Agents of Conversion on the Island of Nias

This book explores the cultural and religious transformations that unfolded on the Indonesian island of Nias during its encounter with German missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from a one-sided story of conversion, it reveals a dynamic process of syncretism, where traditional Niasan worldviews and missionary Christianity collided, competed, and ultimately coalesced into a new religious form. Drawing on untapped missionary and colonial archives, the study greatly expands the somewhat sparse corpus of scholarship on Niasan history, and reframes the dominant narrative by centering Niasan voices, agency, and cultural frameworks. It challenges assumptions about pre-missionary Nias culture, investigates early encounters between missionaries and Niasans, which were fraught with mismatched expectations and cultural misunderstandings, and traces the emergence of a distinct Niasan Christianity—one that both subverted and surpassed missionary intentions through selective adoption, linguistic translation, and cultural resilience. By foregrounding Niasan agency, this book challenges conventional histories of mission and conversion. It will be of interest to scholars of religious, missionary and colonial history, World Christianity, anthropology of religion and beyond.