A Perfect Storm of Change

As hard as I try to think about the text from a purely anthropological stance it's very diffcult and foreign to me and so I often try to put it into terms more relatable to myself. I stumbled upon a great example of this very early on in the text and wanted to share a glimpse of how my mind works.

     While reading through the introduction I was literally blown away by how perfectly Robbins was able to combine the models of cultural change put forth by Sahlin and Dumont and then apply it so clearly to the Urapmin. One passage in particular stood out to me at the bottom of page 26, "In looking for ways to enhance their ability to compete for followers, Urapmin big men are always open to trying innovations. . . one such innovation they embraced was christianity." It's in this sentence we see a parallel between the Urapmin big men and the Urapmin culture as a whole. The Big Men are looking for stability and recognition of importance in the form of followers. Similarly the Urapmin culture is looking for stability in an ever changing landscape and to carve out it's proper place in this new world. For me, having a strong background in cellular biology, this similar to contact mediated cell differentiation which is basically when progenitor cell (Urapmin before Christianity) is unable to transform itself until it's neighbors (early missionaries) reach out to it and tell it what it should become (Urapmin with Christianity). This made me wonder, could the Urapmin have done anything other than to convert to Christianity given the environment they were immersed in? I don't believe so it seems that like cells, the very nature of their society dictated how they must respond to external stressors and while they have the ability to act novelly, there is a limited set outcomes you could reasonably expect. In particular their high emphasis on morality and the need to fit in (in relation to the other neighboring groups) tied their hands so that they HAD to undergo serious change once two things happened. First, they needed to have their morality challenged (early missionaries accomplished this as well as the later arrivals). Second, there needed to be a change in the world around them (Christianity). Once those two things happened they were, in my opinion, doomed to convert to which religion was dominant in the region at the time. This happened to be Christianity.

Traci Dutton