discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 100
100 How Culture Affects Mission
Western dress codes. Though such acts by a few missionaries created negative
fallout for the whole mission enterprise, those few missionaries are not representative
of all missionaries.
Generally, expatriate Christian missionaries have been insightful amateur
anthropologists doing more to conserve cultures than destroy them. Missionaries
tend to become excellent “participant observers,” as anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski started calling those who entered into a culture while studying
and analyzing it. Bible translator Eugene Nida’s classic Customs and Cultures:
Anthropology for Christian Missions let the world know that Christian missionaries
knew the value of cultural anthropology. Nida and some other missionary
anthropologists also started a periodical for missionaries called Practical Anthropology,
a journal that eventually merged with another publication to form what
is now Missiology.
While most contemporary anthropologists understand that missionaries are
less damaging to cultures than almost any other outsiders, missionaries currently
find themselves needing to respond to fellow Christians who in a post-modern
way ask, “What right do we have to try to change their beliefs?” One thing such
criticisms of missionary work ignore is that cultures are always changing. Indeed,
one aspect of culture that intrigues cultural anthropologists is the diffusion
or movement of ideas and innovations across cultural boundaries, and the
changes those imported items will bring about. Cultural anthropologists understand
that the question is not whether a culture will change but what kind of
changes that culture will undergo. The positive changes that Christianity has facilitated
in cultures include leveling the playing field for females and other disadvantaged
groups, such as twins, children, lepers, and AIDS sufferers.
Culture Shock
When missionaries move into a new culture, they usually experience a period
of adjustment that includes attitudes and reactions labeled culture shock.
The phrase culture shock, coined in 1951 by Cora DuBois and popularized by
anthropologist Kalvero Oberg, describes the disorientation experienced when
people move into an unfamiliar culture and have to learn a language and cope
with new patterns of life as well as adjusting to different ways of thinking.
One way of looking at the cultural adjustment process is to see it as a series
of progressive steps that can be labeled: (1) fascination, (2) distaste, (3) rejection,
and (4) recovery and adjustment. The process begins when new missionaries
arrive in their host culture and begin experiencing fascination. Goods
sold in stores and open-air markets seem appealingly different from those back
home. Enamored with new sights and sounds, the new missionary feels like a