From Mission to Movement: The Impact of Christianity on Patterns of Political Association in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Scholars have long argued that the missionization of Melanesia helped to transform tribal fragmentation and localism through the dogma that humans are all God's children - that humanity is a vast community composed not only of kinsmen, neighbours and aflines, but also of strangers one might briefly encounter and many more one will never meet. This article puts forward an alternative hypothesis: namely, that it was the mode of transmission of Christianity, rather than its dogmas, which made it possible for Papua New Guineans to envisage large anonymous communities. In particular, through participation in routinized religious worship, the memories of Papua New Guineans were politicized in a radically new way, leading to the emergence ofmicronationalist movements under indigenous leadership. Most of the earliest European settlers in what is now Papua New Guinea were missionaries and, for many indigenous villagers even up to the present time, the most enduring and intensive links with European culture have been mediated by proselytizing Christians.' The latter were by no means exclusively white; indeed, many of the early missionaries were Polynesians and, later, Melanesians from the more heavily Christianized areas. But whether or not the carriers of Christianity were themselves ethnically European, the mode of religiosity that they sought to spread was fundamentally alien to Papua New Guineans. In this regard, my principal concern is not with the thematic differences between indigenous and Christian cosmologies, but with a fundamental contrast in the nature of their codification and transmission. Christianity codifies its revelations primarily in language, specifically a body of written texts. Its mode of transmission is repetitive, involving continual sermonizing and liturgical ritual. Worship is public and the intricacies of religious dogma are openly broadcast to all who would listen. I will argue that these factors are related to the way in which Christianity instantiates a vast, diffusely integrated Christian fellowship, bound to an elaborate ecclesiastical hierarchy, incorporating elements of centralization at various levels. These are among the chief elements of what might be called the 'doctrinal mode of religiosity' (Whitehouse 1995). The doctrinal mode of religiosity did not exist in pre-contact Papua New