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Partible penitents: dividualpersonhood and Christianpractice in Melanesia andthe West*

Mark Mosko Australian National University

Recent discussions by anthropologists and others regarding the transmission and adoption ofexogenous cultural elements have been framed by such tropes as cultural ‘rupture’, ‘collision’,‘disjuncture’, ‘hybridity’, and ‘globalization’. These studies have been undertaken largelyindependent of the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’ and its distinctive understanding of partiblepersonhood. Burgeoning studies of Christian conversion have elided the partibility of persons withrespect to both indigenous modes of agency and analogous features of Christianity, whilepractitioners of the New Ethnography have mostly avoided analysing religious change. I seek totranscend this bifurcation by demonstrating the dividual character of personhood and agency inseveral exemplary instances of Melanesian Christianity (Maisin, Karavar, Gebusi, and Urapmin), whichprevious investigators have portrayed in opposed terms as inherently individualist. There and in afurther ethnographic treatment (North Mekeo) I show how people’s assimilation of Christianity hasbeen effected through elicitive exchanges involving parts of their persons and correspondingpersonal detachments of God, Jesus, Mary, Holy Spirit, the Devil, and so on. Paying due heed tothese heretofore unrecognized analogies between indigenous dividualism and Christian‘individualism’ provides a novel explanation for the nature and rapidity of conversion and change inMelanesia and beyond.

Among the more innovative developments in Pacific ethnography over the past twodecades has been the elaboration of the Maussian model of gift-exchange (Mauss 1967)into a new perspective on the dynamics of Melanesian sociality, sometimes tagged the‘New Melanesian Ethnography’ (hereafter NME; see Josephides 1991). Central to theNME is the distinction of the ‘partible’ or ‘dividual’ person from the bounded posses-sive ‘individual’ of Western politico-jural discourse (Macpherson 1963). FollowingMarilyn Strathern (1988; 1991b; 1999) and Roy Wagner (1974; 1981; 1991), numerousethnographers have illustrated how Melanesians typically interact as composite beingsconstituted of the detached parts/relationships of other persons through prior agentiveelicitations and exchanges.1

* Awarded the 2008 Curl Prize for best essay submitted to the RAI competition relating to the results oranalysis of anthropological work.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 215-240© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010

While the partible person has been celebrated by some for the novel insights itaffords into indigenous sociality, it, along with its encompassing NME framework, hasbeen critiqued on two main grounds: its inherent synchrony – an inability to addressprocesses of social change;2 and a perceived essentialization of both the Melanesiandividual and the Western individual.3 On the other hand, as Foster (1995: 1-18) hasnoted, most studies of Melanesian social change have paid little heed to the region’sundeniable cultural alterities – such as widespread indigenous understandings of par-tibility – laying stress instead on people’s shared historical experiences of colonialism,capitalism, secularization, and so on, or the overwhelming forcefulness of those intru-sions at the expense of Melanesians’ own agency.4

Although the NME is no longer particularly ‘new’, the conflicting implications itposes between dividual and individual personhood still dog Melanesian anthropology,leaving it deeply bifurcated. Where NME practitioners underscore trajectories of con-tinuity or reproduction even in circumstances of pronounced change, analysts ofchange affix perceived innovations to the same exogenous influences that have suppos-edly produced analogous transformations elsewhere, regardless of Melanesia’s culturaldistinctiveness.

Unfortunately, solutions proposed to this impasse have not proven entirely success-ful. Foster’s (1995: 19, 227) procedure of conducting the two analyses side by side makeslittle headway towards their theoretical integration. Andrew Strathern and PamelaStewart’s promotion of the ‘relational-individual’ – a ‘dialectic between relationalityand individuality (the sociocentric and the egocentric)’ (2000: 6, 63-6, passim) – elidesthe key dynamics of personal partibility and the role played therein by the absence ofclear distinctions between subjects and objects (see below), thereby spuriously bridgingthe distance between studies of Melanesian personhood and change.5 Similarly, Scott’s(2007) dismissal of the NME in favour of ‘poly-ontologies’ deflects attention away fromthe dividual character of both indigenous and, possibly, Western personhood. Some ofMarilyn Strathern’s (1992; 1999) discussions of Western sociality, while partly informedby Melanesian patterns, address transformations in seemingly individualist Westerninstitutions rather than changes in Melanesia.6 Certain implications of Sahlins’s struc-tural history approach have been recently adapted for Melanesian contexts (Robbins &Wardlow 2005) wherein elements of Western culture have been appropriated for servicein pre-existing social arrangements – a general conclusion not antithetical to theapproach adopted here – but those studies have tended to evade the possible entangle-ments of personal partibilty (cf. Mosko 1992; Wardlow 2005: 65).

What is required, I suggest, is an approach to personhood and change which differsfrom those of both NME practitioners and their critics – one which clarifies the relationbetween dividual and individual personhood in such a way as to enable exploitation ofthe dynamic potentialities of partibility and elicitive exchange as change, and which takesdue account of processes analogous to dividuality in introduced dimensions of presumablyindividualist Western sociality (cf. LiPuma 2000; M. Strathern 1991a; 1999: 132-58).

The burgeoning interest in Pacific, especially Melanesian, Christianity is a case inpoint. Just as NME practitioners deploying the partible person model have been inat-tentive to Christian missionization and conversion, students of the latter have presup-posed Christian personhood to be strictly individualist. In this article I therefore seekto overcome this specific impasse by examining several well-documented cases ofreligious transformation for the role played therein by transactions of reciprocal elici-tation premised on personal partibility. I argue that the partibility notion contains a

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considerable unrealized diachronic potential that is superior to rival conceptualizationsas it relies on closer approximations of indigenous religious understandings and prac-tices, both Melanesian and Western. It is implicit, firstly, in the very notion of partibilitythat Melanesian dividuals are composites of prior interpersonal transactions and that agiven person’s composition at any one time indicates his/her potential for future action(cf. Bourdieu 1977). Melanesian partible persons can thus be appreciated as agents ofhistory and change par excellence.7 Secondly, I suggest, the partible person conceptmore closely approximates distinctly Christian understandings of ‘individual’ agencythan the notion of the bounded Western individual to which it is commonly opposed.Contrary to prevailing stereotypes, there is at least one highly significant context ofWestern culture which is premised on personal partibility and elicitation: relationsbetween Christians, and between them and their deity as dividual persons – that is, thereexists a certain profound misunderstanding in the discipline over the contrast betweenMelanesian dividualism and Western individualism which Melanesian Christianity inNME perspective can clarify. I therefore argue, thirdly, that the sort of ‘individualism’routinely attributed to Christianity actually consists in just one aspect of a wider,encompassing unbounded form of personhood – related to, but distinct from, thebounded possessive individual – which is instead closely analogous to Melanesiandividuality. To the extent that these formal compatibilities between indigenous Melane-sian modes of sociality and Christian practices can be substantiated, finally, I venturethat those concordances have contributed to the impetus and intensity of Christianity’sspread across many parts of the region or beyond. Suitably reconfigured around thedynamic potentialities of personal partibility, therefore, the NME offers to socialanthropology novel theoretical insights into Christianity and processes of religiouschange as well as continuity (cf. Cannell 2006a; Robbins 2007).8

I proceed by first outlining the possibly counter-intuitive transactional dynamics ofdividual personhood, drawing particular attention to the place of the subject/objectdistinction and the means whereby partibility and elicitation can be fruitfully extendedto contexts marked by social change and the seeming presence of ‘individualism’. NextI compare this view of personal partibility to Dumont’s and Burridge’s authoritativeaccounts of Western individualism, arguing that the Christian ‘individual’, contrary towidespread presuppositions, is but one aspect of a broader composite, dividual Chris-tian person. Then I scrutinize several highly regarded ethnographies of MelanesianChristianity for traces of partibility: Barker (1990b; 1992; 2003) on Maisin; Erringtonand Gewertz (1995) on Karavar Islanders; Knauft (2002) on Gebusi; and Robbins (2004)on Urapmin. Here I demonstrate, on the one hand, that although ‘exchange’ and‘relationships’ figure conspicuously in the authors’ portrayals of pre-Christian reli-gions, their neglect of personal partibility effectively reduces their accounts of indig-enous sociality to ‘subjects’ transacting over categorically distinct ‘objects’, consonantwith the Western notion of possessive individual agents (Foster 1995: 9-10; Mosko 2000;2002). On the other hand, I argue that these studies’ shared assumption that Christianpersonhood and agency are intrinsically individualistic is misleading (cf. Barnett &Silverman 1979: 41-81; Dumont 1985; LiPuma 2000: 130-2; M. Strathern 1988: 268-70):that is, close examination reveals how Christianity in these cases also involves elicitivedetachments and attachments among dividual persons (converts, God, Jesus, HolySpirit, the Devil, etc.). I then report my own ethnographic findings regarding contem-porary North Mekeo Christian practice, highlighting the transactional dynamics ofpersonal partibility informing relations among human and spiritual persons.

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I conclude that many characteristically Christian notions of personhood and agencycan be seen as closely akin to Melanesian understandings. Contrary to received views,much seemingly individualistic Christian belief and practice in the West and elsewhereinvolves elicitive ritual transactions over parts of dividual persons, divine and human,so that religious change consists in conversions from one dividual mode of socialityinto another. Thus suitably modified, the NME effectively bridges the bifurcation thatcurrently impedes Melanesian ethnography while giving much to the anthropologicaltheory of change and to understandings of Christianity in general.

