The varieties of Melanesian Christian experience: a comment on Mosko's ‘Partible penitents’

In December 1970, Louis Vangeke prostrated himself before Pope Paul VI at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney and was raised as the first indigenous Roman Catholic bishop in Papua New Guinea. He was a Mekeo from Beipa, born in 1904, and made a priest in 1937 after attending seminary in Madagascar. Thousands of other Melanesians have made similar journeys, beginning on hard log pews in village Sunday schools and ending up as clerics, nuns, medical workers, and social activists. Hundreds have passed through seminaries, spending countless hours puzzling over biblical stories and theological conundrums, composing theses seeking out the commonalities and critical differences between orthodox Christianity and Melanesian cultural values (Trompf 1987). One became the first Prime Minister of Vanuatu; another, a martyr to the cause of Kanak independence in New Caledonia. Successive censuses reveal Papua New Guinea as among the most Christian nations in the world in terms of church membership (Gibbs 2006). Not a uniform Christianity, of course, but a vibrant mix of holy rollers, starch-shirted Adventists, gospel rockers, Catholics celebrating the Eucharist to the beating of garamut drums, prophets awaiting the return of Jesus and other ancestors, and entrepreneurs hawking dreams of personal prosperity through faith. Anthropologists are latecomers to the study of Christianity in Melanesia (Barker 1992). Still, they bring something undeniably fresh to the inquiry: insight into the ways that local peoples make Christianity their own. The best village-based ethnographies – including those reinterpreted by Mark Mosko in his essay – combine an intimate knowledge of the history and culture of a local people with a critical awareness of the wider history and varied impact of missions and churches in the region. Anthropological contributions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, moving from traditional community ethnographies to multi-sited explorations of women’s church groups, millenarian and independent church movements, rapidly growing urbanbased Pentecostal churches, Christian interventions in the HIV/AIDS crisis, translations of biblical themes in sermons and vernacular bibles, Christian rhetoric in electoral campaigns, and much else. Mosko’s arguments need to be measured against this literature, which reveals a much livelier and more diverse set of approaches to