A Model for Christianity?

Joel Robbins’s Becoming Sinners is an important addition, not only to the field of Melanesian ethnography, but also to Christian ethnology as well. In his introduction, he suggests anthropologists tend to “sideline Christianity” (5) and “emphasise cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change” (ibid), which often becomes a problem where Christianity is concerned due to its focus on radical change.  Anthropologists thus “become suspicious and often explain away the Christian elements of their cultures” (ibid) – something that ‘Becoming Sinners’ demonstrates need not be the case.  Consequently Robbins is not shy to focus on the discontinuities of religious change in Urapmin society, as it is these he sees as most obvious. The adoption of the Christian faith, as opposed to other forms of cultural change Sahlins proposes can occur, helps to bolster this focus in the Urapmin (opening the question of whether or not such a case could be as well supported or argued in a different context).

Perhaps however the model of discontinuity he proposes is too general to apply to the whole of Christianity – after all the conversion he is discussing in Urapmin is to Pentecostalism, which has a charismatic, millenarian character focused on being ‘born again.’  Robbins’s interest in idea of radical change that Pentecostalism certainly provides is thus justified, but I am wary of whether he can apply this model to the whole of Christianity, where denominations vary hugely in their emphasises on radical change.  Therefore to see his ethnography as exemplary of “Christian culture” (27) is possibly a bit misleading.