Wesleyan University

Hegemony, Imperialism, and the Construction of Religion in East and Southeast Asia
Author(s): Thomas David Dubois
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 4, Theme Issue 44: Theorizing Empire (Dec., 2005),
pp. 113-131
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 2005),113-131 ? WesleyanUniversity2005ISSN:0018-2656
HistoryandTheory,ThemeIssue44 (December

HEGEMONY, IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION

OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA1

THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

ABSTRACT

EdwardSaid's concept of Orientalismportraysthe high tide of nineteenth-centuryimpe-

rialism as the defining moment in the establishmentof a global discursive hegemony, in
which Europeanattitudesand concepts gained a universalvalidity.The idea of "religion"
was centralto the civilizing mission of imperialism,and was shaped by the interests of a
number of colonial actors in a way that remains visibly relevant today. In East and
SoutheastAsia, however, many of the concerns that statecraft,law, scholarship,and con-
version had for religion transcendedthe Europeanimpact. Both before and after the peri-
od of Europeanimperialism,states used religion to engineer social ethics and legitimate
rule, scholars elaboratedand enforced state theologies, and the missionaryfaithful voiced
the need for and natureof religious conversion.The real impact of this period was to inte-
grate pre-existing concerns into largerdiscourses, transformingthem in the process. The
ideals of nationalcitizenship and of legal and scholarly impartialityrecast the state and its
institutionswith a modernistsacrality,which had the effect of banishingthe religious from
the public space. At the same time, the missionarydiscourseof transformativeconversion
located it in the very personalrealm of sincerity and belief. The evolution of colonial-era
discourses of religion and society in Asia since the departureof Europeanimperialpower
demonstratesboth their lasting power and the degree of agency that remains implicit in
the idea of hegemony.

ANDPOSTCOLONIAL
I. RELIGION CRITIQUE

Of all the administrative, military, and commercial ventures undertaken during

the era of European imperialism, perhaps the most significant and lasting con-
struction project was the image the colonial enterprise created of itself. From
divine right to settle the frontier, to the benevolent hand of global capitalism, to
the need to protect hapless natives from rapacious rivals, discursive themes arose
to explain the necessity of a benevolent imperial presence in the colonies. Of
these, however, none was so deeply pervasive as the cultural, which cast the
European mission in the colonies as a sacred duty to protect, educate, and civi-
lize the native population. Since the late 1970s, and especially with the publica-

1. This articlederives froma paperpreparedfor the "CastingFaiths"workshopheld in Singapore

in 2005. Otherpapersfrom this workshopare being preparedfor publicationin an edited volume, and
will be cited below with the shorthandof "CF, forthcoming."I am indebtedto the participants,espe-
cially MaitriiAung-Thwin,RobertaWollons, Oscar Salemink, and Webb Keane, and to Ryan Bishop
and two anonymousreviewers for suggestions made on earlierdrafts.

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114 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

tion of Edward Said's immensely influential Orientalism,the focus has turned

back on Europe, on how the imperialpowers understoodand misunderstoodthe
rest of the world, and on how the range of images they created can be made to
speak about the fears and desires of the Europeanmetropole.
However, was the regime of Orientalistknowledge identified by Said some-
how unique to Westernimperialism?Said himself is somewhatequivocal on this
point. On the one hand,he characterizesthe controlof knowledge as a universal
function of power, acknowledgingthat"all culturesimpose correctionsupon raw
reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge." On the
other, he defines Orientalismas a characteristicallyWesternphenomenon,trac-
ing a persistentEuropeanobsession from Herodotusto the present day with an
imagined (and geographicallymobile) "Orient."In additionto this "internalcon-
sistency," EuropeanOrientalismalso had "a highly articulatedset of relation-
ships to the dominantculturesurroundingit," in otherwords, it evolved with his-
tory. For Said, the key moment came in the late eighteenth century, when the
British and French attained their "positional superiority"over the Levant, and
more importantlywhen their images of the Orient had accumulatedto such a
mass that they could become self-referential.In other words, while the West has
always sought to define its orientalother,this period markedboth a new will to
power and the firm establishmentof a global regime of knowledge. To the extent
that these two factors did not materialize in other empires-a thesis that Said
implies but stops short of saying-the Westernexperiencewas a unique one.2
The real significance of Orientalistand other imperial structuresof thought
lies in the question of hegemony. For Said, the discoursesof Europeanimperial-
ism remain significant because many were inheritedby the United States after
the Second World War, allowing their basic features to continue to shape the
structuresand concepts of the modernworld. Herein lies the fundamentalques-
tion of imperial power. While the United States continues to exercise unparal-
leled political and militarymight, recent events have demonstratedall too clear-
ly the limits to its ability or that of any other power to impose its will on the
world. At the same time, the language and symbols of politics, economics, and
culture do remain largely American, or at least Western,in origin. This would
seem to belie the Gramsciansense of hegemony, in which the ideas, symbols,
and categories of the powerful gain a universal currency,and are unknowingly
but willingly adopted by the powerless, against whose interests they work.
However, despite Gramsci'sMarxistheritage,it is importantto rememberthathe
did not view the realm of ideas simply as a deterministicfunction of class dom-
ination, but ratheras a technique of it, "a willed and a knowing deception"by
those with a correspondingeconomic interest. His call to reclaim the realm of
thought assumes the ability of the oppressed classes to do so, and thus that the
conceptual control at the center of ideological hegemony is less transformative
of consciousness thanit is an independentfield to be fought over and won.3Later

2. EdwardW. Said, Orientalism(New York:Vintage Books, 1979), 22-24, 67.

3. An Antonio GramsciReader: Selected Writings,1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (London:Law-
rence and Wishart,1999), 196.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 115

scholars have not abandonedthe idea of a transformativeelement, hidden in the

deeper messages encoded in practice.This idea would be taken up in the context
of religious conversion, specifically the notion by John and Jean Comaroff that
the transformationof the routinesand habits of daily life, ratherthan discourse,
would constitute a "colonizationof consciousness."4
Of the ideas thrown open to contestation during the Europeanencounter in
Asia, "religion"is one of the most interesting.Certainly,images of religion were
central to the colonial encounter,and featureprominentlyin many portrayalsof
Orientalism.TalalAsad andothershave focused on differentaspects of this prob-
lem, such as the changing role of Europeanand Christianuniversalism,the for-
mation of scholarly disciplines of knowledge, and the changing politics of mis-
sionary advocacy in creatinga set of scholarly and political standardsto which
other religions, particularlyIslam, were held.5Most of these works focus on the
period of most dramaticencounter,the long nineteenthcentury,and it is left to
the readerto seek the relevance of imperial-eradiscourses in more recent politi-
cal developments.
In this essay I would like to examine just what sort of influence European
imperialism might have had on the concept of "religion"in East and Southeast
Asia by comparing snapshotsof various official, scholarly, and missionary dis-
courses before and after the nineteenthcentury.Certainly,there is a great deal of
continuity throughoutthis entire period, and many of the concerns these groups
had with religion pre- and postdatedthe colonial experience. Any political enti-
ty would be concerned with defining, if not controlling, religion; the great pre-
colonial (meaning before the greatest period of Westernimpact) Asian empires
were no exception. Pre- and postcolonial officialdom was equally charged with
the administrationand legal adjudicationof religious institutionsand the eradi-
cation of various forms of heterodoxy.Scholarly elites investigatedthe customs
of the people and incorporatedthese images into largertheories of civilizational
progress. The faithful approachedthe religion of others with a much more per-
sonal mission to reform or replace it, or to seek an alternate enlightenment
through it. In each case, the implied understandingof religion appears to have
been shaped largely by the characterof the medium itself, the Europeaninflu-
ence simply adding new variablesto old equations.
However, certain concerns and representationswere unique to the period of
European imperialism,and left a lasting impact on what would follow as well.
By the late nineteenthcentury,the global reach of the British, French,and Dutch
empires, joined later by the United States and Japan,was an inescapable reality,
making it the first time since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenthcenturythat
the entire Asian continent was drawn into a single set of military,political, and
ideological conflicts. Western influence was pervasive enough that European
4. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1: Christianity,
Colonialism, and Consciousness in SouthAfrica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
5. Talal Asad, "TheConstructionof Religion as an AnthropologicalCategory,"in Genealogies of
Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianityand Islam, ed. Talal Asad (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27-54; Asad, "Religion, Nation-state,Secularism,"in Nation
and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehman
(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1999), 178-196.

