Summary Of Pastor Dowe

627 Words2 Pages

The story follows Pastor Dowe, a missionary, living in an Amazonian indian village in Brazil. The story focuses on the pastor’s inability to understand this foreign culture and how he gradually comes to realize his shortcoming. In broader terms, the story relates the difficulty of directly imposing ideologies from one culture onto another.
The pastor is often reminded of the disparity between our western culture. One instance of the this is when Marta, the little girl, has an alligator swaddled in cloth and cradled in her arms. This image is so far out of pastor downs frame of reference that he mistakes the creature for a doll. A small girl holding a doll would not be out of the ordinary in a most western cultures; a small girl holding a potentially dangerous retile, though, is quite unordinary. Perhaps even stranger to the pastor is that neither the girl nor her father, who is standing nearby, seems worried about the harm that the animal could cause the girl. When …show more content…

When speaking of a Psalm, he says “Passages like these would sound utterly pagan in the dialect [of the indians]… But to their ears everything must have a pagan sound. Everything I say on the way to them is transformed onto something else.” This realization is disconcerting and the pastor quickly pushes this thought out of mind. It may be that the reason this is an unpleasant thought to Pastor Dowe is that he is beginning to realize that societal entities only make sense in the cultural context they are developed in, and to transplant one with none of its baggage is futile. This idea surfaces again on the pastors spiritual journey down a river; he wonders if his god’s influence can even reach such remote place as this forest. Here, he may be reflecting again on the disparity between these two cultures, which is preventing the indian people from being receptive to his religion. But again he suppresses the thought

Open Document