Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (review)

Becoming Sinners begins with a description of a moral crisis, the "heavy Christmas" of 1991 in the Urapmin community, in the Mountain Ok region of the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Joel Robbins, an anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego, carried out his dissertation fieldwork in this community from 1991 to 1993. In Becoming Sinners he gives us an engaging ethnographic description of Christianity in a Melanesian society and challenges us to think about processes of cultural and religious change. This isan important book not only for anthropologists but also for historians of religion and for Christian theologians. Robbins investigates the process of conversion to Christianity and describes the style of Christianity adopted by the Urapmin. His book istimely. Today the large majority of Papua New Guineans are Christian; thus, it is critical for anthropologists working in the country to show how Christianity relates to culture. As demonstrated in Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives, edited by John Barker (1990), Christianity is no longer just a foreign intrusion in Oceania. For historians of religion, the "hybridity" of the Urapmin experience and Robbins's larger analysis of hybridity point to directions that the study of religion might take in an increasingly globalized world, where people are simultaneously engaged with multiple religious systems. And for theologians concerned with the nature of what Philip Jenkins has called "the next Christendom" (in a 2002 book by that name), Becoming Sinners provides occasion for reconsidering the diverse manifestations of Christianity and for pondering the unhealthy as well as the healthy consequences of religious engagement.

The Urapmin, who primarily marry within their own community of some 400 people, have had minimal contact with the world outside the Mountain Ok region. The community is divided into a "top group" and a "bottom group," each of which has its own church building and its own sports teams. A sense of unity pervades the total community. In the 1960s, and 1970s, some Urapmin men traveled to other areas to work on plantations, but after Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975 outside contact decreased until the early 1980s. At that time some Urapmin men obtained employment in Tabubil, a town built to service the Ok Tedi mine, a couple of days' walk from Urapmin. When Robbins arrived among them, the Urapmin were supporting themselves largely by subsistence agriculture, hunting, and pig husbandry. They had little involvement in the cash economy and a sense that "development" had passed them by. However, in 1991 the Kennecott Corporation, prospecting for minerals on the land of the "top group," gave paying jobs to members of the group. Operating on the principle of giving preference to landowners, Kennecott gave jobs to one group but not the other, thus contributing to a festering discontent within the community and to the crisis of the Christmas period of that year, a crisis that the Urapmin understood in terms of sinfulness, that is, in terms of a following of desire rather than a following of law.

Although several groups of westerners visited the Min peoples before World War II, only one group—a party led by an American, Ward Williams, who was working for US and British mining interests—came in contact with the Urapmin. The Australian colonial administration established a patrol post at Telefomin in 1948 and the first patrol into the Urapmin area was made the following year. In 1952 the Australian Baptist Missionary Society, a conservative evangelical group (which had little time for Melanesian cultures but was devoted to providing medical and educational services as well as to proclaiming the Christian gospel) began building a station at Telefomin. In the following years it established Christian missions in several communities ofMin peoples in the Mountain Ok region, but not among the Urapmin. As Christianity...