinical experience and the anatomical perspective to address a range of ethical and epistemological problems posed by Sadrach and his followers' understandings of the body. The modern clinic would serve as a key pedagogical and disciplinary tool for the reordering of a vocabulary and syntax of bodies and souls, a grammar of religious and social expression.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB265422705

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Hoogte, Arjo Roersch van der; Pieters, Toine; (2013)
From Javanese Coca to Java Coca: An Exemplary Product of Dutch Colonial Agro-Industrialism, 1880--1920 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001252167/)

Article Pepijn Brandon; Marten Dondorp; (2023)
Nodes of knowledge, managing transfer: Shipbuilding and repair during the transformation from sail to steam (/p/isis/citation/CBB029547827/)

Book G. Roger Knight; (2018)
Sugar, Steam and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885 (/p/isis/citation/CBB104279760/)

Thesis Luthfi Adam; (2020)
Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1917 (/p/isis/citation/CBB491950509/)

Article Marco Sgarbi; (2022)
Galileo and the Epistemology of Anatomy (/p/isis/citation/CBB809395648/)

Article Parry, Bronwyn; (2013)
The Afterlife of the Slide: Exploring Emotional Attachment to Artefactualised Bodily Traces (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420756/)

Article Oosterhout, Dianne Van; (2008)
From Colonial to Postcolonial Irrigation Technology: Technological Romanticism and the Revival of Colonial Water Tanks in Java, Indonesia (/p/isis/citation/CBB000950519/)

Article Sebastiaan Broere; (2019)
Picturing Ethnopsychology: A Colonial Psychiatrist’s Struggles to Examine Javanese Minds, 1910–1925 (/p/isis/citation/CBB670172565/)

Article Zuidervaart, Huib J.; van Gent, Rob H.; (2004)
“A Bare Outpost of Learned European Culture on the Edge of the Jungles of Java”: Johan Maurits Mohr (1716-1775) and the Emergence of Instrumental and Institutional Science in Dutch Colonial Indonesia (/p/isis/citation/CBB000410765/)

Chapter Ertsen, M. W.; (2005)
Irrigation design in the Netherlands East Indies: The Tjipoenegara system in West Java (/p/isis/citation/CBB001180596/)

Book Axel Fliethmann; Christiane Weller; (2021)
Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today (/p/isis/citation/CBB235658573/)

Article Jacqueline Van Gent; (2019)
Rethinking Savagery: Slavery Experiences and the Role of Emotions in Oldendorp’s Mission Ethnography (/p/isis/citation/CBB518281777/)

Article McGregor, William B.; (2008)
Missionary Linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia: A History of the First Seventy Years (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211639/)

Article Fleck, Eliane Cristina Deckmann; (2014)
A abordagem historiográfica dos séculos XIX e XX sobre a atuação de médicos e boticários jesuítas na América platina no século XVIII (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420728/)

Article Fountain, Catherine; (2013)
Fray Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta's Work on California's Native Languages (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211989/)

Article Swiggers, Pierre; (2009)
David Zeisberger's Description of Delaware Morphology (1827) (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211626/)

Article Louis Fu; (2016)
Medical Missionaries to China and the Reformation of Anatomy (/p/isis/citation/CBB891770550/)

Article Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi; (2022)
Medical Missionaries and the Invention of the “Serai Hospital” in North-western British India (/p/isis/citation/CBB500519781/)

Article Fu, Louis; (2013)
The Protestant Medical Missions to China: Dr Thomas Richardson Colledge (1796--1879) and the Founding of the Macao Ophthalmic Hospital (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421963/)

Article Robertson, Jo; (2009)
The Leprosy Asylum in India: 1886--1947 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932687/)