Christianity and culture change among the Oksapmin of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This is an account of the Oksapmin relationship with Christianity. Through telling it I seek to illuminate three main issues, namely, who the Oksapmin were before they were evangelised, how they were introduced to Christianity, and, thirdly, how they have handled the encounter between the indigenous and Christian religions. While all of these topics are important to the thesis, it is the last that I investigate most rigorously. Through a close examination of various spheres of Oksapmin society and culture, I demonstrate how local people have integrated the two religious systems through a process of what I call fusion. In essence, the Christianity introduced by the mission and the parts of the indigenous religion that survived missionisation have been remade in terms of each other, thereby collapsing difference in the construction of a single composite religion. The indigenous is made to look Christian at the same time that the Christian is made to look indigenous. In so doing the Oksapmin construct historical, ontological, and cosmological unity in the midst of social change. While from the etic anthropological perspective this hybrid situation is the result of fusing two initially separate entities, from the local, emic view there has been no mixing; the current synthesis is treated as a single, fundamental truth and worldview that has always been there. The Oksapmin claim that their traditions and history were really always Christian and also that Christianity in no way fundamentally differs from their indigenous religious schemas and technologies. I set this model of fusion against two opposing anthropological accounts of indigenous Christianity that have recently emerged from the area, one arguing for duality and the other for superposition. In the final instance I show that while these two accounts significantly differ from my own, a careful critique and reappraisal suggests that the difference is principally one of interpretation rather than the result of empirical differences among the three field areas.