Native Christians is a solid addition to recent work in the anthropology of Christianity.
The book is a collection of historical and ethnographic essays exploring the adoption of Christianity among indigenous peoples of, primarily, Amazonia. The editors' focus is on indigenous cosmologies as the primary arena for understanding the process of religious change.
Steering clear of more familiar questions relating to Christian ethics and doctrine, the book's contributors ethnographically chart a territory in which conversion appears as a predominantly somatic phenomenon, a transformational process that reverberates in both individual and social bodies. Peter Gow's essay, in which he argues for an approach to the study of history that begins in ethnography, in many ways sets the tone for the book. Focusing on a number of indigenous peoples who reside in the Bajo Huallaga region of Peru, Gow suggests that Christianity is part of a more extensive structure of social relationships in the region that link the human with other living and non-living entities. Emilia Ferraro's essay turns a similar eye toward the Quichua community of Pesillo in northern Ecuador, arguing that Catholicism is part of a comprehensive and cyclical religious structure of assuming and settling debt that undergirds moral frameworks of reciprocity and healing. In her chapter on the Mapuche of Chile, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo reflects on the relationship between the roles and status of shamans, perceptions of Jesuit priests since the Spanish conquest of the seventeenth century, and cultural notions of transgenderism. Vanessa Elisa Grotti focuses on the creation of bodies and conceptions of being human among the Trio of Suriname, for whom Christianity is regarded primarily as a system of practices that alters the nature of human beings and the ways in which humans relate to one another. Christianity in this context “is located in the body” (110). Oiara Bonilla similarly argues that among Paumari of southwest Brazil, time is understood to be a chain of social transformations relating to changes of skin. Christianity was subsumed into this structure when Protestant missionaries were able to cure certain skin disorders among the Paumari in the 1960s. Aparecida Viaça situates Wari' conversion within a broad cultural tradition involving predator/prey relationships and Wari' self-understanding as ontologically predatory. Being Christian involves a physical rather than a spiritual conversion through which an altered predatory identity is claimed. Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten discuss the way in which Inuit of the Canadian Arctic associate conversion to Christianity with the communal ritual consumption of prohibited game; and Robin Wright traces the religious, political, and economic relationships that converge in the commoditization of Baniwa basket-making in northwestern Amazonia. Commercialization of baskets was initiated by Protestant evangelicals in the late twentieth century, and it has conflicted with Baniwa cosmologies relating to the constitutive relationship between humans and the natural environment, causing substantial tension within the community.
The essays are followed by an afterword by Joel Robbins, a scholar whose ethnographic work focuses on Melanesia. While Robbins provides a cogent overview of the book's general themes, he worries that contributors have generally avoided direct dialogue with other work in the anthropology of Christianity, and in particular, work dealing with issues of continuity/discontinuity and conflicting social values. While the omission is noticeable, it may be indicative of a concern with instantiating an approach to indigenous culture that takes indigenous experience as its point of departure. As Gow argues in his essay, anthropology emerged during the period of colonial expansion dominated by Christian Europeans, and Christian conversion was often an integral ideological component of the enterprise. He suggests that because anthropologists are generally quite familiar with non-indigenous Christianity, they often find themselves making erroneous assumptions about the meaning of the phenomena they study. Vilaça raises the same issue in the introduction to her chapter. Contributors to Native Christians appear to tip the scales in the interest of accountability to the communities they seek to understand. Rather than falling back on well-worn categories of classification (for example, acculturation or syncretism) that we might expect to find in a collection of essays such as this, the authors point to the unique cultural character of arenas of colonial contact. Their language is often different and refreshing. Gow, for example, borrows from Lévi-Strauss, describing Christianization as “audacious innovation” (49); Bacchiddu refers to the “dialectics of encounter” (54); and Vilaça speaks of bodily “metamorphosis” (163). I would also note a significant hermeneutical statement that runs through the book—the turn by many of the contributors to the work of Lévi-Strauss (who died in 1999) for speaking of the alterity and intimacy of indigenous relations with the intrusive “other” of Christianity.
The book has a few weaknesses. While Giovanna Bacchiddu's chapter enters into the discussion in a constructive way, it seems incomplete. Her essay details the way in which Catholicism among Apiao of southern Chile is imbedded in other cultural structures (for example, systems of exchange, collective conceptions of freedom) that have inhibited the efficacy of Protestant missionaries. But the apparent rejection of these critical cultural touchstones by Protestant converts is handled in too cursory a fashion. More critically, perhaps, the title of the book is misleading. Of the eleven chapters, only two treat the subject of indigenous Christianity in the Americas in geographical contexts outside Amazonia, both of which are focused on Canada. While this may be a conscious attempt to counter the academic tendency to regard the United States as central to the meaning of religion in the Americas, I suspect it has more to do with the fact that the essays were originally conference papers. Additionally, while it adds a North American point of view, the inclusion of Allen Greer's chapter comparing Jesuit missions among Iroquois (Canada) and Guarani (Paraguay) is problematic: the indigenous perspective on cosmology that rests at the core of the book is conspicuously absent from this essay.
Despite these few shortcomings Native Christians makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between indigenous Christianity and the constitution of individual and social bodies in modernity.
