Religious History

Robbins contends that the Urapmin’s self-conscious “adoption (using Robbins term here) of Christianity and of foreign culture comprehensively on its terms, “can lead to a situation in which people live with two largely distinct and, in important respects, contradictory cultures at the same time.” (p. 10) The moral domain, particularly in this case, is taken up as the optic through which the Urapmin understand and orient themselves to the everyday (liveable) incongruities of living in dual-cultural framework. The moral domain itself becomes in a context in which, as Robbins notes, traditional and novel moral tenets are not always inclusive. In illustrating these incongruities, Robbins recounts that “if you went to Urapmin…and only watched what they did (and if in doing so you ignored the obviously Christian rituals they performed), Urapmin life in the early 1990s would look for all the world like it fit the sterotype of traditional Papua New Guinea village life.” In essence, that the “’infrastructure’” remained the same. Here, this account of the quotidian dynamics of village life engenders a question of the relation and reconcilability of native history – that is, a chronological and social history – and Christian notions of history. What happens to the historical notion of oneself in the process of conversion? What become of social, historical, mythological, folkloric antecedents when a new history is assimilated? What happens to traditional history when a foreign history is assimilated? These questions do not seem so self-evident when approached through a separating of notions of culture and history, but that discussion here would be tangential.