“God’s taboo”: The heteroglossia of evangelism in Methodist missionary narratives from British New Guinea, circa 1890

“God’s taboo”: The heteroglossia of evangelism in Methodist missionary narratives from British New Guinea, circa 1890

Ryan Schram

November 10, 2017

Abstract

Christianity can be defined in terms of a single, unequivocal message, but as a religion of conversion it necessarily presupposes a dialogue with the world outside of it. Many recent studies of Christian practice in various cultural settings have found that Christians understand their beliefs as a personal commitment, yet also realize themselves as Christians by placing their religion in an inverse relationship with dominant social values. In this paper, I ask why it is that Christianity always develops these hard edges toward social existence. Instead of locating this in Christian asceticism, I argue that Christianity appears as an inversion of the world as people grapple with the paradox of conversion. I examine the various, contradictory ways in which Australian Methodist missionary writings from British New Guinea recruit indigenous voices to depict evangelism and conversion. Although they initially framed indigenous societies of New Guinea as primitive cultures, missionary authors inevitably invest in these voices as heathen interlocutors. Without this dialogue, there can be no conversion, and yet this means that missionaries must relinquish authority over their message. The missionaries instead present themselves as prophets who rebuke indigenous tradition, and so establish a Christianity of hard edges.

The hard edges of Christianity

• Christianity is both a culture and a “part-culture” (Coleman 2006, 3).
• When people seek to instantiate Christianity as a social identity, they define Christianity as an inversion of the dominant social values.
• Christianity seeks to provide a new language of the self, or a new background for the foregrounded figure of the ascetic individual subject, but it tends to impose hard edges on a flat space, rather than a perspectival space.
  • Mission station and village (Barker 1990)
  • “Make a complete break with the past” (Meyer 1998)
  • Big men and Spirit women (Robbins 2012)
  • Taparoro and kastam (Schram 2016)

Why does Christian conversion lead to a social field of hard edges?

• Robbins (2017) and Coleman (2006) each argue that the Christian dualism of body and soul is a template for the Christian’s relationship to the dominant culture.
• Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) argue that missionary Christianity is part of an imperial regime of knowledge in which cultural differences are reified as traditions in relation to the unmarked Western, bourgeois individual.
• I will argue that the answer actually lies in the polyvocality of the evangelical encounter. Because a call to conversion presupposes a heathen who will hear and answer, evangelist and heathen exist in a “metaphysical contact zone” (Straight 2008, 837).

The missionary encounter is a dialogue denied

• Missionaries seek to intervene in their dialogue and represent indigenous voices as evidence of a reified tradition which converts can and must transcend. At the same time, they need to hear the indigenous voice as evidence of sincere, genuine understanding and voluntary change. They thus cannot ever completely reify indigenous culture as tradition. It must be allowed to exercise some control over the emerging translation across economies of signification.
• In Methodist mission writing, indigenous voices from the evangelical encounter are silenced in reports of indigenous cultural traditions, but also allowed to speak in narratives of mission work, where they symbolize heathen opposition. In their writings, missionaries thus straddle a dual role of observer and denouncer of indigenous culture in two distinct genres of mission narrative: ethnographic report and melodramatic adventure.
• Each genre also is an implicit theology of culture, one drawing on Victorian anthropology and the other drawing on a perhaps older concept of heathen darkness.

Victorian evolutionary anthropology and Christian theological anthropology

• Missionary writing contributed empirical material for early evolutionist frameworks (Douglas 2001, 40).
• Morgan argues that “primitive” societies contain the same “primary germs of thought” as European societies (Morgan 1985, 4).
• Although clearly ethnocentric, this framework also posited a “psychic unity” among all people (see e.g. Tylor 1920, 1:6–7). It thus shared something with Christian theological anthropology.

