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CONVERSION AND CONTINUITY: Response to Missionization in the Papua New Guinea Highlands by Robert Millard Smith A thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National University. 1981 All information presented in this thesis is derived from my own research unless otherwise stipulated and listed at the end of the work. / < ,i/. j ' !!- Robert Millard Smith 10. 5 . 2l Abstract The thesis deals with missionization in the Papua New Guinea Highlands and particularly with tne Lutheran impact in the Eastern Highlands. Based partly on fieldwork research undertaken between 1976-78 at Kiseveloka in the Lufa District, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, the study sets the mission impact against the history of contact between Highlanders and Europeans in the 1930s. The Lutheran impact at Kiseveloka and elsewhere in the Highlands is examined, focussing on two issues: the nature of indigenous response to contact and evangelization, and the role of New Guinean mission workers in the rapid conversion of Highland populations during the 1950s and 1960s. Conversion and related change in village society is considered in terms of the interaction between older political and economic processes in Highland societies and the impositions of missions and government. In the light of this, the following issues are considered at length: the nature of Lutheran evangelistic policy and practice; changes in village leadership; the nature of congregational leadership in the current setting of post-conversion decline in mission support; and,finally, the factors underlying this decline and village rejection of Christianity. Acknowledgements The fieldwork research on which this thesis is largely based was undertaken while I was a research scholar in the Department of Prehistory and Anthropolgy, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts for generous financial assistance in meeting fieldwork expenses. In the Department of Prehistory and Anthropology, I am indebted to my supervisors Professor J.A.W. Forge and Dr. A.F. Gell for intellectual support and criticism of earlier drafts of the thesis; to my post­ graduate colleague Yadran Mimica, to whom I owe much insight and other debts; to Mrs. J. Goodrum and Mr. D. Jervis for their help in producing the maps and figures used in the thesis. I am also grateful to Ms. V. Lyons of the Department of Geography for designing these maps and figures. My primary debt is to the people of Kiseveloka, Lufa District, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, among whom I resided between 1976-78, and especially to the residents of the Laukeli and Krigoguma settlements. Among the many Kivuluga and Move people who made the research possible, I should mention: Kafe and Ailan, Upe, Foreda, Yugufa, Solala, Kama, Bena, Aburiaba, Hau'eva, Kabiri, Iyaiyo, Abogosuta, Duba and Roko, Kokoruma, Yugu and Waiyo-Waiyo of Kivuluga; Veyamo, Imara, Haitene and Igu of Move; and Gorio, Sia and Haguvi for their companionship. In the Rongo circuit I am indebted to the Revd. G.L. Renck for his initial help, and especially in generously providing me with copies of taped interviews conducted by him with three of the early Lutheran evangelists in the area (see Bibliography B (i v)); and to Muhucyuc and Yowing for their friendship and hospitality. More generally in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, I am grateful totheRevd. Dr. T. Ahrens (then of the Melanesian Institute at Goroka) for his assistance; to the Revd. R. Blacklock of the National Office of ELCPNG (Lae), who on behalf of the Rt. Revd. Z. Zurenuo gave me permission to consult archival materials, and to Mrs. F. Helbig for her help in locating relevant documents; to the Revd. H. Fischer of Tarabo for making station reports available to me. I received help from missionaries of the New Tribes Mission, and should thank the following for this and their kind hospitality: Mr. and Mrs. "Chippy" Trigg, Ms. C. Gutwein, and Mr. and Mrs. "Tus" Tuscelli of the Tagai station, and Mr. and Mrs. D. Pletts of Kogoraipa. At Goroka I benefited from early conversations with Mr. P. Munster (then of the Goroka Teacher Training College), and am especially indebted to Mr. and Mrs. R. Giddings for their considerable help and unstinting hospitality. Richard Giddings (then Assistant Provincial Commissioner at the Eastern Highlands Provincial Office, Goroka) was also of great help to me in locating archival material at the Provincial Office. I am indebted to Mr. W. Standish of the Department of Political Science (Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University) for bringing to my attention primary source materials for the Chimbu area. Finally, I wish to thank Mrs. M. Lanigan for typing the final proofs of this thesis, and Mr. M. Niblett for his considerable help with proof-reading. