-
Title
-
Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism
-
Creator
-
Adam H. Becker
-
Date
-
2015
-
Description
-
Becker argues that the modern ethnoreligious use of “Assyrian” is an “invented tradition”—a revived ancient appellation taken up in the nineteenth–twentieth centuries from Western scholarly and missionary discourse, not from an unbroken continuity with the ancient Assyrians. European and American missionaries, diplomats, and archaeologists routinely used “Chaldean” and “Assyrian” for East-Syriac Christians in and around Urmia and upper Mesopotamia; that external usage, he says, was gradually appropriated by the East Syriac community itself.
Becker’s aim is to explain how and why this retrieval succeeded. He locates the key drivers in the East Syrians’ intensive engagement with American evangelical missionaries, coupled with language reform, autoethnographic writing, and the push for a national literature—processes that made a modern national identity both imaginable and compelling. The result, in his account, is a self-consciously modern Assyrian identity whose label derives primarily from Western sources, but whose adoption was enabled by local social and ideological dynamics.
-
Publisher
-
Adam H. Becker, Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (2015), ch. 8.
-
press.uchicago.edu
-
Subject
-
Origin of Assyrian nationalism
Gi80LLjX0AABu1U.jpeg