Models of Missionization^[6]

While students of Melanesian religion have had little to say about Christians or Christianity, they have been more forthcoming about missionaries and missionization. There is a staggering literature on the missions in Melanesia, most of it written by missionaries, missiologists, and historians. But anthropologists have also made important contributions since the 1930s. In recent years, a number of ethnographic studies of missions and the missionary impact on indigenous societies have appeared.^[7] These studies reveal much about the foundations of Christianity in various parts of the region. Yet their focus on the missionary as the agent of religious change, when combined with the essentialist perception of Melanesian cultures, presents a major obstacle to the recognition that Christianity has become part of Melanesian religion for a number of reasons. First, the study of missionaries is anachronistic in many parts of Melanesia where most foreign clergy have long departed (a point to which I return later). Second, those who focus upon the missionary tend to think of religious change in dualistic terms: missionaries versus natives, Christianity versus Melanesian religion, Western versus traditional culture, and so forth. This dualism, in turn, provides explicit arguments for denying a Melanesian-supported Christianity by portraying Christianity as irreconcilable with authentic indigenous religious beliefs.^[8]

If one thinks of religious change as a contest between two incompatible religions and cultures then there can be but three possible outcomes to misionization: displacement of Melanesian religion by Christianity, temporary accommodation between the two sides, or rejection of Christianity by indigenous peoples. Each of these scenarios has gained favor at different times. The first was advanced by ethnographers in the 1920s, who loudly protested what they saw as the wanton destruction of native culture by missionaries. Such “dangerous and heedless tampering,” Malinowski (1961, 467, 465) warned, inexorably led to the “rapid dying out of native races.” F. E. Williams (1923, 1928) suspected that missionary mischief also lay behind the mass frenzies (as he saw them) of the Vailala Madness and Taro Cult in Papua. The second opinion formed in the 1940s and 1950s when it became clear that missionized people had not lost all of their traditional religion. Ian Hogbin (1939, 1951) and Kenneth Read (1952) described a kind of creeping Christianization and syncretism among the people of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea Highlands, respectively, in which new converts adopted Christian forms and ideas while maintaining a range of former beliefs and ritual practices. These authors assumed that eventually Christianity would become the

dominant religious strain in this mix. The third perception formed during the explosion of new ethnographic research in the 1960s and 1970s, as several anthropologists working in the coastal regions discovered that many indigenous institutions were thriving despite the long period of colonial rule and missionary activity. Peter Lawrence and Mervyn Meggitt concluded that the religions of missionized coastal peoples “have proved far more durable than is generally supposed. The changes introduced impinged mainly on the superstructure of native life, the external form of the socio-cultural order” (1965, 21).^[9]

Different as these scenarios appear, they are permutations of the same model of missionization. I will review the assumptions underlying this dualistic conception of religious change more closely in the second part of the paper. My concern here is to show how each scenario allows ethnographers to dismiss Christianity as not authentically Melanesian, while buttressing the essentialized notion of indigenous religion. Christianity appears as a threat, a recent innovation, or a rejected possibility. It is not allowed to emerge as an ethnographic subject in its own right. After looming ominously on the pages of an ethnography in the form of missionary activities and pressures, Christianity then disappears. Now you see it, now you don't.

Ethnographic writings on the Trobriand Islands, that “sacred place” in anthropology (Weiner 1976, xv), present a striking illustration of how assertions about missionization may bolster an essentialist perspective on traditional society. The Trobriands were among the first places in eastern Papua to receive missionaries. European and Fijian Methodists arrived in 1894, followed by Roman Catholic priests in 1937. According to historian David Wetherell, membership in the Methodist church “was small for a long time but eventually burgeoned” (cited in Forman 1982, 57). Anthropologists have not worked in the Trobriands as long as the missions, but the islands are almost unique in terms of the historical depth of the ethnographic record, stretching back to Bronislaw Malinowski's famous research in 1915–1918. Susan Montague and Annette Weiner, who worked in the islands in the 1970s, mention the Christian presence. It is interesting to compare what they say with Malinowski's comments and to consider the implications of these different assessments of Christianity on anthropological perceptions of Trobriands society.

Bronislaw Malinowski arrived on Kiriwina in the Trobriands more than twenty years after the Methodist missionaries. While providing few details about the Christian presence, Malinowski's tone in his published work is clearly hostile. Missionaries appear deus ex machina to account for missing or transformed customs. In The Sexual Lives of Savages, for example, he blames mission influence for the disappearance or corruption of several customs (1929, 61, 217–218, 230, 475) and for the encouragement of a “novel im-

morality”: couples resting together in public view (1929, 403). Malinowski makes his reasoning clear: Christianity is utterly incompatible with Trobriand culture.

