Suppressing the Mad Elephant
Missionaries, Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2156367 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M King (0000-0003-0446-7698, Schlumberger (Ireland), corresponding author), Matthew W King, P E Klassen (0009-0009-0455-0951, KLA (United States), corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 529-552 |
| Publication date | 2015-10-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02757206.2015.1037300 |
| OpenAlex | W824257829 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 28 |
The late-nineteenth century was a time of Protestant missionary enthusiasm for the “great closed land” of Tibet. Their prodigious, oftentimes proto-ethnographic, writings continue to provide scholars with archives that document missionary perspectives on Inner Asian society and religion, but few sources have yet emerged that allow for these to be read alongside Tibetan accounts of Christian-Buddhist encounters. This article undertakes such a parallel reading of four accounts of an unsuccessful attempt by the British missionary Cecil Polhill to convert an eastern Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Māyang Paṇḍita, in late 1889. Understanding these texts as conflicting sacred historiographies, we note that these Christian and Buddhist writers shared a commitment to writing and to particular modes of emotional, material, and logical mediation as the “correct” path to religious certainty. Differences in genre, however, lead more to mockery and misunderstanding than to each side’s desired transformation of the other
Archaeology · Art · Buddhism · Enthusiasm · Ethnography · Linguistics · Literature · Mediation · Protestantism · Pure land · Reading (process · Sociology · Theology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies
Curators of the Buddha
Mixed Messages
Cecil Henry Polhill
Borrowed Gods and Foreign BodiesChristian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion
The Last Emperors
Prisoners of Shangri-La
A New History of Christianity in China
The Museum on the Roof of the World
Conversion and Convergence in the Venetian-Ottoman Borderlands
Edward Said, Orientalism. New York
China's Millions. The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832-1905
The Divine Word Missionaries in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang, 1922–1953
Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture
Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion
Cecil Polhill-Turner and Tibet
The Heavens Are Changing
The Invention of World Religions
Translating the Devil
Missionaries, Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia
The Emergence of Authenticity Talk and the Giving of Accounts
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,29 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |