This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a ...crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.
To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in ...the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’Of Revelation and Revolutionillustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away the Christian elements of their cultures. Christian assertions about change are hard for anthropologists to credit because anthropological and Christian models of change are based on different models of time and belief. Unless anthropologists reconsider their nearly exclusive commitment to continuity thinking and the models of time and belief that ground it, the anthropology of Christianity will continue to face handicaps to its development.
In this article, we revisit the relationship among institutions, human capital, and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are ...misspecified, both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential measurement error in these variables, and that this misspecification is at the root of the very large returns of human capital, about four to five times greater than that implied by micro (Mincerian) estimates, found in the previous literature. Using cross-country and cross-regional regressions, we show that when we focus on historically determined differences in human capital and control for the effect of institutions, the impact of institutions on long-run development is robust, whereas the estimates of the effect of human capital are much diminished and become consistent with micro estimates. Using historical and cross-country regression evidence, we also show that there is no support for the view that differences in the human capital endowments of early European colonists have been a major factor in the subsequent institutional development of former colonies.
Highlighting the language ideologies and speech practices critical to missionization, this paper examines the introduction of evangelical Christianity in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, and its uptake in ...local communities. It analyzes the mission’s linguistic and cultural ideologies—valorization of the vernacular language, rejection of cultural practices—and the consequences of these opposing valences. It details Bosavi pastors’ mediation and transmission of these ideologies through their translating practices, showing how local interpretations produced innovation in linguistic categories and transformation of cultural repertoires. I argue that this perspective contributes to continuity and discontinuity debates in the anthropology of Christianity. This paper also details how this mission’s tropes of division and separation and oppositional binaries when translated in Bosavi provided the linguistic categories that guided Bosavi Christians in reshaping the moral geographies of their communities. Finally, it addresses related shifts in the local significance of place and emplaced experiences more broadly, what I call “dis-placement,” the result of mission initiatives carried out by local pastors through which relationships between persons, activities, memory, and place become transformed and lose their meaning.
In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote ...people never directly "missionized," the Urapmin began in the 1960s to send young men to study with Baptist missionaries living among neighboring communities. By the late 1970s, the Urapmin had undergone a charismatic revival, abandoning their traditional religion for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness and driven by a constant sense of millennial expectation. Exploring the Christian culture of the Urapmin, Joel Robbins shows how its preoccupations provide keys to understanding the nature of cultural change more generally. In so doing, he offers one of the richest available anthropological accounts of Christianity as a lived religion. Theoretically ambitious and engagingly written, his book opens a unique perspective on a Melanesian society, religious experience, and the very nature of rapid cultural change.
This study examines the effect of European missionary activities in colonial Africa on the subsequent evolution of culture, as measured by religious beliefs. The empirical results show that ...descendants of ethnic groups that experienced great missionary contact are today more likely to self-identify as Christian. This correlation provides evidence that foreign missionaries alter the religious beliefs of Africans, and that these beliefs persist as they are passed on from parents to children. Put differently, the results show that historic evens can have a lasting impact on culture. The findings also provide rare empirical evidence of the historical determinants of long-run religious conversion. The findings provide one example of the historical origins of cultural differences.
Volumes of historical archives in China have been digitised, from which various datasets have been constructed for scholarly inquiry. Furthermore, the excavation of thousands of archaeological sites ...provided detailed data about prehistoric development across China's landmass. As a result, there has been remarkable progress in quantitative studies on China's past. This article reviews recent work in five theme areas to provide a background for the papers included in this special issue. These themes include state formation, Confucianism, human capital, Christian missionaries, and long‐term persistence studies. The five papers in this issue fall into these themes and are introduced where appropriate.
Why does sub-Saharan Africa exhibit the highest rates of gender inequality in the world? This article evaluates the contributions of Christian missionary societies in German East Africa to current ...socioeconomic gender inequalities in Tanzania. Previous studies ascribe a comparatively benign long-term effect of missionary societies, in particular of the Protestant denomination, on economic, developmental, and political outcomes. This article contrasts that perception by focusing on the wider cultural impact of the civilizing mission in colonial Africa. The analysis rests on a novel georeferenced dataset on German East Africa—based on digitized colonial maps and extensive historical records available in the German colonial archives—and the most recently available DHS-surveys. The results highlight the formative role of Catholic missionary societies in German East Africa in shaping gender inequalities currently witnessed in Tanzania.
Taking as a point of departure Fernandez's survey (1978), this review seeks to show how research on African Independent Churches (AICs) has been reconfigured by new approaches to the anthropology of ...Christianity in Africa, in general, and the recent salient popularity of Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) in particular. If the adjectives "African" and "Independent" were once employed as markers of authentic, indigenous interpretations of Christianity, these terms proved to be increasingly problematic to capture the rise, spread, and phenomenal appeal of PCCs in Africa. Identifying three discursive frames-Christianity and "traditional religion," Africa and "the wider world," religion and politics-which organize(d) research on AICs and PCCs in the course of the past 25 years, this chapter critically reviews discussions about "Africanization," globalization and modernity, and the role of religion in the public sphere in postcolonial African societies.
Why are some former colonies more democratic than others? The British Empire has been singled out in the debates on colonialism for its benign influence on democracy. Much of this scholarship has ...focused on colonialism's institutional legacies; has neglected to distinguish among the actors associated with colonialism; and has been nation-state focused. Our subnational approach allows us to isolate the democracy effects of key actors operating in colonial domains—Christian missionaries—from those of colonial powers. Missionaries influenced democracy by promoting education; education promoted social inclusivity and spurred social reform movements. To make our case, we constructed colonial and postcolonial period district datasets of India and conducted panel analysis of literacy and democracy variations backed by case studies. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom of the centrality of the effects of British institutions on democracy, instead also highlighting the missionaries' human capital legacies.
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