Religious Entrepreneurs? by Howard Burton

Author:Howard Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Religion
Publisher: Open Agenda Publishing
Published: 2021-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Questions for Discussion:

Do you think that if Max Weber were alive today he would still believe in the “Weberian secularization thesis”?

If all global history is, as Nile says, “microhistory writ large”, are there times when it is simply impossible to do, or do sufficiently well, for practical reasons?

V. Terrains of Exchange

Motivations and responses

HB: In Terrains of Exchange you break things up, as I understand it, into three basic categories.

The first category is that of the response by the indigenous community when first confronted with a foreign presence. Missionaries come to a particular place, say, and engender a meeting of cultures. How do the locals react? How do they respond to new messages and potentially new technologies?

The second part describes the internal developments and adaptations of the religion that result from, or are at least related to, these exchanges to various aspects of the religion, such as the development of a Hindu Sufism.

Lastly, you talk about how these exchanges might, in turn, spur these religious groups on to export their own ideas further afield. A moment ago, you referred to Bombay as a source of sending Islamic ideas to other parts of the world; and in your book you talk about the exportation of Islam to places like Detroit and Japan.

One of the things which is perhaps obvious in retrospect, but certainly something I hadn’t expected, is how, in the first category, the responses can be—and presumably often are—in two places simultaneously. That is to say that there is a response where the exchange directly occurs, but there is also, inevitably, a response back in the “home country” as well.

Take the case of missionaries. It’s not just that the missionaries go to various places and affect, in one way or another, the views and attitudes of those whom they encounter. There’s also the story of what happens to them personally, and how they subsequently affect the cultures that they return to, be it Oxbridge colleges or what have you.

There is a certain sense of mutual intellectual and religious development that is occurring. It may not be perfectly balanced and equitable—and in many cases it certainly wasn’t—but that doesn’t deny the fact that it’s a two-way street.

NG: Certainly what is at the heart of the method of religious economy, thinking about global history’s patterns of exchange and outcomes of exchange, is that old, social scientific method of a dialectic: something happens, the opposite happens, then a third thing comes out—the model of a thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

What I see happening over the roughly 150 years I deal with in the book, around 1800 to 1950 is, as you’ve said, these three stages. I call one set of chapters “Evangelicals”, the next is “Innovators” and the third is “Exporters”. These feature the interactions, and adaptations between different Muslim, Christian, and Hindu religious entrepreneurs, which lead to new syntheses, such as Hindu Sufism.

What I see happening is a large-scale global process of Christian missionaries under the influence, and with the ability, of imperial outreach through the British Empire.

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