Heart, Spirit and Understanding: Protestant Hymnody as an Agent of Transformation in Melanesia, 1840s–1940s

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the ways Protestant hymnody, a tool of evangelisation and colonisation, served as an agent in establishing, mediating and transforming relationships between Melanesians and outsiders, and among Islanders themselves. It concentrates on early transmission strategies and the initial reception of hymnody, the role of women missionaries in the establishment of hymn culture, the subsequent increase in participation in hymnody among the second generation of evangelised Islanders, and the nascence of a local, Melanesian form of hymnodic expression. A tension is identified whereby as Islander congregations became ever more proficient hymnodists and thus increasingly more capable of producing a sound acceptable to Europeans, they came to assume a broader-based ‘Melanesian’ identity – a new, wider collective self-understanding based on emergent hybrid expressive practices. The paper argues that Islanders drew on hymn culture as they remade their societies in the light of the new ideas and experiences to which they were being exposed, to the extent that to them it became a key symbol and register of their social and cultural transformation and regeneration.