Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion
Eric Reinders
Abstract
To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views o ... More
Keywords: Victorians, religious identity, Protestant missionary, Chinese religion, mind-body dualism, ritual language, kowtow
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520241718 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520241718.001.0001 |
