4 - Sensing the Mission

Summary

In the last decade, the field of sensory history has made great strides in advancing understandings of the historical and cultural articulations of human ways of knowing. While this body of scholarship has been helpful in broadening our understanding of complex histories infused by the human senses, it nonetheless treats the continents with an uneven hand, largely ignoring the non-Western world. A preliminary ‘history through photographs’, this chapter mobilizes historical sources only recently located and digitally preserved in Mizoram to explore how upland encounters with Christianity were also encounters of the senses. The chapter is organized into six related sections of human knowing: hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the upland harhna (or ‘awakening’). By including a sixth ‘sense’ - the non-biological but still sensory-charged world of the historical upland harhna - we can attempt to approach the earliest Christians on their own terms, remaining attentive both to the diversity of sense broadly defined and to the potential hamfistedness of traditional Western models applied without due reflexivity to sensory cultures in other world regions. Paying special attention to the human senses in zo ram reveals a thicker and more highland-specific understanding of how Christianity in the Lushai Hills became a specifically and overwhelmingly Lushai Hills Christianity.