A Study on the Impact of Introducing Literacy through the Baptist Mission: The Inseparability of Religion and Literacy in the Karen World

Abstract

While Protestantism brought modernity to indigenous peoples, it sometimes created new types of confusion in local society. Previous literature on the Karen Baptist mission in nineteenth-century Burma tended to focus on missionaries’ devising Karen scripts and orthographies, depicting this as the major modern influence of Christianity on Karen speakers. Yet, it is also essential to examine how the invented orthography and printed materials were utilized by Karen evangelists in their oral preaching, in order to understand the vast influence of literacy in the Protestant mission more holistically.

Analyzing various historical sources in Sgaw Karen from the 1840s, this paper reveals how a set of the Christianized Sgaw Karen vocabulary and expressions was created along with the Bible translation. This new Karen lexicon, heavily reflecting the Christian worldview, was used by Karen evangelists in their preaching. The use of the new Karen lexicon meant that incomprehensible literacy and narration emerged in the Karen world, generating a lexical gap between the converted and non-Christians. That the new incomprehensible narration was pivotal in the mission to preach God’s word suggests that modern Karen literacy, despite its modernity, emerged in the Karen world as something inseparable from a particular religion, that is, Christianity.