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract: Acknowledgements: Chapter One: The Study of Missionization: Perspectives and Methods 1 Chapter Two: The Missions 23 Chapter Three: Traditional Society 43 Chapter Four: Contact: Intrusion and Response 81 Chapter Five: Mission Impact and Conversion at Kiseveloka 130 Chapter Six: Lutheran Mission Workers 184 Chapter Seven: Interpreting Lutheran Evangelistic Policy and Practice: Confrontation versus Accommodation 241 Chapter Eight: Lutheran Mission Workers: Power and Change in Village Society 279 Chapter Nine: Decline and Continuity 315 Chapter Ten: Co-Existence and Incompatibility 358 Appendix A: Appendix B: 426 Bibliography: 429 Map 1: The Highlands (and North-East), Papua New Guinea 23a Map 2: Chimbu Valley 90a Map 3: The Eastern Highlands 104a Map 4: Lufa District - Eastern Highlands Province 132a Map 5: Lutheran Mission Stations 189a TABLE OF CONTENTS Cont'd. Page Figure 1: General Migration Patterns at Kiseveloka due to Pre-Contact Warfare 53a Figure 2: Major Patterns of Territorial Group Alliance and Enmity 55a Figure 3: Migration at Kiseveloka in the 1950s 148a Figure 4: Post-Conversion Resettlement at Kiseveloka after 1964 154a Figure 5: Comparison of Government and Lutheran Administration 284a Table 1: Missions in the New Guinea Highlands, 1967 31 Table 2: Kiseveloka Baptisms, 1959-64 153 Table 3: Lutheran Adherents in New Guinea, 1940-62 417 Table 4: Lutheran Adherents in the New Guinea Highlands, 1963-67 422 Table 5: Yagiloka (English) Community School: Pupils per Village, 1975-78. 427 Table 6 : School pupils as percentage of Child Population per Village 428 Chapter One THE STUDY OF MISSION I ZAT ION: PERSPECTIVES AND METHODS This is a study of missionization in the Papuan New Guinea Highlands, and especial ly of the impact of Lutheranism and the response of Highland peoples to that impact. The dominant theme is social change. In this introductory chapter a number of theoretical issues are explored which bear on the approach adopted in this study. Here we are principally concerned with perspectives and research methods and the problems which underlie these matters. The process of change among colonial peoples has been largely bound up with the mission impact. We commence with a discussion of the dominant theme of change in the missionary enterprise. Missions and Change If imperialism can in part be taken to mean that process by which one culture out of a sense of its own superiority comes to dominate other cultures, then the missionary enterprise is imperial­ istic. The missionary enterprise is born from assumptions of superiority; not in this case necessarily from a racial, political, economic, or more generally a sense of cultural superiority, but from a sense of religious superiority. The central assumption built into the mission expansion is the unquestioned superiority of the Christian gospel over and against every other form of religion. To superiority is added exclusiveness, for as the missionary perceives it the claim of the gospel is that on it and it alone hangs the destiny of mankind. Only the gospel offers the means to salvation to a lost and doomed world. The missionary, especially during the 19th century, may have shared the general imperialist assumptions of others, seeing his lot 2. partly in terms of vague ideas about the "white man's burden" and ‘‘uplifting the natives". It was after all the missionary Livingstone who coined the imperialist slogan 'Christianity, Commerce, Civilization'. But that is not the point. For however such notions help to understand the reasons why the imperial powers bumbled their way into the colonial adventure, they do not explain much about the missionary enterprise and the drives which motivated it. The missionary neither bumbled his way into Africa, the Pacific, and elsewhere, nor was his presence there the result of any vagueness of purpose. The religious imperialism of the missionary movement of the 19th and 20th centuries was a response to what was understood as the divine imperative under­ lying the standard missionary slogans: "Go ye into all the world", the purpose of which being to "Preach the Gospel to every living creature". The exclusive claims of the gospel and its universal applicability to "all sorts of conditions of Men" were to the missionary mind unequivocal matters. Indeed, there would have been little point in being a missionary if one thought otherwise. The missionary enterprise commenced with assurance. Moreover, the missionary was fortified by an understanding that he was about God's work. Not on him, a mere instrument, did the evangelistic task depend.