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Comment se fait-il qu’autant de personnes de la minorité montagnarde brao se sont vu confier des postes importants dans le gouvernement cambodgien des années 1980, alors qu’elles ne parlaient pas couramment la langue nationale khmère et n’avaient pas, pour la plupart, fait d’études avancées ? C’est la question qui s’est imposée à Ian Baird, aujourd’hui professeur de géographie à l’université de Wisconsin-Madison, lorsqu’ il a entrepris ses recherches de master dans la province de Ratanakiri e...

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience; The Mission of Development interrogates the complex relationships between Christian mission and international development in Asia from the 19th century to the new millennium. Through historically and ethnographically grounded case studies, contributors examine how missionaries have adapted to and shaped the age of development and processes of ‘technocratisation’, as well as how mission and development have sometimes come to be cast in opposition. The volume takes up an increasingly prominent strand in contemporary research that reverses the prior occlusion of the entanglements between religion and development. It breaks new ground through its analysis of the techno-politics of both development and mission, and by focusing on the importance of engagements and encounters in the field in Asia.

International audience

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development.This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

The two-fold aim of this paper is to outline a hitherto largely unknown history of evangelical Christianity among the Cambodian Bunong and to reflect upon aspects that may have been relevant in the encounters between Protestant missionaries and this minority population living in the highlands bordering with Vietnam. Relying on historical missionary accounts and on Bunong narratives gathered during fieldwork in Mondulkiri province, I will explore three moments of this meeting of different “ thought-worlds”— from the lack of success of early evangelisation efforts during the colonial and post-independence era, over the first conversions during the Vietnam War, to the installation and limited spread of Christianity in liberated Cambodia from the 1980s to the 1990s. In these various political and socio-environmental contexts, particular attention is given to the part of ritual practice in the dynamic of conversion, as it appeared to be a topic shared by the animist highlanders and the evangelical emissaries., Cet article cherche à esquisser l’histoire peu connue de l’arrivée du christianisme évangélique parmi les Bunong du Cambodge. Il vise aussi à réfléchir sur des facteurs susceptibles d’avoir été déterminants pour le déroulement de ces premières rencontres entre des missionnaires protestants et cette population minoritaire vivant sur les hautes terres, à la frontière du Viêt-nam. À partir d’écrits missionnaires et de récits de vie bunong, recueillis dans la province de Mondulkiri, nous explorerons trois «moments » de cette rencontre entre différentes visions socio-cosmiques, ouvrant sur l’échec de l’évangélisation à l’époque coloniale et sous le régime post-indépendant, pour passer par les premières conversions lors de la guerre du Viêt-nam et finir par l’installation et la dispersion limitée du christianisme après la libération du Cambodge, dans les années 1980-1990. Dans ces différents contextes politiques et socio-environnementaux, une attention particulière sera portée au rôle joué dans le processus de conversion par les pratiques rituelles. Celles-ci semblent avoir constitué un point d’intérêt partagé tant par les animistes des hautes terres que par les émissaires protestants., Scheer Catherine. When the Spirits are Angry, God Gains in Popularity: Exploring the Emergence of Bunong Protestantism in the Highlands of Cambodia. In: Aséanie 28, 2011. pp. 45-72.