Lutheran in Two Worlds: Remaking Mission from Madagascar to the Midwest United States.

Abstract

This dissertation is an historical ethnography of moral personhood and practices of moral and political collectivity among former American Lutheran missionaries to Madagascar, their American supporters, and their social relations in Madagascar. Through examining post-colonial Lutheranism in the Midwest United States and Southern Madagascar, it develops an analysis of the everyday construction of religion as a dynamic and debated material-semiotic process. The dissertation stems from twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota and in travel to Southern Madagascar. American Lutheran involvement in the southern region of Madagascar began in 1888 with the establishment of a mission church and continued through the late twentieth century. Although the American Lutheran mission (ALC/ELCA) has largely dissolved in the past twenty years, the movement endures through family relationships, practices of remembrance, and material exchanges in two international aid organizations.

For missionaries and their families now living in Minnesota, Madagascar has become a sacred site in an interwoven moral geography that includes Norway and the Midwest U.S. Moreover, the connection to Madagascar reinforces other dimensions of social identity, such as Norwegian ethnicity. Through family keepsakes and memoirs, missionary involvement on the island is remembered as a Norwegian-American endeavor that stems from the Norwegian Mission Society’s establishment of a mission in 1866. In exploring how the legacy of colonialism compelled a reassessment of worldly engagement, I show that retired missionaries use practices of kinship to place religion and social identity outside the institutional boundaries of the ALC/ELCA.

My research found that American Lutherans and Malagasy Lutherans are engaged in a related process of socializing biblical models of personal relationships, such as that of “accompaniment” from Luke 24, into new religious institutions. Two recently established medical aid organizations in Minneapolis provide biomedical relief to Madagascar and other former sites of American Lutheran evangelism. The medical relief organizations usher in a new situation whereby things rather than people become the primary cultural and religious intermediaries, producing as one result the reconstitution of the medical supplies as person-like, speaking forms through which to know the world beyond.