Bearing witness: Interventions into 19th-century American missionary practice in Kurdistan

Abstract

Over the course of the 19th-century, American missionaries worked extensively on the border of the Ottoman and Persian Empires with a community of indigenous Christians they called ‘Nestorians,’ in a region known then, as it is known today, as ‘Kurdistan.’ Reading the archival material they left through a poststructural lens, this paper is a philosophically-grounded case study of the historical movement of American evangelicals into ‘Bible lands.’ While attentive to the many forms of violence missionaries wrought, this paper refuses to grant present-day social scientists the power to right historical wrongs by virtue of their alleged intellectual advancement beyond the missionary pasts they have displaced into archives. Rather, this paper argues that an ethical confrontation of the Nestorian Mission entails ‘bearing witness’ to it—like the witness, the researcher must remain beholden not to a dispassionate analysis of artifacts but to the event of missionary work itself.