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5 - Crisis and Conversion

Bamboo, Debt, Disease (1906–1924)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2023

Kyle Jackson
Affiliation:
Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver
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Summary

In the 1910s, human and animal populations all over the Lushai Hills were pounded by a chance series of calamities - environmental, financial, agricultural, and epidemiological - forever altering the social landscape. This chapter is about how people attempting to escape the crush of bamboo famine, debt, crop failure, and disease were set in motion across mountains. As traditional coping strategies were constrained by new political, economic, and environmental realities, shattered clan groups began to forge new survival mechanisms out of missionary medicine and Christianity itself. Shattered families, scattered clans, sickly refugees, and indebted labourers were dashed across mountainsides to become seekers of new powers as older survival mechanisms failed or were ruled out, regulated, or lost. Disasters reordered not only by catalyzing opportunities for spiritual searching, but also by remixing splintered clan groups of survivors - once disparate kin groups and communities that, according to contemporary upland cultural logics, were in dire need of communal healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Foregrounding local terminology in the telling of these pasts opens up causal explanations, interpretative pathways, and complexities otherwise obscured by using Western categories and frameworks alone, and points to the multiple meanings of the conversion process itself. Christianity advanced through catastrophe as shattered populations folded it back into the normal healing structures of upland life.

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The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj
Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890–1920
, pp. 172 - 205
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Crisis and Conversion
  • Kyle Jackson, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver
  • Book: The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj
  • Online publication: 12 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009267359.006
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  • Crisis and Conversion
  • Kyle Jackson, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver
  • Book: The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj
  • Online publication: 12 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009267359.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Crisis and Conversion
  • Kyle Jackson, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver
  • Book: The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj
  • Online publication: 12 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009267359.006
Available formats
×