@article{CultivatingCatholicism:Gender:4000,
      recid = {4000},
      author = {Pacyga, Johanna Alaimo},
      title = {Cultivating Catholicism: Gender, Vocation, and  Missionization in Colonial Senegal (ca. 1860-1930)},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-06},
      pages = {428},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the daily life of women and  girls at the St. Joseph Mission in Ngasobil (Senegal;  1863-1930), in an effort to better understand colonial  missionization as an intimate lived historical experience,  not simply part of a global process. Critically, not only  was St. Joseph’s host to French missionary women and men,  but it was also the hub of the first sub-Saharan order of  religious sisters. These women were among the first  Africans to access and commit to Catholic religious  vocation, and they became an integral part of the Church’s  mission to Senegambia. Their contributions to that project  are the crux of my inquiry.

My approach is unique in that  I focus on vocation rather than solely conversion as the  primary means of understanding missionization.  Missionization then emerges as a collaborative effort in  which Africans and Europeans were both actively and  productively involved in the building of community—perhaps  most especially from the point of view of women’s labors,  here understood as the sisters’ ministry (that is, the  outwardly visible, community-based deployment of their  vocation). I identify vocation as both a diverse suite of  practices and a potent analytic through which to think  about Senegambian and French women involved in the  missionary project. To parse vocation, this dissertation  brings together archaeological, documentary, and oral  archives from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,  with an emphasis on the interstices of mundane and sacred  practices engaged in by the women and girls of St.  Joseph’s. I offer the argument that through an assemblage  of seemingly non-religious practices bound up in vocation  and nineteenth-century Franco-Catholic ideals of womanhood  (including laundering, cooking, sewing/tailoring, teaching,  nursing), the women and girls of Ngasobil forged a cohesive  and vibrant Catholic community. In framing St. Joseph’s  missionary project as one of community-building, the agency  of Senegambian converts—particularly women and girls—is  taken seriously. Viewed through the lens of vocation, their  actions are not reduced to a binary of indigenous  resistance against missionary (framed as colonial)  hegemony, but understood as creative, productive, and  invested in fostering a uniquely Senegalese Catholic  community in Ngasobil, and across Senegal’s littoral  regions (where the majority of Catholics still live today,  despite being a small minority in Senegal, where only about  5% of the population identifies as Christian). 

The  overall significance of this research is twofold. First, it  complicates the missionary-missionized relationship  (resisting a tidy dichotomy) and the place of  missionization within the larger context of modern  colonialism. Instead, my research illuminates the murkiness  of these categories in Senegal and suggests it is more  productive to think about St. Joseph’s as a place of  cultivation—of Catholicism and community—arguing that the  community-building aspect was foundational to the  entrenchment of Catholicism as practice and belief. Second,  this dissertation brings to the fore the role(s) of women  in missionization, not simply as secondary support staff  for male missionaries on the one hand or passive targets of  evangelization on the other, but as particularly situated  and creative agents in their own right. As central actors  in Senegambian missionization, these women—through their  labor, faith, and social (re)production—crafted a  Franco-Senegalese concept of Catholicism as feminine  practice and community. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4000},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4000},
}