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116 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

models of society and governance and the Christian missionary experience

became points of universal reference that anchoreda wide variety of postcolo-
nial discoursesof modernityand nationalliberation,and on questionsof religion
and its place in society, these were not silent. However, while the period of
European imperialism consolidated numerous discourses of religion, the
Europeansalone did not dictate their content.6Rather,I would argue thatthe real
impactof nineteenth-centuryimperialismwas to unify the conceptualvocabulary
used in the representationof religion, and furtherthat this was not simply a func-
tion of naked Europeanpower, nor was it necessarily intentional.Rather,it was
broughtaboutprimarilyby organizationalchanges in states and civil institutions,
and actually acceleratedafter the decline of imperialismitself.7

II. POLICYAND THE SOUL OF THE CITIZEN

AlthoughprecolonialAsian statecraftdemonstrateda rangeof approachestoward

religion, certain broad themes are evident. First, precolonial empires of every
stripe exercised a degree of monopoly over religious legitimacy and practice,
maintainingboth a ritualregimen thatlegitimized rulershipand practicalpolicies
that limited the political and fiscal autonomyof ecclesiastical structures.In most
cases, ideas one would now generally identify as "religious"were deeply entan-
gled with state legitimacy, whetherin termsof validatingclaims to kingship (as
in BuddhistSri Lanka) or as an embodimentof national ethics (as in Confucian
China).8As such, policy consisted generallyof maintainingstate monopoly over
access to and interpretationof this realm, preventing the emergence of hetero-
doxy, and upholding a national ethical code. Non-state religious groups were
clearly subjectedto state authority,or else were perceived as dissidents and por-
trayed as a seditious threatto public morality.9In practice, however, the mini-
malist administrationof most precolonialempiresmeant that these policies were
enforced at some distance from society. While especially dangeroussects might
be hunteddown with great ferocity, few states had the resourcesto pursuethese
policies at the local level. Campaigns such as the anti-Christianpurges of early
seventeenth-centuryTokugawa Japan, which scrutinized individual belief by
forcing villagers to renounce Christianityby defiling a picture of Mary and the
infant Jesus, and which was buttressedwith long-term structuresof village sur-
veillance, were thus the exception ratherthanthe rule.10Instead,the task of estab-

6. On the mutual creation of Indian and British discourses of religion, see Peter van der Veer,
ImperialEncounters:Religion and Modernityin India and Britain (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity
Press, 2001).
7. Prasenjit Duara has written extensively on the discursive interaction among imperialism,
nationalism, civilizational identity, and modernization. See especially his Sovereignty and
Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers,2003).
8. YarinaListon, "TheTransformationof BuddhismduringBritish Colonialism,"Journalof Law
and Religion 14, no. 1 (1999-2000), 189-210.
9. B. J. ter Haar,The WhiteLotus Teachingsin Chinese Religious History (Honolulu:University
of Hawai'i Press, 1999).
10. One set of village regulationsfrom 1662 begins with a demandthat "eachand everyone,down
to the last person,has been thoroughlyexamined .., .to make sure that thereis not a single Christian

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 117

lishing a nationalethical standardwas aimedmore at policing elites thanwinning

over the soul or conscience of the commoners.In late imperialChina,these elites
were trained and vetted by a Confucianexamination system that also provided
the route into the ranksof the civil service. Even when they had no official posi-
tion in the government,these scholarly elites were still expected to act as per-
sonal exemplars and proxy guardiansof state orthodoxy within local society."
The imperialismof the nineteenthcenturypresentedAsia with new forms and
models of governance,and its particularconcern for religious life in the colonies
in many ways represented a logical extension of earlier European trends.
Politically, the long-term evolution of what had become the Europeannation-
state was characterizedby the unprecedentedcentralizationof administrative,
political, and culturalpower, largely at the expense of local identities and actors,
and in this the extension of centralcontrol over religion had played an important
role. Acts such as the standardizationof a nationalcalendarof festivals or list of
accepted saints had come at the expense of local religious elites and identities
and were often met with violent resistance.12 At the same time, the increasingly
directadministrativeand culturalintegrationof the nationalsubject saw the state
take on a uniquereligious significance of its own. The new currencyof the nine-
teenth-centurynation-stateform was the citizen, and the need to court citizen
nationalism changed the natureof the state, recasting it as more than a political
body, but ratheras a nation, conceived famously in 1882 by Ernest Renan as "a
soul, a spiritualprinciple."'3In a way that would brook no competitionfrom the
Churchor local religious allegiances, the nation itself was made sacred, as were
its symbols, forms, and rituals.At the close of the eighteenthcentury,the highly
scripted festivals of the French Revolution illustratedboth this search for tran-
scendence and the need to transferthe sacrality of the former regime and the
Church(in particularthe local Church)onto the new nation.'4One hundredyears
later, such tactics and events had been copied in one form or anotherby states
throughoutEurope.
If these new states sought to give theircitizens a stake in a quintessentialsense
of national belonging, the extension of empire during the same period further
emphasized this sense of civilizationaldifference. Parallel to the developmentof
citizen nationalism at home, the cultural dimension inherent in the colonial
encounter was enhanced by a growing sense of Europeanexceptionalism. This
had the ironic effect of furtherincreasing the distance between colonizers and

in the village." Lateracts stipulatethat village surveillance regulations aim to root out "Christians,
of course," later adding murderersand other criminalsto the list. HermanOoms, TokugawaVillage
Practice: Class, Status, Power Law (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996), 356-357.
11. Timothy Brook, Prayingfor Power: Buddhismand the Formation of GentrySociety in Late-
Ming China (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversityPress, 1993).
12. This conflict was especially sharp when evidence of the miraculous was involved. David
Blackbourn,Marpingen:Apparitionsof the VirginMary in Nineteenth-CenturyGermany(New York:
Knopf, 1994); William A. Christian, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic in the Reign of Christ
(Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996).
13. Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York:Oxford
University Press, 1996), 52.
14. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution,transl.Alan Sheridan(Cambridge,Mass.:
HarvardUniversity Press, 1988).

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118 THOMASDAVID DUBOIS

colonized, even as the two were physically drawn togetherin greaternumbers.

