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In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly viewed Christian conversion as a form of rupture from the past. But what happens if the people with whom they work begin to speak a language of continuity and sameness with that past? In this richly contextualized study, Liana Chua explores how a largely Christian Bidayuh community has been reconfiguring its relationship to its old animist rituals through the trope and politics of "culture." Placing her ethnography in dialogue with developments in the nascent anthropology of Christianity, Chua argues that such efforts at 'continuity speaking' are the product not only of Malaysian cultural politics, but also of conversion and Christianity itself. This book invites scholars to rethink the nature and scope of conversion, as well as the multifarious, yet distinctive, forms that Christianity can take.
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CONTEMPOR ARY A NTHROPOLOGY OF R ELIGION A series published with the Society for the Anthropology of Religion Laurel Kendall, Series Editor Curator, Division of Anthropology, America Museum of Natural History Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Body/Meaning/Healing By Thomas J. Csordas The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar By Michael Lambek After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark By Andrew Buckser Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future By Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation By Daniel Martin Varisco Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen: Ruling Families in Transition By Gabrielle Vom Bruck A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Muslim Java By Ronald Lukens-Bull The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar By Eva Keller Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London By Hermione Harris Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia: From the 16th to the 21st Century By Thomas Gibson Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland By Gladys Ganiel Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines By Brian M. Howell
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Missions and Conversions: Creating the Montagnard-Dega Refugee Community By Thomas Pearson Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives By Maya Mayblin Direct Sales and Direct Faith in Latin America By Peter S. Cahn Shamans, Spirituality, and Cultural Revitalization: Explorations in Siberia and Beyond By Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer Spirits without Borders: Vietnamese Spirit Mediums in a Transnational Age By Karen Fjelstad and Nguyễn Thị Hiền The Halal Frontier: Muslim Consumers in a Globalized Market By Johan Fischer Faith in Objects: American Missionary Expositions in the Early Twentieth Century By Erin L. Hasinoff The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo By Liana Chua Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy By Edith Turner
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The Christianity of Culture Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo
Liana Chua
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THE CHRISTIANITY OF CULTURE
Copyright © Liana Chua, 2012. All rights reserved. Parts of Chapter 4 were previously published in “Fixity and Flux: Bidayuh (Dis)engagements with the Malaysian Ethnic System.” Ethnos 72 (2): 262–288. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publi