Missionaries, environmentalists, and the Maisin, Papua New Guinea
Date
2002
Authors
Barker, John
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Canberra, ACT: State, Society and Governance in Melanesia (SSGM) Program, The Australian National University
Abstract
The arrival of Anne Marie Tietjen and myself in Uiaku village in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, in November 1981 triggered a great deal of speculation. I had made contact with the local priest and village leaders through the good offices of the Anglican Church and some of the people who met us were clearly familiar with the odd pursuits of researchers. Some fifteen years later, I learned that some of the older people had speculated that we were returning ancestors who would hopefully rejuvenate the fortunes of the Maisin people. Others, perhaps more in tune with the national times, hoped that we would draw upon our vast business connections in “America” to bring development to the Maisin. These reactions were the kind we expected in light of what we had read and heard about New Guinea. What we did not expect was that the majority of villagers had already decided that we were missionaries. Anthropologists working in Papua New Guinea expect to encounter “strange” customs and “exotic” beliefs, by which we mean phenomena that we assume to be indigenous in origin, that make sense within the distinctive logic of a cultural “Other”. We tend to be decidedly less impressed by things that look familiar – churches, schools, trade stores, and the like. Anthropologists have always studied such things – and in recent years these studies have become quite sophisticated – but usually as signs of the impact of outside agencies with which, as outsiders ourselves, we are already familiar. Like other anthropologists who have worked in Oro Province in recent years, I could not help but be impressed by how central the church was in Maisin life in the 1980s but I still perceived it largely as an import that duplicated Christian institutions elsewhere. So too, incidentally, did the Maisin. But Maisin notions about the nature of and their need for “missionaries” provided an early clue that much more was at work here. Christianity was an import but one that Maisin had over the course of decades remoulded to fit with their own cultural orientations, the contingencies of interacting with outsiders, and aspirations for social and economic improvement in their community. In greeting my wife and myself as missionaries, Maisin gave us our first clue that Christianity meant something different for them than it does for people in my own country. When we arrived in Uiaku in 1981, most Maisin longed for missionaries who would assist them in achieving political and moral unity and, thus united, economic prosperity. In the mid-1990s, this dream seemed to be coming yes. The Maisin have gained practical and moral support from a wide variety of organizations, most of them involved in environmental conservation. The activists do not think of themselves as missionaries anymore than my wife and I did. They tend to view the Maisin as an autonomous indigenous people whose traditional ways of life are now threatened by the rapacious forces of multinational corporations, particularly logging and mining interests. I do not think that their perceptions are entirely wrong. I do want to suggest, however, that the Maisin have been dealing with outsiders for a long time. Their prior experiences necessarily shape their perception of and ways of dealing with the newcomers. And to a considerable extent, they are treating the newcomers as if they were the long-awaited missionaries. Unfortunately, there is often fierce rivalry between different groups and agencies that work in partnership with indigenous peoples. There is a long-standing rivalry between some anthropologists and missionaries although their battles tend to pale when compared to the nasty sectarian sniping that occurs between missions and between rival environmental organizations. What I write here could be read as a put down of the environmentalists who have arrived in large numbers in Collingwood Bay in recent years but this is not my intention. I feel tremendous respect and gratitude for the generous time, energy, and imagination that these activists have put into direct assistance to the Maisin and to the development of projects meant to benefit the community. Indeed, I have joined their ranks. I hope, however, that twenty years of researching and thinking about Maisin society and history have provided me with some insights that will be of interest and use to my new colleagues. I use the term “colleagues” here deliberately. I have myself become a missionary in the Maisin sense.
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Maisin, Papua New Guinea, missionaries, environmentalists, Anglican mission, community, tradition, conservation, forestry, logging
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