Repetition in the work of a Samoan Christian theologian: Or, what does it mean to speak of the Perfect Pig of God?

ABSTRACT

The Samoan Christian theologian Ama'amalele Tofaeono draws on diverse intellectual sources to articulate an ecological theology both distinctively Samoan and self-consciously Oceanic. I examine Tofaeono’s writings through the lens of recent work in linguistic anthropology on repetition and replication. By paying close attention to the ways texts and their original contexts, authorship, and intentions can be brought forward into new contexts, such anthropological work offers a useful perspective on Tofaeono’s theological arguments about creation and salvation. Tofaeono frames creation and salvation as actions that are necessarily ongoing—matters of repetition rather than rupture, a kind of continuity that depends not on fundamental durability but on repeated reengagement. An appreciation of Tofaeono’s articulation of time and repetition can in turn illuminate the anthropological study of social transformation and help develop productive interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and theology.

KEYWORDS:

• Repetition
• Christianity
• theology
• Samoa
• American Samoa

Acknowledgments

Funding for field research came from the Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship FT110100524). Early versions of this paper were presented as a Herbst Seminar at the Australian National University and a paper at the 2014 American Anthropological Association conference panel organized by Andreas Bandak and Simon Coleman. For comments, I am grateful to Andreas and Simon as well as James S. Bielo, Ghassan Hage, and the reviewers for this journal. For library assistance in Fiji and Samoa, I thank Nalini Premadish and Uesile Tupu. Finally, this article, and the larger project of which it is part, could not have come to fruition without the patient and productive support of Ama’amalele Tofaeono, to whom I am indebted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Matt Tomlinson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9808-7615

Notes

1. Scholars of Peircean semiotics have emphasized that indexicality and iconicity are never exclusive: ‘Unless materially embodied and teamed with indexicality … iconicity remains as unstable as the shapes of clouds as they morph and file across the sky’ (Lempert 2014, 386–387).

2. Eisenlohr investigates Mauritian Muslims’ use of cassettes and compact discs to play recorded praise poetry, arguing that they embrace these media because playing these recordings accords with their ideas about the perfect transmission of holy discourse. In developing his argument, Eisenlohr identifies three ‘strategies of entextualization,’ ways in which people turn ‘performed discourse’ into ‘a relatively bounded, recognizable, and replicable chunk of discourse we call text, which can be detached from one discursive context and fit and grafted into others’ (Eisenlohr 2010, 320; on entextualization see also Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Goodman, Tomlinson, and Richland 2014; Tomlinson 2014b).

3. Some theologians have drawn on anthropology in turn as a way of pushing their discipline into new kinds of commitment and inquiry. A notable example is Michael Banner, who in The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014) uses anthropology in order to challenge and rethink moral theology. With reference to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds’ compact summaries of Christ’s life (he was ‘conceived, born, suffered, died, and buried,’ in Banner’s even shorter summary), Banner argues that moral theology and bioethics botch the job of apprehending the meaning of these events and their ethical weight in people’s daily lives. Moral theology, he writes, focuses on ‘hard cases’ rather than routine ones, and comes to conclusions which can seem, to put it bluntly, inhumane. His central case in point is the scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Tissues and body parts of deceased children had been kept without parents’ consent, and when this fact came to light, some parts were returned but others were not. The point which evidently disturbs Banner the most is not just that hospital officials would claim the right to keep children’s body parts against the wishes of parents, but that, during official inquiries, they expressed bafflement that parents felt the way they did. Such a failure to understand parents’ deep ethical commitments towards their late children, Banner writes, points to the need for moral theology to engage closely with anthropology, and specifically ethnography, in order to learn how humans really think about (and act within and towards) processes of conceiving, birthing, suffering, dying, and burying.

4. In the second telling of the story in Genesis 2, God does not create humanity in the divine image out of nothingness but out of ‘the dust of the ground’ (Genesis 2:7). For some Christians, 2 Corinthians 5:17 signifies a ‘new creation’ of humanity, although this newness is predicated on surpassing oldness rather than emerging from nothing.

5. He received his doctorate from the Augustana Divinity School in Neuendettelsau, Germany, in 2000, and has held visiting fellowships at University of California–Berkeley, Union Theological Seminary, Vancouver School of Theology, and the University of Winnipeg. He has taught at the Pacific Theological College in Suva, and in Auckland at both the University of Auckland’s School of Theology and Trinity Methodist Theological College. He also served for six years as a pastor in Henderson, west Auckland, in a Methodist Church rather than a Congregationalist one.

6. For his Bachelor’s thesis he used his full name, Ama’amalele Tofaeono Siolo II, but in later works he has gone by the shorter form Ama’amalele Tofaeono.

7. Compare Valeri’s (1989, 240) discussion of the ‘exemplar,’ a model for repetition that can never actually be repeated:

For, on the one hand, an exemplar demands to be imitated, reproduced and thus ultimately, substituted; but on the other hand, it claims that it cannot truly be reproduced and thus ever be displaced. What keeps its authority is precisely that it creates both a desire to be like it, to take its place, and a sense that it is impossible to do so. (Valeri 1989, 240; see also Bandak and Højer 2015)

8. These verses mention, respectively: ‘a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout’ (compared to ‘a fair woman … without discretion’); people ‘which eat swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things is in their vessels’; and one who ‘offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine’s blood’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT110100524].