British attitudes to Indian culture changed dramaticallyduring the nineteenth
century,and such actions as taking a local bride or joining a local religion that
had been informally acceptable at the beginning of the century were all but
unthinkableby the end.15Certainly much had happenedto harden British atti-
tudes towardlocal culture, but the greaterchange was in the perceptionof their
own. The transferof British administratorsthroughouta global empiremust cer-
tainly have emphasizeda starkdichotomybetween Britainand everyoneelse. At
the same time, confidence in the ability of culture to bind or unbind a political
unity was seen in the policies pursuedat home and abroad,and the strikingsim-
ilarities between the two. What could be called "internalcolonization," such as
the forced integrationof minority communitiesat home, acceleratedthroughout
the nineteenthcenturyand was both inspiredby and was a model for similarpoli-
cies pursued in the colonies.16However, although this sort of integrationmay
have taken place internally within colonies, it was not a goal for empires as a
whole. Colonial natives were ruled as subjects, not as citizens, and this meant
allowing and even encouragingculturaland religious differencebetween metro-
pole and colony. In practice, this dampenedofficial enthusiasmfor missioniza-
tion. While native religious structureswere frequentlyreformedand manipulat-
ed, they were less frequently targeted for replacement by the religion of the
metropole, and many colonial officials were at best ambivalenttowardmission-
ary activities by their own citizens. This was especially pronouncedwhen it was
feared that overly aggressive missionizationwould stir up internecine struggles
between ethnic groups or against European colonizers, as in the Dutch East
Indies, where missionaries were prohibitedfrom trying to convert the majority
Muslim population.17
At the same time, the strengthof Europeancitizen nationalismand the role of
religion in creatingit was not lost on Asian nationalists,who came to define their
own revolutionarymovements and the states that grew out of them in compara-
ble terms. At first the lessons were largely negative, revealing the dismaying
inability of even very large nations such as China to present a viable militaryor
culturaldefense againstthe betterorganizedimperialistpowers. Nationalistide-
ologues blamed the deficient patriotismof the citizen. As the pace of imperial-
ism reached its peak at the end of the nineteenthcentury,reformersthroughout
Asia came to express admirationfor the sense of individual responsibilityand
sacrifice that they perceived in Westernnations, and dismay at the lack of such

15. As reflectedin Britishreceptivityto ideals of Indianbeauty;see HarminderKaur,"Beautifying

the Indian:The Cultureof Cosmetics in Colonial UrbanIndia,"M.A. thesis, National University of
Singapore,2005.
16. EdmundBurke III, "The Terrorand Religion: Brittanyand Algeria," in Colonialism and the
Modern World:Selected Studies, ed. Gregory Blue, Martin Bunton, and Ralph Croizier (Armonk,
NY: M.E. Sharpe,2002), 40-50.
17. On the perceptionof culture in the mutual separationof religious and secular,see Peter van
der Veer, Imperial Encounters:Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton:Princeton
University Press, 2001). This was especially pronounced when it was feared that missionization
would stir up unrest or disruptcommerce. In the Dutch East Indies, for example, missionarieswere
prohibitedfrom attemptingto convert Muslims, and thus had to restricttheir activities to highland
tribes.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 119

virtues among their own people. From Sun Yat-Sen's characterizationof the
Chinese people as a "loose sheet of sand," individual particles yet unbound by
the cement of nationalism,to the largely hollow but portentousdeclarations of
"one country, one nation, and one language" pronounced by Indonesian and
Malay nationalists during the late 1920s, new leaders sought to harness the
power of Westernnationalforms by replicatingtheir hold on the individual.18
The fruits of such discourse can be seen in the attempts,successful or not, of
the states of postcolonialAsia to replicate sacred and transcendentprinciples of
nationalunity.These attemptsoccasionally used religion overtly,as in state cults
or religious monarchies,but more frequentlyinvolved the pseudo-sacralizationof
the state.This was most spectacularlypursuedthroughthe equationof the nation-
al body with cultic figures, such as the JapaneseMeiji Emperor,Mao Zedong, or
Sukarno, who were themselves the embodiment of transcendentstruggles for
nationalwealth andpower,Marxistdestiny,and anti-imperialistterritorialintegri-
ty, respectively.In each case the new state createdand held fast to a sacred ide-
ology that was meant to galvanize citizens by inspiringthem with visions of the
national past, present, and future. As it had in Europe, the national essence
became the soul of public life, while other beliefs, particularlythose defined as
"religious,"were often cordonedoff to an optional and privaterealm.19

III. LAW:THE TRIUMPHOF RATIONALITY

In contrast to policy, which addresses immediate concerns with practical solu-

tions, a code of law is more idealistic and foundational,in many ways replicat-
ing the role of religious doctrine in society. Law and religion act as parallel
sources of authorityby virtueof their embodimentof moral absolutes, although
the precise relationshipbetween them deserves closer examination.Durkheimian
anthropologylargely equates the two, portrayinglaw as a crystallization of a
society's sharedethical code.20In contrast,Max Weberseparateslaw from ethics,
considering the pursuitof moral goals distinct from practice, in particularfrom
legal procedure.For Weber,it is precisely the primacy of bureaucraticprocess
over substantiveethical concerns that marksthe rationalizationof legal authori-
ty. For historicalreasons, he considered this rationalizationto have existed only
in the modernWest, with the subservienceof form to the interpretationof ethics
18. Rebecca E. Karl, "CreatingAsia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth
Century,"American Historical Review 103 (October, 1998), 1096-1118. Echoing much of what he
had come to admire about Japanesenationalism, Sun characterizedthe Chinese people as a "single
pure race," with a "common blood, common language, common religion, and common customs."
Sun Yat-sen, San min chu i: The Three Principles of the People, transl. Frank W. Price, ed.
Commission for the Compilationof the History of the Kuomintang(Taipei:China Pub. Co., n.d.), 5.
19. Perhapsthe best example of how the sacralizationof the state necessitatedthe marginalization
of religion is the use of Shint6 by the Meiji elite to engineer a new Japanafter 1868. In response to
opposition, Shinto was officially divided in 1882 into Shrine and Sect Shinto. The former comprised
the system of nationallymandatedethics and ritualsand was defined as civic ethics, while the small
minority of discrete sects that made up the latter were defined as "religion."Sheldon M. Garon,
"Stateand Religion in ImperialJapan, 1912-1945," Journal of Japanese Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer,
1986), 273-302. The same type of comparison could easily be made for the place of Marxism in
China before the 1990s.
20. Sally Humphreys,"Lawas Discourse," History and Anthropology1 (1985), 241-264.

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120 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

