This article seeks to describe and analyze the failure of the first Christian mission in Western Polynesia. Applying Victor Turner's model of social drama, we deal with the early confrontations on the Tonga islands in the years 1797-1801. A complex of overlapping and interdependent social dramas is identified between different social categories: missionaries and Tongans, missionaries and beachcombers, and beachcombers and Tongans respectively. Moreover, there is a social drama between the renegade missionary Vason, who "went native," and the other missionaries. This paper also includes a Tongan point of view on these confrontations.
Key Words: social drama, missionaries, beachcombers, chiefs, Tonga, Polynesia
This paper attempts to re-examine the concept of "nativistic movement" by analyzing the case of the Christian Fellowship Church (CFC) in the Solomon Islands. Criticism from Said's Orientalism redirected the study of natistic movements to overcome the binary opposition of "non-West" interaction and applied a universal meaning of "fundamentalism" in place of "nativistic movement." The conventional research on CFC has followed the same academic trends as well. Although the CFC and fundamentalism are similar on the surface, their meanings of and attitudes toward "religious revival" differ. While fundamentalism originates in the history of Western Christianity, CFC doctrine elicits an opposition to Western society. In this paper, I show that the application of fundamentalism to socio-religious movements in the "non-West" conceals colonial inequality and underestimates the effect of colonialism.
Key Words: nativistic movements, fundamentalism, religious revival, colonial inequality, CFC, Solomon Islands
This paper will focus on the circumstances surrounding the plan to build a local museum in an Aboriginal town in Arnhem Land, North Australia. To understand the situation, the author investigates changing relationships between@indigenous people and mainstream museums, as well as historical changes in the realm of Aboriginal arts. This study will make clear the differences of conception concerning art and representation. Aboriginal paintings have become famous internationally for their unique style. At the same time, they retain their local religious and social functions in the context of retuals and ceremonies in Arnhem Land. The plan to create a local museum in which sacred paintings and other artifacts would ne exhibited as aesthetic objects has created controversy in the area. In discussing this situation, the paper argues that there exists a difference in attitudes toward exhibiting or showing knowledge, as well as between the outsiders' value of artistic excellence and the local value of clan mythology.
Key Words: art, museum, representation, knowledge, identity
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