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Browsing by Author "Agmon, Danna"

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    Aristocrats, Republicans, and Cannibals: American Reactions to French Women in Violence
    Stoltz, Taylor (Virginia Tech, 2015-05-28)
    This thesis discusses the reactions of American newspapers and elite individuals to French women in violence as perpetrators and victims during the French Revolution. Canvassing the years between 1789 and 1799, it includes papers, especially politically aligned ones, from across the states of America and attempts to assess the prescriptive nature of various reports. In includes case studies of common/working-class women, aristocratic revolutionaries (Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland), and Queen Marie Antoinette. Using newspapers with and without political affiliations, to either the Federalist or Democratic-Republican Party, it argues that the dividing ideological lines between these factions were not as steadfast and rigid as previously believed during this period. Though papers and individuals did adhere to party lines, their opinions toward women in violence were affected by other factors, such as their ideologies about violence. Building on historiographies of colonial and revolutionary American attitudes toward women in violence, gender ideology in the early Republic, and political parties in the 1790s, it seeks to illuminate American views toward women in violence during the years of the early Republic.
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    The Brahmin Problem: Charity, Expenditure and the Genealogy of Sovereignty in Travancore
    Shajahan, Muhammed Shah (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-15)
    Envisioned as a contribution to South Asian studies in general, and the fields of historical and political anthropology in particular, this dissertation develops around a set of relationships centered on the concept of sovereignty. In addressing the question of what the expenditure on Brahmins and the colonial, missionary, and Nair critiques against it meant for the evolving notion of sovereignty for the princely state of Travancore in the nineteenth century, I argue that the colonial, missionary and Nair critiques were not just based on the economic logic of productivity and the governmental logic of welfare, but also on the recognition of the Brahmin Problem as the fundamental crisis of sovereignty. Brahmin is the name of a problem that concerns the practice of expenditure, the relationship of property, and the construction of religion in the nineteenth-century Travancore. Travancore, located in the southwest of today's South India, was a native princely state under the indirect rule of the British East India Company in the first half of the nineteenth century and under the British crown in the second half. The problem was articulated in the colonial critique of spending money on Brahmins, their ceremonies, and their feeding. In trying to construct an archive of the crisis out of this problem embedded in the colonial and later missionary and Nair critiques of the state's expenditure in the nineteenth century, I focus on three key sites of contestation. The first one is the relationship of property, the second is the practice of feeding, and the third is expenditure on ceremonials. The postulation of the problem in these three sites is marked by colonial policies such as the integration of temples, or Brahmin properties, to the state treasury in the early nineteenth century and the activation of expenditure as a category of critique owing to the colonial pressure on the native state of Travancore to ensure the surplus of two lakhs rupees per year for the tributary payment for the British and the emergence of what I call public critique in nineteenth century. In my effort to build this problem, I particularly pay attention to its relationship with the evolving notion of sovereignty in the nineteenth century. This relationship is not a stable or steady text for analysis, but rather contingent on how the state variously negotiated this problem, leading to the emergence of the concepts of charity, trust, and religion. I characterize this negotiation of the state as translation, transposition, and adaptation within the colonial grammar of power. The archive of this negotiation, characterized by translation, transposition, and adaptation, provided me with the first material to think about charity, trust, and religion and see how they were connected to the evolving sovereignty of the state. By drawing on primary sources collected from various archives in Kerala, I map how sovereignty constituted a problem space in Travancore for a genealogical rumination. Following David Scott, Quentin Skinner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Talal Asad, and Michel Foucault, I employ genealogy as a method to understand sovereignty as a relationship of power rather than an absolute type of power. This relationship of power is characterized by the crisis of the Brahmin Problem, giving rise to what I call, following Scott, the problem space of sovereignty. My primary sources consist of Travancore administrative records, temple records, written exchanges between the Dewan of Travancore and the British Resident, royal orders, colonial policy records, records of the policy discussion for temple reform, newspapers, and magazines. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the scholarly stakes in studying sovereignty as a relationship of power in the context of caste, religion, and state in the contemporary context.
