Further thoughts on Robbins- (extended)

Robbins, Joel. Becoming Sinners: Christianity + Moral Torment in A Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

    Underlying Robbins’ account of Christianity and cultural change in Urapmin society are two central notions that ultimately inform the reader’s sense of the people described. One is adequacy to experience, the other accountability to the system of morals and values in which social and spiritual relations are formed. Much like Malinowski, Robbins is keen to depict the “native point of view” through a meticulous rendering of the role of language, geographical imagination, spatio-temporal positioning, and desire. In his introduction, Robbins states that he is attempting to make his “perspective as an observer and anthropologist adequate to the experience of their [the Urapmin] lives” (xxiv). He also admits at various points throughout the book that many of the theoretical frameworks with which he started had to be discarded during the course of fieldwork with the Urapmin. Ultimately, the unique questions arising from his interaction with a community possessing a “double consciousness” owing to its simultaneous recognition of traditional spiritual beliefs and Christian moral reasoning demanded a profound and critical re-assessment of and re-engagement with existing ethnographic and theoretical work on Melanesia and Christianity.

    Based on what is arguably a sympathetic and intuitive connection with his informants, who are themselves moral perfectionists, it seems that Robbins puts himself to the task of painstakingly assessing and then dismantling convenient theories of hybridization, colonial imposition, cultural imagination, and “transformative reproduction” that might massage away tensions between life as it is lived and the way it might be perceived by someone of his training. While Robbins does not seem to endure the same bouts of pessimistic moral self-examination which characterize Urapmin encounters with social difficulty and upheaval (as in the framing case of the “heavy Christmas”), he does seem to emphasize the fact that his “synoptic” layout of Urapmin cultural dynamics can “also tell us something more general about the ways Christianity has often made itself felt during times of cultural change, and also about why it has so often succeeded in making itself central during such times” (318). There is urgency in his own desire to express a theory of cultural change adequate to the experience of the Urapmin that cannot be ignored.

    In defending the monograph as a thorough and systematic survey of a people, Robbins claims that getting the “weighting of elements right” is at the heart of the matter; it is no coincidence, I think, that weight is associated with sin, which in Tok Pisin is literally translated as a “heavy”. Other examples of his sense of caution in relation to properly expressing what is going on at all times is marked by small insertions, but most notably (and not surprisingly) asserted in the context of recording confessions: “Although I was greatly cheered by how little worry my request caused among people and by the extent to which the rationale they gave for their lack of concern accorded with other facets of their way of thinking about sin and confession, my sense of unease about this aspect of my research has never fully left me” (233). A careful foregrounding, followed by a confession of his own unease seems so perfectly to encapsulate the weight of depicting the social, moral, and spiritual lives of a people whose actions are primarily informed by the possibility of sin and transgression. Robbins avoids the temptation to make easy distinctions between categories like “the everyday” and “the millennial”.

    Thinking about the future, and most importantly, imagination, are key elements of Pentecostalism, especially the charismatic vein. An inability to “productively think with” a particular imposition on everyday life, as in the case of the Kennecott mine in the Urapmin community, can be fatal. Robbins is keen to address this by framing the spatio-temporal issues underpinning ways of understanding the present in relation to a radically different future. The Kennecott mine “upset the collective project of imagining”; in the case of other countries, the appearance and realization of projects provides an interesting juxtapostion. In southwestern Nigeria, where the majority of the population is born-again charismatic-Pentecostal, state projects are generally perceived to be the source of bad feeling, in that they have were most likely set in motion by corrupt officials. Because corruption is associated with belief in a traditional spiritual world-view, and specifically evil spirits, it must be circumnavigated. In a similar vein, since corruption is also associated with the “law” in Nigeria, the law, unlike in Urapmin society, is something which can be dismissed in favor of other projects. Earthly laws are not believed to be consistent with God’s will. The most obvious example of this is that of the relationship between piracy and evangelical film. The word of God, which can redeem Nigeria, is to be spread through the endless proliferation of visual messages, encoded in evangelical film. Piracy and evangelism have become linked up in a very intimate way, even in such a way that the state and the law have come to be treated as porous boundaries over and through which religious communities and structures of feeling are to be constituted. Thus it is important to point out that that while loopholes in global IP governance make apparent very material ways of circumnavigating the “law” in the Nigerian context, they also reveal the spiritual basis of the intentionality behind many kinds of piracy which directly link the redemption of the Nation with the enlightenment and salvation of an endless sea of individual viewers.