Melanesian personal partibilityFor Melanesia and possibly elsewhere, the person can be considered a dividual being, acomposite formed of relations with a plurality of other persons (M. Strathern 1988). Inthis view, a person is a product of the gifts, contributions, or detachments of others. Inmany Melanesian contexts, persons are regarded as composed of gendered substances,such as father’s bone and mother’s menstrual blood, plus lifetimes of donations ofembodied and non-substantial labour by other kin and relatives such as food, magicalknowledge, ceremonial wealth, land, and so on. Typically, these personal gifts should bereciprocated. Among North Mekeo, for example, since my mother contributed womb-blood to me during conception and gestation, at appropriate later points I am obligedto give her analogous parts of myself acquired from still other persons. Thus persons’compositions change through time as they both attach others’ contributions to them-selves and detach personal tokens for attachment to others. The transactions compos-ing persons and relations create a history of sequential reciprocities as so manycapacities for future agentive action.

Following Gell (1998), I define an ‘agent’ as a person capable of changing thedispositions of some victim or ‘patient’. By acting (i.e. detaching parts of themselvesthat they earlier acquired as patients from others), agents externalize the relations ofwhich they are, or until then have been, composed. Through acting, partible personsare decomposed, anticipating and evincing the recognition of their externalized capaci-ties through the responses of corresponding patients (Fig. 1). For me to detach theappropriate part of myself so that it will be effective in drawing forth a desired part ofanother person (i.e. his or her sister in marriage, a shell valuable, or a ritual spell), Imust be able to conceptualize the internal capacities of both myself and my exchangepartner so that I can strategically externalize that part of me which will be successful inuncoupling the part of the other person which I desire. Through these kinds of elici-tations, persons stimulate one another to action and reaction. Every action – or trans-action – is in this way both conventional and innovative.9

Figure 1.

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This model of dividual personhood and agency, like classic Maussian gift reciprocity,presupposes the absence of the rigid distinction between ‘persons’ and ‘things’, or‘subjects’ and ‘objects’, which is definitive of the bounded, possessive individual ofWestern ideology. Thus when people from a Western viewpoint might appear to beexchanging objects – items of food, wealth, knowledge, etc. – in indigenous Melanesianperspective they are rather transacting over bits of themselves as persons (Barnett &Silverman 1979: 62-6; Hampsher-Monk 1996: 244-5; LiPuma 2000: 130-6; Lohmann2003: 117; Mead 1934: 222-226; M. Strathern 1988: 171-81). I take the reluctance toappreciate this distinction fully to lie at the heart of many ‘relationalist’ misreadings ofMelanesian sociality. Regardless of how intensely people valorize relationships, if theitems transacted are not construed as parts of the transactors as persons, relationalistperspectives tacitly recapitulate the subject/object distinction on which possessive indi-vidualism in the West is premised. Similarly, as discussed below, the denial of possibleidentifications between persons and things in certain contexts has greatly distorted thescope of ‘individualism’ in the West.

With the aim of transcending the NME’s essentialist and synchronic limitations,however, I introduce several refinements of the personal partibility notion. First, genderis not necessarily the only contrast animating Melanesian partibility (cf. M. Strathern1988). Dimensions of relational meaning and identity such as sacred/profane, human/divine, good/evil, living/dead, and so on, may also participate in partibility processes,especially in religious contexts. And inasmuch as Western persons may also exhibitdividuality – for example, in Christian ritual practice (see below) – a suitably modifiedNME perspective escapes the charge of crudely ‘essentializing’ or ‘othering’ Melanesians.Second,extension of the partibility model to temporalized interactions between Melane-sianandexogenouspersons,whetherhumanordivine,enables theNMEtoaccommodateprocesses of change: that is, it is through such transactions over acquired identities andcapacities that Melanesians change themselves, their social relations, and their cultures.And third, as already mentioned, the stark opposition of individual versus dividualpersonhoodonwhichMelanesia’scurrentbifurcationispremisedisoverlysimple;rather,the individualism that has been routinely associated with Christianity is itself a mani-festation of dividuality closely analogous to Melanesian personhood.

The Christian dividual personOf course, this last claim, that Christian personhood could be at base dividual ratherthan individual, opposes received anthropological wisdom. Burridge (1979) andDumont (1985), among others, for example, are often cited as testimony to Christiani-ty’s inherent individualism in contrast to Melanesia’s relationalism.10 But careful read-ings of the key texts affirm that the total Christian person represented therein is as fullypartible as indigenous Melanesians: that is, that the individuality at issue concerns onlya single, detachable element of an otherwise composite agent. For Dumont as for Weber(1930), the modern Western individual – the non-divisible ‘individual’ subject categori-cally differentiated from things he/she transacts – emerged fully formed only in the lastfew centuries of Christianity’s unfolding. So what kind of Christian person existed inpre-Reformation times? Dumont (1985) locates Western individualism’s first appear-ance in the early Church as a transformation from an ‘inworldly’ to an ‘outworldly’orientation.11 Like ancient Hindu ascetic renouncers, early Christians removed them-selves from society, amounting, I suggest, to no less than the rejection/detachment ofinworldly parts/relations from people’s persons which enabled them to receive/attach



the outworldly gifts of Pentecost as further detachments from God. As surprising at itmay appear to some, Dumont’s model of the achievement-orientated early Christianindividual consists in an overall dividual (as in divide-able) being or person signifi-cantly distinct from its modern descendant:

[S]omething of modern individualism is present with the first Christians and in the surroundingworld, but that is not exactly individualism as we know it. Actually, the old form and the new areseparated by a transformation so radical and so complex that it took at least seventeen centuries ofChristian history to be completed, if indeed it is not still continuing in our times (Dumont 1985: 94,emphasis added).

The key pivots of transformation into the modern individual for Dumont were the latertheologies of Luther and Calvin, wherein early Christian outworldliness was re-focusedupon the penitent’s inner, indestructible, and sacred but indivisible soul, identified withthe will of God (1985: 113-19): that is, detachable, transactable parts of both people’s andGod’s total persons.12 The post-Reformation Christian thus remains a composite beingcomprising at minimum inner immortal soul,will, and faith as well as mortal body,outerdevotions to God, good works directed to fellow communicants, and so on.13 And evenif the individual Christian soul is hierarchically valued over other personal parts, itremains only one component of the plurally constituted total Christian penitent.

Building upon Dumont’s treatise, Burridge (1979) distinguishes between ‘person’and ‘individual’ as alternate states of a composite, dividual ‘self ’. Whereas, for Burridge,the thoughts and actions of a ‘person’ largely conform to accepted roles, statuses, andnorms, the predications of an ‘individual’ consist in the stripping away of those con-ventions and in the receipt or creation of new charismatically inspired arrangementsfor transmission to other people in the future (1979: 41, 47, 54, 165, 211, 218). Theindividual is therefore a being who both detaches from and attaches to him/herselfelements of personhood rather than objects through transactions vis-à-vis others.Similar to Dumont also, Burridge traces Western individualism to the early Church,specifically to Pentecost, where penitents, having shed their customary social identitiesand relations, became qualified to receive spiritual gifts from God for communicationto fellow Christians (1979: 54, 72, 158-9, 168, 194, 208). Further in the direction ofMelanesian partibility, Burridge ties individualism cross-culturally to metanoia – ‘arenunciation of the given moralities when it is not a transcending of them ... a changeof mind envisaging new moralities, it appears as the basis of, and may lead into,individuality’ (1979: 215, emphasis added). As a process, in other words, metanoiainvolves the dividuality of the self into parts – alternate states of mind and moralities– neither of which qualify as objects separate from self (1979: 193, 210). Burridge’s‘individual’, Christian or otherwise, therefore, implicates a conception of personhoodwhich, similarly to the composite partible person of Melanesia, contrasts with thebounded possessive individual distinguished through transactions over depersonalizedthings. I strongly suspect that this particular confusion over radically distinct meaningsof ‘individualism’ has contributed most egregiously to the bifurcation of the anthro-pology of Melanesia and, perhaps, elsewhere, and to widespread misunderstandingsover the character of personhood in the West generally and Christianity specifically.

Melanesian Christianity as dividual agency and transactionAiming to transcend these lacunae, I now reconsider several exemplary ethnographiesof Melanesian Christianity.