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    Building Cultural Bridges: American Women Missionaries in Korea 1885-1910
    Skiles, Debra Faith (Virginia Tech, 2016-05-17)
    In this thesis, I explore the role of American women missionaries to Korea and how they built cultural bridges that Korean women crossed to become Christian converts. American women missionaries opened their homes to and deliberately sought out relationships with Korean women, relationships centered on evangelism, a common search for Korean language literacy, a shared identity as women and on something missionary women termed a "friendship." These actions by the American women missionaries created opportunities -- bridges -- for Korean women to step into Christianity along a uniquely female path. The bridges I discuss are the intentional actions by women missionaries to make connections with Korean women, the creation of spaces within American homes that met Confucian expectations for women and the production of a "middle ground," a conceptual space of (mis)understanding and new understandings that facilitated cross-cultural interaction. These bridges helped a significant number of Korean women to convert to Christianity and also shed light on the development of a syncretic Korean Christianity.
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    A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India
    Agmon, Danna (Cornell University Press, 2017)
    Early in the eighteenth century, in the French colony of Pondichéry, India, a man’s life was thrust into turmoil. A Tamil commercial broker named Nayiniyappa, the colony’s most powerful local man, was arrested, swiftly convicted of tyranny and sedition, and died in prison while serving out his sentence. But following his death a global mobilization effort on his behalf ensued, and the French King exonerated Nayiniyappa posthumously. The struggle over this man’s guilt or innocence drew into debate merchants of the French trading company, the Compagnie des Indes, Catholic missionaries of various orders, high ranking officials in Paris and Versailles, and local families in Pondichéry. As they fought over Nayiniyappa’s fate, they also articulated radically different visions of the French colonial project in India. This microhistory of the affair and the fault lines it reveals shows that conflicts between and within the projects of trade and religion were a defining feature of the little-known French empire in South Asia.
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    The Currency of Kinship: Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French India
    Agmon, Danna (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2014)
    In the French colony of Pondichéry, French and local actors alike drew on the shared idiom of kinship to strategically advance their political and commercial agendas. Recent scholarship has shown that the structures of family underlay early modern European state building and imperial expansion. This essay deploys this insight in the colonial context, to examine how indigenous families in the Tamil region entered into the European colonial project. For native commercial brokers, involvement with European newcomers could actually strengthen local family ties. Simultaneously, French employees of the Compagnie des Indes were eager to insert themselves into Tamil networks and did so by deploying public and inscribed performances of kinship.
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    Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India
    Agmon, Danna (Cambridge University Press, 2021-10-01)
    This article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps - physical, historiographical, and epistemological - to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history - questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty - with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie's early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.
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    I Would Never Set Foot On American Soil Again: Religion, Space, and Gender: American Missionaries in Korea
    Skiles, Debra Faith (Virginia Tech, 2021-09-29)
    By using three lenses of analysis not often used together, theology, space and gender, this dissertation explores the decisions, practices, and gender dynamics of one group of Protestant religious imperialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Southern Presbyterian missionaries to Korea. The Southern Presbyterian's missionary theology drew not only from Presbyterian beliefs and doctrine, but also from more radical ideas outside the church. This more radical theology emphasized the importance of and expedient nature in achieving world evangelism. To advance world evangelism as quickly as possible, the missionaries' primary focus became converting Koreans to Christianity. Therefore, to convert Koreans, both Korean women and men, the Southern Presbyterians made two more changes, they created sex-segregated spaces to conform with Korean cultural expectations for spatial use and, secondly, used them for intimate, one-on-one evangelism, similar to the "inquiry room" styled evangelism of Dwight Moody. These decisions put American women to work in gender roles that mimicked those of men as primary evangelists, teachers, and tacit pastors to Korean women. These changes in theology, changes in spatial arrangements, and changes in gender roles characterized the Southern Presbyterian mission to Korea. Importantly, all three of these transformations, when implemented on the ground in Korea, did not contradict with one another, however, instead contributed to the success of the mission with each change supporting the others. While the Southern Presbyterians espoused a conservative evangelical theology, that included conservative social values, their mission theology, based in their belief that they could help usher in the second coming of Jesus, superseded the upholding of Southern gender norms for women. Further, missionaries' intimate evangelism in sex-segregated spaces allowed for evangelism of both Korean men and women in spaces and existing religious styles Koreans already considered as appropriate for religious or quasi-religious activities. By using three fields of analysis, connections between the rise of Christianity in Korea and missionary inner social dynamics can be seen. Specifically, the analysis sheds light on the significant role a group of evangelizers dedicated to certain theological beliefs not only shape a mission's endeavors but also the lives of the missionaries themselves. Theses lenses of analysis also show that much similarity existed between existing Korean spatial religious practices and the spatial evangelistic methods used by the missionaries. Also, changes within missionary gender roles can be explained which exposes the central work of evangelism done by not only single female missionaries, but married ones as well.
