European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Encounters, identities and objects: missionisation in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Karen Jacobs, Fanny Wonu Veys, Marja van Tilburg

Session presentation

Christianity has had such a profound impact on the Pacific region, that its effects are not only obvious, but inseparable from life in Oceania today. The study of Christianities in Oceania has thus far focused on doctrines and its relation with cultures, politics and colonial history. This session aims to focus on the social and material dimensions of missionary activity in Oceania.

It is generally accepted that early missionaries, despite their civilising mission, played a crucial role in the understanding of Oceanic societies because they actively collected objects and produced texts, drawings or photographs. However, their work depended on the encounter with people in the Pacific who had their own intentionalities and strategies. Therefore, objects, photographs, missionary reports and museums with a missionary connection have the potential to become a focus for reflections on the multiple values and valuations and their associated complexities that can be attributed to them by a diverse range of individuals and communities. They provide evidence of histories of global exchange, Pacific people’s agency and testimony to pre-Christian cultural and religious practices in Oceania.

We welcome papers that address following issues:
• What does examining the process of collecting (or not collecting) tell us about the enmeshment of missionary interest and Pacific peoples’ agency?
• Missionary museums and their link with Oceania.
• The missionary object or photograph as evidence of idolatry, as witness to traditional practice, as ancestor, as art work, as relic, or object of suspicion for contemporary Christians in Oceania.
• The role of missionary material and visual culture in processes of reconciliation and commemoration in Oceania.
• The encounter between missionaries and Pacific Islanders as interaction and transformation: how did they establish common ground? Were specific practices developed to facilitate the evolving connections? Did cross-cultural relationships lead to more precise, more rigid social boundaries? And did these relationships incite both parties to reconsider their own cultures, or rethink their own identities?

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

The place for real missionaries: when the attraction for New Guinea becomes a stereotype

Astrid de Hontheim (UMons)

Even accompanied with total conviction, self-sacrifice and unshakeable faith, to become a missionary, intention is not enough. In a great majority of cases, the missionary knows he/she would become one when he/she receives a call, a sign directly sent by God which expresses a divine will in favor of his/her vocation. Despite Protestants’ disdain for supernatural intervention in Catholic sacraments, apparitions and miracles, they are as concerned by the call as Catholics are. Besides, there is another type of motivation, sometimes as strong as the call and inspired by the general attraction of the field and by an image of the unknown world progressively built by stories told by others. New Guinea in particular has an aura which makes it to be thought as the place for “real missionaries” who would face the “jungle” and its “hostile” inhabitants. With the example of the Asmat people in West Papua, this paper studies the issue of the mystical call of Western missionaries and tries to deconstruct the stereotype which determined some them to go to New Guinea in the 20th century.

Creating Identities in Cross-cultural, Historical Contexts: Relationships between Missionaries and Pacific Islanders Revisited

Marja van Tilburg (University of Groningen)

The first attempt of the London Missionary Society to establish a mission on Tahiti failed miserably, to a large extent because the missionaries had difficulty establishing functional relationships with islanders. Historians and anthropologists have offered explanations – pointing out the poor preparation and the rigid attitude of the missionaries, the frustrated expectations of Tahitians, and the lack of communication between them. As Nicholas Thomas has argued in Islanders (2010), Tahitians converted to Christianity in their own time and for their very own reasons.

This paper addresses the topic once again in order to explore the role of the missionaries’ identities in the above events. Early reports of the missionary endeavor suggest that both parties had a strong sense of ‘self’, and that their interpretations of events enhanced their perceptions of ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Furthermore, the LMS learned from the experience and adapted its strategies – probably because the LMS evaluated the missionaries’ functioning and their attitude towards the islanders.

A textual analysis of missionaries’ reports suggest the first missionaries being engaged first and foremost with obeying God’s Command in order to earn eternal life, whereas Tahitians were frustrated because of the lack of exchange of goods and services, which would have enhanced the quality of life.

