The newly published monograph presents a 300-page comparative study of two missionary travelogues from the 1930s, herewith first presented within an academic book format. In addition to an in-depth contextualization of the two texts, the book also includes biographical data of both travel writers, as well as a detailed analysis of their texts. The authors approach the travelogues from the point of view of the spirituality and materiality of their journey as well as various discourses, and finally from the point of view of intercultural and inter-religious themes. Deploying a close-reading method, the analyses open up ambiguous questions about the two texts, which differ greatly in terms of both content and style. With insights from postcolonial and women's studies and in the context of the historical development of the travelogue as a genre, the books shows how Miriam Zalaznik's writing already anticipates modernist narrative approaches, while Stanko Poderžaj's text remains deeply rooted in the authoritative realistic narrative of the 19th century. Moreover, her writing is self-reflexive, thus seducing the reader into the intimate world of her personal experiences, while Poderžaj’s text tries to interpellate the reader into the field of knowledge through self-referential repetition, where it is somehow clear who “we” are and who are “they”. The book represents an original contribution to the understanding of the missionary travelogue - this overlooked genre that deserves more in-depth research in terms of literary-historical, cultural, migration and women's studies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 62072835
Contrary to the normative apostolic letter Maximum illud, which demanded that mis-sionaries cut their ties with national(ist) and colonial agendas, the missionary project of the Yugoslav interwar missionaries in Bengal was deeply suffused with patriotism, with the newspapers and missionary publications alike portraying the Yugoslav Bengali mission as a symbolic victory of the newly-established Yugoslav state. The present paper aims to interpret this controversy by exploring how men and women missionaries negotiated the conflicting relationship between the transnational missionary project and the nationalist agendas, while also struggling with the controversial decisions of which national agenda to pursue.
COBISS.SI-ID: 44908589
This paper is a panoramic survey of a millennia-long tradition of asceticism and monasticism in the Indian subcontinent. The main ascetic traditions of India are over-viewed, with a particular focus given to female renouncers. Their doctrinal premises and religious practices are discussed within a historical framework, and major emerging themes are identified. Since this paper forms part of a research project investigating the lives of Catholic female missionaries in India in the twentieth century, it concludes with the identification of significant overlaps between female renunciation in the Indic and Christian traditions, and engages in some reflections on the encounter between the two discourses.
COBISS.SI-ID: 69857890
This article follows a circular path. Its starting point is the well-preserved family ar-chive of more than a hundred letters written by Sr. Conradina to her family back home in Slovenia from her assigned mission in India. It then journeys through layers of historical context important for understanding the qualitative methodological approaches, reflecting on various aspects relevant to the analysis of the letters (material aspects, questions of comprehension, content issues, the ethnographic context, etc.). Finally, it reaches - or rather comes back to - the source, the missionary herself, writing letters from India to Slovenia from within the framework of different hierarchies, discourses and relationships.
COBISS.SI-ID: 44895533
Drawing on archival, oral sources and historic in-terpretations, this paper brings to light a surprisingly neglected foundational chapter of medical professionalisation amongst the nuns within the Catholic Church. By analysing the contribu-tion of two women doctors – the Scot Agnes McLaren (1837–1913) and the Austrian Anna Dengel (1892–1980), two key players in the struggle for sisters to be able to practice the full scope of medicine – it shows the standard postcolonial culturalist critique to be inadequate in explaining the motivations of the two pioneers, interpreted instead as visionaries able to carve out a space of greater freedom for themselves within the patriarchy of the Church as well as society at large.
COBISS.SI-ID: 43774253