(and thus the irrationalexercise of personalpower) having been characteristicof

theological andAsiatic legal systems.21Judgingfrom their actions, it appearsthat
colonial administratorsas well assumed the neutralityand rationalityof bureau-
craticprocedureand its superiorityto a system based on substantiveethics. Legal
reform in the British colonies often consisted precisely of the imposition of pro-
ceduralrationalizationonto extant systems, which as the debate over extraterri-
toriality shows, were considered yet incomplete and unreliable.22Variously by
administrativereformas in Yemen or by mistranslationas in India, "Britishcol-
onizers took the embodied, spoken, and interpretedtext and made it into a fixed,
abstracted,and disembodiedone."23
However, the assumptionthat legal procedurecan be value-neutraland dis-
tinct from ethical substanceis a tenuous one for both modern Westernand pre-
colonial Asian law. When Europeanlaw was transmittedto the colonies, it car-
ried with it a great deal of ethical (and often religious) baggage. British law in
African colonies, for example, regulatedthe practiceof daily life and in doing so
"transformedconceptions of time, space, property, work, marriage, and the
state," often according to an overtly Christianmission.24Beyond this, for the
prophets of rationality such as Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith, order, pre-
dictability, and procedurethemselves representan ethical ideal, wherein utility
and the common good themselves become the ultimateprinciple. Moreover,the
tension between procedureand substance was also evident in Asian legal codes
long before the Western impact. As had those in Europe, codes such as those
developed in precolonial China and Japanbalancedboth procedureand princi-
ple.25In these cases as well, representationwas an importantconcern, although
the politics was reversed. In China, the discursively dominantConfucian moral
ethic lay in historicalcontrastwith the use of law as a deterrent,and Confucius's
famous maxim that "if you use regulations to lead, and punishments to keep
order,the people will evade them and become shameless"demonstrateshow the
resort to formallaw was portrayedas corrosive to the transformativemoral mis-
sion of the ruler and was symptomatic of social decline.26Despite this, later
dynasties did rule by law, employing detailed legal codes and numerousinformal
texts to guide magistrates in procedure and precedent, and even coming to
employ the instrumentsof internationallaw when they proved useful. The dif-
21. Max Weber,Economy and Society: An Outline of InterpretiveSociology, ed. GuentherRoth
and Claus Wittich,transl.EphraimFischoff (New York:BedminsterPress, 1968), 809-815. A simi-
lar dichotomy appearsbetween his portrayalof Eastern"virtuosoreligions," based on the inherent
charismaticpower of ecstatics or mystics, andWesternreligions in which the priestly class acts as an
interchangeabletool of an activist absolutedeity. Max Weber,The Sociology of Religion, transl. and
ed. EphraimFischoff (London:Methuen, 1965).
22. On the relationshipbetween civilization and the revocation of extraterritoriality,see Alexis
Dudden, Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i
Press, 2005).
23. Sally Engle Merry,"Law and Colonialism,"Law and Society Review 25, no. 4 (1991), 917.
24. Ibid., 890-891.
25. For Japan,see the six-volume Law and Justice in TokugawaJapan: Materialsfor the History
of Japanese Law and Justice under the TokugawaShogunate1603-1867, ed. JohnWigmore (Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press, 1967). For China, see note 27, below.
26. This is followed by the charge, "if you use morality to lead, and rites to keep order, the peo-
ple will have a sense of shame and correctthemselves."Analects, 2:3.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 121

ference between late imperialChina and the governmentsthat followed the rev-
olution of 1911 is less one of substancethan of representation.While the impe-
rial Chinese state sought to portrayitself and its decisions as paternalistically
moral, since the early twentiethcenturythe language of choice has shifted to one
of procedure,most recently beginning in late 1989, with the call by the newly
appointedSecretaryGeneralJiang Zemin to "use law to rule the country"(yi fa
zhi guo).27
In some cases this type of representationwas employed in orderto mask deep-
er interestsand ideologies in what might be characterizedas a ritualof legitima-
tion. Perhapsthe best example of this is the very public adoptionof Westernlegal
forms by the socialist world. Despite Marx's ambivalence towardlaw, and their
own hostility to the capitalist order, legal scholars in the Soviet Union and the
People's Republicof Chinaspent decades tryingto adaptEuropeanlaw to social-
ism, a task frequentlydismissed as simple propaganda.In some cases, such as
the show trialsin Stalin'spurges,it clearly was. However, both the need for polit-
ical despotism to seek shelter in legal formalism and the perceived incongruity
of socialist ideology and rationaljurisprudenceby outside observersattest to the
durability of Weberiancategories of analysis and the universally recognized
legitimizing power of procedure.28
This is not to say that the introductionof Westernjuridical norms during the
colonial perioddid not have an importantimpact on the substanceof extantAsian
legal systems. Places under direct European administration,such as much of
Malaya,Vietnam,or the Dutch East Indies, incorporatedthe legal cultureof their
colonizing power directly,often traininga stratumof native lawyers, such as the
young Mohandas Gandhi, that moved freely throughoutthe empire. Many of
these places recognized a bifurcatedsystem, either by grantingextraterritoriality
to European residents, or by leaving private disputes and small crimes to be
decided by community leaders according to local custom. This latter process,
such as the formationof Indonesianadat, requiredcustom to be reshaped and
codified to resemble law, often placing judicial authoritiesin the awkwardposi-
tion of deciding mattersof religious doctrine.29However, even those areas that

27. In 1863, HenryWheaton'sElementsof InternationalLaw was translatedinto Chinese, and was

first put to use one year later when three Danish ships were seized by Prussia in Chinese territorial
waters. JonathanSpence, The Searchfor Modern China (New York:W. W. Norton and Co., 1990),
201-202. For the practice of domestic law, see Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris,Law in Imperial
China: Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases, Translatedfrom the Hsing-an jui-lan. With
Historical, Social, and Juridical commentaries(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1967).
The tension between the substance and representationtheme runs throughthe "Law, Society, and
Culturein China"book series edited by Philip C. C. Huang and KathrynBernhardt,especially Philip
C. C. Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representationand Practice in the Qing (Stanford:Stanford
University Press, 1996). The use of the currentformulationin 1989 was obviously aimed at soothing
the fears of the foreign business communityfollowing the Tiananmenmassacrein June of that year.
The phraseitself does not imply that the law is sacrosanct,but ratherthat it is a tool for governance,
making its common mistranslationas "the rule of law" particularlytelling.
28. Peirs Bierne, Revolutionin Law: Contributionsto the Development of Soviet Legal Theory,
1917-1938 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy (Berkeley:
University of CaliforniaPress, 1986).
29. Especially when religious customs were given legal weight, so that secularjudges occasion-
ally had to decide questions such as what constituted a correct Hindu wedding. Jothie Rajah,
"Negotiating Legal Identities: Hindu Law in Singapore," unpublished paper, Faculty of Law,

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122 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

were not underdirect rule adoptedthe forms and discourse of Westernlaw, often
as partof a programof nationalmodernization,precisely because of its perceived
authorityand rationality.30
While clearly flawed, the dual legacies of the myth of proceduralrationality
and of the privilege of procedureover ideology has clearly exerted a transfor-
mative influence over postcolonialAsian legal systems, most notablyin the place
of religion under law. Realistic or not, the subjection of ideology to law has
attaineda global legitimacy. As external criticism of attemptsfrom within the
Islamic world to reverse this trenddemonstrates,the accepted form remains the
legal marginalizationof anything recognizable as ideology, including religion.
Comparethe first Japaneseconstitution,promulgatedin 1889, which was grant-
ed as a gift from a "inviolablysacred"(shinsei ni shite okasu be garazu) imperi-
al house to its subjects,with thatcomposed in 1946 by the Americanoccupation,
in which authorityis located in the "sacredtrustof the people" while the consti-
tution itself is self-referentiallyheld up as the supremelaw of the land. What is
notableis thatwhile each of these constitutionspresumesa conditionof absolute
authorityfor the state and its ideology, they also assure freedom of religion, so
long as the latterdoes not contradictthe former.31
As these two documents demonstrate,the need to officially distance religion
from law actually has the effect of masking the dominantideology in the guise
of rationality,while redefining religion as something that is personal, optional,
and ultimatelya right grantedcontingent only on its non-interferencewith invi-
olable principlesof state. The same type of separation,guaranteeingfreedom of
religion while subjecting it to an ideology of state sacrality,is visible in most
Asian constitutions, albeit with some variation. The constitution of Indonesia
allows freedom of worship, provided that it does not contradictthe principle of
monotheismupon which the stateis based. Perhapsthe most extremecase is that
of China,whose constitutionunequivocallyreaffirmsatheisticMarxist-Leninism
as the founding principle of the state, and then continues to insist that no gov-
ernmentbody may coerce the belief or disbelief of the individual.32

National University of Singapore. WinnifredFallers Sullivan discusses a similar case in which a

courtin Floridawas chargedwith determiningwhat sortof gravesidepiety constituted"religion."The
Impossibilityof Religious Freedom (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005).
30. TadashiAruga, "The Declarationof Independencein Japan:Translationand Transplantation,
1854-1997," Journal of AmericanHistory 85, no. 4 (1999), 1409-1431.
31. Constitutionof the Japanese Empire.1889. Ch. 1, Art. 3, Ch. 2, Art. 28; Constitutionof Japan.
1946. Preamble,Art. 20. The terms used are worthexamining.While the English and Japanesever-
sions of the 1946 documentwere preparedat the same time, the formeruses the word "sacred,"while
the Japanesetext describes it as merely "solemn" (genshyr). Similarly, while the 1889 document
refers to subjects having "freedom of religious belief' (shin kyd no jiyd), the 1946 version refers
specifically to freedom from state interference,more closely resembling the establishmentclause of
the AmericanConstitution.
32. Constitutionof the Republic of Indonesia. 1945. Ch. XI, Art. 29. Constitutionof the People's
Republicof China. 1982. Art. 32.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 123

IV. SCHOLARSHIP:REPRESENTATIONAND CONSCIOUSNESSIN THE ACADEMIES

Long before the arrivalof the scholars of imperialEurope,the scholarly elites of

precolonial Asia had filled libraries with their studies of religion. On the one
hand, much of this work was a defense of religious orthodoxy.This is not sur-
prising, given thatthe scholarlyclasses were often educatedlargely within a reli-
gious tradition;theological explorationand religious apology defined Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Islam in Asia, as much as it had the Catholic Church of
medieval Europe.
On the other hand, secular scholars also carved out the religious as a distinct
sphere and defined the parametersby which it is understood,a line of inquiry
more commonly associated with the comparativestudy of "worldreligions" by
imperial academicians, such as Max Muiller.However, while he and other
Europeanscholars of the nineteenth century would construct numerous racial,
philological, and theological theories of the origins and evolution of religion,
they were hardly unique in doing so.33 Such comparisons and typologies are
unavoidablewhenever distinct traditionsare juxtaposed, and formed an impor-
tantfield of study in precolonialAsia as well. In late ImperialChina, Confucian-
ism, Buddhism, and Daoism were recognized by state authority and popular
eschatology alike as the "threeteachings"(san jiao), and evolved both a degree
of structuralsimilarity and a division of ritual labor. The canonization of the
three teachings not only painted other belief systems as invalid or immature,it
also promptedexplorationof the relationshipamong them accordingto a variety
of ethical and cosmological systems.34Similarly,the strengthof Buddhist insti-
tutions in medieval Japanencouragednativist scholars to fit pre-Buddhistprac-
tices into the Buddhistpattern,naming their tradition(Shinto, literally the "Way
of the Spirits")in such a way as to imply paritywith or superiorityto Buddhism,
and even going as far as to forge a scripturaltraditionthat was claimed, not sur-
prisingly,to predateBuddhistsutras.35Such aims presage those of the early nine-
teenth-centurystudy of comparativetheology in Europe,in which "Christiantri-
umphalistsof the first order"used theological proofs to demonstratethe unitary
superiorityof Christianity.When this study gave way to what was purportedto
be the dispassionatelyscientific study of world religions duringthe middle of the
century,it exchanged a Christianbias for a variety of equally burdensomeracial
and culturaltrajectories.36The idea of spiritualprogress distinguishedculturally

33. For the full scale and diversity of European perspectives, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The
Inventionof WorldReligions: Or How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of
Pluralism (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2005).
34. Officially, the three teachings were classified as orthodox(zheng), and their activities tolerat-
ed or even encouraged. Scholars ranked the three in a graded validity, in which inferior teachings
were still useful as stepping-stonesto a greater truth.A more populareschatological traditiontraced
the three to a single divine source called the EternalVenerableMother,of whom the three canonical
founders(Confucius, the BuddhaSakyamuni,and Laozi) were children. See KennethDean, Lordof
the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press,
1998).
35. Sources of Japanese Tradition,ed. William Theodore de Bary et al. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), I, 336-341.
36. Masuzawa, The Inventionof WorldReligions, 86.

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124 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

conditioned religious expression (national religions) from superior universal

belief systems (such as Buddhism and Christianity),and defined advancedreli-
gion in terms of discrete belief systems with canonical founders and texts and a
goal of personal dialogue with the divine.37True to these standards,European
philologists of the nineteenth century held up arcane Hindu and Buddhist texts
as the crystallizationof ancient wisdom, while often denigratingthe practice of
the modem faithful as superstitiousand untrueto the principles of a faith they
but vaguely understood.38
However, scholarshipis not simply an internalaffair of the ivory tower-as
Foucault famously expressed in his image of the panopticon,a prison in which
all cells were visible from a shielded centralpoint, access to knowledge is a very
real power.39The urge to collect data and monopolize informationarguably is
naturalto any administrativeentity, and precolonial Asian powers did keep a
close watch on religious institutions, ideas, and customs, largely through the
scholarlyclass.40Returningagain to Said, althoughthe relationbetween knowl-
edge and power is certainlynot unique to Europeanhigh imperialism,what was
unique was simultaneousEuropeandominancein both spheres during this peri-
od. ImperialEuropeanscholars not only had unprecedentedphysical access to
the world, their analysis was also backed up with the prestige of empire, the
authorityof scholarly societies, and often the force of law.41 In this sense, the
scholarly apparatusof industrializedEurope was substantively different from
that which came before, and arguablythe larger structureof knowledge that it
createdremainshegemonic to this very day.
Moreover,imperial power and scholarly authoritybeing the two distinguish-
ing features of Europeanexceptionalism, Said's criticisms are even more rele-
vant in the postcolonial order,particularlywith respect to the American acade-
my. Along with the rise of the United States as an economic and military super-
power, the years afterWorldWarII saw the eclipse of imperialacademiesby the
institutionsand methodologies of American social science. Despite the size and
diversity of the postwarAmerican academy,the study of religion remains very
much, as JonathanZ. Smith famously called it, a "productof the scholars'study,"
and academicsstill work within clear constraints,the most fundamentalof which

