{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "So the \u201cha a missionary tried to convert the Sentinelese and immediately got killed\u201d is mostly revealing for how strange that...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/180438484768/", "html": "

So the \u201cha a missionary tried to convert the Sentinelese and immediately got killed\u201d is mostly revealing for how strange that registers to people, like that needs to be accounted for now

Where mainline Protestant America was HUGELY invested in Indo-Pacific archipelago missionary work among potentially hostile recipients in the late 19th/early 20th century, and that remained a residuum in American culture so Gary Larson\u2019s The Far Side (the canonical 1980s newspaper cartoon other than Calvin & Hobbes) regularly drew on the \u201cnatives cooking a pith-helmet Euro in a big pot\u201d trope

(while being able to take that base level and understand later secular developments in those terms, to wit:

)

My Sandpoint story, the guy who saved me was a missionary working for a company that built missionary planes, and he explained one of their selling points was being able to fly to these Asian archipelago remote islands and loiter enough that you could drop a bucket of bibles/supplies on a rope and orbit the still-tethered bucket until someone came to pick it up

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