We must realise that the cardinal dogma of God the Father and God the Son, the sacrifice of the only Son and the filial love of man to his Maker would completely miss fire in a matrilineal society, where the relation between father and son is decreed by tribal law to be that of two strangers, where all personal unity between them is denied, and where all family obligations are associated with mother-line. (1929, 159)^[10]

In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961, 464–467), Malinowski unleashes a tirade against government and mission meddling and predicts the imminent collapse of Trobriand society. He thus sees his task in classic salvage terms: to make a record of a disappearing way of life.

Annette Weiner (1980, 1982), who returned to Kiriwina in the early 1970s, found that Malinowski had been unduly pessimistic. Trobriand society has successfully resisted colonial pressures (including missionization) for more than a century. Malinowski's first error was to regard the islanders as passive victims awaiting the colonial steamroller. Weiner claims instead the Kiriwinans eagerly embraced the new opportunities presented by church, state, and capitalism. Still, as Margaret Jolly shows in her detailed critique in this collection, Weiner consistently presents changes in the Trobriands as extrinsic and superficial; the core values and reproductive processes of the society remain intact. By exchanging yams and women's wealth, the Trobrianders “ultimately subvert any plans that touch at these core elements” (1982, 72); and so cooperative commercial ventures fail, school enrollments drop, and out-migration and remittances flag, while Trobriand culture endures. Working from the kind of unidimensional conception of European-Native contact that Carrier describes in the Introduction, Weiner not only uses indigenous institutions to explain cultural persistence, she presents them as evidence that Trobrianders really are traditionalists. Perhaps for this reason she finds it unnecessary to say whether there are churches in Trobriand villages or even if any islanders regard themselves as Christian or pagan. The acceptance of the new order by Trobrianders, then, turns out to be a mirage. They are, at their core, the same people described by Malinowski some fifty years earlier (see Carrier's and Jolly's discussions of this in their contributions to this collection).

Although Kiriwina apparently escaped the ravages of missionization, by the 1970s Kaduwaga village on Kaileuna island off the west coast of Kiriwina looked like Malinowski's nightmare come true. According to Susan Montague, the villagers had abandoned colorful yam houses, canoes, traditional ceremonies, and ritual deference to their chief in favor of numerous “Westernisms”: manufactured clothes, cooperative stores, and ardent Christian

worship. Rather than seeing this as the inevitable result of colonialism, however, Montague expresses surprise:

It was one thing to find that Trobrianders, exposed to Western ways, have largely ignored them. But it was quite another to discover that a large, prominent Trobriand village, physically located well away from the Westerners who reside in the Trobriands, should move against the current of conservatism, and go out of its way to embrace Western life ways. (1978, 93)

Montague argues that the collapse of the traditional society has been more apparent than real. She takes the position I have described as creeping Christianization, implying that real change has not progressed much further than external forms. Unlike Malinowski, Montague believes that several key premises of Christianity and Trobriand cosmology are easy to reconcile (and the rest, presumably, can be ignored). These Trobrianders reinterpret Christianity to make it consistent with what they already know. They see Christianity as a source of power, as a means of access to the European wealth to be utilized in cultural reproduction. The Kaduwagans' purpose in converting, in other words, has been to appropriate the power of Europeans by adopting their mannerisms. Their conversion amounts to “a series of changes designed to perpetuate traditional life in the village” (1978, 100).

Unlike Malinowski or Weiner, Montague reveals some details about Christian practices and identity in one part of the Trobriands. Yet this is the exception that proves the rule. Montague does not provides the historical background on colonial and missionary activities in Kaduwaga that would allow one to evaluate her claims of cultural continuity. Nor does she investigate the connections between the various “Westernisms” and encompassing political, religious, and economic systems (it would be interesting to know, for example, if pastors receive training from the United Church or are even Kaduwagans). In an unintentionally revealing aside, Montague mentions that she refused to attend church services, despite the urgings of some Kaduwagans, because of her personal agnosticism (although this does not prevent her from commenting on the contents and significance of the services [1978, 98]).^[11] The effect of such neglect, of course, is to deflect attention from Western introductions and innovations to the conceptual and social processes that form the authentic Trobriands culture. The key part of the article is thus taken up with an analysis of traditional cosmology and of how Christianity and other “Westernisms” have been appropriated and made Trobriandisms.

Malinowski, Weiner, and Montague assess the impact of the missions on Trobriand society differently, but they share the premise that Christianity and traditional culture do not mix. Because Christianity is a Western imposition that works to displace Trobriand culture, indigenous elements ipso facto represent rejection or subversion of Christianity. The premise thus provides a rationale for elegant synchronic interpretations of the traditional culture,

and fends off—in ethnography if not in the actual Trobriands—the Christian influences Malinowski dreaded. Caught in crossfire between missionaries and indigenous culture, Trobriand Christianity never appears in its own right. Indeed, these anthropologists have little to say even about the missionaries.