37. Asad, "The Construction of Religion"; Said, Orientalism, 60, 67; Jane Simpson, "lo as
Supreme Being: Intellectual Colonization of the Maori?,"History of Religions 37, no. 1. (August,
1997), 50-85.
38. N. J. Giardot, "Max Miiller's Sacred Books and the Nineteenth-centuryProductionof the
ComparativeScience of Religions," History of Religions 41, no. 3 (2002), 213-250; Curatorsof the
Buddha:TheStudyof BuddhismunderColonialism,ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.(Chicago:Universityof
Chicago Press, 1995). See Masuzawa,TheInventionof WorldReligions, for a reassessmentof Miller.
39. Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish: TheBirth of the Prison, transl.Alan Sheridan(New
York:Vintage Books, 1979).
40. In China, for example, the Confucian-trainedadministrativeclass was chargedwith providing
informationthrough government channels, and their disgust with heretical practices would occa-
sionally spill out into unofficial publications, such as the 1834 Detailed Refutation of Heresies
penned and publishedby the county magistrateHuangYiibian.Sawada Mizuho, K6chdhaja sh6ben,
[An annotated"DetailedRefutationof Heresies"] (Tokyo:Kokushokankokai, 1972).
41. The interactionbetween colonial legal and scholarly authorityis presentedin MaitriiAung-
Thwin, "CastingFutures:Rebellion Ethnologies, Archives, and the Law in Colonial Burma," CF,
forthcoming.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 125

is the need to maintainthe language of objectivity.42For Said, such pretense not

only masks layers of political and religious ideology; when he remarks on
American social science's "singularavoidance of literature,"his real criticism is
that the rationalistmethodologyof the social sciences preventsthem from taking
cultureor belief seriously.43Like legal procedure,the academic study of religion
itself is automaticallyburdenedwith an implicit ideological stance.
Beyond the dictates of personal or professional conscience, this stance is
enforced by the ultimatearbiter:access to grantmoney throughthe largestschol-
arly bodies and funding agencies. The most influentialof these bodies, the Social
Science ResearchCouncil (SSRC), representsthe ambivalentrole of ideology in
the development of American social science as a whole. Founded as a service
organizationin 1923, the SSRC funded individual research on pressing social
issues until 1930, when it was decided that such a tactic was merely "apiecemeal
attack on a wide range of problems in society, but no coordinatedattack at any
point" and that it would be better to concentrateon a few select themes.44Thus
began a new role for the SSRC in actively determining research initiatives
through multi-yearresearchcommittees. This more activist stance has allowed
the SSRC to have an immense impacton the natureand mission of social-science
research, a role that has led critics such as the historian Harry Harootunianto
characterizethe committees as the "sole custodians and vigilant guard dogs" of
an intellectual orthodoxyunderthe guise of free inquiry.45
In the long history of the organization,religion has appearedas a frequentvis-
itor to SSRC projects,particularlyin the context of Area Studies, but rarely as a
focus. Like its original broad-basedcommitment to social betterment,the early
committees themselves were thematic, and while none addressed religion as a
primaryconcern, many made reference to issues with a moral component, such
as juvenile delinquency,or to religious organizations,as in a project on social
change in Mormon communities.After WorldWar II, the council took the lead
in the formationof Area Studies centers and research,and it was throughthese
committees that the study of religion made its greatest progress. By the 1980s,
Area Studies had become the single largest component of the SSRC, and these
committees funded a large number of projects concerning religion, producing
some of the most influentialscholarshipon religion in Asia and the Middle East.
However, what both periods share is a tendency to treatreligion as symptomatic
or derivative of other social functions and phenomena.46While prewarscholar-
ship was concerned with religion in a highly abstractedform as a vehicle for
42. JonathanZ. Smith, ImaginingReligion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), xi. For one of many examples of how this plays out on university campuses,
see "MideastTensionsAre Getting Personalon Campusat Columbia,"New YorkTimes(January18,
2005), B1.
43. Said, Orientalism,290-291.
44. KentonW. Worcester,Social Science Research Council, 1923-1998 (New York:SSRC, 1998);
Social Science Research Council:Decennial Report 1923-1933 (New York:SSRC, 1933), 12.
45. Worcester,Social Science Research Council, 35. The full list of committees is available at
http://www.ssrc.org/inside/about/consolidated list of committees_1924-1997.page (accessed Sep-
tember 13, 2005).
46. Recent work on Islam and the 2001 SSRC committee on Immigration,Religion, and Civic
Life suggest that this may be moving in a new direction.

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126 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

social transformation,andpostwarArea Studiesinitiativespresentedit as an inte-

gral partof civilizational identity, in both cases the view of religion is de-theol-
ogized. Religion is treatedlargely as a functionallens of social ethics and struc-
tures, while scholarsassiduously avoid any of the questions thatone might asso-
ciate with theological inquiry. In practice, the limitations of the social-science
approachare often balanced with the approachof divinity schools, which can
represent distinct entities within private universities (as at the University of
Chicago) or enter into a dual orbit with public ones (such as the relationship
between the Graduate Theological Union and University of California at
Berkeley). Within social science, however, the ideals of value-free empiricism
and scholarly impartialityclearly define the ground rules of academic inquiry,
and in doing so equally define a scholarlydiscourse of religion.
How has this affected scholarly inquiryin postcolonial Asia? The pretenseof
disinterestedresearchis not unique to the American academy;the earlierdecline
of "comparativetheology" as a field of study attests to the broad and lasting
legitimizing power of the perceptionof scholarlyimpartiality.Of course, in Asia
as anywhere, a pluralityof institutions and individuals espouse or disdain reli-
gion as they please. However, the inverserelationshipbetween religious advoca-
cy and perceived scholarlylegitimacy has clearly developed a universal curren-
cy, and scholars with a strong religious affiliation must often first overcome the
perceptionthat they are engaged in religious apology ratherthan "real"research
before they will be taken seriously.
This alone, however, is a far cry from hegemony. Research oriented toward
engaged activism often receives sponsorship from Buddhist, Christian, or
Muslim charitableand educational institutions.If the pretense of ideology-free
research does hold hegemonic sway, it is among scholars seeking to establish
themselves outside these spheres, de-theologized social science being very much
the lingua franca of the internationalconferences and journals. Even in this
sphere,however,Americansocial science does not constitutethe entiretyor even
the majorityof academic research,particularlyin Asia, where individual schol-
arly communitiesare nationallybased and are divided equally by theory andlan-
guage. Within these smaller communities, local considerationshold sway; cer-
tain types of researchare encouragedor discouraged, often with global criteria
as justification. Social-science research,particularlythat conductedfor a nation-
al ratherthan internationalaudience, is frequently mobilized toward political
ends or for programsof social engineering,the ideology of which is masked or
justified by virtue of its being portrayedas objective, or at least progressive.47

V. CONVERSIONAND THE CONVERTED:

MISSIONARIESAND CONVERTCOMMUNITIES

Finally, what of those arguablymost directly involved with religion duringthis

period, missionaries and their converts? The Christian missionary enterprise,

47. In China, scientific atheism dictates the purpose and parametersof social-science research,
while in Japanthe legacy of religiously tinged wartimescholarshipunofficiallymarkscertainthemes
as out of bounds.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 127

particularlythat of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lies at the
heartof postcolonial critique,touching as it does on issues of civilizational hege-
mony, the transformationof individual consciousness, and the integration of
local societies into global structures.However, the impetus to seek converts is as
old as religion itself, and religious mission certainly played an importantrole in
precolonial Asia. There, the political significance of conversion was such that
these efforts were often concentratedat high levels. Centuriesbefore the arrival
of Europeans,Buddhist and Muslim emissaries had traversedlong distances on
official missions to win over the political elites of neighboring states. More than
individual salvation, conversion offered new routes of access to divine power
and the promise of various forms of political and economic co-religionist
alliance. Such types of motivation are seen in the mid-sixth-century gift of
Buddhist sutrasmade by the KoreanPaekche kingdom to the emperorof Japan,
or the Islamic conversion of commercial elites in South and Southeast Asia.48
When Jesuit priests arrivedin China and Japanin the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, bringing with them access to lucrative trade routes and scientific
prowess and seeking to win the prize of a Catholic emperor,they were in many
ways inheritorsof a familiarand well-establishedconversion strategy.49
However, the burst of Christianmissionization that followed in the wake of
Europeanhigh imperialismis often understoodas a defining moment that was
substantivelydifferentin scale and ambitionfrom these earlierefforts. One rea-
son was simply the scale of the enterprise.During the late eighteenth and espe-
cially nineteenth centuries, Catholic and Protestant missions from throughout
Europeand NorthAmericabroughttheir faith and civilization to every corner of
the globe. This reach was facilitated by the penetration of imperial military
power, leading to the frequentlyevoked image of the missionary arriving with
the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, or as one Chinese critic put it in
1927, Christian missionization was "the most sinister instrument of foreign
imperialism,"populated by "the most vicious mischief makers imaginable."50
Other critics see a more subtle, yet far more fundamental,alliance between the
two enterprises.In their Of Revelationand Revolution,John and Jean Comaroff
famously demonstratedhow the type of Christianitypreachedby missionariesin
southernAfrica demandedmore than conversion of faith, but ratherthe recon-
struction of individual consciousness, recreatingideas about gender, clothing,

