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47° THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1994

PATRICIA GRIMSHAW

University ofMelbourne

a means to enrich their reading of textsand their interpretation of cultures.Caroline Ralston in turn emphasizesthe need for women's specificities to betaken into consideration in all histori­cal situations, as she traces her ownrecognition of the utility of genderanalysis through an important studyof Maori women.

Finally, Sione Latukefu's chapter,"The Making of the First Tongan-bornProfessional Historian," makes com­pelling reading for understanding theintellectual journey of a scholar whosekin and community background arerepresentative of the objects of Pacifichistorians' inquiry. In particular, heconfronts his readers with their secularassumptions about the impact of Chris­tian faith and practices on indigenousPacific peoples, a corrective echoingsome of David Hanlon's concerns.With all the constructive writing thecollection contains, this insightful con­tribution from a Polynesian islandscholar looks distinctly solitary. Noone should deny any historian the rightto research subjects across ethnic orracial divides, but one would feel morecomfortable if white voices were heardamid those of a comparable number ofPacific peoples. That must be an urgentagenda for the politics of research andpublication on the Pacific over the nextdecade.

* *

Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity inOceania to World War II, by JohnGarrett. Geneva: World Council ofChurches; Suva: Institute of PacificStudies, University of the SouthPacific, 1992. ISBN 982-02-0068-7,xvi + 514 pp, maps, photographs,glossary, notes, bibliography, index.US$15; F$8.

Until the 1970s, books about mission­aries in Oceania were usually of an"inspirational" kind. The regularappearance of such books caused noreaction other than surprise at therebeing purchasers who would enjoyreading them enough to want to buythem. In the meantime, during theSouth Pacific's educational boom yearsbefore independence, a host of imagesabout missionaries arose among aca­demic newcomers confronting Pacificsocieties that had long since yielded toChristianity. There was much criticismof the alleged lack of missionaryrespect for traditional cultures. Thehabit of mind, during an age of reli­gious decline in the sixties, was todownplay theological depth, preferringthe portrayal of missionary religion asa kind of metaphor for European polit­ical or economic domination and littleelse.

In 1978 Kenelm Burridge's bitingessay, "Missionary Occasions," blastedfield anthropologists for an ignoranceof, and prejudice against, Pacific mis­sionaries (in Boutilier, Mission,Church, and Sect in Oceania). Sincethen, an adjustment seems to haveoccurred in the thinking of those previ­ously inclined to equate all missionaryendeavor with a philistine chauvinismtoward the cultures of other races.

BOOK REVIEWS

What we knew to be true of so-calledFundamentalist missionaries was notnecessarily so for all others, and recentstudies have laid to rest the ghost of themissionary as a cultural vandal. JohnBarker's Christianity in Oceania (1990)differs from the common portrayal oftraditional Pacific custom and Christi­anity as being in conflict, emphasizingelements of continuity between thetwo. Gary Trompf's Melanesian Reli­gion (1991) carries an implicit disagree­ment with the analysis that saw west­ern religion overwhelmingly in terms ofcolonialism and the imposition of west­ern culture. And now Footsteps in theSea (1992), the second in John Garrett'strilogy about the coming of missions tothe Pacific, continues the story of "howit actually happened" from the firstmissionary landfall in 1797 to thepresent, this volume being concernedwith the interval between Europeanannexation of the islands in the 1880sand World War II.

A reviewer of volume I was criticalof Garrett, whose blandness occa­sioned the comment that he "did notlinger" over missionary shortcomings.In volume 2, let it be noted at once,Garrett neither lingers over faults, norpulls his punches. Unedifying clashesbetween missionaries are fully docu­mented; sexual and other lapses arerecorded without euphemism; andGarrett's comment is unsparing whenmissionary motives are overlaid withmaterial ambition, for example, withthe business shrewdness that someAmerican missionaries brought withthem around Cape Horn to Hawai'i(229-231).

In less experienced hands, such abroad sketch as this might have lapsed

"

471

into a glib and trifling digest, flittingfrom character to character against abackground of local atmosphere. Butthe superficial and racy brush strokesimposed on Garrett's large canvas areredeemed by the deeper hues of hismain characters' theologies. The writ­ing is certainly racy. Here we read ofBishop Louis Couppe bringing "asplash of episcopal purple to the col­ourful society around Ralum inBlanche Bay"; there we learn of Meth­odist John Goldie who "dispensed dualpower" in the Solomons "as a promi­nent white Australian big man amongthe black big men"; elsewhere, theMelanesian Anglicans were "not fondof ideas about industrial mission,"being members of a "sailing mission forgentlemen." Despite this facility forfast-moving glimpses, the theologicalwellsprings are never far away.

