Nominalism: Negotiating ethnicity and Christian identity in contemporary Yunnan

Abstract

This article deals with the convergence of ethnicity and faith in the context of Christian Yunnan. Contemporary Evangelical missionaries working in Yunnan encourage the preservation of ethnic markers while attempting to create a form of ‘pristine faith’: a religiosity that severely limits the role of ethnicity in the construction of identity, emphasizing instead individualism and globalism—processes that may be beneficial for the Chinese state. My discussion here revolves around the distinction made by many Evangelical Christians in China between ‘true’ faith, based on an individual experience of salvation and rebirth, and ‘nominal’ faith, a traditional understanding of religion as an identity that is acquired at birth. Thus, minority Christians whose ancestors converted en masse prior to the 1949 revolution and retain a distinctly ethnic form of religiosity are often labelled ‘nominal’ by contemporary missionaries and converts. In contrast, the latter represent a faith that stems from personal experience and belongs to a global and transnational community, transcending the narrow limits of ethnic culture.

Constructing and deconstructing the sacred geography of Hebron: Movement and pilgrimage in and around the Tomb of the Patriarchs

“…The answers provided here employ Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of space production, namely, the ways in which societies deploy and represent space to serve their ideological, social, and financial needs. While Lefebvre is concerned mostly with the production of space by the modern state, others have written about the ways in which sacred space is produced and negotiated through the practice, movement, and performance of tourist bodies (Edensor, 2001; Holloway, 2003) or other agents (Elazar, 2018).…”