    Ironically, the term “enlightenment” is also used by WIPO in its plea for a more consistent regulation of Nigerian copyright. In this sense, “enlightenment” entails a sense of belonging to an international community in which particular rights, especially those concerning intellectual and artistic creativity, are held dear. This is not unlike the Urapmin sense of belonging to a transnational Christian community that informs their outlook, however closed off they may be geographically. What is striking in the Nigerian evangelical context however, is a direct inversion of the kind of value scheme of relative elaboration (based on Dumont’s theory of encompassment) that characterizes Urapmin priorities: the liberty of the individual is perceived first and foremost as the means for a productive re-fashioning of the nation-state. Many breeds of Pentecostalism in Nigeria promote the idea that salvation inevitably equates with material wealth--- for this reason, they can encourage piracy, which is deemed to be “wealth-stripping” by the international community, on the basis of its potentially infinite returns.  

    If we compare this to the Urapmin context, we can see how the theory of encompassment becomes essential. As Robbins explains, ancestor worship had no place for elaboration in the new value system that came with the adoption of Christianity because it became supremely important the God, and not the ancestors, created everything. Hence the Urapmin refer to having “gently thrown away the ancestors”---they had to remove them from the system of spiritual valuation, but did not have to stop believing in them entirely. As for the nature spirits, or motobil, they were easier to keep because of their embededness in the landscape and geographical imagination of the Urapmin. Whenever they appear, it is only in relation to and against the background of the Christian cosmos. They are forces that can be negotiated within the new system of belief through prayer, which helps to establish re-encompassment. This is particularly visible in the prayers that accompany pig sacrifices. Because prayer is a social action, and within the deontological reasoning of the Urapmin, ritual constitutes an immediate effect, prayer can mediate forces that would otherwise be unwieldy. Similarly, prayer has the ability to reinforce strict codes of conduct, much like faith in the “new new laws”, or “pig laws for people” which never actually had to be put in place by the Kaunsil at heavy Christmas. With the institution of the law of exchange, whereby sins are forgiven and anger is put aside after an equal exchange of equivalent goods, people again begin to have faith in their ability to control sinful tendencies. This is one example of a process crucial to the Pentecostal faith, which relies on the fulfillment of conditions for salvation (by believers). In this case, belief in an external order affirmed the moral system that came into question, which is based on control of the will. This is not entirely the case in Nigeria, where it is more difficult to disentangle the effects of ritual prayer from the consequences of other manifold other active forces within the cosmos. For instance, if two born-again families have a feud, the political and material consequences may reel out for years, mainly because the actors are so often engaged in an aggressive pursuit of material wealth. In the southwestern brand of Pentecostalism at least, the possession of material wealth is taken in and of itself to be an indication of spiritual blessing, though not without suspicion. If one is rich, it may be automatically assumed that one is spiritually gifted, but this does not rule out extensive superstition arising from the surrounding community, which regularly perceives even slight material advantages as having roots in the occult and occultist practices, especially in pacts with spirit men and women who provide money in exchange for regular sacrifices of personal belongings, associations, and even attributes. For this reason, people are regularly scanning each other for proof of changing behavior, which would indicate an involvement with the occult. The only way to be spiritually and materially wealthy without suspicion is by consistency of action, regularity of behavior, and persistent evocation of one’s faith in Jesus.

    Interestingly, Robbins often invokes metonymy in describing the relation of outside forces to the Urapmin community. The most obvious example is that of Kennecott, which he argues is a stand-in for all of the forces of change that the Urapmin have experienced. What seems problematic about this is that despite what is portrayed as an adept, even masterful juggling act involving the multiple systems of meaning and value associated with traditions, spiritual beliefs, and charismatic Pentecostal reasoning, the Urapmin cannot themselves see what is really going on, or at least they choose not to. Of course one could simply agree with this assessment given the apparent need of the Urapmin to suppress some kinds of knowledge while avowing others in the process of reifying the connection with an unstable but crucial future. In this particular context, the narrative about the young man asking for information related to the Gulf War comes across in a new light (158). While Robbins admits that it was not clear to him at first what the boy meant in describing how the Urapmin were praying for the war not to expand, he concludes that an ongoing concern with the approaching millennium and end-times, and a need to continuously self-regulate had infiltrated every aspect of Urapmin life, and led to their persistent scanning of “wol nius” (world news).

