From the earliest Christian missionary endeavours, when St. Paul made himself to become "all things to all men" (1 Cor. 9:19-22), Christian missionaries have avowed the principle of 'identification' - the sympathetic adaptation of one's behaviour and message to the culture within which one engages in missiop. But the precise nature of this 'identification' seems to have undergone significant changes as the 'Christian' West came to dominate the rest of the world idealogically, politically, and economically. Utilizing representative sources of the period, this study attempts to portray missionary identification as it was understood and practiced by Protestant missionaries between 1860 and 1910. The record is examined at several levels: Anglo-American Missionary Conference reports are used to paint the broad picture of missionary attitudes and concerns; the London Missionary Society - with special reference to its activities and personnel in Central Africa and Central China - serves to fill in the details of the larger canvas. The result depicts Protestant missionaries of the time as having been so enmeshed in European civilization as to preclude any significant adaptation to non-Western life - in either theory or practice. Materially, socially, politically, economically, educationally, and religiously, the missionary remained a European. Even in the linguistic sphere, missionary identification came gradually to mean the instruction of natives in the English language. While exceeding any degree of identification which might have been attempted or achieved by any other group of Westerners (such as adventurers, explorers, merchants, colonists, and colonial officials), missionary identification was severely truncated by the powerful press and pull of their own Eurocentrism, and by their self-conscious awareness that they were the incarnation of European superiority in virtually every sphere.

<p>This thesis is a study of the patterns of change within Sri Lankan Tamil tradition, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. It endeavours to accomplish two things. First, by the examination of colonial Sri Lanka against a detailed consideration of the pre-existing society and culture, the thesis shows that the colonial period, far from being one of great change and disjunction with the past, in fact experienced a very gradual course of social change which was facilitated by the widespread incorporation of traditional structures that gave colonial society a much needed stability and a peaceful environment where trade and commerce could prosper. ~econdly, by taking this approach, the thesis demonstrates that the nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon Protestant missionaries eventually fell into the traditional role of sannyasins, a role, as this work shows, that had been adopted by the Jain mendicants and the Buddhist bhikkhus who had preceded them. The thesis first demonstrates that the sannyasin, although in a fundamental sense an enemy of caste, having turned his or her back on caste society, has nevertheless deeply influenced Hindu society, partfcularly when organized as a community of renouncers. The thesis then goes on to argue that the Protestant sannyasins likewise, in the establishment of male and female boarding schools, advocated a form of communal renunciation, which contributed .to the formation of a parallel society alongside the caste society, and which became instrumental in initiating many changes within Tamil culture in Sri Lanka.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)