2.4. Christianity, Colonialism and Post-colonialism
To understand the
place of Christianity in Minahasa and Minahasa in Christianity, it is
necessary to put into perspective the colonial history in the past
and the present academic discourse of post-colonialism. This way the
road into contextualization may be without distraction from any
unresolved historical wound or inappropriate critical application of
the post-colonial study.
Sometimes
Christianity is regarded as a “colonial religion.” This is
especially evidenced in the colonial history of Indonesia.1
This labeling may imply two different understandings. One suggests
that the colonialists were Christians, which can be validated though
still is contestable, and the other is that Christianity is
ontologically colonial in orientation, which is an unfortunate
misunderstanding.
In the rhetoric of
European-imperialism, expansion was seen as “the fulfillment of a
universal mission...[and] a contribution to a divine plan for the
salvation of the pagan.”2
It manifested in a form of colonialism or “modern colonialism”
defined by Jürgen Osterhammel as:
a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonialized population, the colonializers are convinced of their own superiority and of their ordained mandate to rule.3
It is obvious that
religious elements played an important role in the history of
European colonialism to the extent of legitimizing expansion for
larger economic and political control.4
But here a critical distinction should be made between faith in
Christ and the quest of imperialism. History has proven undeniably
that these variables are mutually exclusive; the post-colonial,
independent nations would have abandoned Christianity if they were of
the same root, which is not the case. On the contrary, Christianity
grows in an unprecedented rate, credited for playing an important
role in national independence movements and in inspiring the
development of new nation-states.5
Notwithstanding, Christianity is also claimed as part of an ethnic
identity. Because of this complex and delicate relationship between
Christianity and European colonialism, as well as the role of
Christianity in colonial and post-colonial societies, post-colonial
scholarship necessitates approaching Christianity in a fair and
balanced view, and conscientious scholars should be able to avoid
being caught up in the misunderstanding described above.
Edward Said's book
Orientalism (1978), in which he exposes the making of the
exotic “Others” in the eyes of the European colonial power,
became a landmark for post-colonial study.6
Said particularly underlines the mode of relation between the so
called “East” (Orient) and “West” (Occident). There are two
principal elements in it, he writes:
One was a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient, knowledge reinforced by the colonial encounter as well as by the widespread interest in the alien and unusual, exploited by the developing sciences of ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology, and history; furthermore, to this systematic knowledge was added a sizable body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers. The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination...the essential relationship, on political, cultural, and even religious grounds...was seen to be one between a strong and a weak partner.7
He further lists
different terms that were used to express the relation: ... “The
Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different';
thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal'.”8
Said's work culminated in the invention of post-colonialism, an
academic term which became popular with the publication of The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature
(1989).9
Now, if there is a hope within post-colonialism, it is not to
demonize the colonializer but to humanize all.
The exact
definition or parameters of post-colonialism are still debated,10
including whether or not the hyphen (-) in the field's title should
be dropped (post-colonialism or postcolonialism).11
In response, Leela Gandhi asserts, “Whatever the controversy
surrounding the theory, its value must be judged in terms of its
adequacy to conceptualise the complex condition which attends the
aftermath of colonial occupation.”12
There is more to say about this shortly.
Because a lot of
discussions on post-colonialism come from the experience of the
European colonial era, there is a tendency to confine it to the
“expansion of Europe in the past 400 years.”13
However, this conclusion is rather short-handed and overlooks needs
for a wider definition among the once-colonized constituents. This is
for the reason that colonialism was not exclusive to the Europeans.
This practice of domination and exploitation is the same whether it
takes place for three centuries or only three years, as in the case
of the Japanese occupation in Indonesia during the 1940s.
Furthermore, making post-colonialism focus only on European expansion
is like transferring the practice of colonial trade monopoly into the
academic field. Post-colonialism needs to expand its framework so
that the people in East Timor,14
for example, may benefit from post-colonial study. Confining
colonialism and post-colonialism to this lens of “Europe-only as
colonizer” is a blunder in the name of scholastic uniformity.