    In the explanation of the boy’s worries which Robbins records, we come to understand that the immediate risk is that posed by “the Catholics”, who are potentially at the core of a de-stabilizing new “world order” which will hasten apocalypse. While this explanation in itself is not too surprising given the Urapmin millennial views, and hence fear of specific groups deemed to be a threat to world order, it is necessary to point out that this kind of narrative can perfectly well exist alongside a narrative about a real war, with real consequences, still linked to salvation, but more importantly, linked up to a more nuanced impression of “wol nius” within Urapmin culture. Throughout the book, there are references to people accessing and interpreting information from “outside”, but given the heightened isolation of the community, it is strange that this act of interpretation is given a privileged position within Urapmin-Pentecostal discourse alone. For one, the boy’s account introduces a series of actors in the unfolding world “theater of operations” (including Australia); this would indicate the need to place geographical imagination alongside specific understandings of Catholicism handed down over the years (which Robbins does recount, separately). Perhaps the argument seems slightly thin given the preeminence of the day-to-day issue of reckoning the survivability of Armageddon, but the question remains: what of “wol nius” that is discarded as irrelevant, or as containing no sign? What of failures to find what is sought after? Are these bits of news then determined to possess a different kind of reality? In Nigeria, news is read with two sets of eyes, as it were: one scanning for signs of apocalypse, the other for signs of Nigeria’s progression within the international community though development projects, education, etc. This directly implies Nigerian concern with occupying a central place both in the transnational Christian community and the international community. The two are thought of as going hand in hand.

    Turning to the issues of thought and feeling, we find in Robbins’ account that the heart, and not the mind, is the seat of emotion, thought, and will. What I find most resonant in the Urapmin case is the fact that thought is given a privileged position in determining “good” actions and a proper control of the will. I say this because there seemed to be a similar sentiment being expressed when I was on the set of a Taste for Change in Ibadan: after a puzzling conversation about the nature of thought (particularly in relation to the observation by one young minister that I was “thinking too much”), I went to the head minister of Mount Zion, Mike Bamiloye. He told me that thought was overrated, because men’s bodies were the tools which God had given us with which to do our work. When I asked if thought might be something the body could do, he said, “Of course, but it shouldn’t ever be used to think about using anything in any other way than God intended it. This is what leads to unhappiness and confusion, and corruption.” What then of intentionality? Are we capable of stopping ourselves from thinking about certain things, of remembering some, of forgetting others? In the Urapmin context, there seems to be a handy self-fashioning at work, which Robbins describes in terms of Foucault’s techniques of the self, that allows a continual oscillation between two sets of knowledge (even though Robbins resists dualism, it does end up getting reinforced in the interplay of the two logics which he sees at work in their moral system). Problems of thought seemed to be the everyday problems on the set of the film I shadowed; when actors weren’t getting a scene, they were also thinking too much, about their own problems, about their place, about the role they felt they had been assigned unfairly. They were not letting themselves be led by the Holy Spirit. The only thought necessary to them was the acting out of it, the pretense of thought. This strikes me as similar to the Urapmin tendency to abandon their daily activities like gardening in order to become possessed, and also resonates with their distinction between an “inside” and an “outside” both of the Church and of the world as such. Within the Church, Urapmin are actively working on themselves in such away as to avoid sin outside, where little control can be asserted. In Nigeria, it is certainly the case that people often leave regular activities like work to go to extended revival sessions, but this would never lead to longer periods of abandonment which might threaten livelihood altogether as in the Urapmin case. This is because “good” thought in this case involves an assessment of material consequences for every action, meaning that even prayer, and extended prayer sessions, can be deemed to have unsavory and spiritually unfavorable results because they threaten the gradual and constant build-up of material wealth that makes one appear to be blessed by the Holy Spirit. So there is always an attention to the here and the now, and even to the near future, which does seem evacuated in the case of the Urapmin. Struggling to understand a community of born-again evangelicals like those in Ibadan is challenging because one can never say that an action is being done solely or mainly out of consideration for a radically different future; actions are also performed to avoid losses in the near-future, in order to prevent loss of face and loss of real material wealth, which might threaten one’s own salvation as well as the salvation of the Nigerian nation as a whole.