48. Daigan and Alicia Matsunaga,Foundation of Japanese Buddhism (Los Angeles: Buddhist
Books International, 1974). Patricia Risso, "Muslim Identity in Maritime Trade: General
Observations and Some Evidence from the 18th-CenturyPersian Gulf/Indian Ocean Region,"
InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 21, no. 3. (1989), 381-392.
49. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan
(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988).
50. TalalAsad contraststhe role of discipline in Augustan Christianitywith the ideal of heartfelt
conversion in post-EnlightenmentProtestantism,a point that should be rememberedwhen trying to
understandthe Catholic policy of forced conversion in places like the Spanish New World. Asad,
"TheConstructionof Religion."The criticism in question comes fromT'ang Liang-li, "Missions, the
CulturalArm of WesternImperialism,"in Christian Missions in China: Evangelists of What?, ed.
Jessie G. Lutz (Boston: Heath and Co., 1965), 51-52. A more recent, but still generally unflattering,
portrayalof missionariesin Chinacan be seen in Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising
(Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1996), especially 75-76.

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128 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

hygiene, andthe individuatedself, all of which served the greatermasterof a the-

ologically-chargedcolonialism.Native resistancealso turnedon these issues, but
they assert that the missionary drive was eventually able to enact a truly hege-
monic influence, a "colonization of consciousness" that remains active in the
"millennialcapitalism"that drives the postmoderndiscourse of globalization.51
Was the missionizationof the nineteenthcenturytruly successful or unique in
this regard?Comparingelements of the sixteenth-and nineteenth-centurywaves
of Christianmissionization demonstratesthe scope of difference. On the one
hand, doctrinally and structurally,the two movements were very similar; both
drew inspirationlargely from the same scripturalcharge to "go and make disci-
ples of all nations"(Matt.28:19), and each representedan armof a largerchurch
at home. They were also facilitated by more general commercial and imperial
expansion, which eased numerouslogistical problems and greatly enhanced the
ability of missionaries to go and remain overseas, while it occasionally pricked
the consciences of the missionaries themselves. On the other hand, the two
instances did differ in terms of who was sent into the mission field, the relation-
ship these people would develop with imperialism,and ultimatelyin the type of
Christianitythey sought to spread. Most obviously, while the earlier Iberian
phase was organized and populatedby priests of Catholic orders,most notably
the Jesuits, the nineteenth-centuryphase was lay, primarily Protestant, and
included men, women, and entire families.52Although many factors motivated
individualmissionaries,including the practicaldesire to seek a careerabroador
to escape social constraints at home, this second wave of missionization also
coincided with an increasein activist lay piety throughoutthe United States and
England,characterizedby itinerantpreachingand tent revivals. It was not, how-
ever, simply an explosion of fervorat home spilling onto the world stage. Studies
of revivalism in American religiosity suggest that periods of especially pious
intensity are less productiveof social transformationthan they are reflections of
new opportunitiesfor expansion.The success of nineteenth-centuryimperialism
fed missionaryenthusiasmnot only as manifestproof of the divine approvaland
necessity of the Christianmission, but also by opening vast new "markets"for
missionariesto ply their trade.53
The natureof the movement also shaped the type of conversionthat it sought.
Appropriateto lay revivalism, nineteenth-centuryProtestantmissionaries con-
demned the mindless superstitionof native practice (which many equated with
stereotypesof Catholicism)and idealized the Pauline model of a conscious, will-
ing conversion. To ensure the sincerity of potential converts, many initially
sought to distance themselves from the commercial and militarybenefits of the
51. Comaroffand Comaroff, Of Revelationand Revolution,vol. 1.
52. The close of the centurysaw single women become the dominantforce in many overseas mis-
sions. RobertaWollons, "Outpostsof Culture,Politics, and Gender:The Missionary Experience in
Non-WesternSettings, 1868-1927," CF, forthcoming.
53. On marketdynamics in the study of religion, see Roger Finke and LaurenceR. Iannaccone,
"Supply-SideExplanationsfor Religious Change,"Annals of the AmericanAcademyof Political and
Social Science 527, Religion in the Nineties (1993), 27-39; more generally, Timothy L. Smith,
"HistoricWaves of Religious Interestin America,"Annals of theAmericanAcademyof Political and
Social Science 332, Religion in AmericanSociety (1960), 9-19; John B. Boles, "Turner,the Frontier,
and the Study of Religion in America,"Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (1993), 205-216.

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 129

very empires that facilitatedtheir presence in the field. However, the increase of
anti-imperialistsentiment and violence over the course of the century created a
situation into which most missionaries could not but be drawn. Despite earlier
misgivings, most became willing to accept the protectionof imperialistwarships
and increasingly associated themselves and their understandingof Christianity
with the institutionsof the Europeanimperial presence and the largerdiscourse
of civilizational progress-what Ussama Makdisi has termed "evangelical
modernity."54
If late nineteenth-centurymissionaries came to think about conversion in
terms of personaltransformation,did this amountto a Christian"colonizationof
consciousness?"Althoughthe conversion process was fundamentallyone of edu-
cation, both religious and civilizational, this concept still raises a number of
problems, the most importantof which is the complexity of the local response.
Christianteachings carrieda variety of meanings in local context, and were sur-
prisingly easy to dissociate from Europeanpower. The ability of conversion to
take on independentmeaning is evident in the fear that the authorityto evangel-
ize would escape the control of the white missionaries.55Such fears were well
founded.Throughoutthe colonial world, indigenous Christianmovements erupt-
ed that were either ambivalent or hostile to the Western missionaries, and that
usually involved a theologically contrivedcircumventionof missionary authori-
ty. Often the movements were led by charismaticnative leaders who asserted
more direct ties to Christianity,such as direct revelation from or kinship ties to
Jesus Christ,the most spectacularexample being the claim of nineteenth-centu-
ry Chinese rebel Hong Xiuquan to be the younger brotherof Jesus Christ. In
other cases, such as Korea, Christian churches were able to develop entirely
independentof Europeaninfluence, while in Japan and China, native churches
claimed a spiritualheritage superiorto that of the West.56The latter were espe-
cially importantfollowing WorldWarI, when the ideals of the social gospel were
held up in contrastto the hypocrisy of imperialismand perceived degradationof
Westerncivilization.As Wu Yaozong,leaderof the Chinese state-initiatedThree-
Self Church put it in 1951, "it was the Communists who really love their ene-
mies," while "imperialismis really the devil."57
Even when less hyperbolic in their rhetoric, communities of converts were
able to develop multivalenced identities, demonstrating the ability of the

