From Mission to Movement

Abstract

Abstract Most of the earliest European settlers in 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 early missionaries were Polynesians and, later, Melanesians from the more heavily Christianized areas. But whether or not the carriers of these diverse ‘Christianities’ were themselves ethnically European, the mode of religious transmission they established was fundamentally alien to most Papua New Guineans. My principal concern in this chapter is not with the thematic differences between indigenous and Christian cosmologies but with a set of fundamental contrasts in the nature of their transmissive characteristics.