Adam’s Escape: Children and the Discordant Nature of Colonial Conversions

TY - JOUR

T1 - Adam’s Escape

T2 - Children and the Discordant Nature of Colonial Conversions

AU - Vallgårda, Karen Asta Arnfred

PY - 2011/8

Y1 - 2011/8

N2 - The article traces the fundamental incoherency that structured the Danish Missionary Society's work at a boarding school for low-caste 'heathen' children in South India in the 1860s and 1870s. Through elaborate disciplinary methods, the missionaries set out to Christianize and civilize the Indian children's morality, social behaviour and bodily comportment. Yet, the missionaries' perceptions of 'the Indian child' also reflected the contemporary bolstering of racial thinking in Indian colonial society, resulting in doubts whether Indian children could in fact become true Christians. This paradoxical endeavour shows how children became a site for the production of difference that sustained colonialism.

AB - The article traces the fundamental incoherency that structured the Danish Missionary Society's work at a boarding school for low-caste 'heathen' children in South India in the 1860s and 1870s. Through elaborate disciplinary methods, the missionaries set out to Christianize and civilize the Indian children's morality, social behaviour and bodily comportment. Yet, the missionaries' perceptions of 'the Indian child' also reflected the contemporary bolstering of racial thinking in Indian colonial society, resulting in doubts whether Indian children could in fact become true Christians. This paradoxical endeavour shows how children became a site for the production of difference that sustained colonialism.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - barndomdshistorie

KW - mission

KW - Indien

KW - pædagogik

KW - omvendelse

KW - postkolonial teori

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0907-5682

VL - 18

SP - 298

EP - 315

JO - Childhood

JF - Childhood

IS - 3

ER -