Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns adroitly accomplishes what the best scholarly monographs hope to achieve--crafting ethnographic detail into the foundation of a remarkable theoretical contribution to anthropology and the social sciences. In this densely-packed work, Keane explores semiotics, material culture, language, ideology, and identities intersecting in the colonial missionary encounter of Dutch Calvinists in Indonesia. He constructs (and then deconstructs) the oppositional dichotomies of this encounter to purposefully “discern more clearly both a number of assumptions that might otherwise pass unremarked and the paradoxes they produce” (4). Through his analysis of various material conflicts stemming from ideological contrasts, Keane powerfully comments on how people situate words and things in relation to agency.
Christian Moderns is organized into three parts. The first section introduces the theoretical framework of the book. Keane set ups an interplay between language, objectification, and purification. Subsequent sections of the book employ this framework in their exploration of specific case studies. In the introduction, Keane establishes the purpose of Christian Moderns. This book is not a history of Dutch Calvinists in Indonesia. Rather, it positions the question, “What has agency?” as the analytical lens for exploring moralities and modernities in this encounter. By acknowledging his use of oppositions as an analytical tool, Keane brings readers to one of the book’s central paradoxes: the proselytizer cannot construct the unconverted as completely Other. Each party recognizes a fundamental level of similarity. In the mission encounter, for example, the Calvinist assumes the unconverted have souls that are capable of conversion. Subsequent conflicts arise as the parties negotiate commonality and difference. As a globalized religion, Christianity has long wrestled with such issues of local practice. How and why, for example, do Dutch Calvinists maintain difference from Sumbanese believers? How do these questions change when both parties see themselves as united under the broader identity of Christianity? Keane points to the broader significance of these tensions. “I am not simply describing a problem peculiar to missionaries. I am pointing to paradoxes we may face ourselves” (25).
Parts II and III put Keane’s theory to work on specific case studies. Part II analyzes moral problems stemming from the objectification of language within the context of Sumbanese ritual life. Keane explores the controversy between colonial Dutch Calvinists and Sumbanese Indonesians over the use of scripture and the appropriate role of sacrificial offerings. Christian religious texts are assigned various uses as devotional readings, prayers, and tools for divination. Keane explains these uses as manifesting contrasting agencies and thus problematically advancing different relationships between divine and human existence. Likewise, agency is at stake in disposing of or partaking of food used in traditional Indonesian religio-cultural practices. This debate not only challenges the semiotic ideologies of the contrasting religious systems but also probes the boundaries separating religious and cultural identity. In Part III, Keane continues to develop his concepts of semiotic ideology and representational economy through an exploration of the introduction of money into Sumbanese culture during Dutch colonialism.
Christian Moderns stands apart from many academic ethnographies of Christianity. “This book takes doctrines seriously,” Keane explains. “There are simply too many things that we cannot understand if we do not listen to what religious believers have to say about their cosmos and its implications for how they set about acting in, and on, the world” (32). The usual anthropological pitfalls of excessive empathy or cold objectivity do not plague Christian Moderns. Giving brief, but meaningful snippets as to his own religious background, Keane finds a remarkable balance between respecting his subjects and subjecting their beliefs to academic analysis.
Judging the book only by its title, many prospective readers might assume that Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter only relates to the anthropology of Christianity or colonialist studies. This assumption, however, would be quite wrong. Any social scientist would be hard-pressed not to find direct application of this book to his or her own research. The bookshelves of every folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and anthropologist should hold a copy of Christian Moderns--and this copy should be kept dust-free from frequent use.
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[Review length: 675 words • Review posted on February 16, 2009]