This paper is part of a larger research project on identity-formation in cross-cultural relationships within imperial contexts, entitled “Race, Gender, Culture: Creating Identities within Cross-cultural, Historical Contexts”.
This project is conducted in collaboration with Dr Michel R. Doortmont of the Department of International Relations and International Organisation, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Creating a Christian Island. Some points on the history of conversion on Ahamb Island, Vanuatu

Tom Bratrud (University of Oslo)

This paper will be tracing historically how Christianity has become a central part of contemporary identity and everyday life of Ahamb Island in Malekula, Vanuatu. Key points will be (1) the use of local Christian leaders who could develop a more independent indigenous understanding of the Christian message, (2) the use of local men in these tasks which created a continuation of customary male roles and male hierarchies and thus political authority, and (3) notions of the peaceful and Christian Ahamb as a life-saving safe place refugees (whose descendants make up half of the island population today) at a turbulent time of sickness, war and death on mainland Malekula around 1900.

Ahamb became one of the first mission stations in South-Malekula when David Hailongbel, a man from Ahamb, returned from work in sugar cane plantations in Queensland, where he also attended Sunday school. He was then sought up by Presbyterian missionaries who later arrived in Malekula and agreed to go to the Presbyterian mission school in Aulua, Malekula, for four years. His return to Ahamb was met by resistance but he managed to build a small church with the support of his mother’s brother’s lineage, who was feared magicians. In attracting people to church he merged customary forms with Christian contents. He used for example the traditional slit drum (tamtam) to call in to service and made Christian lyrics of songs used for custom dances. He eventually recruited other men to join mission school and they became a team of local missionaries who went out on missions to mainland Malekula to convert the still heathen villages there. In her work from nearby Ambrym, Annelin Eriksen, describes how Christianity proposed an egalitarian social form contrary to that of the customary male hierarchies. The high graded men of Ambrym first sought to establish the church as another representation of their eminence, but was denied this by the missionaries. On Ahamb, however, it was to a significant extent the men themselves who could guide the expression and work of the church. Thus, the political and religious authority on the island was not challenged to the same extent. In the paper I want to give a little extra attention to the so-called “Salvation Army” dance that resembles the kastom (custom) dances used in rank taking ceremonies but with the use of Christian songs and “proper” Christian dressing at that time; white shirt for men and white dress for women. The songs and dance were tought at the mission school in Aula and danced by Ahamb missionaries on their trips to unconverted villages to attract high ranking men to the new religion. The dance is still danced by old and young at important Christian occasions, such as Christmas and church jubilees. Christianity today is regarded by many as a new kastom of Ahamb and typical customary practices and ideas, such as the yearly New Yam feast, the work of the chiefs, conflict resolution and various ceremonies, are expressed and executed through a Christian framework. I argue that the possibility of developing a “local” Christianity has been instrumental in the position the Christian church has in Ahamb society and identity today. The opposite has been the case for example in nearby Lamap, where the relatively intense presence of expatriate Catholic missionaries left little room for local interpretations. This has led to emerging conflicts and greater distance between the church and people of Lamap, as well as a stronger interest in reviving pre-Christian kastom.

”If I got to do it all over again” – Catholic missionaries in the field

Hélena Regius

This paper presents”work in progress” and reflections on earlier research.
In the 1990s I conducted fieldwork in New Britain, PNG on the process of indigenous Catholicism and the making of Catholic Priests. This work looked at both the historical and the missiological aspects of Catholic mission activities, and the development of a local Catholic Church in the area. Two perspectives were presented; the Catholic understanding and acceptance of indigenous culture vis a vis the indigenous response dealing with ”kastam” (traditions) in relationship to ”lotu” (Church).
Catholic missionaries have a long tradition of writing a form of ”mission anthropology” whilst in the field. In contrast to Protestant, Catholics have appeared more tolerant and inclusive to some local cultural practices. The keyword to understand Catholic mission strategies since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), is the notion of ”inculturation”. This implies that Christianity is to ”graft” itself on the local culture. Today’s Catholic Church has adopted a lot of traditional local forms such as art, decorations, dance and music during Mass and other church activities.
15 years later I have conducted some informal interviews with MSC priests who started their work as missionaries in the 1960s and 70s in New Guinea. The point of departure has been the process of local culture going into the Catholic format. What is the relationship between the two, and has ”inculturation” indeed taken place? This paper will try to revise some of these issues in the light of previous research.