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Barker, ethnographers’ neglect of Melanesian Christianity, andMaisin charismatic revivalismJohn Barker’s (1990a; 1990b; 1992: 147) influential critiques of anthropologists’ neglectof Melanesian Christianity, while laudable, have reinforced the discipline’s bifurcationin at least two ways. First, paragons of the NME such as Munn (1986) and Wagner(1986), among others, have been singled out, with undoubted justification, for theirsuperficial treatment of Christianity’s presence in the communities they were studying(Barker 1992: 147). But rather than underscore the contribution that indigenous under-standings have made to villagers’ appreciation and embrace of Christianity, Barker hasargued, second, that local Melanesian Christianities constitute ethnographic subjects intheir own right as products of historical experiences shared by Islanders and expatriates(1990a: 5-9; 1992: 145, 149, 151; 2001: 106). Here particularly, the role of personal parti-bility in Melanesian Christianity is elided in favour of Christianity’s supposed ‘indi-vidualism’ (2003: 272, 280-1, 287, 291; 2008), which actually, as discussed above inreference to Dumont and Burridge, closely approximates Melanesian partibility. As aconsequence, Barker’s analyses tend to exclude indigenous dividual forms of agencyeven when considering the ‘crucial part played by villagers, especially converts, inadapting Christian ideas and institutions into Melanesian settings’ (1992: 155; see also1990a: 15, 22; 2008: 146-7, 211).14

The analytical dividends that personal partibility might offer to Barker’s materialscan be illustrated in his account (2003) of Maisin (Oro Province, PNG) charismaticrevivalism during the late 1990s. After a decade’s absence, Barker returned to hisdoctoral research site to find young Anglican Church members engaged in a fellowshipmovement focused on possession (‘slaying’) by the Holy Spirit as a cure to serioussorcery illnesses (2003: 278, 290). While noting that the rituals – healings, laying ofhands, testimonies of sin and faithfulness in God – resembled indigenous practices ofcuring (sevaseva) sorcery illness, Barker claims they represented instead a decisive shiftfrom concern over collectivist (i.e. ‘relationalist’; see above) moral breaches in thecommunity to an individualist conception of Christianity (2003: 275, 280, 290; 2007:126-7, 132-3; 2008: 146-7, 211). I shall focus here on aspects of the charismatic activitiesthat were characteristics of the supposedly new individualism.15

By the time of the revival, Maisin had already accommodated many tenets of Chris-tianity to their understandings of ancestral spirits and sorcery (2003: 288). For some,God was either a kind of ‘super sorcerer’, capable of bringing (i.e. giving) disasters onpeople when angered by their actions, or the party responsible for giving sorcery tohumankind in the first place. For others, sorcery was being perpetrated without thereceipt of God’s approval, thereby eliciting for practitioners personal sins against God.But Maisin universally believed that by placing (i.e. giving) their trust in God (or Jesus)or by ‘giving oneself to Christ’, God gave people health and the power to turn fromsinfulness and defend themselves against sorcery attack (2003: 278, 289; 2007: 150).People suffering fatal diseases (attachment of evil spirits sent by sorcerers) were curedafter receiving palliative visits and/or gifts from Jesus, Mary, or God (2003: 289). Healingwas a gift of God or Holy Spirit (2007: 130, 131). ‘Salvation’ (jebuga) which renderedChristians free of sorcery consisted in people ‘telling narratives to one another [which]entail[ed] a mutual healing of bodies’ (2003: 286). These verbal reciprocities reiteratedthe elicitive process of indigenous sevaseva curing whereby detachable ancestral spiritfamiliars were internalized and externalized by participants in séances, possessions,and trances (2003: 279-80, 282, 287-90).16 Similarly, at youth fellowship meetings,



‘individuals’ would give (and thus receive, detach, and attach) testimonials of their sinsto one another in order to restore or re-give their faith in God (2003: 290).

A Maisin villager’s relation with God, I suggest, was neither an individual matter nora collective one, but revolved around the partibility of all persons (cf. Barker 2003: 281).The possessions by Holy Spirit – gift detachments from God – were viewed as drivingoff the previously attached, afflicting evil spirits. At possession meetings, participantsgave personal testimonials and externalized songs in exchange for communion. Uncon-firmed members offered their heads and shoulders to the priest, who reciprocated withgifts of his blessings and the laying of hands which took away patients’ illnesses (2003:277). Barker records, ‘God had given everyone his or her own special gift. He himself[i.e. the priest] had received the “gift of healing” ’ (2003: 278). During the revival, faithsurrendered to God was understood to give people ‘the truth’ and the capacity to resistsinful behaviour (2003: 278, 284). A church deacon proclaimed that Jesus, everyone’s‘elder brother’, died for his younger siblings so that they could be united with him andtake care of each other in social amity (marawa-wawe), the ‘sharing of one’s innermostself ’ (2003: 285) or ‘sharing oneself with another’ (2008: 55).

Just as earlier forms of sorcery causation and curing were far from being merelycommunal or relational in their underlying mechanics, the sociality of the Maisincharismatic revival was decidedly not ‘individualistic’ in the sense of bounded person-hood but consisted instead in elicitive transactions between dividual persons, humanand spiritual.

Errington and Gewertz on Karavaran Christian conversionFred Errington and Deborah Gewertz’s (1995) study of conversion and New Churchrevival on Karavar Island (East New Britain, PNG) also underscores the bifurcation ofcontemporary Melanesian anthropology. On the one hand, their account of KaravaranChristianity fully engages with local agency in historical perspective; and, although theyreference their exposition to seminal NME works (1995: 117-19), they effectively limittheir treatment of indigenous personhood and agency to a version of ‘relationalism’where personal partibility plays virtually no role. On the other, similarly to Barker,Errington and Gewertz fail to appreciate the dividual character of Karavaran Christianpersonhood.

Shortly after the arrival of missionary Rev. George Brown in 1875, Karavarans uni-versally converted to the Methodist (later United) Church (1995: 103n). In the 1990s,one-fifth of Karavarans underwent a second conversion to a ‘modern’ New Churchwhich set them apart from ‘anachronistic fellow villagers’ still loyal to the UnitedChurch (1995: 107). According to the ethnographers, the New Church was a nostalgicreturn to the particularly distilled form of ‘individualism’ delivered by Rev. Brown totheir ancestors, initially emulated by them but subsequently corrupted by backsliding,hypocrisy, and falling into sin (1995: 107, 109-10, 116, 118, 130-2).

There are numerous indications, however, that New Church members were seekinginstead to revive the kind of gift transactions their ancestors and Rev. Brown engagedin as dividuals. Rev. Brown ‘first brought the “wider world” to their ancestors’ (1995: 107,120, 129-30), and the supposed individualism he bequeathed involved ‘shar[ing] insignificant measure his sense of the portentous making of history’ (1995: 108, emphasesadded). Members remembered that, with gifts of salt, money, and steel tools, Rev.Brown pacified the ancestors (1995: 79), who, handing over their weapons, were givenhymn books (1995: 91). The missionaries’ ‘purchases’ of land and local big men’s

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attempts to ‘buy’ the new church for their own villages were clearly perceived by theancestors as gift transactions, as were missionaries’ offerings of a ‘free gift of God’ (1995:91, 111) and Rev. Brown’s gifts of God’s Word, the Gospel, light, life, Christian souls,messages, and joy and happiness (1995: 78, 83, 95, 102, 108-10).17

New Church preaching similarly implicated personal detachments and attachmentsinvolving Christian spirits. It was God who brought the New Church (1995: 125) andwith whom people sought ‘personal contact’ (1995: 110). God’s Word was a gift (1995:120), as was his help, protection from evil, and, on one occasion, good weather (1995: 96,102, 133n7). Brought into people’s lives, Jesus gave his healing flesh, everlasting spirituallife, and salvation (1995: 119, 120, 122). Holy Spirit as a detachment of God was creditedwith entering people’s lives through ‘visitations’ and thus being within them (1995: 119,120, 122, 128). In return, people gave God and Jesus praise through prayer, guitar-playing, hand-clapping, testimonials, hymns, thanksgiving, and sermons (1995: 110,120). As Jesus took upon himself people’s sicknesses and sins (1995: 120), New Churchmembers gave up darkness, savage hearts, fighting, sorcery, theft, lying, destruction,fear of sorcery and death, dukduk and tubuan initiation rituals, competition, display,vanity, disparagement of others, skin, blindness, and sins and laws originating with theDevil (1995: 78, 83, 91, 95, 102, 109, 111, 114, 115, 119, 120, 133n7). Through these detach-ments, New Church members established personal contact with God, and they created‘unity’ in their own relations as another gift of God (1995: 95, 110, 111). With publictestimonials, members helped one another receive salvation (1995: 120). As ‘family’(1995: 133n; cf. Gudeman 1971), members ‘would be the nucleus of a new and exemplarycommunity of like-minded fellow believers’ comprising all who had taken Holy Spiritinto their lives (1995: 120).

Partibility and elicitive gifting were thus definitive of New Church members’ rela-tions with one another and with spirits. The individualism highlighted by Erringtonand Gewertz was restricted to dealings with non-members, that is, Karavaran NewChurch non-members and nation-state representatives (1995: 117-22, 130). The fact thatKaravarans’ ancestors underwent initial conversion within three days of Rev. Brown’sarrival also implies that, despite many undoubted misunderstandings, they readilyrecognized in Christianity familiar patterns of gift reciprocity. The kind of personhoodthat modern-day New Church members sought for themselves was similarly premisedon the commonalities between Christianity and indigenous sociality. The problem theysought to overcome was less the loss of Rev. Brown’s primal ‘individualism’ than thesubsequent intrusion of the ethic of bounded individualism which compromised hisoriginal gifts proffered through Christian dividualism.

