From Transformation to Negotiation: A Female Mission in a “City of Schools”

In much recent research on missions and colonialism, the notion of a civilizing mission has served to highlight asymmetries of power in colonial encounters. Drawing on the example of the school and orphanage run by German Protestant deaconesses in late Ottoman Beirut, this article questions these perspectives, arguing that an analysis focused on the criterion of discipline fails to seize the profoundly reciprocal character of missionary encounters. Missionaries were doubtlessly involved in bringing about global cultural transformations, but they were not omnipotent. Offering a novel perspective on the study of missions, this article shows that local agency as well as the dynamics of the larger field turned the missionary encounter into a process of negotiation starkly at odds with the idea of a unidirectional civilizing mission.