The Tell-Tale Heart: Conversion and Emotion in Nias

Abstract

In this article, I use historical and ethnographic data to analyse the Great Repentance, a violently emotional conversion movement that swept through the Indonesian island of Nias from colonial conquest around 1915, with recurrences until the 1960s. Against rationalist and materialist explanations, I argue for a constitutive role for emotion in the conversion process. I show how the techniques and idioms of Protestant missionaries suppressed indigenous meanings and encouraged a native emphasis on ‘the speaking heart’. The existential dilemmas of modern Christians in Nias, their sense of exclusion, can be accounted for by the paradoxical ethical and affective legacy of the repentance movement. The article is a contribution to both the study of emotion in historical perspective and to the analysis of conversion.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• conversion
• Christianity
• Nias
• Indonesia
• translation

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Mercedes Garcia de Oteyza and to the Ethnos referees for their helpful comments. Thanks also to audiences at Edinburgh University and Freie Universität Berlin. The British Academy (grant R30062) kindly funded my recent field trip to Nias.

Notes

For my own angle on emotion, see Beatty (2005, 2010).

Robbins’ study of a Papuan population shows that, in contrast to the universalizing tendency, ‘Pentecostalism radically localizes Christian authority’ (2004:33) – which is not to say that it localizes Christian cosmology.

In 1917, the Dutch controleur of Nias wrote, ‘As long as paganism remains, human sacrifice is required by adat … Change can be brought by government measures, medicine, but only the mission is in a position to bring definitive change’ (Schröder 1917:756).

Worsley's (1970:255–8) explanation of emotionality – as due to ‘inflated wants’, frustration, ambivalence, and catharsis – is persuasive, though his comparative perspective limits discussion of individual cases.

Feelings can, of course, be expressed or unexpressed, inchoate or fully-formed, trivial or consequential, intentional (about something) or free-floating. Here I am distinguishing between feelings as felt and feelings as formulated. Recent discussions of ‘affect’ might be assumed to be helpful here since they are directed to threshold phenomena (between persons and things, conscious and unconscious), but the evolving concept of affect remains, as yet, too nebulous and contradictory to be useful for my purposes. For a recent appraisal, see Pile (2010).

A poetic version of this myth is recorded in Thomsen (1979).

Following Keane (2007), one might argue that they represented a materiality and displacement of agency to which the Protestants were hostile. Cf. Rutherford (2006) on the iconoclasm of Biak Protestants.

Compare Robbins (2004:131). ‘Urapmin remember feelings of enormous sadness brought on by deep conviction of sinfulness. Their bodies became extremely hot, and they cried in anguish as they recognized the enormity of their need for correction. They furthermore found themselves immediately convinced that Jesus’ return was imminent and that it would usher in the day of God's final judgment’.

The missionary to central Nias compared Niha priests to Catholic bishops (Noll 1930:302).

What defines a Christian? The pitfall (discussed by Cannell (2006)) is to assume there is an essential Christianity to which converts must conform, rather than – as in post-Vatican II thinking – diverse realizations of shared doctrines. Besides which, as Rambo (2003:214) notes, ‘no conversion is total, complete, and perfect’. Nevertheless, missionaries do fail. At least four of Hefner's (1993a) contributors analyse cases of failure.

Schröder (1917:321) comments tartly: ‘When a Christian missionary was present, at least something was certain, that what was said [by the natives] was the exact opposite of what happened’.

Cf. Robbins (2004:247–8). For the Urapmin, ‘the Christian life is impossible to live ….[because] the Christian moral system conflicts with the demands of Urapmin social life in such a way as to make its breach inevitable … the system also in and of itself defines success in such a way as to create the conditions for people's failure to meet its demands’.