Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (review)

The latter half of the Qing period, by and large identical with the reign of Queen Victoria, has attracted academic attention ever since Sino-European contacts intensified during the 1830s. The same can be said for the history of the Christian missions during the same time span, in particular concerning the experiences of British and American missionaries. The past fifteen to twenty years have witnessed an upsurge in publications based on missionary accounts. Why, then, yet another book on Victorian missionaries? The same question could be asked about the parallel topic, "bodies." What began with Anthony Smith's exploration of The Body (1968)in general terms now inhabits most of the territories of historical discourse. The contributions by David Arnold (colonial India) and Frank Dikötter (early modern China) may suffice as examples. Physical aspects of the Victorian era have been analysed since Bruce Haley's explorations, in turn engendering interest in the sexual (Pamela Gilbert) and narcotic (Virginia Berridge).

But far from following a historiographical vogue, Eric Reinders concentrates on the specifically religious interpretation of the human body, of its functions and postures in the mindset of foreign missionaries. In this context we are introduced to the missionaries' utter aversion to prostration, despised as "Catholic" or generally "Oriental." Condemnation was particularly reserved for the kowtow, as an expression of Asiatic despotism and of the propensity of the Chinese towards unquestioning subjugation. In a more "visceral" sense, opinions on Buddhist vegetarianism form a secondary line of investigation. In this specific sense, "body" and "missions" have never been analysed as a related pair.

The monograph's main argument is summarised in its title, namely that the impressions of missionaries arriving during the nineteenth century were reduced to the interpretation of the physiognomies they encountered. Deprived of any relevant language skills, the Europeans commented on physical features and body positions as character-revealing traits. These invariably tied in with perceived conceptions of "the oriental character," providing the foreign envoys of Christianity also with a heartfelt cultural mission. Reinders links the missionaries' perceptions of Chinese physical attributes to their observation of greed and gluttony—"God is their belly"; "Money is the god of the Chinese" (64). Materialism in Chinese culture is a phenomenon earlier generations of Christian visitors had already remarked upon, usually in disparaging tones. Yet what is missing here is an explanation of what the "material nature" of Chinese society consisted of. The main weakness of the monograph is thus the relative absence of insight into Chinese culture, perhaps to be explained by the complete lack of Chinese language source materials.

Reinders, on the contrary, is strongest in his observations of the ecclesiastic Victorian universe. In his observations on language (mainly chapter 6, "Babel Embodied"), he emphasises the contemporary arguments over "Catholicising" intonation in Anglican ritual (94). The same goes for the chapter on vegetarianism ("Blessed are the meat eaters," chapter 10), where nineteenth-century objections are linked to the observations of early Jesuit missionaries (150). Physical attributes in Victorian churchmen after 1850, such as full beards, are thus interpreted as assertions of masculinity (as opposed to Anglo-Catholic effeminacy), puritanism (that is, Low Church identity), and, crucially, of a "European" identity, both in cultural and in racial terms. The author's work blossoms in passages analysing "muscular" late-nineteenth-century Protestantism (176–86, 209–11).

The monograph is subdivided into fourteen thematic chapters, which can be grouped into three clusters: religious belief (chapters 1–5), the body (6–7, 11–14) and socio-racial behaviour (8–10). Alternatively, a simpler division into "metaphysical" (1–5) and "physical" (6–14) is possible. The chapters themselves rarely reconstruct the historical development of the phenomena described. Instead, detailed photographic depictions of nineteenth-century China, as encountered by foreign observers, are provided.

Reinders bases his research on published missionary accounts. These fall into two categories: travel writing (published diaries and reminiscences: Évariste Huc, Harry A...