Christianity, Relationality and the Material Limits of Individualism: Reflections on Robbins's Becoming Sinners

Abstract

In his 2004 monograph, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Joel Robbins argues that the Urapmin, a small group of newly converted Chistrians in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, are trapped between two conflicting systems of values, namely the relationality of indigenous culture and the individuality of Christian culture. Yet, Robbins suggests that the Urapmin are troubled not only by conflicting values, but also by the fact that they have embraced a new ideological system without changing the material base of their lives, that is, subsistence agriculture on land owned by kin groups. Drawing on Robbins's work on the Urapmin and my own research on two different Christian denominations in the Western Solomon Islands, I bring a political–economic dimension to discussions of subjectivity, cultural change and ideologies of modernity that have arisen within the anthropology of Christianity.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• Individualism
• Land
• Papua New Guinea
• Solomon Islands

Acknowledgements

This is a revised and retitled version of a paper entitled Moral crisis and the secularisation of territory in Christian Melanesia, presented at the Australian Anthropological Society Conference on 29 September 2006 as part of a panel on ‘Rationality, Relationality, and Religious Experience in the Contemporary Pacific’ organised by Mary Patterson and Martha Macintyre. I am grateful to my friends on Ranongga for sharing their histories and their insights into Christianity. I thank the organisers, panellists and attendees for a stimulating discussion of these issues and also Alan Rumsey, Mark Edele, Matt Tomlinson, Michael Scott, and Courtney Handman, as well as two anonymous reviewers and a TAPJA editorial board member, for their helpful suggestions and useful challenges. The remaining shortcomings are my own. I am most grateful to Joel Robbins for his stimulating work and for the energetic and collegial encouragement that he has given many of us who study Christian cultures in Melanesia.

Notes

1. Robbins substitutes the term ‘culture’ for what Dumont (1986) more often called ‘ideology’, a move Robbins discusses explicitly elsewhere (Robbins 2007b). In much current social theory, the word ‘ideology’ has a ring of superficiality, reflecting the importance of the kind of Marxian theory that Dumont rejected as simply an instance of the modern Western ideological privileging of the material over the ideological.

2. In his comments on a collection of essays focused on possessive individualism in the Western Pacific (Sykes 2007), Robbins (2007c) engages more directly with social and economic, rather than the ideological, limits of individualism.

3. Robbins also draws heavily on Marshall Sahlins, but because this is primarily in theorising culture change rather than individuality and relationality with regard to Christianity, I do not discuss this influence here (but see Robbins and Wardlow 2005).

4. An earlier collection of papers (Jolly & Mosko, 1994) may be seen as precursor to Robbins's work in applying Dumontian notions of value hierarchy to societies of the Western Pacific. Focusing on hierarchy rather than holism and Austronesia rather than Melanesia, some contributors (especially Fox 1994) suggested that the notion of precedence allows for a plurality of oppositions more appropriate to the region. (For other discussions of Dumont in the region, see Barnes, Parkin & de Coppet 1985.)

5. Recently, Hirsch (2008, p. 145) has made a similar point in his reading of Robbins, following Strathern (1988) in arguing that both wholes and individuals are cut out of relational material.

6. As one reviewer of this paper has pointed out, in many areas of the PNG Highlands Christian millennialism resonates with ancestral cosmologies that are focused on the material and moral dimensions of apocalyptic events (see, for example, Biersack 1999; Ballard 2000). However, Robbins does not mention any such continuities between indigenous and Christian millennialism for the Urapmin.

7. According to the 1999 census, Ranongga's population of approximately 5000 is 63 per cent United Church and 30 per cent Seventh-day Adventist. The remaining 7 per cent of the population belong to smaller denominations, including a conservative Wesleyan Methodist group, the Pentecostal Christian Outreach Centre, the local charismatic church Gospel Mission International and Jehovah's Witnesses (Western Province, 1999 Census Cross Tabulations, available from http://www.pacificweb.org/DOCS/Other%20P.I/SolomonIs/Si1999/99Census%20Crosstab2.htm (accessed 20 October 2008); see McDougall 2008).

8. Writing of Anglicans in Isabel and Makira provinces of the Solomons, respectively, White (1991, pp. 103–30) and Scott (2007b, pp. 179–87) discuss how indigenous Christian converts confronted and transformed shrines following conversion.

9. In 2005, many government primary and secondary schools were taken back by the United Church Educational Authority, which oversees their staffing, but salaries continue to be paid by the Solomon Islands Government; by most accounts, the church does not yet have the administrative capacity to effectively administer the schools.