This course will be seminar-based and involve examination of archival sources.
The course this year explores the history of religious conversion in the South Pacific since European contact and also in comparative perspective.
Key questions include: How have people described their own conversion and the conversion of others in written and oral texts -- and how have these descriptions changed over time? What do archival accounts of conversions reveal about the nature and practice of conversion itself? And what role has sharing and circulating conversion stories played in the past?
The course readings and assignments will emphasise Christian conversions in colonial contexts in the South Pacific. However, we will also examine comparative, methodological, and theoretical readings on conversion in other times and cultural contexts.
The history of conversion raises a number of themes fundamental to the practice of history, such as the nature of historical change, the relationship between the individual and society, the possibilities and limits of historical methods and archival sources, and deciding what "context" matters when writing histories. This course also provides an introduction to the history of religion as well as a critical perspective on the impact of Christianity in the South Pacific and its relation to colonialism.
- Lecturer: Daniel Midena