Garrett apparently takes the viewthat the disciplined theological knowl­edge most missionaries possessed is atleast as important as their attitudes andbehaviors on arrival. Half of the treat­ment of the Seventh Day Adventists,for example, is concerned with theirpre-Pacific cultural and theologicalorigins in America (59-61). A knowl­edge of the theology of his subjects iscombined with the sureness of touch ofone familiar with practically all thechurches in Oceania. Writing of Pacificreligion, as both "outsider" and"insider," and possessing long experi­ence in the United States, Geneva, andSuva, Garrett has an advantage oversome of his Australian compatriotswho are obliged to work within therestrictions of a single Australiannationality, and who also write aboutmissionaries without knowing much

472 THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC. FALL 1994

about the religion that motivated them.By skirting around theology and stylesof worship, some recent Australianhistorical writing on missionaries doesits subjects' religion less justice than itdoes their social and economic circum­stances.

Garrett, by contrast, is able to takehis readers painlessly through a wealthof religious nuance. Theology was partof the air breathed by ordained mis­sionaries and is as natural in a bookabout them as, for example, what theyate or how they reacted to their sur­roundings. To take one example: hisopening character, Johann Flied, thepioneer Lutheran in New Guinea(arrived 1886), was "rooted in the con­servative Lutheran beliefs and values ofhis childhood in rural Germany,"whereas Christian Keysser (arrived1899) "quickly became emotionallyresponsive to the corporate life andoutlook of the Kate people" (3-7).Flied's vocation was shaped by theNeuendettelsau Mission and by thoselike-minded Lutherans in South Aus­tralia and in the American mid-westernIowa synod, forced to emigrate asexiles from the state union of Luther­ans and Calvinists imposed by thePrussian King Friedrich-Wilhelm III.Flied's churchmanship in New Guineareflected this blend of "Pietist intensityand high church Lutheran convictionsand standards" (3-7). Such a combina­tion of theological sensitivity and prac­tical knowledge makes Garrett easilythe most knowledgeable of all Pacificscholars over the whole range of themissionary background spanning thetwo-hundred-year period.

The narrative is divided for conven­ience into two time-slices that convergein 1920. It provides detailed glimpses of

individual missions, beginning in NewGuinea, taking in a broad sweep ofPolynesia, and ending in the CarolineIslands. After the study of Flierl andKeysser (1-15), readers journey aroundall the Pacific missions-Methodists,Seventh Day Adventists, Marists,American Board, and others-beforereturning to the Lutheran story atchapter 12, with Flied's successorsWilliam Bergmann and Georg Pilhoferworking in the New Guinea Highlandsduring the early 1930S near their Aus­tralian secular counterparts Dan Leahyand James Taylor.

The book provides not only a pano­rama of leaders but also of individualsof the second rank. The "family" mis­sions are also well represented: theSouth Sea Evangelical Mission of theYoung and Deck families, Kwato,maintained by descendants of CharlesW. Abel, and the Presbyterian missionin the New Hebrides with its Scottishclan leadership of Patons, Mackenzies,Bowies, and Milnes (99). With strongindividuals at the helm, conflict is inev­itable: A. J. Small of the Fiji MethodistDistrict versus Father Rougier, thebible-burning Marist; Abel versus theLondon Missionary Society in Papua;J. E. Moulton versus Shirley Baker inTongatapu (383-388), followed byQueen Salote's initiatives in bringingabout reconciliation forty years later.There is a touching account of thedeath in the Loyalty Islands of Haxen,pioneer London Missionary Societyteacher in the Torres Strait, the dayafter the arrival in the Loyalties of theFrench ethnographer the ReverendMaurice Leenhardt in 1902 (111-112).A section on Te Aute College inHawkes Bay in New Zealand dealswith its trio of Maori knights, Sir Peter

BOOK REVIEWS

Apirana Ngata, Sir Peter Buck, and SirMaui Pomare. Since the book endswith the Japanese invasion in I94I,Pacific Islanders are inevitably oversha­dowed by European mission leaders.

In reading this book, one has thefeeling that denominational Christian­ity, reinforcing ethnic and kinship loy­alties, is the enduring legacy of thecolonial age of missions. It is not mark­edlyecumenical. Topography, difficul­ties in travel, the comity of missions,and so on, all contributed to the recur­rence of that phenomenon, the reli­gious "state within a state," whoseEuropean officials rarely, if ever, mettheir contemporaries in other missions,and whose indigenous converts in somecolonies never became acquainted. Thepersonal faith and intellect of a Flierl ofNew Guinea, a de Boismenu of Papua,or an Elizabeth (or Jane) Baldwin ofthe Carolines, was rooted in the soil oftheir own national European Christi­anity; the "common core" made littleappeal (hence the utterly differentresponses of various missions to thecoming of war in I942). In the periodcovered in Garrett's second volume,many missionaries scarcely spared amoment from their labors to considerwhat their Lutheran, Roman Catholic,Seventh Day, or Methodist neighborswere doing.

