Partible penitents

A response to comments

Dados Bibliográficos

ID11619699
AutoresMark Mosko (0000-0002-6408-2629), Mark S Mosko (Australian National University, autor correspondente)
Ano2010
Volume16
Fascículo2
Páginas253-259
Data de publicação2010-05-06
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01623.x
OpenAlexW1568138397
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas9

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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