Missions and Conversions Creating the Montagnard-Dega Refugee Community

This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of "missionaries" that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee. Thomas Pearson uses ethnographic and archival research to tell the story of cross-cultural contact in the highlands during the Vietnam Wa...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Pearson, Thomas
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: New York Palgrave Macmillan US 2009, 2009
Series:Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: Springer eBooks 2005- - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
Description
Summary:This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of "missionaries" that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee. Thomas Pearson uses ethnographic and archival research to tell the story of cross-cultural contact in the highlands during the Vietnam War, Christian conversion, refugee exile, and the formation of the Dega refugee community in the United States. His insightful study considers not just evangelicals and Catholics, but humanitarian workers in the highlands, refugee resettlement volunteers in the United States, and the American Special Forces soldiers. This book makes the case that the Dega have appropriated the anthropological and religious discourses of this disparate group of missionaries to recreate themselves through a multivalent "conversion."
Physical Description:XII, 241 p online resource
ISBN:9780230622524