Discursive Dishonesty: Methodist Missionary Mistruth and Truth in the Western Solomon Islands, c.1902 – 1920

Abstract

Why would missionaries, concerned with the moral condition of individuals and whole societies, connive at dishonesty? This seems an especially notable contradiction when indigenous integrity is a key theme of mission discourse. The Australasian Methodist Mission to the Western Solomon Islands (1902 – 1968) repeatedly promulgated textual mistruths at institutional and individual levels and in regard to different parties and diverse phenomena, among them, indigenous cultural understandings and social practices, other colonial actors, missionaries’ own actions in the field and the mission’s establishment and relationship with other key colonial missions. While colonial and missionary cultures and texts have been productively analyzed in terms of propaganda (e.g. Thomas), representational othering (e.g. Eves), disguised ignorance or outright lies, etc., such approaches tend to reduce missionary accounts to textual content itself, to the pragmatic exigencies of persuading home audiences to their causes, or to stereotypes of missionary character. Without discounting such approaches, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concepts of “silencing” and “conditions of possibility” may enhance our understanding of such discursive dishonesties. I illustrate my argument by reference to the sustained insistence that Western Solomon Islanders had no understanding of time (or time management) until taught its virtues. Beyond the obvious self- and ideological justification informing this trope, I suggest, following Trouillot, that is was, literally, impossible for missionaries to perceive the complex indigenous temporal system, despite its prominence and ubiquity.