Missions and Conversions: Creating the Montagnard-Dega Refugee Community [Hardcover]

This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of missionaries that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee. Thomas Pearson uses ethnographic and archival research to tell the story of cross-cultural contact in the highlands during the Vietnam War, Christian conversion, refugee exile, and the formation of the Dega refugee community in the United States. His insightful study considers not just evangelicals and Catholics, but humanitarian workers in the highlands, refugee resettlement volunteers in the United States, and the American Special Forces soldiers. This book makes the case that the Dega have appropriated the anthropological and religious discourses of this disparate group of missionaries to recreate themselves through a multivalent conversion. Introduction Representing the Montagnards The Conversion of the Dega Conversion to Refugees Sickness, Sin, and Animal Sacrifice Hearts and Minds The Conversion of the Special Forces

In this lively book, Thomas Pearson describes the multiple conversions that produced the Christian Montagnard-Dega community in the United States from the vantage point of that Dega diaspora, looking back and interpreting their life journeys in terms of their new-found religion. Based on a wide array of documentary sources and interviews and on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Dega community in North Carolina, Pearson skillfully weaves numerous narratives together to tell the story of the conversion of disparate tribal groups in Vietnam to Montagnards; of their political conversion to guerrilla warriors and their religious conversion to Dega Christianity; of their conversion from guerrilla fighters to refugees in the diaspora; and of the conversion of Special Forces to loyalty to their erstwhile allies. Bringing the voices of the Dega and their American supporters to life, Pearson carefully sketches a picture of the Dega as active or passive agents - as warriors, Christians and relãÀ