[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_49

The production and embodiment of respectability, Malathi De Alwis, 1997

The role of the Christian missionary was the same as in any colonized country: education was used as a moral power to detach children from "paganism," that is, from their families, impose civilization, that is,European thought, and erase any wrongdoing, that is all other identities.

Malathi De Alwis, a Sri Lankan anthropologist, talks about the impact of Christian missionary schools on women in her country.

The school shaped the concept of womanliness as a manner of living (calibrating it on purity and modesty). It established a disciplinary monotony, a government technique designed to maintain their domination in the land by determining the moral conduct of native women.

Kids were divided based on sex and educated differently: needlework for the girls, who had to embrace the domestic dimension, and vocational skills for the boys, for whom low-level blue-collar employment was envisaged. The female timetable was regulated by repeating particular actions such as praying, reading the Bible, singing the Psalms, cleaning, cooking, and "doing school lessons." Malathi writes, “Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.”

Reading the schedule of actions (wake up at 5 am, Bible reading and songs at 5.30, frugal breakfast at 8, prayers at 8.30, lesson at 9, etc.), I was struck by the similarity with the actions prescribed by the Christian rules still in force in cloistered monasteries.

While writing my Master’s dissertation about early Christian thought, I ended up in a female cloister convent and was hosted there for four days. This place is one of Europe's most significant female cloistered convents, and 80 nuns live there. Out of curiosity, I decided to try to follow the Dominican Rule, which marked the routine of the convent: the wake-up call was at 4.45 am. There followed a series of sudden actions, without pause, which did not include studying, reading, or chatting (there’s the rule of Silence) but rather house-working (cleaning and cooking), socially beneficial work (painting objects to sell to the faithful visiting the monastery) and endless prayer sessions. Even during meals, the nuns must listen to prayer.

You don't have time to think, and it's an alienating lifestyle like working on the assembly line; it eliminates yourself, and not in the mystical way that one can imagine.

When I told one of the nuns that it seemed to me that they lived "in a hurry," she corrected me by saying that it was not "hurry" but "industry.”

This word, industry, is precisely one of the keywords in the missionary educational training reported by Malathi: “Their education should be practical and solid rather than theoretical and showy, and whatever their situation may be, habits of great industry, economy, and self-denial are of the utmost importance.”