Songs of the Lisu Hills

A century ago, missionaries from the China Inland Mission brought a faith built on scripture to the Lisu people of southwest China. What the Lisu made of it is the subject of Aminta Arrington's study, which carries the story beyond the familiar missionary account, through twenty-two years of government persecution and into the present. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, she shows how a text-based religion became something lived and shared: line dancing, church festivals, evangelising, working in one another's fields and singing Western hymns in translation.

Most Lisu Christians remain subsistence farmers, and Arrington sets the stories of individual believers alongside the wider social forces shaping their church in the mountainous margins of the world's largest atheist state. A careful, humane account for anyone drawn to world Christianity, the anthropology of religion or faith in modern China.