Knauft on Gebusi ‘exchanging the past’Presuppositions of Christianity’s inherent individualism also figure centrally in BruceKnauft’s (2002) portrayal of religious change among Gebusi (Western Province, PNG)based on a re-study conducted some sixteen years after initial fieldwork. For Knauft,Gebusi ‘exchanged’ their pre-Christian, non-individualist mode of sociality for theindividualist Christianity and individualism of modernity. None the less, his account isreplete with instances of partibility and elicitive gift-giving in both pre-Christian andlater Christian contexts.18

Indigenous Gebusi religion was orientated to the maintenance of ‘good company’(kogwayay) among humans and with non-human ‘true spirits’ of the above. Goodcompany meant literally to ‘talk or yell/joke all together’, such that feelings lodged in the



chest were audibly forced to ‘come out from inside’ through the breath (Knauft 1985:61-9). Traces of anger in people’s hearts were externalized for attachment to sorcerers,enabling the breath of camaraderie to be reciprocated among participants (1985: 92,296). Such interpersonal transactions were performed at feasts, dances, and séances ledby mediums possessed of the souls of spirit wives with whom they fathered spiritchildren (1985: 66-7, 87, 296-304; 2002: 134-5). Mediums’ spirit wives and childrenhelped secure the aid of other true spirits in giving people knowledge, identifyingsorcerers, curing sickness, and securing life and well-being (1985: 303-7; 2002: 52-3). Inthe absence of such good company, people experienced fear, held anger secretly in theirhearts, or acted violently (1985: 69-79; 2002: 76). Lower ancestral and other malevolentspirits caused illness and death by exchanging their souls for the souls of their victims(2002: 83-9, 93, 404n2). Curing involved the expulsion of the attacking lower spirit’ssoul and the return of the patient’s soul through the aid of true spirits (2002: 83-9,93-4). Sorcery and its cure similarly involved the removal and replacement of detach-able parts of people’s and spirits’ persons (1985: 86, 94-7, 104, 312; 2002: 60, 120, 131).

By the time of Knauft’s 1998 return, Gebusi had supposedly abandoned these prac-tices and adopted a fundamentalist Christianity based none the less on personal par-tibility and elicitation. Like true spirits, God and Jesus lived in an invisible, remoteworld (2002: 148). At church services people could ‘sing to God’, offering praise to himand his spirit world (2002: 24, 157, 162). Pastors rather than mediums led the singing andother ‘talk’ with this spirit world, duplicating in their forceful ‘teaching’ the previoussinging and yelling (2002: 133, 135, 161). Church-goers accordingly offered heart-feltprayers to God and received through pastors’ pronouncements God’s talk or Word – a‘big present’, vital for the soul of any person who accepted it (2002: 137, 140, 142, 151, 162).Like true spirits’ messages given through mediums, pastors relayed God’s Word inunfamiliar language (i.e. Tok Pisin or English) (2002: 135, 161, 162). Bible-readingenabled literate Gebusi to receive God’s ‘talk’ and ‘have the spirit of God’ (2002: 162).Gebusi thus took up new personal souls and life-breath in exchange for their old onesthrough transactions with Christian instead of indigenous spirits (2002: 39, 151).

Trust previously given to mediums was transferred to Christianity (2002: 124).Rather than mediums being fathers of spirit children, Christians were children ofpaternal God (2002: 133, 146-7). Earlier animated affinal/heterosexual spirit séancetransactions were accordingly converted to more subdued agnatic reciprocities (2002:133, 146-7, 151). Christian ritual consisted principally in offerings of breath, prayer,testimonial, obedience to God’s Word, sin-avoidance, thanks, hymns, and praiseintended to elicit God’s protection and satisfaction of penitents’ desires (2002: 124-5,129, 135, 146-7, 149). As God’s son, Jesus was a giver of aid much like mediums’ children,and people established sibling-like spirit exchange relations with him (2002: 135, 145).Jesus’ crucifixion and blood were gifts of life analogous to the health and vitality of truespirits (2002: 148). Jesus was allowed into people’s hearts, while people gave themselvesto Jesus (2002: 166, 169).

Acceptance of pastors’ teachings was considered sufficient to disrupt people’s sinfulreciprocities with indigenous spirits so they could receive baptism (2002: 25, 125, 128,131-2, 140-2, 147, 160-1, 169). Baptism enabled Christians to ‘speak out the talk of God’and receive new souls and names from God ‘in direct reciprocity for Jesus’ (2004: 78,124, 162). Many sins were conceived as internalizations of the Devil and/or evil lowerspirits that ‘come up inside’ a person, making him/her forget God’s injunctions andforcing God to withhold grace (2002: 131-2, 164, 166-7):

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If you give one finger to Satan, he will take your whole body and your heart. So don’t give even onefinger to Satan! Satan will take your soul and drive you into the pit of fire! Satan kills the body, but ifyou let him do this, the Lord will kill your spirit!! So let us pray for forgiveness ... (2002: 166).

Very likely, Christian Gebusi recognized a parallel between lower spirits’ undergroundabodes and Hell.

Relations among Gebusi Christians also involved interpersonal detachments andgift-giving. Catholics interpreted their work as ‘bringing’ Catholicism to fellows (2002:267n3). For Evangelicals, inner anger could harm others, as earlier, but it could beeliminated through receipt of Jesus’ mercy and forgiveness (2002: 166). As indices ofpeople’s good company with God, church-goers gave of themselves by working on thepastor’s compound and church grounds and by giving money and materials. For thesedevotions, church authorities distributed material gifts (plane-fares, food, lodging, etc.)and God was presumed to reward them in the next life (2002: 145, 152-7). Even malin-gerers were viewed as personal givers, that is, of ‘excuses’ (2002: 143).

I suggest these transactions qualify as personal detachments rather than exchangesbetween individual subjects over objects. Knauft argues differently, that Christianscannot bargain with God and that acceptance of Christian precepts is construed as ‘aresolutely individual responsibility rather than as a collective or interactive one’ (2002:149, see also 132, 144, 158-9). However, converts clearly perceived their church and otherobservances (praying, singing, sinning, etc.) as reciprocal elicitive transactions betweenGod, Jesus, Satan, pastor, and themselves. God was expected to ‘answer’ people’s prayers(2002: 146), and his messages were both internalized and externalized as personaltokens rather than transacted as commodity-like items. Judgment Day was viewed asGod’s own sorcery inquest, wherein Jesus as a ‘super-spirit medium’ would assignpeople’s detached souls to Heaven or Hell, which, in either event, promised to be asintensely social as life before Judgment (2002: 132, 162). Those granted salvation wouldreceive omnipotent grace, unlimited wealth and happiness, and Gebusi who hadredeemed their sins prior to death would be reunited in Heaven (2002: 24, 25, 148). It isdifficult to detect here that the anticipated pleasures of Heaven were to be enjoyedindividually, for through Christianity Gebusi persons became related ‘to a wider com-munity of Christians and especially to the kingdom of God’ (2002: 164).

Robbins’s ‘adoption’ theory of Christian conversionJoel Robbins’s account of conversion among Urapmin (West Sepik, PNG) – perhapsthe most thorough treatment so far of Melanesian evangelical Christianity – has beenmore strongly influenced by NME writings than comparable studies (2004: 187-91,291-4, 347n). However, his attraction to Sahlins’s (1981; 1985) structural history pro-gramme and his reading of Dumont (1985) on Christianity’s individualism have evi-dently precluded any overt consideration of the relevance of dividual personhood to hismaterials. On the one hand, the Urapmin case for Robbins exemplifies a distinct typeof culture change, ‘adoption’ (2001a: 7-9; 2004: 11-14, 48-9, 87-8), wherein people incor-porate a foreign complex more or less intact without the sorts of complicated concep-tual revaluations involved in either of Sahlins’s ‘reproduction’ or ‘transformation’scenarios. And on the other, in terms critiqued above, Robbins presents Urapminpre-Christian religion as ‘relationist’ and their adopted Pentecostal Christianity as‘individualist’ (2004: 13, 182-3, 292-4). Additionally, for Robbins, the two religionsco-exist in a hybrid situation (2001b: 903; 2004: 13, 313-33), consonant with Barker’s



early anti-syncretic viewpoint but in contrast to Knauft’s Gebusi case, where Chris-tianity has supposedly replaced the indigenous religion.19

In accord with NME postulates, Urapmin conceive of human procreation and kinand clan relations as consequences of the exchange of bodily substances – i.e. thedetached parts of other persons such as parents and grandparents – even determiningpeople’s genders and gender-based capacities. But Robbins claims that Urapmin soci-ality is based instead on the connections between people’s desires or wilfulness (san)and the pre-existing lawfulness (awem) of social relations which constrain them (2004:25-6, 190, 191, 196).

This is true for all of the relations and groupings – marriages, families, trade partnerships, gardeningand hunting groups, villages, and sports teams – that make up the Urapmin social landscape. Increating these, people have recourse to idioms of kinship and something like ‘clanship,’ but theseidioms only have force when they are put to persuasive use in willful individual projects of relation-ship building. On their own, they do not determine any aspects of Urapmin social life (2004: 191).