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    VT Authors Event 2018
    Walters, Tyler; Clarke, Cyril R.; Johnson, Sylvester; Potter, Peter J.; Walz, Anita R.; Ellingson, Steve; Agmon, Danna; Ewing, E. Thomas; Hofer, Stefanie; Giminez Smith, Carmen (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2018-03-21)
    The 13th Annual University Libraries’ VT Authors Recognition event honors authors of books published in 2017 as well as authors of articles published through the University Libraries' Open Access Subvention Fund. The evening will include remarks by interim provost Cyril Clarke, assistant vice provost for the humanities Sylvester Johnson, and University Libraries dean Tyler Walters.
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    We Can Do Very Little With Them:  British Discourse and British Policy on Shi'is in Iraq
    Furrow, Heath A. (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-26)
    This thesis explores the role of metropolitan religious values and discourses in influencing British officials' discourse on Sunni and Shi'i Islam in early mandate Iraq. It also explores the role that this discourse played in informing the policy decisions of British officials. I argue that British officials thought about and described Sunni and Shi'i Islam through a lens of religious values and experiences that led British officials to describe Shi'i Islam as prone to theocracy and religious and intellectual intolerance, traits that British officials saw as detrimental to their efforts to create a modern state in Iraq. These descriptions ultimately led British officials to take active steps to remove Shi'i religions leaders from the civic discourse of Iraq and to support an indigenous government where Sunnis were given most government positions in spite of making up a minority of the overall population of Iraq. This study draws on documents created by British officials serving in Iraq from 1919-1922, including official reports and correspondence, published government reports, personal correspondence and memoirs. It also draws on biographies of British officials, the secondary literature on religion and civil society in Great Britain, and the secondary literature on Shi'i Islam in Iraq. I engage in the historiography surrounding European Imperial perceptions of Islam and argue that historians should pay greater attention to the role that metropolitan religious experiences and values played in informing the way that imperial officials differentiated between different groups within Islam. I also engage in the historiography of British policy in mandate Iraq, offering a deeper view of how British discourse on Shi'i Islam developed and how this discourse influenced the policy decisions of British official.
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    'What are ye, little mannie?': the Persistence of Fairy Culture in Scotland,1572-1703 and 1811-1927
    Hight, Alison Marie (Virginia Tech, 2014-06-09)
    This thesis is a chronologically comparative study of fairy culture and belief in early modern and Victorian Scotland. Using fairy culture as a case study, I examine the adaptability of folk culture by exploring whether beliefs and legends surrounding fairies in the early modern era continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a single culture system, or whether the Victorian fairy revival was a distinct cultural phenomenon. Based on contextual, physical, and behavioral comparisons, this thesis argues the former; while select aspects of fairy culture developed and adapted to serve the needs and values of Victorian society, its resurgence and popularization was largely predicated on the notion that it was a remnant of the past, therefore directly linking the nineteenth century interpretation to the early modern. In each era, fairy culture serves as a window into the major tensions complicating Scottish identity formation. In the early modern era, these largely centered around witchcraft, theology, and the Reformation, while notions of cultural heritage, national mythology, and escapist fantasy dominated Victorian fairy discourse. A comparative study on fairy culture demonstrates how cultural traditions can help link vastly different time periods and complicate traditional conceptions about periodization. Ultimately, this thesis reveals how issues of class impacted the popularization and persistence of fairy culture across both eras, reflecting ongoing discussions about Scottish identity.