54. Ussama Makdisi, "Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and
Evangelical Modernity,"American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997), 680-713. Such considera-
tions are seen at home and abroadin the rise of the Anglo-AmericanSocial Gospel and Dutch Ethical
Policy towardthe end of the nineteenthcentury.
55. ElizabethElbourne,"WordMade Flesh: Christianity,Modernity,and CulturalColonialism in
the Work of Jean and John L. Comaroff,"American Historical Review 108 (2003), 435-459; Sally
Engle Merry,"Hegemonyand Culturein HistoricalAnthropology:A Review Essay on Jeanand John
L. Comaroff's Of Revelationand Revolution,"AmericanHistorical Review 108 (2003), 460-470. The
ambivalentrole of texts is illustratedin the celebratedessay by Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for
Wonders:Questions of Ambivalence and Authorityunder a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," in The
Location of Culture(London:Routledge, 1994), 102-122.
56. Duk-WhangKim, A History of Religions in Korea (Seoul: Daeji Moonwha-sa, 1988).
57. Wu Yao-tsung, "ChristianIdeals Implemented by Communism," in Lutz, ed., Christian
Missions in China: Evangelistsof What?,67-70.

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130 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

Christian variations to develop independently. Christian conversion was fre-

quently a sign of ethnic identity,particularlyamong the minority groups target-
ed by missionaries.It was also a markof class; in some cases, missionaryschool
systems facilitated the creation of a bilingual, self-consciously modern elite,
while in others, sectarianChristianliberationmovements provided an outlet for
millenarianlongings among the poorest of the poor.58The identities affordedby
Christian conversion thus coincided and mixed with family, lineage, village,
commercial networks, guild associations, generationaldivides, and gender, and
the very specific nature of these identities often led to violent conflict among
local Christiancommunities.59
Perhapsthe best expression of the mobility of the missionaryform is the abil-
ity of otherreligionsto employ its techniquesandideas. The establishedChristian
presence in Asia imbuedmovementsto reformnative religions with urgencyand
a new standardof conscious conversion. Moreover, many of the lessons of
Christian success were quickly learned by other religious groups, such as the
JapaneseBuddhistmissionarieswho began workingon the Asian continentin the
late nineteenthcentury.60This is seen in the transferof specific organizational
forms-including Sunday schools, catechisms, hymnals, and organizationssuch
as the YMCA (the firstYMBA, YoungMen's BuddhistOrganization,was found-
ed in Yangonin 1906).61 More recently,the missionarydrive itself has become a
hallmarkof Asian Christianity.Asian (especially Korean)missionariesare active
throughoutthe globe, and many Asian Christian groups speak specifically in
terms of revitalizinga WesternChristianitythat has grown lax and corrupt.62
Like the pretensionsof value-neutralityin law and scholarship,the techniques
and tropes of transformativeconversion itself have spreadnot only beyond the
confines of missionary Christianity,but beyond religion as well. Of course, the
model introducedby the missionaries builds on extant models of conversion,
such as that of a sudden Buddhistenlightenment,but as was the case with pros-
elytizing techniques,it has also reshapedthese extantideals as well. More strik-
ingly, it has made its way into political hagiography,particularlythat of Marxist
systems, the political ideology of which was inculcatedthroughtransformative
58. JenniferConnolly, "ChristianConversion and Pan-DayakIdentity in East Kalimantan,"CF,
forthcoming.
59. In late nineteenth-centuryChina, Christianscould access the powerful advocacy of foreign
missionaries,a point thatleads Esherickto questionthe motives of village-basedconversion.See also
CharlesA. Litzinger,"TempleCommunityandVillage CulturalIntegrationin North China:Evidence
from 'Sectarian Cases' (Chiao-an) in Chih-li, 1860-1895." Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California,Davis, 1983.
60. Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West (Chapel Hill: University of
North CarolinaPress, 2003); Nakano Ky6toku, Tenndseikokkato shokuminchidend6 [The imperial
system and colonial mission] (Tokyo: Nichiren Shuppan, 1976).
61. While JapaneseChristianmissionariesestablished 877 Sunday schools in prewarManchuria,
three sects of Buddhismcombined to build 1,304. Shimada Michiya, Manshu kyoikushi[History of
Educationin Manchuria](Dairen:Testudoshuppan, 1935), 544-545.
62. As of 2004, South Korea had 12,000 Christianmissionariesin the field, second only to the
United States. "KoreanMissionaries CarryingWord to Hard-to-Sway Places," New YorkTimes
(November 1, 2004), Al; many of these groupsrepresenta distinct departurefrom precolonialmis-
sionary roots. See, for example the Back to Jerusalemmovement, at
http://www.backtojerusalem.com/ (accessed September 13, 2005).

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 HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM,AND THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RELIGION 131

labor, as well as throughchanting,hymns, and study thatYue Daiyun recalls hav-

ing "hadthe air of a Bible class," while the developmentand maintenanceof cor-
rect political consciousness was often portrayedin terms that closely resemble
religious conversion.63

VI. CONCLUSIONS:HEGEMONY,AGENCY,AND REPRESENTATION

In sum, then, how unique and importantwas Westernimperialismin shaping the

concept of religion in East and SoutheastAsia? It could be arguedthat the con-
cerns that statecraft,law, scholarship,and conversion each had for religion pre-
determinedthat they would view and implicitly define religion througha partic-
ular lens, and furtherthat these concerns largely transcendthe colonial experi-
ence. The period of Westernimperialism thus representedonly a difference of
scale from precolonialempires. States in both pre- and postcolonial Asia sought
to control religion and based their rule and their laws on a premise of unim-
peachable ethical or divine authority.Scholars served this apparatusby tracing
its internal theology as well as its boundaries. The process of missionization,
sometimes connected with the state, sometimes not, articulatedthe interaction
between the individualand this largersystem of divine and human authority.
Yet the process of globalizationthat began with the periodof high imperialism
did fundamentallyalter these processes by incorporatingthem into larger pat-
terns and discourse. The spread of the nation-state form across Asia was
premised on the language, if not content, of humanisticnational citizenship and
the dual myths of legal and scholarlydisinterest.Each had the effect of recasting
the state and its institutions with a public and uniquely modernist sacrality,
promptingthe exile of what would be labeled "religion"into a sphere that was
separate,individual,and personal.Ratherthan counteringthese trends,religious
activism embracedthe personalnatureof religion with a definitionof conversion
that emphasized sincere and willing transformation.
This was certainly a substantivechange, but was it hegemony? On the one
hand, the fact that even fiercely anti-Westernstates such as North Korea feel the
need to enshrine an originally Europeandefinition of religious freedom in their
constitutions does attest to the universal legitimizing currencyof certain forms
of representation.On the other hand, it also demonstratesthat the global dis-
course that emerged from imperialismcannot be understoodsimply as unidirec-
tional domination,at least not along the simple lines of East and West. From the
very beginning, Asian actors exposed to Europeandefinitions and criticisms of
religion became active participantsin the discourse, and some, such as D. T.
Suzuki, took the lead in shaping originally Western concepts to very different
ends.64

National Universityof Singapore

63. Yue Daiyun, To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman(Berkeley:
University of CaliforniaPress, 1985), 208.
64. Judith Snodgrass, "PublishingEastern Buddhism: D. T. Suzuki's Journeyto the West," CF,
forthcoming.

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