Evolutionary anthropology and missionaries: R. H. Codrington

• R. H. Codrington formulated anthropological humanism as a maxim. He opens his ethnographic monograph The Melanesians by saying that “one of the first duties of a missionary is to try to understand the people among whom he works” (Codrington 1891, vii).
• Because indigenous societies possess “primitive cultures” the missionary must be both a scientific observer as well as an evangelist to obtain conversion.
• Codrington’s theory of tambu is an example. Melanesian tambu, he says, is less developed than Polynesian tabu. In Melanesian societies, a tambu is only respected out of fear of magical retribution, not respect for intrinsically sacred qualities.

The Methodist Mew Guinea mission

• Begun in 1891 after the invitation from the new colonial administration of British New Guinea.
• William Bromilow, several Australian minister, and several more Polynesian pastors arrive on Dobu island and establish a station.

The Methodists in New Guinea

Methodist Sabbatarianism

On Saturday evening we told the men and boys that to-morrow was Tapwaroro, and that we could not buy anything from them on the sacred day. […] We could not explain fully to this people about the obligation of the Sabbath, but we could tell them a little, and I always thing it best to commence straight off with making the day sacred. These natives are but children, it is true, but while we are not too strict with them, we ourselves refrain from everything that would cause the day to seem common. Then their minds are set inquiring by our declining to buy or do anything on one day. (Bromilow 1897, 8)

Bwebweso or garewa

[I]n the course of his address, he asked the people if they had given up bwebweso, but an old woman answered “No! we want to go to bwebweso! we do not want to go to garewa!” Others joined in and Mr. Fellows had a lively time. (Bromilow 1893b, 6; see also Fellows 1891, Nov. 20, 1892)

• Not only did people resist this choice, some also claimed to be able to entrance people and send them to Bwebweso as proof. Bwebweso is thus not merely a primitive custom. Codrington’s model is breaking down.

The woman of Gaula

I was dead, and my spirit went up to heaven. I met Jesus there. He is so good! I am so bad! He told me to return and tell my people that taparoro is true. (Bromilow 1893c, 9).

Bromilow denounces Dobu custom

“Where are the people who have professed to believe in taparoro? I know there are many in this place who have said that taparoro is all lies! But where are those who have said taparoro is true that they allow this?”

“Oh! it is taboo for us to interfere,” said one, “we are of such a relationship that we dare not!”

“Well,” I said, “taboo or no taboo, we must have this woman out of the grave. Do you want to disgrace yourselves in the eyes of good people by following out this custom in these times of light?

“Oh, but,” said one, “this is our custom in this village, and it is taboo for us to lift her out! As you have come let her die in the grave till the breath is out of her.”

“Taboo,” I said, “then we will break your taboo to-day! Some of your taboos may be good, but this is a bad one, which I know nothing about. You are breaking God’s taboo, which is far worse. Come, lift the woman out!” (Bromilow 1893a, 7)

References

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Bromilow, William E. 1893a. “British New Guinea District: Dobu Circuit Report.” In Report of the Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society for the Year Ending March, 1893, li–liii. Sydney: Samuel E. Lees, Printer.

———. 1893b. “Incidents at Dobu, British New Guinea.” The Australasian Methodist Missionary Review 2 (11): 5–8.

———. 1893c. “The Firstfruits of Dobu Unto Christ.” The Australasian Methodist Missionary Review 2 (11): 5–9.

———. 1897. “British New Guinea.” Australasian Methodist Missionary Review 7 (3): 6–9.

Codrington, R. H. (Robert Henry). 1891. The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore. Oxford: Clarendon Press. http://archive.org/details/melanesiansstud00codrgoog.

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———. 2017. “Can There Be Conversion Without Cultural Change?” Mission Studies 34 (1): 29–52. doi:10.1163/15733831-12341482.

Schram, Ryan. 2016. “‘Tapwaroro Is True’: Indigenous Voice and the Heteroglossia of Methodist Missionary Translation in British New Guinea.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26 (3): 259–77. doi:10.1111/jola.12138.

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