An ethnography of faith: Personal conceptions of religiosity in the Soutpansberg, South Africa, in the 19<super>th</super> and 20<super>th</super> centuries.

Abstract

The study of the history of Christian missions in the context of colonialism has focused on missions as institutions and on the manner in which people addressed by missions were caught up within the economic, political and ideological spheres of imperial powers. It has evaded consideration of the aspect of faith. Reduced to an experience occurring interior to a person, faith was deemed unapproachable by scientific methods. This has, in effect, constituted a silence regarding the everyday experience of religiosity among those drawn to Christianity. The ethnography of faith is a detailed investigation of how people engaged with and experienced the religious in order to lift into recognition and comprehension this suppressed voice of religiosity. The analysis on the Lutheran church in the Soutpansberg in 19<super>th</super> and 20<super>th</super> century South Africa listens carefully to how people describe their own faith and that of others in mission produced archives, often the only sources available for the study of mission history. A careful reading of this archive---for breaks, misunderstandings and oppositions, as well as for sentiments of agreement, praise, compatibility and claims of shared experiences---identifies negotiations of meaning which give indications of conceptualisations of faith in distinction to those of the missionaries. The nature of the sources demands the recognition that an investigation into faith in relation to Christian missions is one of non-closure: the interpretations do not offer clear answers but indications of possibilities of reading. They draw attention to the relationship of power in which students of mission history stand in relation to their subjects of study. Nevertheless, though author-ial, the identification of possible conceptualisations of faith allows reflection that there might be spaces that slip out of the reach of hegemonic and dominant power. It is a method of removing ourselves as observers from the dominating voice of the missionaries to free our ear to hear other tones, additional resonance, additional meaning.