I know of one prominent Protestantmissionary in Papua New Guinea,Charles W. Abel, who went regularlyon twenty-thousand-kilometer jour­neys to Britain, the United States, andAustralia. But Abel, it seems, did notonce visit the headquarters of hisMethodist or Anglican missionaryneighbors during the whole forty yearsof his career, although the three mis­sions were only six hours' sail apart. It

473

is interesting to see how this aloofnesshas affected the leading Papuan pro­teges of such missions. While writingthis review I learned that members ofthe prominent Tarua family of MilneBay, domiciled in the Kwato missionfrom World War I, had never encoun­tered the Rautamara clan, a leadingfamily on the Anglican side of theKwato mission border, and a familythat from I9I4 produced three succes­sive generations of Anglican clergy atDogura. (A photograph of the Rauta­maras is in volume I of Garrett's tril­ogy.) The three missions-LondonMissionary Society, Methodist, andAnglican-were established along anarrow strip of coast between the vil­lages of the Taruas and Rautamaras.So it was that the premier mission fam­ilies of two denominations, whosehome villages are separated by only aday's walk, are to this day quite un­known to each other. An "iron curtain"seems to have fallen between the fore­fathers of the mission elites by the crea­tion of mission boundaries.

Here lies a contrast of a sort: therelaxation of sharp doctrinal divisionsin western Christianity and the appealto "common core" religion by theWorld Council of Churches (thecopublisher of this book), have not hadtime to strike deep roots among manyindigenous "mission" families inOceania. Today's Melanesian Councilof Churches and Pacific Conference ofChurches seem pale shadows beside thesolid identity of the local denomina­tional Christian missions.

Garrett is ill served by his printers,and occasionally seven words arerolled virtually into one by the typeset­ters. A pity, but still not too great asacrifice to make for getting a major

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474 THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC. FALL 1994

book into readers' hands in Oceania ata reasonable price.

DAVID WETHERELL

Deakin University

*

Ethnographic Presents: PioneeringAnthropologists in the Papua NewGuinea Highlands, edited by TerenceE. Hays. Studies in MelanesianAnthropology 12. Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1992. ISBN 0-520­07745-8, xv + 301 pp, photographs,maps, notes, bibliography, index.US$4°.

Rarely does the primary title of a bookso neatly capture both its centralthemes and its dilemmas. Terry Hayshas cajoled a set of fieldwork reminis­cences from the first wave of profes­sional anthropologists to enter thePapua New Guinea Highlands, anexercise in salvage autobiographyren­dered all the more timely by the recentdeaths of two of the contributors. Theresult is a volume charged throughwith a sense of history that is so oftenlacking in the ethnographies of theregion. Hays, in an introductory chap­ter, draws on his encyclopedic grasp ofthe literature to provide a concise over­view of the exploration of the PapuaNew Guinea Highlands by miners,missionaries, and administrators fromthe 1920S through to the 1950S. Hesummarizes neatly both the abortiveprewar efforts by a handful of profes­sional and missionary anthropologists,and the gathering of the researchstorm, based largely in Sydney andCanberra, that was to see almost adozen anthropologists enter the High-

lands region between 1951 and 1955.The context for anthropologicalresearch provided by the colonialadministration, deftly sketched here byHays, emerges as a critical themethroughout the volume.

The list of the other contributors is averitable pantheon of early Highlandsethnographers, including almost halfof the anthropologists who worked inthe Highlands region between the1930S and the mid-1950S. There arechapters by Ronald Berndt, CatherineBerndt, Marie Reay, James Watson,D'Arcy Ryan, and Robert Glasse and achapter by Reo Fortune's niece, AnnMclean, on Fortune's two little-knownfield visits to the Kamano in 1935 and1951-52. A check on the roll of thosemissing from the volume (among themBeatrice Blackwood, Paul Wirz, RalphBulmer, Richard Salisbury, and FrancisWilliams), throws up only three of the"first wave" who are still alive: Ken­neth Read, Mervyn Meggitt, and Vir­ginia Watson, and, of these, both Readand Meggitt might fairly claim to havepublished their field reminiscenceselsewhere. The volume thus makes aclaim to thoroughness that is well sup­ported by the detail of the individualtestimonies.

Each of these central chapters tracesa route from pre-fieldwork trainingand expectations through to initialencounters and the mutual process offamiliarization between ethnographersand local communities. Here are fasci­nating accounts of the sometimes halt­ing development of the key themesknown to us from the authors' publica­tions: Glasse's description of his diffi­culties in understanding Huli socialstructure either as "an agnatic system