Missionization, colonial collecting and the domestication of gendered bodies in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea

Anna-Karina Hermkens (Macquarie University)

Since the first encounters between Anglican missionaries and Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, PNG, objects have been continuously exchanged. The majority of Maisin objects collected at the end of the 19th century ended up in museums in England and Australia, but also in other parts of the world, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland, and even in the USA. By collecting objects, missionaries not only collected physical artefacts. The act of collecting can be regarded as a primary means of producing knowledge. It affects both the society and identity of those engaged in collecting as well as of those whose objects are being collected. Missionization in Collingwood Bay was entangled with collecting and exchange -both between missionaries and other colonial agents, and between missionaries and Maisin- and the ‘(de-)materialization’ of local female bodies in particular. By collecting inalienable objects, stripping local girls and women of these personal adornments, cutting their hair and prohibiting mourning and initiation rituals for women, missionaries tried to re-shape and reform local female bodies and thereby Maisin culture as a whole. Although eventually all Maisin became Anglicans, not all bodily reforms were accepted. By focusing on objects and personal histories of both missionaries and local women, this paper elucidates the materiality of missionization, but also its counter-colonial dynamics.

A recontextualized encounter: Emma Hadfield's text (1920), collected objects, and contemporary Lifouan women's narratives

Anna Paini (Università degli Studi di Verona)

Emma Hadfield published a book on Lifouan society and Islanders (1920) and collected objects during her lengthy residence on the Loyalty Islands with her husband, the LMS Pastor James Hadfield. Her perceptions and representations leak into the text through the vocabulary of the colonialist, but on closer reading they reveal a more ambiguous attitude, which does not completely subscribe to the view that Christianization is amelioration. Further, her observations show an interesting and challenging continuity on past-present Kanak daily life.
She collected indigenous objects, some of which she mentions in her book. Upon her return the objects were mostly acquired by British Museums. Some of them stayed within the family and in 2009 made the journey back to Nouméa accompanied by the Hadfield’s descendants, among the Kanak objects some fine woven female works. At the request of the MNC (Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie), which doubted the provenance of two fine mats of the collection, I conducted fieldwork in Lifou to document women's responses to the mats and bags of the collection. The women recognized them as valuable assets related to their past but also as moving objects (Jolly 2011), objects inserted in dynamic flows and thus bearing complex, multidimensional histories. For the women what was at stake was not the return of the objects but rather the narrative they evoked, the symbolic relevance they still had in their construction of their own past, as well as the representation of Lifouan women that these repatriated objects might convey once displayed. The paper discusses the intertwinings between the text, the objects, the narratives, ant the protagonists in conversation with the literature on (re)constructing meanings in/of colonial encounters.

A Shared World: the Female Dimension of Early Missionary Encounters in Central Polynesia

Deborah Pope (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

Between 1797 and the 1860s, more than 50 British women lived in the islands of central Polynesia for varying lengths of time and in different, often multiple, locations. They were the wives of the first missionaries sent to the Pacific by the London Missionary Society. Missionary documents of the time make it clear that these women were expected to fulfill specific missionary duties: essentially the teaching of Polynesian women and children. But, more importantly, theirs was the "civilizing" mission: working the change in the fundamentally social and material dimensions of dress, living habits, child-rearing and sexual mores which, for these missionaries from Britain's Evangelical revival, was to accompany conversion to Christianity.
This paper will be an exploration of the ensuing interaction between these British missionary wives, fired by reforming religious zeal, and the Polynesian women who, reluctantly or willingly, accepted them into their very different world. It will examine the transformations this contact would bring about, the rethinking of female identities and representations it would entail and the common ground these women would, despite many obstacles, sometimes manage to establish. My principal source will be missionary correspondence and journals, particularly those of the LMS wives themselves, despite the relative paucity of this material, and the paper will concern essentially the first islands of missionary labour in the Pacific, those of today's French Polynesia and the neighbouring Cook Archipelago, where evidence of these women's agency remains visible today.

Drawing the missionary map: the LMS deputation journey through Central Polynesia (1821-24)

Karen Jacobs (University of East Anglia)

In 1821 British Reverend Daniel Tyerman and layman George Bennet embarked on one of the longest missionary journeys made: they formed a deputation sent out by the London Missionary Society (LMS) with the aim of undertaking a global inspection of their mission stations in the Pacific, Asia and Africa. The journey lasted eight years of which the longest time was spent in Central Polynesia. Between September 1821, when Bennet and Tyerman landed in Tahiti, and May 1824, when they left for New Zealand, both men assessed not only the established mission stations in Central Polynesia but also the potential of the mission’s extension to other areas. They spent time meeting missionaries and local chiefs to discuss their interest in the Christian gospel. They were impressed with the newly built chapels and were shown the remains of previous so-called ‘heathen’ veneration in the form of objects, people and sacred spaces. They also assembled a large collection of artefacts and associated knowledge. The deputation visited Central Polynesia at a time that the London Missionary Society was expanding its influence and the deputation members concretised this expansion by collecting objects from each converted region. As such they were drawing the missionary map in material terms. The resulting collection of objects and newspaper articles served an important role in Britain in advertising the missionary zeal in Polynesia and elicit further funding for the mission. The aim of this paper is to consider the deputation collection as missionary map components, bearing in mind that both collecting and mapping are processes that are influenced by various parties. Particular attention will be paid to the role and influence of Pacific Islanders in the mapping and collecting process.

Few collections, many archives: material, political and spiritual transactions between Fijian islanders and Wesleyan missionaries (1835-1854)

Stéphanie Leclerc-Caffarel (Smithsonian Institution)

Until the conversion of Cakobau, supreme chief of the paramount island of Bau in April 1854, the missionisation of the Fijian islands was largely dominated by the Wesleyan Church. In spite of an early attempt of settlement by the London Missionary Society in 1830, and despite the arrival of Catholic priests in the 1840s, the Wesleyan envoys (talatala) who benefited from a strong Tongan support were the most successful in their endeavour during the period under consideration. Therefore, most of the research material regarding the early missionisation process in Fiji is linked to Wesleyan activities in the eastern and northern islands of the archipelago. On one hand, these resources include few museum collections, especially small in comparison with the vast ensembles gathered by other Western visitors in the islands during the same period. On the other hand, however, the amount of archival documents available is huge. They include missionary logs, accounts, printed books and pamphlets, most these with a high documentary value. This paper intends to question these resource proportions in link with the Wesleyan doctrine. It also seeks to highlight the nature and issues of material and political transactions happening on the fringe of the spiritual and moral enterprise of conversion led by the Wesleyans.

Inadvertent Ethnographers and Collectors: Missionary Attitudes towards Tongan Material Culture

Fanny Wonu Veys (Museum van Nationaal Wereldculturen - National Museum of World Cultures)

Christianity has had such a profound impact, that its effects are not only obvious, but also not dissociable from life today in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga. From 1796 onwards protestant and later catholic missionaries have been primordial in introducing new forms of material culture, including manufactured cloth, church architecture and books. However those same missionaries also collected objects and recorded aspects of life in their working place. In order to facilitate conversion, some missionaries made attempts to understand indigenous culture; others seemed to express sympathy or outright disgust for local practices. In an initial attempt to unravel how Christianity changed Tongan culture and ontologies in both subtle and far-reaching ways, I will explore the engagements with material and visual culture of missionaries from the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society and the Marist Missionary Society. Through archival material and visual and object collections scattered in the UK, France and Italy, particular attention will be paid to how missionary attitudes were shaped by national specificities and denominational competition. With their collecting and recording activities, missionaries became fortuitously engaged in processes of knowledge creation.

Mediating Interpretations: early museum collections from Milingimbi in Arnhem Land

Lindy Allen (Museums Victoria)

Museums across the globe are repositories of vast holdings of collections of Indigenous cultural material of great relevance to source communities, and yet these remain essentially and effectively isolated from a context within which their fundamental significance can be established. At least since the 1970s, these collections have been an active and pivotal point of reference for source communities providing a unique and essential key to unlocking memories about place, people, practice and events. This has resulted in the emergence of what Peers and Brown have identified as a ‘new curatorial praxis which incorporates community needs and perspectives’. (2003:2)
This paper draws upon research being undertaken with Yolngu, the people of Arnhem Land, on their cultural patrimony dispersed across museums in Australia, Europe and the USA and reveals the way in which research on early mission collections has great contemporary relevance to Yolngu at Milingimbi.
This paper provides a critical examination of a significant body of cultural material collected in the earliest years of the Methodist mission station of Milingimbi, a small island off the coast of northern Australia. It compares collections associated with two men – the Revd TT (Ted) Webb and Eduard Handschin – and reveals differences in these collections reflecting what is often perceived as protectionist and isolationist mission policies versus Western scientific paradigms. Webb was considered a visionary who, at Milingimbi, implemented major changes that revolutionized the Methodist mission model including the abolition of abolishing the dormitory system. He sought to create a new social order with key Aboriginal leaders who chose the transition from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to life on the mission station. This included embedding the production of art and craft in the fabric of the lives of Yolngu at the mission. Handschin, by contrast, was a biologist and curator who went to Milingimbi around 1928 to collect for the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland. Webb also sent a significant body of cultural material to the MKB and to Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia between 1930 and 1935. This paper will discuss not just the differences but the way in which these collections can also reveal the agency of Yolngu at Milingimbi particularly in the cultural record created by Webb. This is of particular importance and an element that emerges particularly in dialogues with Yolngu today, who in fact reflect on the mission times and the contributions made by their parents and grandparents.

Pots and Patterns of connection in Wanigela: establishing relationships with the Anglican Mission.

Elizabeth Bonshek (Museum Victoria)

In the 1890s the villages at Wanigela represented the newest frontier of Anglican mission activity on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The Reverends Abbot, Chignell, and Ramsay and lay missionary Percy Money all made collections which are now housed in various institutions in Australia and the UK. Percy Money also sold prints from his photographic albums. While all four men collected pottery from Wanigela, they did so in vastly different numbers. Money collected around 50 pots most of which are distinguishable from traditional exchange pots by their elaborate applied designs which also denote clan affiliation. I argue that these beautifully patterned pots made by Wanigela women represent attempts to establish connections with the missionaries, the new arrivals who appeared not to be leaving any time soon. These elaborate pots contrast with the cooking pots made for exchange with their regional neighbours for items such as barkcloth, string bags and hunting dogs. The missionaries’ acquisition of pots with clan associations, pots ordinarily withheld from indigenous trade and exchange networks, requires a more highly nuanced understanding of the interactions between the two groups: for the missionaries, collecting preserved in material form the “disappearing” cultures that they were actively engaged in changing. However, Wanigelans, I suggest, were transacting pots bearing clan designs as part of their negotiations to establish and maintain connections with the newly arrived mission establishing itself in their midst.

The collections of Rev. J. H. Lawrie from Vanuatu

Antje Denner (National Museums Scotland)

The recently completed Review of Pacific Collections in Scottish Museums has shown that a large percentage of them was assembled by missionaries who were stationed on different islands throughout the region. One of these collections stems from Rev. J. H. Lawrie who spent the years from 1879 to 1897 on Aneityum in southern Vanuatu. The artefacts he collected today are housed in the National Museum of Scotland (253 artefacts) and in Glasgow Museums (191 artefacts); a series of 93 photographs that Lawrie took is in the National Library of Scotland.
In the course of my presentation I will analyse the composition of Lawrie’s collection as well as a few single objects in order to answer the question what they can tell us about his interests in, and attitudes towards, Vanuatu culture, his relationship with the Pacific islanders he dealt with and his responses to their agency. This will be linked with an assessment of available biographical materials and other sources that can shed light on the motivations and interactions which moved and went on between the missionary and ni-Vanuatu. Finally, I will point to questions that cannot be answered by such an approach and address possible directions for future research.