However, I suggest, ‘will’ itself constitutes merely one part of a person, with lawfulrelationships to parents, grandparents, agnates, and other kin composing other parts(2004: 25-6). Thus Urapmin will is comparable to Christian ‘wilfulness’ as just oneelement of personhood, namely ‘a condition of the individual heart considered as theinnermost essence of the individual’ (2004: 293; 2005: 51, 54-5; cf. Dumont 1986: 244, andabove). Even aggressive, epitomizing big men assert their wills successfully on othersonly by appealing to shared relationships of generosity and reciprocity elicited in priorexchanges through which all Urapmin are plurally composed and capacitated (2004: 16,25-6, 185, 191-2). Of particular relevance to Christian agency (see below), big men’s‘pulling’ consists in eliciting specific behaviours from others in exchange for past orfuture gifts of food, land, pigs, and so on (2004: 197-8, 201-4, 208, 286). Wilfulness andpulling thus involve the same ‘kind of regular interaction that leads people to regardeach other as kin and to develop dense histories of reciprocal giving and communalsharing’ (2004: 204, 207-8).

The indigenous religion focused on similar elicitive relations with spirits. People’slands were gifts of nature spirits, as were taboos imposed by them. Inhabitants whorejected those taboos were made sick by the transfer of another, malevolent element ofthe angered spirit to the human patient. Curing required the sacrifice of pigs, thedetached smell- and blood-offerings of which induced attacking spirits to exit patients(2004: 66, 135, 151, 168, 180, 184, 209-11, 222-4, 345). Men and households similarlysacrificed to ancestral spirits for the transfer of their powers of fertility into gardens andyoung men’s bodies (2004: 151).

Conversion to Christianity transpired during a charismatic revival of the 1970s and1980s when leaders received previously secret knowledge – God’s Word, a detached partof God’s spiritual person – given by ‘Spirit’ (Holy Spirit) and shared among communitymembers (2004: 122-4, 130, 144, 266). These and other divine gifts were received indreams, visions, possessions, and other ecstatic experiences (2004: 124, 126, 343n). Theyincluded guidance on interpreting the Bible, healing, and speaking in tongues, as wellas new names, enhanced strength, and other miracles (2004: 131-3). Recipients were‘kisim Spirit’ (possessed of Holy Spirit), wherein a detachment of God entered people,recalling pre-Christian possession by nature and ancestral spirits (2004: 129, 130-1).

Through possession of Spirit and other revival gifting, Urapmin received knowledgeof their personal sins and the requirement that they cast them off, give them to God in

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confession, and be baptized (2001b: 903; 2004: 131; 2005: 52-3). People sometimesreceived God’s gifts in response to prayers for his help (2004: 126, 254). Some revivalistsrequested worldly success with health, gardening, hunting, and protection; others askedGod or Spirit to give the strength and knowledge to recognize past sins and to avoidfuture ones (2001b: 903; 2004: 132).20 These appeals, I suggest, amounted to sacrificialtransfers of penitents’ sinful wilfulness/desires designed to elicit God’s blessings (seeMosko in press, and below).

Urapmin also understood salvation as a gift from God to persons in relationships(i.e. groups comprising pastors and their congregations) rather than individual orsingle petitioners (2004: 300-9). Converts visited one another’s houses offering prayersto God for each other (2004: 310). Families and communities worked towards salvationtogether, rendering one another help, sharing inner thoughts, knowledge, and feelings(2001b: 905-6; 2004: 306-9). Robbins discusses in considerable detail the tensionbetween what he sees as individualist and relationalist salvation (2004: 278, 294-309);but to the extent that it was detachable parts/relations of persons – their eternal soulsrather than their total selves – that elicited salvation from God, Urapmin Christianpersonhood was constitutionally dividual.

To Revival Urapmin, God was a ‘father’ who, analogous to human fathers, providedcare and protection for his children. Jesus – God’s son and an extension of his person– was the people’s ‘friend’. Holy Spirit, detached from God, was sent to Jesus’ friendswhen he (Jesus) had been unable to communicate with them. None the less, like bigmen, Jesus was expected to deliver on promises given in return for his friends’ fidelity(2004: 313n, 343n).

Urapmin sin and confession corresponded to the agency of dividual rather thanbounded individual persons (cf. 2004: 297). Sinful acts, thoughts, and especially emo-tions arising from wilfulness and anger were understood to be acquired throughinteraction with ‘devils’ (i.e. nature and ancestral spirits) (2004: 148, 298). Sins (yum)established debts towards God, ‘heavy things’ or ‘burdens’ that collected inside the bodyuntil removed through confession (2004: 282). Confessions were given privately topastors and deacons, ‘act[ing] only on the “heart” ’, where sins as well as people’s inneressences, including their wills, were stored (2004: 286-7, 297). Once confessed, sins wereplaced in God’s hand, and he took them away (2004: 282, 297). Confession therebyenabled cleansed sinners to receive God’s Word and the salvation of their souls uponJesus’ second coming (2004: 298).

Urapmin Christian dividuality was most dramatically exhibited in ‘Spirit disko’,which erupted at church meetings when it was concluded the sins of all present hadbeen sincerely confessed. Penitents asked God and/or Jesus for possession of Spirit,whereupon they received God’s or Jesus’ strength in their ‘hot’ hearts, enabling them topraise the deities’ names and give them happiness (2004: 283-4). Spirit disko prayerswere conceived as ‘pulling the Spirit’, similar to big men’s elicitations. Hymns previ-ously received as Spirit gifts were sung back to God. The ritual ended after Spiritdeparted the possessed, leaving the congregation spiritually healthy and free of sinfulwilfulness (2004: 282-8), at least until they were subjected to new wilful elicitationsoutside of church services.

There is therefore in Urapmin as in other influential accounts of Melanesian Chris-tianity and religious change strong empirical evidence of personal partibility, theoversight of which has produced misleading analytical effects. Descriptions of indig-enous ‘relationalism’ have tended to conceal unwarranted assumptions of bounded



individualistic subjects transacting over categorically differentiated objects, whileexplicit presuppositions of Western Christianity’s individualism have obscured intrin-sic dividualities. The natures of culture change represented in Melanesian Christianityand of Christianity itself have thus been misconstrued. Christian personhood, Isuggest, has appeared to some Melanesians, at least, as dividual as they are themselves.The chief differences consist in the distinctiveness, novel or otherwise, of the detachableparts of persons, not in the processes by which they are transacted or the dividualcharacter of the persons doing the transacting.

North Mekeo personhood, agency, and ChristianityMy enquiries among North Mekeo (Central Province, PNG) further substantiate theseclaims.21 Like other neighbouring Austronesian-speakers, their pre-colonial socialorganization was based on a complex system of ‘hereditary’ officials (i.e. ‘chiefs’ andritual experts or ‘sorcerers’) ideally represented in each local branch of the severaldispersed patrifilial clans. Village communities and tribal confederations, however,were established around formalized affinal exchange relations between exogamouspatriclans. Sustained encounters with Europeans began in the late nineteenth century.Although colonial and national governments have been significant forces since then, ithas been primarily through the Mission’s presence that villagers have sustained rela-tions with the outside world.

Indigenous understandings of procreation, food exchange, spirits, magic or sorcery,and renown or fame usefully contextualize the mode of personal partibility intrinsic topre-Christian and subsequently adopted Christian sociality.Human beings are conceived(engama) fromtherelease,admixture,andsolidifyingof twogender-marked‘bloods’(ifa;i.e. father’s semen and mother’s womb-blood) in roughly equal proportions inside themother’s womb. Ordinarily, people’s blood(s) stays inside their bodies, but the ‘heat’ ofcoitus concentrated on the woman’s vagina (ito, the same word for ‘fire’) reverses thosepredilections, eliciting the simultaneous ejaculation of both parents’ procreative bloods.In her womb, the father’s semen coagulates the mother’s amorphous womb-blood toform the foetus. Since each partner’s parents are also composed of equal genderedprocreativebloodcontributionsof theirparents,andsoon,apersonatbirthsharesaspartsof him/herself the shared blood elements of all known kin or relatives. Within thisinterpersonal web of cognatic relations, ideally purely patrifilial blood commonalities areregarded as the feature connecting fellow clan members. Similarly, maternal procreativebloods link each person to members of his/her mother’s clan as ‘women’s children’. EachNorth Mekeo person is thereby conceived as a composite of detached blood parts/relations to other similarly constituted persons.

Food exchanges augment these blood relations. Vegetables and meats contain thevital complementary elements of blood formation, including the embodied labours ofpersons who produced them. But, instead of eating the comestibles they grow them-selves, villagers reciprocate the foods they nurture or procure with kin, thereby com-pounding existing reproductive blood relations. The special foods eaten by a woman inpregnancy which nourish the foetus, for example, are provided by her husband and hiskin, enhancing contributions of paternal semen. After birth, the foods a person attachesto him/herself through ingestion and/or detaches for giving to others reinforce theblood relations initiated in conception. In complex mortuary exchanges, however, theblood and food contributions that composed living persons are undone or ‘de-conceived’ (Mosko 1985: 150-99).

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Along with blood and food relations, every person (papiau) embodies a ‘soul’(lalau), possession of which differentiates humans and human-like spirits from ordi-nary animals and plants.22 When people die, their souls become ancestral spirits(tsiange). However, the region’s autochthonous bush spirits (faifai) and several mythi-cal deities, most notably the spiritual culture-hero Akaisa, also possess souls and arethus recognized as persons (papiau) with distinct agentive capabilities. Just as humansouls are intrinsically associated with people’s material bodies and leavings, spirits areincorporated in particular physical entities (e.g. parts of plant and animal species,stones, locations) depending on the type of spirit involved.23 These detachable personaltokens of spirits are commonly regarded as ‘hot’ and ‘dirty’ and can cause harm ifcontacted or improperly assimilated by living humans. But also they can be used as‘medicines’ (fuka) in magic and sorcery (see below) wherein the contained spirits act asritual allies. Knowledge of which items embody spirits is mostly secret, carefullyguarded by ritual experts.

