Abstract
André Iteanu argues that many Melanesians see Christianity as an impermanent cult that traverses their region, like many other cults have previously done. Therefore, for them the passages from old circulating cults to Cargo cults, to conventional Christianity, and then to Evangelical Christianity, and finally to contemporaneous Melanesian Christianity, are identical in kind. This chapter thus concludes that some Melanesian societies develop a dynamic conception of religion that allows for swiftly repeated transitions between different forms of religiosity without disturbing their global balance in which impermanent cults keep on feeding local rituals new ideas and new practices.
This paper owes much to the sympathetic readings of Michel Picard, Cécile Barraud and Annelin Eriksen. I want to thank them. I am also grateful to Chelsie Yount-André who greatly improved my broken English.
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Notes
- 1.
In Melanesia historical records are very shallow.
- 2.
Although the terms religion, Church and kastom are widespread in Melanesia, I am not sure that every language uses them. My use of these terms does not therefore claim to be universally valid.
- 3.
Robbins’ use of these notions is inspired by Dumont (for example 1986). By individualism he means‚ I believe‚ a social configuration in which a notion of the person that Euro-Americans call the individual, characterized by its freedom, equality and autonomy, is attributed the highest social value. By contrast, he claims that Melanesian social configurations consider relations as their highest value. Hence, each person is not an individual, but an emanation of the relations he or she creates and maintains with others.
- 4.
Following Schneider and Wagner, Marilyn Strathern uses the expression dividual person to designate the specific Melanesian person made of relations. This notion has lately become dominant among Melanesianists and Americanists.
- 5.
Both these cults have appeared in the wake of colonization and are today classified as Cargo cults.
- 6.
Melanesia is so diverse and its Christianization has been achieved over such a long period of time that no generalization can represent each and every case. I hope nonetheless that my wider argument, as well as some of its intermediary conclusions, applies to a significant number of cases. When I think that my analysis may be widely valid, I use the terms Melanesia or Melanesians in relation to it.
- 7.
Among the most visible ones is the replacement, in many places, of the initiation ritual by birthday parties.
- 8.
This can be found in several other places in Melanesia, either in cults or in rituals like initiation or divination.
- 9.
In contrast to usual rituals where drums are always beaten while dancing.
- 10.
I mean, extending beyond a village or a cluster of villages.
- 11.
Marilyn Strathern (1991) discusses this question of the persistence of local diversity from a different point of view oriented on the construction of the person. The two arguments seem to me complementary.
- 12.
Christianity was introduced at least fifty years earlier in the outer islands that belong now to PNG. However, I have no clue whether the news was then spread in mainland PNG. A wealth of information on the Anglican Church in Melanesia can be found in the Canterbury Project, http://www.anglicanhistory.org/, and bibliographical references and information on religion in Melanesia in Trompf 1991 and 2006.
- 13.
This of course does not apply to much smaller islands where everyone had a chance to see the missionaries as soon as they settled.
- 14.
Papua New Guinea is known to have more than 800 hundred different languages.
- 15.
This is of course different when conversion occurred centuries ago, like in South America.
- 16.
This is not the case of the Urapmin (Robbins 2004a).
- 17.
Since most Melanesian societies lack organizing features like unilinear descent, social hierarchies, chiefs, priests, they appeared to many anthropologists to be highly individualistic.
- 18.
As I mentioned earlier, whether Melanesian societies were originally individualistic or not and whether Christianity construes a dividual person or not are ongoing discussions concerning which I do not take position in this paper. My point is only to stress the highly socialized nature of conversion.
- 19.
In certain cases, the treatment of Christianity as a cult may fail. This was the case among the Urapmin, who immersed themselves in the most radical form of Christianity, rejecting almost all previously practiced cults and customs.
- 20.
This applies as well to politicians and businessmen, whose importance comes and goes at a fast pace.
- 21.
The establishment of the Anglican Church was a long process in the Oro Province. In the Asigi region where I work, it dates back to the mid-1950s.
- 22.
This skin is ritually constituted to include all paraphernalia attributed in initiation (Iteanu 1998).
- 23.
Nonetheless, Papua New Guinea has one of the highest violence rate against women.
- 24.
However, Marcel Gauchet (1985) considers Christianity to be the religion with inevitably brings forth ‘the end of religion.’
- 25.
During the same period, ‘traditional’ knowledge also sustained similar promises. In the region surrounding the village where I work, a man presented himself as Totoïma, a famous mythical character. He asked everyone to chip in money, which he promised to invest in order to pay them back, with considerable interest. Everyone did. The man was never seen again and those who gave money felt stupid. Recalling this story, I recently told my friends about what happened in America with Madoff.
- 26.
For certain Orokaiva, a ministry is a branch of a larger Church. In the Oxford dictionary, the term appears as: “The body of men set apart for spiritual functions in the Christian Church or in any religious community.”
- 27.
In Christian official contexts and especially in Catholicism, this term designates the adaptation of the Christian faith and ritual to local cultures.
- 28.
This is, in spirit, very similar to what Margaret Mead described ten years later among the Arapesh (1938).
- 29.
For a similar situation in a different society, see Handman (2015), for example pp. 7–9.
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Iteanu, A. (2017). Continuity and Breaches in Religion and Globalization, a Melanesian Point of View. In: Picard, M. (eds) The Appropriation of Religion in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56230-8_9
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