Christianity, Culture Change, and the Anthropology of Ethics

Abstract

Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 419 pp. This is a path-breaking book on several counts. One is that, notwithstanding central importance of Christianity in lives of many Papua New Guineans and hundreds of English-language ethnographic monographs that have come out of field settings there, this is first of them to take culture of Christianity from one of those settings as its main subject matter. For Melanesianists, another of its virtues is that it is one of only a handful of monographs yet to have appeared from Mountain Ok region at western end of Highland Papua New Guinea. Best known to anthropologists through work of Fredrik Barth (1975, 1987), region has been central to debates on diverse topics such as ritual (e.g., Gardner 1981, 1983; Jorgensen 1981; Strathern 1991; Crook 1999); ecology (Hyndman 1979, Morren 1986, Gardner 1980, Ohtsuka 1994) and impact of large-scale mining operations on indigenous peoples (Hyndman 1987, 1994; Jorgensen 1997; Kirsch 1997, 2001). But few book-length studies have appeared from region, and it is renowned among Melanesianists for number of outstanding PhD theses from there that remain unpublished. One can't help but wonder about extent to which this may be due to change of fashion in anthropology over past twenty years or so, whereby field projects carried out in such locales have come to be regarded as antediluvian: embarrassing reminders of anthropology's original identification with among social science disciplines. In truth, this reversal has had unfortunate consequence of tacitly affirming very proposition that we as anthropologists should aim to combat: that there is such a place in world as the savage slot, which we can and should avoid by directing our research elsewhere. To assume as much is to fail to heed following eloquent injunction by originator of phrase himself, Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Anthropology did not create savage. ...Anthropology came to fill savage slot in trilogy order-utopia-savagery, a trilogy which preceded anthropology's institutionalization and gave it continuing coherence in spite of intradisciplinary shifts. This trilogy is now in jeopardy. Thus, time is ripe...to attack frontally visions that shaped this trilogy, to uncover its ethical roots and its consequences, and to find a better anchor for an anthropology of present, an anthropology of changing world and its irreducible histories. But postmodernist anthropologists pass near this opportunity looking for savage in text. They want us to read internal tropes of savage slot... But they refuse to address directly thematic field (and thus larger world) that made (makes) this slot possible, morosely preserving empty slot itself (Trouillot 1991:40). Becoming Sinners (without reference to Trouillot) attacks this problem frontally by taking as its subject matter irreducible history of a long-isolated corner of world which an earlier anthropology would unhesitatingly have claimed for (or which would have been consigned to on that basis), and treating it instead in terms of same trope that is widely regarded as diagnostic of post-modern condition, trope of hybridity. Thus Robbins tells us in conclusion: I find myself in unexpected position of having written an ethnography of an unfashionably remote and geographically contained group of people that raises issues ... that are at center of a much in vogue theoretical discourse focused on populations that are far better integrated into world economy and that are often to some or other degree geographically displaced. The primary watchword of this theoretical discourse is hybridity, a term that well captures nature of Urapmin predicament. …