A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania

Abstract

Cloth and Christianity have long been seen as intimate partners in Oceania. The introduction of manufactured cloth�cambric,2 calico, chintz, linen, serge and silk�from the mills of Manchester and New England and the workshops of China, the cultivation of the arts of sewing, quilting and embroidery and the adoption of Western-style clothing: modest dresses for women, demure trousers or laplaps for men, have all become iconic of Oceanic Christianity. Integral to the �before and after� story of indigenous conversion is the narrative of how Oceanic Christians �covered up� beautiful bare breasts, exposed bottoms or penises previously proudly displayed. In the eyes of some scholars and popular observers Oceanic people thus succumbed to the colonial power of a Western Victorian model of gender and sexuality, characterised by heterosexual monogamy, modesty and sexual repression and the celebration of a novel form of domesticity focused on the faithful wife and good mother. She was allegedly both creator and creature of a �home,� bearing and nurturing children, cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing. Many scholars have challenged and complicated such stories from the perspective of Europe, North America, Africa and Asia: revealing the class, national and regional specificities in the emergence of ideals of �domesticity�; demonstrating how the realities of working women�s lives differed markedly from any idealised demarcations of a masculine public sphere and a feminine domestic sphere; arguing that these spheres were leaky rather than hermetically sealed.