Embracing
contextual understandings of colonialism, the term post-colonialism
(rather than postcolonialism, which is more fixed to the prefix
“post,”) offers more advantages. First, taken as a whole, it
signifies the struggle to raise up from the post colonial condition
(after colonial occupation/independence), where issues such as
ethnicity, culture, identity and hybridity15
are among the primary concerns after long subjugation to and
imposition by different cultures;16
second, the hyphen (-) offers space to engage the condition of
transition between the impending “post” and the still present
colonialism, where the study may then also incorporate analysis,
advocacy, and empowerment of the “subaltern;”17
and third, in addition to the first and second, post-colonialism may
provide a framework to engage any form of present colonialism, or
what is often referred to as “neo-colonialism,” which may range
from political, to economic, and to cultural domination, including
military actions taken to serve metropolitan interests.
I place this work
as a Christian post-colonial engagement. Herein, there are three
important points: First, colonialism and Christianity are
substantially different. Therefore, it is not only the West that
“should get over its Christendom guilt complex about Christianity
as colonialism”18
as Gambian theologian, Lamin Sanneh, writes. The Non-West, too, needs
to get over perceiving Christianity as identical with colonialism.
Second, awareness
must be raised to the fact that Christianity is not of European
origin; it was born in the “Orient,” and therefore is subject to
the dangers of Orientalism. With the rise of Aufklärung
at the end of the 18th century, which turned the table
for Christianity in the western academy, these dangers are often
present with systematic efforts to discredit religion, especially
Christianity.19
Third,
post-colonialism appears to be, using the language of D. T. Adamo, “a
hopeful discourse.”20
Post-colonialism provides the academic round-table to engage with
issues of our past colonial experiences and how the colonialized has
been conceptualized, religiously or scientifically.21
Within it, due respect to the peoples and their religions, long
perceived as 'uncivilized' and 'primitive', may be paid as
post-colonialism provides an equal foothold for dialogue between
cultures, within it Christianity and, in our case, Minahasan ethnic
religion.22
-------
1 See,
for example, A. A. Yewangoe, “Kerukunan Umat Beragama Sebagai
Tantangan dan Persoalan: Menyimak Bingkai Teologi Kerukunan
Departemen Agama R.I.” in Agama dalam dialog: pencerahan,
pendamaian, dan masa depan; punjung tulis 60 tahun Prof. Dr. Olaf
Herbert Schumann, ed. Dr. Soegeng Hardiyanto, et. al. (Jakarta:
BPK Gunung Mulia, 1999), 78-79.
2 Jürgen
Osterhammel, Colonialism: a theoretical overview, Trans.
(Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), 16-17.
3 Osterhammel,
Colonialism, 16-17.
4 Such
as the position of B. J. O. Schrieke in the case of the Iberian
nations as delineated by Azyumardi Azra in “1530-1670: A Race
Between Islam and Christianity?” in A History of Christianity
in Indonesia, ed. Jan S. Aritonang and Karel Steenbrink [Leiden:
Brill, 2008], 10-12); M. J. C. Schouten, quoting Luis Filipe Thomaz,
points out that the Gospel is important as an ideological foundation
or as a legitimating rhetoric for a state power to subdue peoples
and occupy a territory (Leadership and Social Mobility in a
Southeast Asian Society: Minahasa 1677-1983 [Leiden: KITLV,
1998], 40); Cf. Th. Van Den End, Ragi Carita I: Sejarah Gereja di
Indonesia 1500-1860 (Jakarta: BPK Gunung Mulia, 1980), 28.
5 This
phenomenon is especially obvious in African Christianity. A good
discussion and reflection on this topic is given by Keith A. Burton
in his book The Blessing of Africa The Bible and African
Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Acad, 2007), 227-243. This
book also presents the European Christian imperialism beginning in
the Crusade Era and its impact on Africans. It is unfortunate,
however, that this book gets carried away with negative sentiments
toward the Muslim faith.
6 David
T. Adamo explains the inception of post[-]colonialism back to Frantz
Fanon's two publications, Black Skin White Mask (1952) and
later The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which made Fanon come
to be regarded as the father of post-colonialism. This academic
field became prominent with Said's Orientalism (1978)
(“Christianity and the African traditional religion[s]: The
postcolonial round of engagement,” Verbum et Ecclesia 32[1],
http://www.ve.org.za/index.php/VE/article/viewFile/285/663 (accessed
August 21, 2012).
