Abstract:
Extended Abstract: “GREATER LOVE…” European Missionaries, Self-Sacrifice and Christian Partibility in the Western Solomon Islands Christine Dureau The University of Auckland To get the best from these people, we must teach them to be industrious, honest, clean, and self-reliant and, if need be, self-sacrificing (Goldie 1916:4) Despite growing interest in the articulation of global and local understandings in Christian conversion, anthropologists still pay limited attention to the worldviews and cultural imperatives driving missionaries who were key agents of conversion, disciplinary concerns with discourse, power and agency tending to marginalize questions about missionaries’ cultural-theological imperatives. In Melanesian missions a key question concerns the relationship between missionary and indigenous understandings of the properly moral person. This is particularly the case for non-Conformist Protestants, long associated with individualist modes of personhood, working in a region where the person was conceived as ideally dividual, defined as a person according to the totality of their relational enmeshments. I consider one such mission—the Edwardian Australasian Methodist Mission to the Western Solomon Islands—during approximately its first two decades (1902 – 1922), paying particular attention to Rev. John Francis Goldie, its founding chair. In keeping with Protestant industrial missions of the time, Goldie and others typically dismissed Islander values and practices as forms of primitive communism, commensurate with their putatively low social evolutionary position (Stanley 2009; e.g. Goldie 1909) and sought to inculcate more Western forms of character marked, for example, by personal responsibility, orientation to nuclear family over extended kin commitments, the courage to stand alone against others. Yet, there are points at which missionaries’ moral personhood echoes indigenous models of the dividual. Mark Mosko has recently argued that, in fact, Christianity has been essentially dividualist since Antiquity, stressing Godly gift—of grace, forgiveness, etc.—and the reciprocities—“confessions…, prayer, songs of praise, tithes, … good works”, etc.—to which Christians are, in turn, morally obliged (2015: 370). Mosko’s broad inclusiveness threatens conceptual weakness and reductionism to the point at which all religious exchanges are forms of dividualist partibility, as his commentators have observed (e.g., Errington & Gewertz 2010; Barker 2010). Still, I want to engage the idea that at least some aspects of Christian personhood can be analyzed as forms of dividualism Late Victorian and Edwardian missionaries and missionary literature elevated self-sacrifice as Christian essence: Calvary as the model of selfless giving on behalf of all humankind; missionary lives as self-surrender in order to bring heathens into Christian relationship; and the aspirational surrender of self-interest and self-indulgence as the mark of true conversion from heathenism. These understandings of Christianity in terms of community, kinship and transcendence of the self often eclipsed concerns with individual souls, and I ask how they might be understood in terms of dividuality. For Edwardian Methodist missionaries, the Christian person was not solely self-authored. Although they must permanently strive for self-improvement, their Christian being was authored by God, who had offered them an adult conversion or deepening faith, rather than by their own efforts (O’Brien 2015). Nor could one be Christian solely in oneself: owing a personal debt of acceptance and acknowledgment to Christ, they felt compelled to share the Word, bringing others into the Christian ecumene. Frequently beset by ill health, permanently exhausted, often separated from kin and friends for years or decades, endlessly dealing with frustrations and occasionally dying or left with broken health—and extolled accordingly in religious literature—they understood their lives as simultaneously reciprocity to God and gift to heathens. These ideals of surrendering the self on behalf of others imply a Christian personhood as morally embedded in networks of relationships limited only by the boundaries of Christianity. But beyond relationality, the dividual further implies a partible person, one materially embedded in the lives of others through relations of substance detached from the self and gifted to others, who reciprocate in turn. I suggest that missionary ideals of self-sacrifice can be partially understood in such terms. Certainly, the sacrifice of the incarnate Christ on Calvary suggests that the triune God, in which each was both individual and dissolved in the One, could be interpreted as partible. And missionary self-sacrifices of time, effort, energy or health on behalf of mission can be also interpreted in terms of detached corporeal substance, transacted as gifts to other members and potential members of their religion. Finally, seeing their own lives as models for converts, they sought something similar is seeking to teach self-sacrifice to Solomon Islanders, often judging their success by how much they materialized their faith by surrendering their wealth for mission support. In making such judgements, missionaries did not recognize the extent to which such giving reflected the congruence between their own understandings of salvation as gift and indigenous models of moral sociality—a point long made by some Pacific theologians who see the two as inherently compatible with Christian ideals. References Australian Broadcasting Commission, John Cleary, Benjamin Myers, Chris Fleming & Michael Jenson. 29/3/2013. The Cross and the Atonement. http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s3727892.htm http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/local/sundaynights/201304/r1095168_13154458.mp3 Downloaded 29/1/2017. Centuries of disputation about the meaning of the Crucifixion, meanings have shifted in changing historical-cultural and theological contexts, and ongoing changes in its interpretation in different denominations and evangelical manifestations (Australian Broadcasting Commission et al, 29/3/13. Listen again. Barker, John, 2010. The Varieties of Melanesian Christian Experience: A Comment on Mosko’s “Partible penitents.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 16: 247–49. Errington, Frederick, & Deborah Gewertz, 2010. Expanding Definitions, Contracting Contexts: A Comment on Mosko’s “Partible Penitents.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 16: 250–52. Goldie, Rev. J., 1909. The People of New Georgia: Their Manners and Customs, and Religious Beliefs. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland XXII (1): 23 – 30. Goldie, Rev. John F., 1916. Industrial Training in Our Pacific Missions. Australasian Methodist Missionary Review (4/6/06) XXVI(3): 2 – 5 Mosko, Mark S. 2015. Unbecoming Individuals: The Partible Character of the Christian Person. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 361 – 93. O’Brien, Glen, 2015. Australian Methodist Religious experience. In Glen O’Brien & Hilary M. Carey, eds, Methodism in Australia: A History. Farnham: Ashgate, pp, 167 – 66. Stanley, Brian. 2009. The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans.