Melanesia, Christianity, and

cultural change: a comment on

Moskos Partible penitents
J ovi Ronni xs University of California, San Diego
I am glad to see this vigorously argued article in print. As Mosko makes clear, we differ
in some respects in our understanding of theoretical and ethnographic matters, yet I
think he has put on the table many topics worthy of debate. I pick out a fewin response.
For ease of exposition, I organize my comments around the following claims: Mosko
notes that the NewMelanesian Ethnography (NME) is no longer very new. I would also
suggest that in his hands it is also no longer very Melanesian, nor is it very ethno-
graphic. Furthermore, the NME-inspired model of cultural change that Mosko gives us
is in anthropological terms unoriginal.
Not Melanesian
Mausss argument that exchange is fundamental to social life is widely accepted the
idea that humans exchange is one of the few successful non-trivial anthropological
universals. Its success rests in part on being right about the world and in part on
being sufciently abstract that its basic formulations do not violate what ethnogra-
phers nd in the eld. Instead, ethnographers have been able to develop specica-
tions of Mausss model based on local understandings of exchange. As Mosko notes,
the NME grew out of one such specication, as scholars developed a purportedly
pan-Melanesian understanding of exchange as rooted in the detachment and attach-
ment of transacted aspects of dividual persons. At the heart of this article is Moskos
assertion that this model is not only Melanesian, it is also Christian, and perhaps
almost universal. I think, though, that in this case a better Mauss has turned out to
be a trap.
It is a trap in that the argument depends on reading virtually all exchange as if it
is roughly similar to the canonical NME exchanges of bodily substances such as
Mekeo bloods. We are told that there are some kinds of non-NME exchanges out
there in which bounded persons exchange objects that are not parts of themselves,
but we are given no examples of them and no criteria by which to discriminate
between exchanges that fall into this category and those that t the NME model. In
this article, all exchanges are detachments and attachments of personal parts. Since
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Christians, like all human beings, engage in exchange, they are dividuals just like
Mekeo. Never mind that it does not seem to me that most Christians talk about
detachment and attachment in anything like the ways Mosko suggests, all they have
to do is exchange and they are in the NME club. But what have we gained by stretch-
ing the NME in this way? Certainly we have lost the kind of ethnographic specicity
scholars once developed on the basis of Mausss less locally encumbered framework.
And note that we have lost that specicity on the Melanesian side as well. The NME
in Moskos hands is tantamount to the already widely accepted claim that at least
some aspects of the self are sociocentric everywhere (Spiro I,,,). This is a rather sad
place to end up for an author who began by arguing that those anthropologists he
opposes have lost Melanesias cultural distinctiveness in their studies of cultural
change: for he has lost it even more thoroughly by dissolving that distinctiveness into
a questionable universalism whereby almost all exchange everywhere is carried out in
NME terms.
Not a novel theory of change
Moskos liberalization of what counts as dividualism also leads him to make inated
claims for a theory of cultural change that is in fact quite banal in anthropological
terms. I have argued elsewhere that anthropology tends to be a science of continuity
one that sees change as a process whereby people incorporate anything new they
encounter into their old understandings, and thus reproduce their traditions even as
they may open themto incremental transformations (Robbins :oo,). I have also argued
that one way they make such arguments convincing is by playing fast and loose with
judgements of similarity, which, as Goodman (I,,:) has taught us, are notoriously
slippery; by saying something new is really similar to something traditional, anthro-
pologists downplay the extent of change that has occurred (Kiernan I,,:; Robbins
:oo,: ::8-,o). When Mosko asserts that Christian personhood ... has appeared to some
Melanesians ... as dividual as they are themselves (p. ::8), and that they have therefore
in conversion only changed the aspects of themselves they attach and detach and not
their fundamental model of personhood, he does just this. I hope to have demonstrated
his proigate sense of similarity between kinds of exchanges in the previous section;
here I only want further to indicate that in its basic form there is little new in his model
of change.
Not ethnography
I could under this heading point out all of the rough or inaccurate ethnographic
reports Mosko offers of my own and others work. For example, he claims that the
Urapmin become possessed by the Holy Spirit in a way recalling pre-Christian pos-
session by nature and ancestral spirits (p. ::o; note the argument for continuity based
on similarity). But on one of the pages of my book he cites to support this observation
I state explicitly that the Urapmin had no indigenous tradition of possession (:oo:
I,I). There are other examples but no space to reviewthem. Taken together they suggest
a drive to reduce all ethnographic detail to a procrustean scheme, and I mention
them to suggest that readers should not take the impressive number of works Mosko
cites as a guarantee that he has made his arguments satisfactorily in ethnographic
terms.
Joel Robbins 242
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On another level, I want to point out that there is a more profound way in which
Moskos NME has left ethnography behind. He blames Sahlins and Dumont for
leading me away from seeing the obvious truth that Christianity is just more dividu-
alism, and for missing that this provides a sufcient explanation for why the
Urapmin have converted. But he is wrong about this. As I document over and over in
my work, it is the Urapmin themselves who assert constantly that charismatic Chris-
tianity is something new, and that since they converted to it their lives have changed
dramatically I turned to Sahlins and Dumont to help me understand why they
would say this. We can of course doubt what the people we work with tell us. We can
doubt the Urapmin really have changed, or that Christianity is really as different as
they claim it is from what they had done before, just as we can doubt that the Mekeo
are really swapping different kinds of bloods around among themselves. But we
cannot completely ignore that the Urapmin and the Mekeo say such things. And this
should be doubly true for NME theorists, who pride themselves on attending more
carefully than anyone else to indigenous understandings. In this light, Moskos com-
plete disregard for what Urapmin and many other Melanesians say about the expe-
rience of conversion is particularly troubling. As Mosko notes, I have been deeply
inuenced by NME thought myself, and I see it as having many virtues, but if leaving
behind what Melanesians say about things like conversion is the price we have to pay
for an NME theory of change, we will continue to have to look elsewhere for help
with understanding the dramatic transformations that are so much a part of Melane-
sian life today.
REFERENCES
Gooux.x, N. I,,:. Seven strictures on similarity. in How classication works: Nelson Goodman among the
social sciences (eds) M. Douglas & D. Hull, I,-:,. Edinburgh: University Press.
Kivvx.x, J.P. I,,:. The herder and the rustler: deciphering the afnity between Zulu diviner and Zionist
prophet. African Studies , :,I-:.
Ronnixs, J. :oo,. On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalismand the perils of continuity thinking. Religion ,
::I-,I.
:oo. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinean society. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
:oo,. Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: belief, time, and the anthropology
of Christianity (with CA commentary). Current Anthropology , ,-I,.
Svivo, M. I,,,. Is the Western conception of the self peculiar within the context of world cultures? Ethos ,
Io,-,,.
Joel Robbins is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His work
focuses on the anthropology of Christianity; the globalization of Pentecostalism; Melanesia; and the study of
ritual, language and exchange. He is author of the book Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in
a Papua New Guinea society (University of California Press, :oo) and is co-editor of the journal Anthropo-
logical Theory.
Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA -,
USA. jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu
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