Persons, human and spiritual, are seen as acting in accordance with personal predi-lections or ‘desires’ (anina keani), typically associated with particular body parts – e.g.food in the belly, meat and water in the throat, sex in the genitals and skin, betel nut inthe skin.24 In general, desires are mediated through a person’s ‘mind’ or ‘brain’ (mino),which is closely associated with his/her soul. Some thoughts are thus consideredpromptings of one’s own soul or other body parts, or from the soul-parts of otherpersons (‘medicines’) which have become attached to oneself through magical or ritualexchange and elicitation. Agency (etsifa, ‘cleverness’, ‘skilfulness’) in traditional andcontemporary understandings thus consists in transactions which are hot, inverting theordinary predilections of patients so that their desires become undesirable and thethings they ordinarily dislike become desirable. For example, villagers desire food andavoid hunger. When one is hungry, ingested cooked food is hot for changing an unsweetbelly to feeling sweet. By eating to satiation, however, food becomes unsweet and one’sbelly no longer desires food. But then with the continued withdrawal of hot food, aperson’s belly eventually cools and reverts to its prior state of hunger whereby food isperceived as sweet.

Indigenous ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’, for which Mekeo peoples are renowned, are espe-cially germane to villagers’ experiences of Christianity, involving analogous reciprocaldetachments and attachments vis-à-vis spirit persons. Prototypically, the practitioneremploys the hot, spiritually impregnated medicines obtained from other persons’remains to affect mystically the likes and dislikes of his patient (see Mosko 1985: 54-5, 61,79-80, passim).25 The magician first acquires (attaches to himself) the hot materialremains of the appropriate spirit allies. By manipulating these tokens outside his ownbody and voicing hot spoken spells with his externalized breath, he directs his spiritallies to enter the patient and reverse his/her predilections (e.g. ‘change the mind’, ‘belly’,or ‘skin’) in alignment with the magician’s own desires. If successful, the magician’sattachment of his spirit allies to the victim produces the desired effect, a furtherdetachment on the part of the victim: he/she vomits, excretes blood, plays cards fool-ishly, approaches the sorcerer rather than fleeing, and so on. In the typical scenario,upon receiving confirmation of these responses, the magician will effect anotherdetachment to produce yet a further response in his victim, and so on in a prolongedseries of such transactions.

As with other Melanesians, the most intense desire villagers usually attribute to oneanother is personal ‘fame’ or ‘praise’ (keauafangainia; see Mosko 2002), consisting also



in interpersonal transactions but as regards third parties. Public display of one’s skillsand effectiveness in work, gardening, fishing, cooking, oratory, and so on, is regarded assufficiently hot that it changes other people’s minds from not wanting to praise you towanting to do so. In 1976 I once asked a neighbour how she was so certain my closefriend, Kaiva, possessed hot magic for hunting, which he had never confided to me. Sheanswered, ‘You have eaten enough of his meat that you should know’. Correspondingly,the commentaries that people receive from others, whether as praise or ridicule,become parts of their personal inventories and/or capacities for future action.26

Christian missionization among Mekeo peoples has been dominated by the activi-ties of the Sacred Heart Mission (MSC), based in Issoudin, France (Bergendorff 1996;Delbos 1985; Dupeyrat 1936; Mosko 2001; Stephen 1974). From 1885 to the present, MSCpersonnel and institutions have been the primary agents of external-induced change inpractically all areas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ (education, health, commodifi-cation, etc.), including Christian practice. Here I concentrate on the dynamics of NorthMekeo Christian personhood as I have observed it over the past thirty-five years.

From the beginning,MSC priests,unlike some Protestant missionaries,have concededto villagers that indigenous spirits recruited as magicians’ allies are true, actually existingbeingswithhotpowerscapableof affectinglivingpeople’sthoughtsandactions.However,allowing those spirits into one’s heart or mind by calling their names in spells amountsto ‘sin’ (pekata; see below) against Deo (God). Prior to receiving Deo’s message aboutsalvation throughYesu (Jesus) via the Church, it is argued, some ancestors were good andsomewerebadorevil (cf.Hau’ofa 1981).Thesoulsof thesepeoplearenowineitherHeavenor Hell, respectively, which Deo only knows. So if villagers invoke indigenous spirits asallies in magical performances, there is no way to ascertain whether they are summoningallies from Deo or Diabolo (the Devil). To avoid sin and Deo’s retributions, Christiansshould offer prayers (mengamenga) only to good spirits with Deo – Deo himself, SantaMaria,Yesu, los Sangtos,or‘all those deceased ancestors who are now in Heaven with Deo’– so they can help Deo give back blessings.27

Villagers accordingly understand sin as adding to one’s person some bit or taint ofDiabolo, which simultaneously closes oneself off from receiving Deo’s gifts. On a recentfieldtrip, people I have known for decades clarified for me that pekata, the word thatpriests had been using for ‘sin’ in their language, was a Latin word, and that the trueindigenous word was iofu, the term for hot, dirty, spirit-laden detachments manipu-lated by sorcerers and magicians. The internalized hot, dirty detachments of Diabolochange sinners’ minds to desire evil instead of goodness. Sin confession thus consists inthe giving away of acquired bits of Diablo to Deo who forgives and forgets them. Onlythen can people atone and open themselves to receiving hot, clean detachments of Deo(blessings, strength, Espiritu Sangtonga or Holy Spirit) to become parts of their persons.

The success achieved intermittently by some communities in marketing areca nutand betel in Port Moresby over the past two decades is widely regarded as a miraculousgift received directly from Deo, enabling people with his hot, clean power to attract hot,clean money and manufactured articles to their persons (Mosko 1999b; 2007). Butrather than using this God-given wealth in morally positive sharing with family, kin orchurch relatives, many North Mekeo opened themselves to transactions over Diabolo’shot, dirty influences in the forms of drunkenness, adultery and fighting. To no one’ssurprise, during 1994-6 Deo replaced his hot, clean blessings with punishments includ-ing the loss of villagers’ previous betel trade monopoly and a dramatic increase indeaths by sorcery and raskol attack. To elicit Deo’s blessings once again, affected villages

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contributed surplus wealth towards the construction of modern permanent churchbuildings and, in one case, inaugurated nightly kerismatik (Catholic charismatic) per-formances wherein penitents gave praise, song and prayer to Deo, Yesu and Santa Mariain order to restore the flow of blessings.

In the aftermath of 1990s developments, villagers proclaim they cannot expiate sinssimply by participating in kerismatik, going to Sunday prayer services and Mass, or evenby confession unless their thoughts and actions are sincere. One cannot become a trueChristian ‘for nothing’; one has to ‘pay’ (kaua) with something personally appropriatesuch as honest remorse, generosity to others, support of community projects and so onin exchange for Deo’s grace. With the hot powers of Deo inside them, people can coolthe powers of sorcerers and raskols so they cannot be harmed. In possession of HolySpirit, people are made ‘happy’ (engama) – the same expression used for procreativeconception, hence ‘reborn’ (see above). In receipt of Deo’s blessings, people are madefurther desirous of giving their praise to him to enhance his personal fame; and as aresult, Deo is made happy and desirous of giving blessings and Espiritu Sangtonga to thepeople. It was in these terms that the increased sickness and death of the mid-1990sended by decade’s end.

Although in numerous respects contemporary North Mekeo Christianity appears tobe continuous with indigenous modes of personhood and agency, in others it differssignificantly from both pre-Christian and MSC orthodoxies. For example, women playactive roles far exceeding their earlier gender-based agency. Their devotions oftendominate Church Committee and Fatima Society activities inasmuch as the cleanofferings of Christian rituals have replaced the dangerous, dirty ingredients of magicwhich earlier disqualified them. Even adult men previously had to close their bodies orabrogate many relationships through fasting, sexual abstinence, and other detachmentsso as to prevent hot, dirty elements of other persons, including their spiritual allies,from entering their bodies and causing harm. Under Christianity, these relations havebeen partly inverted. Men as well as women can now assert their ritual agency byopening their bodies to receive the hot, clean, externalized elements of other spiritualpersons such as Deo, Yesu, or Espiritu Sangtonga so as to protect them from and coolDiabolo’s evil influences. In the past, North Mekeo would never knowingly ingest thehot, dirty flesh of another person.28 Yet, for Catholics the Eucharist consists in the hotbut clean flesh and blood of another (albeit extraordinary) human with precisely theopposite effect of giving eternal life rather than death. Also, many villagers are deeplysceptical of priests’ claims that inducements directed at indigenous spirits are inher-ently evil, since in the past (and for many villagers, still today) these same spiritscontributed to ancestors’ morally good undertakings such as growing crops, raisingpigs, hunting, curing illness and sorcery, hunting, and mortuary feasting. These doc-trinal points constitute subtly profound transformations of indigenous understand-ings, which have been affected through the dynamics of personal partibility.

