Partible penitents

A response to comments

Bibliographic Data

ID11619699
AuthorsMark Mosko (0000-0002-6408-2629), Mark S Mosko (Australian National University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume16
Issue2
Pages253-259
Publication date2010-05-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01623.x
OpenAlexW1568138397
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited9

I thank the respondents for their remarks and for the opportunity to clarify and elaborate upon several pivotal points in my article.Relevant concerns include: my chief focus -the core ritual practices of indigenous Melanesian religions and Christianity -as distinct from the respondents' interests in 'larger realities'; the formal correspondences and differences between pre-and post-conversion ritual performances; conceptual clarifications of dividuality, relationalism, Christianity's supposed distinctive individualism, and possessive individualism; adaptations of NME models of personhood to situations of change; the suitability of my ethnographic, analytical, and comparative methods; what constitutes 'change' , 'continuity' , and 'non-change'; and the adequacy of my attempt at bridging Melanesian anthropology's current impasse.As Barker, Knauft, Errington and Gewertz, and Robbins variously stress, the topic of religious change in Melanesia covers a vast field of well-researched themes as to how Melanesian cultures have undergone 'ruptures' , 'breaks' , or 'disjunctures' resulting from diverse and protracted encounters with colonialism and modernity.But the tangled, multi-faceted, and perhaps livelier changes which have involved Melanesian Christianity at that scale, while hardly irrelevant to my analysis, are not my chief focus, which their critiques barely address.My article concentrates on the precise character of the transition of modes of personhood and agency in contexts of conversion between indigenous religions and varieties of Christian ritual practice (except, in the case of Karavar, between earlier and later Christian ritual forms).I presume that this 'severely constricted conception of Melanesian Christianity' , as Barker (p.248) construes it, is crucial to the Melanesians who have internalized it as well as to those indigenous scholars Knauft mentions, regardless of the complex historical processes which might have preceded or accompanied it.I surmise, in other words, that Melanesian Christians' culturally variable views of the character of their religious identities and ritual interactions -that is, their personal reciprocities of grace, blessings, sins, praises, prayers, and so on, with one another and with God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, the Devil, and other spiritual agencies -are conceived as set apart, as holy or sacred.This surely has much to do with people's

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