| This dissertation applies the lens of religious experience to the monumental changes China went through between 1860--1937. I argue that conversions are highly complex cultural interactions and must be seen as social processes that assemble diverse modes of knowledge, transform them, and then recirculate them back into society. Converts need to be seen, not as passive absorbers of another faith, but as faithful agents actively reforming the social world around them. Thus, in China during this period, Christian converts sculpted identities that simultaneously reflected and amended both Chinese and Christian values, and sought to create communities within a nexus between Chinese popular religions and western Christianities without being reduced to either. Through the processes of conversion novel idioms of individual and communal identity emerged that, while never uncontested, reverberated throughout the larger world. In many respects, my dissertation revisits some questions raised by earlier intellectual histories of the Great Encounter between China and the West. However, by focusing on Chinese converts themselves rather than on the material successes or failures of western missions I seek to reassess how religious identities function and resonate in a modern China.; In short, this is a work about the rupture and resurrection of communities, about the blending of traditions, and about the reinforcement of boundaries. It is about attempts to translate the novel into the extraordinary, and render the mundane uncanny. It is about individuals trying to make sense of lives that had become fragmented and unmoored. It is about communities (families, villages, churches) trying to maintain cultural norms and assert communal cohesion in the face of unprecedented (though not always unwelcome) external intrusion.; It is a meditation about conversion, and about continuity. It is a series of descriptions of some of the many attempts made by Chinese Christians to come to grips with the changes and challenges of entering the twentieth century. |