ConclusionContrary to prevailing understandings of both Melanesian relationalism and Christianindividualism, religious change in the instances examined here has pivoted around theelicitive detachment and attachment of the parts/relations of dividual persons, humanand spiritual. On this evidence, Melanesians’ engagements with Christianity consistneither in cultural ruptures, disjunctions, or collisions between relationalist and indi-vidualist religions nor in their simple syncretic fusion or hybridity. Such claims misread



both the beginning- and end-points of these transformations while betraying, perhaps,a particular Western conceit. On the one hand, the modes of pre-Christian sociality Ihave discussed exhibit properties whose significance far exceeds the mere ‘relationalist’valuation of relationships, exchange and transaction – namely the partibility ofpersons/relations and the absence of indigenous discernments between them and itemsor objects transacted. On the other, Maisin, Karavarans, Gebusi, Urapmin, and NorthMekeo exhibit the considerable extent to which, consonant with Dumont’s andBurridge’s formulations, Christian ‘individualism’ itself is premised on analogousunderstandings of the partibility of total persons, notwithstanding the momentaryemergence of ‘individual’ agents in processes of elicitory detachment and attachmentor the uniqueness of the indivisibility of the human soul. In Melanesia, therefore,Christian activity and experience as religious change appear to consist in the conver-sion of one dividualist form of personhood, agency, and sociality into another. And inlight of ethnographic reports of personal partibility beyond Melanesia, it is conceivablethat over the centuries many missionized and evangelized peoples have been transact-ing elements of Christian personhood in accordance with similar procedures.

The same compatibilities may also help explain Christianity’s sometimes-rapidadoption across some parts of Melanesia as compared with the more moderate pace atwhich other Western institutions have spread. Depending on circumstances, in otherwords, aspects of Christianity as presented by missionaries, indigenous evangelists,Bible-readings, modern media, and so on, might well have been more readily percep-tible and thus inducing to villagers than, say, features of modernity premised on theboundedness of individual subjects (e.g. commodified markets, formal education,electoral politics, court jurisdictions, medical treatment, development projects). And ifboth pre-Christian and Christian religions indeed share analogous forms of person-hood and sociality, then conversions between them would not necessarily have entailedthe deep ruptures that have sometimes been posited.

In this regard, specific claims by Knauft and Robbins deserve special comment.Knauft reports that Gebusi, after exchanging their indigenous culture for Westernmodernity, exhibited a certain ‘recessive agency’, or voluntary submission to the author-ity of powerful outsiders (e.g. pastors, missionaries, government agents) who con-trolled access to the benefits of the inaccessible wider world. From an NME viewpoint,however, this seeming passivity might be better interpreted as the response appropriateto persons who, having surrendered the detachments required by God or other authori-ties, were merely awaiting expected counter-prestations. God had given a promise thatJesus would come, the people had given what was expected, so they then had to wait forGod’s response, knowing it would not be immediate: ‘When we pray, we may have towait a long, long time for God to answer our prayers’ (2002: 146). ‘We don’t know when[Jesus will come], but we have to wait and be ready ... Jesus might come soon. So wemust be ready now’ (Knauft 2002: 145-6; original emphasis; cf. Robbins 2007: 12).

Robbins’s claims for Pentecostalism’s distinctive capacity to retain its content andform in situations of culture change (2001a; 2004: 320, 323-32; 2007) presupposes thatit and Melanesian pre-Christian cultures are radically distinct from and antithetical toone another, albeit joined in a relation of hybridity, and that the two persist in unsyn-thesized struggle. But if Urapmin and their Pentecostalism are neither ‘relationalist’ nor‘individualist’ but share dividual forms of personhood, then some other explanationfor their observed irreconcilability is required. I suggest that Urapmin have conceptu-alized the two cultural orientations as closely approximating the profane and the

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sacred, respectively – i.e. having desacralized their traditional culture while sacralizingChristianity – and it is the intrinsically oppositional character of this relation as positedby Durkheim which has inhibited their synthesis and, hence, lent the impression thatPentecostalism travels as a ‘hard’ and coherent cultural form. If so, moreover, then theongoing periodicity among Urapmin – from sinful traditional pursuits to churchredemption and back again – on which Robbins’s ‘adoption’ model (2004: 215ff.) isbased, consists rather in Durkheimian-Van Gennepian-Turnerian-Leachian sacred-profane-type transpositions put to the creative service of cultural transformation. Thiswould imply also that the transformative roles that Robbins attributes to people’sexperience of ‘humiliation’ (2004: 33-6; 2005; see also Sahlins 2005: 39) might beclarified as reflexes of people’s recalibrations of their indigenous practices as profane inrelation to newly introduced sacred powers of divine foreign origin.

Although Melanesian Christianity does not exhibit quite the sort of rupture thatsome have posited, neither does it involve the mere continuity of pre-existing religiousbeliefs and practices or some simple slotting-in of exogenous features. For each of thecommunities I have discussed, villagers have taken upon themselves some elements ofChristian personhood and agency in complex transactions involving the strategic elici-tive relinquishment of personal elements of indigenous heritage. And because theacquired novel elements have replaced pre-existing ones, it can be affirmed thatpersons’ identities, relations, and religions have changed.

If so, and finally, my modified version of the NME based on the dynamical poten-tialities of dividual personhood provides a plausible theoretical path for bridgingMelanesian anthropology’s current bifurcation. Personal partibility and elicitation arenot necessarily restricted to pre-modern, non-Western societies; rather, those notionsintimate some of the critical dynamics at the centre of Western sociality. By implica-tion, studies of social change wherein exogenous Western persons, images, and materialitems are being or have been disseminated to Melanesia and beyond through modern-izing, globalizing flows might be profitably reassessed for the distinctive kinds ofcontributions they both present and elicit.

NOTES

This article has grown out of a paper on North Mekeo Christian partible personhood (Mosko 1999a)presented in a session chaired by Sandra Bamford at the 1999 annual meetings of the American Anthropo-logical Association. Subsequent expansions including the several comparisons contained herein were pre-sented at the ANU/CREDO Pacific Encounters workshop chaired by Serge Tchérkezoff at La Ciotát in June2005; at the 2005 meetings of the European Society for Oceanists, Marseilles; and at anthropology seminarsat the Australian National University, the University of Virginia, Academia Sinica (Taipei), National TaitungUniversity, Aarhus University, and the University of Papua New Guinea. I am grateful to numerous colleaguesfor their thoughtful suggestions and criticisms, and especially Margaret Jolly, Joel Robbins, Roger Lohmann,Marilyn Strathern, Rev. René Bredow (LMI), Father José Diaz (MSC), Eugene Ogan, Serge Dunis, Jean DeLannoy, Alan Abrahamson, Fred Damon, Jack Morava, Bronwen Douglas, Roy Wagner, Ying-Kuei Huang,Darrell Tryon, Aparecida Vilaca, Ton Otto, Richard Werbner, Philip Taylor, Courtney Handman, Bishop JohnRabat and Father Albert Boudaud (MSC). The ANU Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, theMarsden Fund of New Zealand, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research generouslyprovided financial support for my recent North Mekeo field research. I thank Ton Otto and the Institute ofAnthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistics for valuable support during September–November 2007 allow-ing me to develop the manuscript into its final form. I remain in great debt to my many North Mekeointerlocutors – first among them, Michael Ameaua – who have given me so much of their knowledge andthemselves over the past three decades. Any and all shortcomings contained herein are my own.

1 Some of the ethnographies exemplifying the NME would include: Battaglia (1990) for Sabarl Island;Bercovitch (1996) for Atbalmin; Clay (1986) for Mandak; Damon (1983) for Muyuw; Foster (1995) for Tanga



Islands; Gillison (1991) for Gimi; Mimica (1988) for Iqwaye; Mosko (1985; 1995) for North Mekeo andTrobriands; Munn (1986) for Gawa Island; Reed (2003) for Port Moresby prison inmates; Wagner (1967; 1986)for Daribi and Usen Barok; and Weiner (1991) for Foi. A number of studies of personal partibility anddividuality have recently emerged regarding other regions of the world, including India (Busby 1997; Marriot1976), Amazonia (Kelly 2005), Fiji (Miyazaki 2004), Native Alaska (Fienup-Riordan 1994), and West Africa(Piot 1999).

2 See, for example, Barker (1992: 147), Carrier (1992: 18-20, 33n), Douglas (1998b; 2001), Foster (1995: 3-4),Gewertz & Errington (1991: 19-21, 219n), Jolly (1992: 145-6), Keesing (1992: 129-30), Macintyre (1995), andThomas (1989: 55-7; 1991: 5).

3 See Barker (1992), Biersack (1991), P. Brown (1992: 126), Carrier (1992: 10-13, 33n), Douglas (1998a: 33;2001), Foster (1995: 2-4), Jolly (1992: 139, 145-7), Keesing (1992: 131-4), LiPuma (2000), Macintyre (1995),Rollason (2008), Scott (2007: 24-34), A. Strathern & Stewart (2000: 63-4), and Thomas (1989: 44-5, 52-7, 211n;1991: 52-3; 1999).

4 See Barker (1990a: 9), Carrier (1992), Gewertz & Errington (1991: 219n), Knauft (2002), Robbins (2004),and Thomas (1991).

