著者

冨川 多佳子

出版者

英米文化学会

雑誌

英米文化 (ISSN:09173536)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.51, pp.37-53, 2021

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<p>This paper examines the purpose of missionary work to "Gypsies" by "domestic evangelical groups" who carried out evangelical missionary activities in England in the early 19th century. The home missionary society criticized the imprisonment of the Gypsies as "vagrants" and argued that in order to change their nature of wandering, it was necessary for them to live a civilized life and not be imprisoned. It was hoped that this method of missionary activities could be tried in the United States. However, Sarah Nicolasso, who studied the transition of the legal definition of "vagrants", notes that the specific "race" group "Gypsy" was stipulated as "Vagrant" in the "Vagrant" Control Law. She points out that it worked effectively as a means to create a "racist" yet conceptually flexible, judicial-controlled space in the colonial United States. Since the 16th century, Gypsies had been legally categorized into a comprehensive definition of "homeless", and the "racial" characteristic of Gypsies had been used to justify policies and the like. In the early 19th century, the missionary work on Gypsies was justified as a method of denying this vague definition.</p>