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Abstract
The article examines the claim that some Melanesian Christians are caught between cultures; between a Melanesian ‘relationalism’ and a Christian ‘individualism’. It is suggested that such an argument attributes Western knowledge conventions and dilemmas, where understanding involves distinct but connected whole orders of knowledge, to Melanesians. The article questions the appropriateness of this. To illustrate the issue, case studies of understanding Melanesian Christianity from a historical and anthropological perspective are considered and it is shown that interpretive problems arise by being caught between these disciplinary wholes. It is argued instead that Melanesian Christians are not caught between cultures. Rather, the diverse forms of Melanesian Christianity express conventional Melanesian concerns about certainty, power and truth, concerns that are nonetheless influenced by Christian conceptions and conduct.
Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this article was prepared for The Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography, Megaseminar, 22 24 May 2006, Hindsgavl, Denmark. I thank the organisers of the conference, especially Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt, for their invitation and hospitality. The article benefitted from the comments of two anonymous readers for the journal, as well as those of the journal editor Nils Bubandt. I am very grateful to Andrew Beatty and Narmala Halstead for their close reading of a draft of the article and their very helpful comments. Daniele Moretti's comments on the text are also appreciated. Any errors that remain rest solely with the author.
Notes
1. The use of Western or Euro-American here refers both to people associated with areas conventionally understood as distinctly ‘Western’ or ‘European’, i.e. North America, Western Europe, Australia, among other historically connected areas. Western or European also refers to knowledge conventions that were historically formed in these places but whose use is not restricted to these contexts.
2. Prior to this Strathern (Citation1988:319) states: ‘The relation between the two is that of alternation, not hierarchy’.
3. Or Deo, as it is spoken of locally.
4. Published in Issoudun, France, since 1866.
5. With respect to people like the Fuyuge and other Melanesians, persons understand themselves as renderings of a single person-like entity such as tidibe or God, and that persons/tidibe/God are implicated in everything. It is not that they all ‘add-up’ to a whole such as parts integrated into a whole. Instead the whole is an originary unity and can assume an infinite number of forms (Strathern Citation1991:119). In other words all forms God, tidibe, persons, etc. are potentially versions of one another. Bodi's question, along with those posed by other Fuyuge were making this conception explicit.
6. Quoted texts from the ANDSC were translated from the French by Mrs Valerie Phil-lips.
7. This paragraph derives from Hirsch Citation2001.
8. Rivers suggested this ‘was from ten to thirty years after a people had been brought under “the mollifying influences of the official and the missionary”’ long enough to ensure the ‘friendly reception and peaceful surroundings’ (Rivers Citation1913:7, quoted in Stocking Citation1991:10).
9. Known as Cross, Colos or Colossi in various Fuyuge dialects.
10. Portions of the material that follows in this section appeared in Hirsch Citation2003 and 2006.
11. Prior to this expedition in 1896 Jullien had met five young Fuyuge men at Bubuni in Kuni country (Dupeyrat 1948:57).
12. Many years later Fastre (n.d.: 8) would contest the description of Baiva as a big chief and his view holds much weight as he founded the mission in the area Baiva resided and stayed there for several decades. Fastre wrote: ‘Take Baiva, for example. There is no way around it: he was a man to be feared, nothing more. He could never have become a chief [amede] … The [c]hief is the man who remains very peaceful, looks after his village and protects his subjects.’ In Fuyuge these men are known as amede in the anthropological literature of the ; region they are referred to as chiefs (see Hallpike Citation1977).
13. In this account Baiva's murdered brother now becomes his son.
14. This problem of comparison between societies is not so very different from the problem of writing history. As Collingwood (Citation1961:154) states: ‘The historical past is the world of ideas which present evidence creates in the present. In historical inference we do not move from our present world to a past world; the movement in experience is always a movement within a present world of ideas. ’