5 See also Barker (2003; 2007: 132-7), Errington & Gewertz (1995: 116-17), Stewart & Strathern (2000: 17), A.Strathern & Stewart (2000: 64), and White (1991).

6 The main exception to this claim is chapter 5 of Property, substance and effect, ‘New economic forms: Areport’ (M. Strathern 1999: 89-116, see esp. pp. 106-7, 112-15), describing changes in monetized personhoodamong Mt Hageners. There, Strathern’s critique of the ‘possessive individual’ in relation to markets and thenation-state converges closely with my commentary on Dumont’s and Burridge’s characterization of theChristian individual (see below): that is, both of these formulations of the modern ‘individual’ in the Westfigure as components of total, dividual persons.

7 Cf. Cannell (2005), Englund & Leach (2000), LiPuma (2000: 128-52), Ouroussoff (1993), Robbins (2004;2007), Scott (2005; 2007), M. Strathern (1999), Trompf (1994: 401-2), and Weiner (1999: 236-7).

8 A few ethnographers of Melanesian Christianity who to varying degrees have already graspedsome of this potential include T. Brown (2005), Hess (2007), Hirsch (2008), Jolly (1996), Lohmann (2003:114), Otto (1998), Thune (1990), Toren (2006), Van Heekeren (2004), Wardlow (2005), and White (1985;1991). Studies of Christianity in other regions which are also variously consonant with the partibility,elicitation, gift-exchange, or other elements of the NME include Cannell (2005; 2006b), Coleman (2004;2006), Csordas (1997: 65-7, 69 and passim), Luhrmann (2004), Parry (1986), Rafael (1988), and Rutherford(2006).

9 For further NME insights on these countervailing processes, see Mosko (2002: 93-4; 2007), M. Strathern(1988: 15, 241-2, 296), and Wagner (1981).

10 See, for example, Barker (2003: 285, 287), Errington & Gewertz (1995: 117, 122), Robbins (2004: 293, 295-6),Keane (2007: 149-75), and below.

11 In this and other respects, Dumont’s (1985: 98-105, 113-17) account of the origin of Western individualismin Christianity closely followed the writings of the philosopher-theologian Troeltsch, particularly his mag-isterial The social teachings of the Christian churches (1931); see, e.g., Troeltsch (1931: 55-8, 325-8, 472, 480-1,587-90, 991-2).

12 See Dumont (1986: 59; cf. Robbins 2004: 293, 295, 307-8; M. Strathern 1999: 106-7, 112-15; and below).13 It can be argued that Dumont’s view of ‘outworldly’ as distinct from ‘inworldly’ experience closely

approximates the classic Durkheimian opposition of sacred versus profane. For reasons I have discussedelsewhere (Mosko 1994), Dumont’s analysis of Indian caste hierarchy in terms of purity and impurityrequired a certain elision of the sacred/profane dichotomy. His formulation of outworldly and inworldly thusappears to be similarly motivated. This is particularly germane to my argument below that the alternationbetween traditional sinful and Christian sinless activities which Robbins describes for Urapmin conversionand ‘adoption’ conforms to classic formulations of rites de passage.

14 While Barker’s more recent writings partially concede the extent of syncretic mixing in post-PNGIndependence Christian revivalism and in one instance (Barker 2007) touch on the topic of partibility, he hasyet to address the contradictory implications of individual versus dividual personhood when he writes, forexample, of ‘the possibility that individuals not only may shift religious identities rather easily but hold morethan one simultaneously’ (2001: 106, emphasis added).

15 Elsewhere (Mosko forthcoming) I expand this commentary on pre-Christian Maisin sorcery and healingas involving more than just ‘moral breaches’ and ‘making amends within the community’ (Barker 2003: 289).

16 Although Barker claims that jebuga heals ‘a community’, it seems clear that only the people who engageddirectly in the exchange of narratives were healed.

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17 It is possible, of course, that in these contexts Rev. Brown was covertly acting in terms of commodity-liketransactions of ‘buying’ converts, but the overt content of the Christian messages that he delivered regardinghimself and his actions leaves little doubt as to the extent to which his offerings would be interpreted as giftsrequiring appropriate reciprocity.

18 Although Knauft does not declare himself on the ‘relationalism’ of his account of pre-Christian sociality,it certainly would qualify as such to the extent that the ‘good company’ of traditional Gebusi sociality wasunderpinned by themes of exchange and contrasted to Christian individualism. As ethnographic and his-torical background to Gebusi Christian personhood traced out here, I elsewhere (Mosko forthcoming)attempt a fuller reinterpretation of Knauft’s (1985) outstanding account of indigenous Gebusi sociality, or‘good company’, which was published a few years before the NME had coalesced as such.

19 Elsewhere (Mosko forthcoming) I elaborate on the implications of personal partibility for Robbins’smodel of ‘adoption’; here I concentrate on the evidentiary nature of Urapmin conversion from pre-Christianto Christian personhood.

20 In this view, Robbins’s differentiation between ‘petitionary’ and ‘self-formation’ prayers (2004: 254-5,266) would appear to be an extraneous imposition of the Western subject/object distinction (see above).

21 For fuller ethnographic accounts of Mekeo culture and social organization, see Hau’ofa (1981) andMosko (1985). Although I focus here on transactions between North Mekeo and agents of Western Chris-tianity specifically, in other recent publications I have similarly extended the NME approach so as to addressadditional dimensions of North Mekeo social change: commodification, the adoption and utilization ofmanufactured goods, body decoration, religious syncretism, architecture, changing patterns of chiefly inher-itance, and so on (Mosko 1999b; 2001; 2002; 2007; forthcoming).

22 Knowledgeable people I have interviewed since 1974 have so far revealed no definitive cultural theory ofthe source of people’s souls.

23 Dead human’s spirits animate their bodily remains. Bush spirits often assume the bodily form of specificanimal species (e.g. fish with big heads, worms that devour buried corpses, certain eels). ‘Medicines’ (fuka)consisting mainly of plant and animal materials as well as small stones employed in magical charms areconsidered the bodily/spiritual remains of Akaisa or other deities.

24 North Mekeo ‘desire’ (anina ani) in my view very closely approximates the Urapmin notion of ‘will’ asI have interpreted it above.

25 I refer to North Mekeo agents as gendered males in contexts of ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’ inasmuch as it isritually prepared men rather than women who nominally qualify to practise these arts (Mosko 1985: 60-99).

26 For the sake of clarity, this technical schema of indigenous North Mekeo personal agency enjoins a kindof personal individuation which remains fundamentally distinct from canonical Western individualism (i.e.bounded politico-jural individuals). Villagers view one another as personally distinct or individuated to theextent that the exact combination or integration of ordinary desires and dislikes of each person at anyparticular time is unique. My personal predilections and those of my close relatives may be very similar butnot identical, and it is the very dividual, non-individualist character of our respective persons which estab-lishes our individuated distinctiveness and corresponding agentive capacities. See comments above in refer-ence to the ‘individualism’ of Dumont and Burridge.

27 The term for Christian prayer (mengamenga) is an introduced duplication of the indigenous word formagician’s or sorcerer’s spells (menga) which consist in articulated requests (pinoi ‘begging’) for specificresponses from named spirit addressees.

28 See Mosko (1985: 150-99; 1992; in press) on what exactly qualifies as human ‘blood’ in the context ofeating.

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Des pénitents divisibles : personne dividuelle et pratique chrétienne enMélanésie et en Occident

Résumé

Les récentes discussions à propos de la transmission et de l’adoption d’éléments culturels exogènes, enanthropologie aussi bien que dans d’autres domaines, font appel aux tropes de « rupture », « collision »,« disjonction », « hybridité » et « globalisation » culturelle. Ces travaux n’ont pour l’essentiel aucun lienavec la « Nouvelle ethnographie mélanésienne » et sa notion de personne dividuelle. Les études émergentessur la conversion au christianisme ont éludé la divisibilité des personnes en relation avec les modesd’agencéité autochtones autant qu’avec les caractéristiques analogues du christianisme, tandis que lestenants de la Nouvelle ethnographie se sont pour la plupart abstenus d’analyser le changement religieux.L’auteur cherche ici à transcender ce clivage en démontrant le caractère dividuel de la personnalité et del’agencéité dans plusieurs exemples de christianisme mélanésien (Maisin, Karavar, Gebusi et Urapmin),qui ont auparavant été décrits comme intrinsèquement individualistes. Dans cette étude et dans un autrecas d’étude ethnographique (Nord-Mekeo), l’auteur montre comment l’assimilation du christianisme aété effectuée par des échanges électifs, impliquant des parties de la personne des sujets et des détachementspersonnels correspondants de la part de Dieu, de Jésus, de la Vierge, du Saint Esprit, du Diable,etc. L’attention accordée à ces analogies jusqu’ici méconnues entre dividualisme autochtone et« individualisme » chrétien met à jour une nouvelle explication de la nature et la rapidité de la conversionet du changement, en Mélanésie et au-delà.

Mark Mosko is Professor of Anthropology, Australian National University. Publications include the forth-coming Gifts that change: personal partibility, agency and Christianity in a changing Melanesian society(Berghahn).

School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University,

Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. [email protected]

Mark Mosko240


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