Patterns and Iconoclasm in Motion

Anthropological scholarship of Christianity has been thriving over the last one and a half decades. While studies of Pentecostalism have played an important role in the growth of this field, research on elements of religion that are typically associated with studies of Catholicism (experience, motivation, personhood and movement or pilgrimage) has been less influential. While Protestant and in particular Pentecostal believers tend to explicitly position themselves against local culture, Catholic identity formation is often less coherent. It is therefore no surprise that in many studies of conversion to Pentecostalism, much analytical emphasis is put on the deployment of rituals that have an uncompromising character. As a result, the anthropological focus of the Anthropology of Christianity tends to elaborate on the causes of social and cultural change at the expense of how people experience and deal with such changes, as Simon Coleman (2014) suggests. Coleman laments the particular “semiotics of theory” in the Anthropology of Christianity and, in response he pushes for a reconciliation between studies of Pentecostalism and pilgrimage studies (in which “Catholic elements” have been prominent). The two studies reviewed here engage with the Anthropology of Christianity, albeit mostly implicitly, and Coleman’s attractive agenda nicely help us to highlight their merits and limitations. Jeffrey Sissons’s historical analysis of Polynesian iconoclasm takes ritual as uncompromisingly structuring social and cultural life, as “largely ‘systemic’” (7), a revolutionary mode of historical agency that was arranged by both chiefs and priests in the Society Islands, Southern Cook Islands and Hawai’ian Islands. The main argument of the book is that because all the people in this region shared ritual and seasonal precedent, the Polynesian iconoclasm was destined to become a regional event, and, “as a ground for historical being, the ritually-produced seasonality of life was fundamental to the indigenous agency through which Christian conversion was affected” (11). The iconoclasm is the destruction or desecration of temples and god-images that began on the island of Mo’orea, near Tahiti, in the winter of 1815 and spread rapidly to the neighboring islands. Chapter 2 details the iconoclasm on Mo’orea as led by the high chief Pomare and his new god, Jehovah, and suggests that hierarchical divisions in society were dissolved in collective feasts. The following two chapters consider the extension of the Mo’orean iconoclasm on the other islands. Analytically these chapters build on Arthur Maurice