Review of The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific, edited by Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘Because of the missionaries': The ambiguous presence of past missionaries in the Marshall Islands
History and Anthropology, 2021
This article analyzes the contemporary presence of pioneering missionaries to the Marshall Islands by looking at how conventional conversion narratives construe them as agents of radical transformation. Ridden with ambiguity, conversion is a recursive factor in social and political life, a fact that point to the context-dependent nature of this specific narrative. While rupture often serves as a useful metaphor in folk-models of conversion, it reflects a perspective with a clear political goal and therefore glosses over its inherent ambiguity and dynamism. In the Marshall Islands, the conversion narrative (where the past was horrid while the present is harmonious) is only one way of addressing contemporary challenges through the past. Running parallel to this is another narrative that speaks to a perceived moral degradation in the present, a discourse that relies on a harmonious rather than horrid past. By contrasting the contemporary presence of past missionaries with a historical analysis of the conversion era, this article argues that, more than a moment in history, cultural change is a discursive tool in which the people populating the ethnographic present use distinct representations of the past to address what is at stake here and now.
Beyond rupture: Christian culture in the Pacific
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2020
In its many forms, Christianity tends to focus adherents' attention upon earlier religious traditions, compelling them to renew their faith, repent and seek redemption. This special issue takes up questions about Christianity's temporal "secondarity." Contributors move beyond increasingly futile theoretical debates about rupture and continuity by considering how Christians in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands conceptualise and enact their fraught relationships with prior religious traditions. By examining the place of culture within Christianity, contributors avoid the analytical pitfalls of assuming that Pacific culture is not already thoroughly Christian. Rather than taking up questions about initial Christian conversion, these articles focus on revival. The relentless campaigns of Christian renewal that have transformed religious landscapes more than a generation aim not only to overcome pre-Christian powers, but also to supersede earlier versions of Christianity. In examining not only highly localised ethnotheologies, but also regional movements, this issue opens questions that should be of interest beyond the anthropology of Christianity. The anthropology of Christianity in the Pacific is saturated with discussions of the relationship between culture and Christianity. Is the relationship one of continuity, where prior cultural practices and worldviews continue to inform Christian practice? Or, is it one of rupture, where Christians really do become new kinds of people living new kinds of lives? Recent publications addressing such questions, carefully reviewed in this Special Issue's introduction, show that both rupture and continuity can be discerned in religious change. This Special Issue takes an important step beyond such discussions. Rather than looking at a relationship between culture and Christianity, the editors and contributors consider the position of culture within Christianity in the Pacific. That little word, 'within,' makes a significant difference. It reminds us that, even in areas of Highlands Papua New Guinea where missionisation occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, Christianity has now been part of life for at least a generation. Arguably, Christianity's influence on the whole region is so profound that even the lives of non-Christians (for example, followers of ancestral religions or converts other global religions like the Baháʼí Faith or Islam) might be analysed as living 'within' a Christian world. Traditional ancestral religion as practiced by some people of the Kwaio region of Malaita in Solomon Islands, for example, has been deeply transformed through an attempt to hold traditional culture ('kastom') distinct from Christianity and the laws of the colonial and postcolonial state (Akin 2003). Even in such apparent exceptions, then, Christianity and culture are not external to one another.
Christianity and development in the Pacific: An Introduction
Sites, 2019
Although a significant literature has arisen examining the intersections of Christianity and development in the Pacific, these themes have yet to receive the full attention they deserve. This special issue seeks to encourage further scholarship on these important themes. In this introduction we trace some of the entanglements between religion and development in Pacific history and suggest some productive future research trajectories.
From Arrival Stories to Origin Mythmaking: Missionaries in the Marshall Islands
Ethnohistory, 2021
In December 1857, Protestant missionaries arrived on Epoon Atoll to establish the first mission station in the Marshall Islands. The story of their arrival has historical interest and contemporary importance in the Marshalls because it has been used to form local theology and to shape contemporary identities. Thus, the arrival story of the first missionaries to the Marshall Islands functions as an origin story that serves religiously anchored identity construction on Epoon today. This article illuminates aspects of the arrival story that have been purposefully forgotten by Marshall Islanders and overlooked by academic historians and historically minded scholars.
The Quest for a Pacific Theology: A Re-consideration of its Methodology
This paper offers a critique of the Pacific theological enterprise and its foundational principles set forth in the beginning by Dr Sione 'Amanaki Havea of Tonga. In my view, the current shape of Pacific theology and its theological constructs has proven profoundly unhelpful to Pacific people on the grassroots level.
The Journal of Pacific History, 2019
‘Missionary’ and ‘archaeology’ may appear incongruous partners within contemporary archaeological practice, but archival, museum and oral sources reveal historical connections. This paper explores two missionaries, active in the western Pacific from 1896 to 1973. Reverends Charles Elliot Fox (Melanesian Mission, Solomon Islands) and Frederick Gatherer Bowie (Free Church of Scotland Mission, Vanuatu) both conducted studies related to the prehistory and migration of Pacific people. Both produced material assemblages, as well as textual and visual documents, and formed ideas influenced by their own networks and self identities. The paper examines their data collection methods and relationships with others, considering particularly how their relationships with Pacific Islanders and with psychologist and ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers influenced the missionary research process. By understanding these aspects of their work, Fox and Bowie can be placed within a broader genealogy of Anglophone missionary archaeology dating back to the late 18th century.
Inscribing missionary impact in Central Polynesia
Journal of the History of Collections , 2014
Together with the Revd Daniel Tyerman, George Bennet formed part of a deputation sent out in 1821 by the London Missionary Society with the aim of undertaking a global inspection of the state of the mission. This paper aims to map the collection that Bennet assembled in Central Polynesia during that journey and to ask what the parties involved in the collecting encounters understood to be embodied in the material forms that were collected. By paying attention to how the various agents involved in the collecting process played a role, the Bennet collection offers an appropriate case-study to query the view of missionary collecting as merely trophy collecting.