Missionary Albert Kruyt and colonial modernity in the Dutch East Indies

Intense debates emerged in the Dutch East Indies during the course of the third decade of the twentieth century concerning the role of missionaries in the development of the Outer Islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Ostensibly concerning “native welfare”, disagreement fundamentally reflected underlying fractures within the Dutch nation, projected through its “colonial mission” concerning the nature of modernity. While the main focus appeared to be a disagreement concerning the goals of mission and government agencies, it would be too simplistic to characterise the debate as one between adherents of a secular versus a religious world view. This paper considers the question of “missions and modernity” in the context of this debate about “native development” in the Dutch East Indies through the prism of the Poso mission in Central Sulawesi, headed by missionary Albert Kruyt, one of the foremost missionaries of his day.

Greeting the state: entanglements of custom and modernity on Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast

In May 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village on the country’s north coast to receive a petition against proposed mine activity. The encounter between the politicians and the villagers who had invited them involved two very different articulations of power and authority, and two competing cartographies of centrality and marginality. The encounter speaks to the need to approach the concepts of custom and modernity not only as powerful discourses which are taken up and performed in local places, but also as analytical descriptors of actually existing patterns of practice and meaning which are structurally and ontological distinct. At the same time, however, analysis of the encounter between villagers and politicians makes clear that this structural difference cannot be written straightforwardly onto the social bodies of opposing collectivities. Rather, customary and modern forms of social relations exist in dynamic and ambivalent entanglements, pulled into contingent and differently weighted configurations by actors in local places.

The sociological imaginary and disability enquiry in late modernity

Mills’s idea of the sociological imagination has captured many generations of scholars interested in the difficult social issues that people grapple with in their lives. Yet, sociology has traditionally had a poor record of linking disabled people’s ‘private’ accounts of their difficulties to ‘public’ issues. We contend that disability is still marginal to the sociological imaginary, despite attempts by disability studies and subdisciplines within sociology to make the concept relevant to the larger discipline. There is a range of conceptual tensions in sociology such as public/private and normal/abnormal that can be better illuminated by focusing on disability. We argue that critical disability studies, with its reimagining of disability within late modernity, may be better positioned to make more effectively the case for disability’s significance to the sociological imaginary. Facilitating dialogue with sociology on the concept of disability, however, may require disability scholars to develop more explicit strategies of engagement.

Indigenous peoples and modernity

Includes bibliography