Description

The Asia Program and the Religion and Theology Program are pleased to recommend a special grant of $50,000 to Duke University for the project Christianity, Modernity, and Ethnicity in China-Southeast Asia Borderlands . Specifically, our funds would support an international conference planned for March 2022. The conference is linked to a larger collaborative research effort on the topic and will lead to an edited volume. Each of our programs would commit $25,000 to the project. The Asia Program would administer the grant.   The request came from Xi Lian, the David C. Steinmetz Distinguished Professor of World Christianity at Duke Divinity School. His research focus is China’s modern encounter with Christianity. With an award in 2015-16 from the ATS Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology program, he completed Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China (New York: Basic Books, March 2018). Xi is co-organizing the proposed project in partnership with Ralph Litzinger (cultural anthropology, Duke) and David Bradley (linguistics, La Trobe University). (Bradley served as a regional director for a Luce-supported project on endangered languages in China and Southeast Asia for the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (grant to University of Hawai’i in 2013).)   The project involves 18 scholars in fields including history, anthropology, linguistics, missiology, and gender and cultural studies, from Asian and Western countries, whose work centers on the ethnic, mostly upland and historically marginalized, minorities inhabiting the borderlands of China and Southeast Asia, particularly Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Participants, including in-group scholars, examine how the introduction of Christianity both disrupted traditional lifeways and empowered minority peoples against dominant groups and the secular state. The co-organizers write that this historical process included “both the weakening of elements of upland traditions and the preservation of minority languages, the strengthening of ethnic consciousness and solidarity, and improvements in education and public health.” The agency of these groups is the focus, as opposed to the agency of the missionaries. They continue, “The proposed research redirects scholarly attention to the peripheral peoples themselves and offers a corrective to a situation in which they are spoken of and for but do not speak. It will contribute to our understanding of World Christianity in a way that defies ideological oversimplifications. In exploring ethnic minorities’ engagement with Christianity and with the policies and dictates of majority-controlled nation-state in China and its Southeast Asian neighbors, the proposed study participates in those peoples’ construction of their own narratives while also advancing our understanding of the evolution of modern China and Southeast Asia.”   At our request, Charles Biff Keyes, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington (anthropology), reviewed the concept paper and found the project “well worth supporting,” noting that the organizers have attracted the most relevant scholars. He confirms, “Minority peoples in many countries are silenced and this project will be a ‘corrective’.”   The project aligns with several Asia Program goals and objectives, including furthering both China and Southeast Asian studies. It also fits well with program goals and objectives shared by both the Asia Program and the Religion and Theology Program, including supporting transnational and border-crossing efforts, and giving voice to marginalized groups and underrepresented knowledge makers.   The grant funds would cover participant travel to the conference and associated accommodation and meals. Additional support in the amount of $30,945 will come from the Duke Divinity School, Duke’s Asian Pacific Studies Institute, and research funds available to the co-organizers. The fallback date for the conference if travel restrictions remain in place due to the pandemic is fall 2022.   Submitted by Helena Kolenda and Jonathan VanAntwerpen