7 Said,
Orientalism, 39-40.
8 Said,
Orientalism, 40.
9 Written
by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London:
Routledge); See Adamo, “Christianity and the African traditional
religion(s),” 2.
10 Adamo,
“Christianity and the African traditional religion(s),” 2.
11 Aschroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 45.
12 Leela
Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3-4.
13 Aschroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies,
45.
14 East
Timor was annexed by the Indonesian Government in 1975, which
forcibly made the territory one of its provinces. Before Indonesia's
takeover, East Timor was under Portuguese colonization for
centuries. In 1999, with strong support from the UN and especially
Australia, a referendum was held where the majority of East Timor
people opted for independence. Regarded as one of Asia's poorest
countries, the Timor Sea contains vast oil and gas fields (see East
Timor profile, BBC,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14919009 [accessed
March 28, 2013]).
15 Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin under the entry “hybridity” draw
attention to Homi K. Bhabha,who argues that in the experience of
colonialism, both the colonizer and colonized participated in the
construction of their subjectivities. He calls this the “Third
Space of enunciation,” a meeting place that leads to, as Bhabha
puts it, “an international culture, based not on the
exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures,
but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity”
(Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts ([London: Routledge,
2000], 108-11 [italic's Bhabha's]); Abdennebi Ben Beya suggests
Bhabha's hybridity is not a rhetoric of passivity on the side of the
colonized, rather as “a counter narrative, a critique of the canon
and its exclusion of other narratives” (in “Mimicry, Ambivalence
and Hybridity.” (1998):no pag. Online. Postcolonial Study at Emory
Pages.
http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/mimicry-ambivalence-and-hybridity/
[accessed April 24, 2013]).
16 Adamo,
“Christianity and the African traditional religion(s),” 2.
17 The
term “subaltern” (of inferior rank) was specified by Antonio
Gramsci to refer to “those groups in society who are subject to
the hegemony of the ruling classes” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and
Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 209). The
term has also been used interchangeably with “the poor,”
“exploited” and “oppressed” (I. John Mohan Razu,
“Deciphering the Subaltern Terrain: Exploring Alternative Sources
for an Emancipatory Mission,” CTC Bulletin Christian Conference
of Asia Vol. XXVI, No. 1 [June 2010]: 96).
18 Sanneh,
Whose Religion is Christianity?, 74.
19 In
the context of post-colonial Christian communities, this is often
done by dismissing, almost in entirety, the autonomy of the people
in their decision making and perceiving them as those who were
“acted upon” and who had no say in what they were doing, whether
personally or collectively, religiously or culturally.
20 Adamo,
“Christianity and the African traditional religion(s),” 2.
21 There
were on one hand, as Walls points out, “earnest men” surging
with the new wave of missionary movement, with a special eye to see
“not usually a grave, distant, polite people preserving over
thousands of years the knowledge of God and pure morality,” but
mainly the bad news in the societies, while on the other, “[t]here
was a whole new science, with evolution as its basis, of
anthropology” that put the other as “animistic peoples who had
not reached the appropriate stage;” hence their idea of a supreme
God was immediately suspected as a “missionary invention” (The
Missionary Movement in Christian History, 61-63). This
caricatured, reduced, and imbalanced depiction in the past of the
colonized, the bad people or the 'uncivilized heathen' and the
primitive or the ones that need to be “modernized,” is called
the two brushes effect of the colonial experience (cf. Josef Manuel
Saruan, “Opo dan Allah Bapa: Suatu Studi Mengenai Perjumpaan Agama
Suku dan Kekristenan di Minahasa,” book format [Ph.D. Diss., The
South East Asia Graduate School of Theology, 1991], 78-80).
22 Wenas
utilizes the term “ethnic religion,” as sub-title in his book on
Minahasa, although in his explanation he uses agama purba
Minahasa (ancient religion of Minahasa) (Sejarah Kebudayaan
Minahasa. 65). In Indonesia, the term agama suku (tribal
religion) is often used, while others utilize agama asli
(indigenous religion) or agama traditional (traditional
religion). The term “ethnic religion,” which is commonly used
today, has a better representation as it captures the essential
meaning of these other terms: traditional, indigenous, and
tribal/ethnic.
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