Monographs in Anthropology. Canberra: ANU Press, 2023. vii, 164 pp. US$30.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760465599.
Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks is renowned anthropologist Karen Brison’s third monograph from Fiji and fourth monograph overall if one includes the classic Just Talk: Meetings, Gossip, and Power in an East Sepik Village (1992) about Papua New Guinea. The present book, which is published open-access and as print-on-demand from ANU Press, thus not only demonstrates the author’s substantial fieldwork in the region but also her multiple thematical research interests. In Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks, we learn about the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal Church that Brison has followed since 2005, and its largely middle-class members in Fiji and also Papua New Guinea and East Africa. Brison describes the church as one of several middle-class projects in contemporary Fiji “through which a growing group of urban, professional indigenous Fijians create new leadership roles and new kinds of communities” (8). The appeal of the church is seen in relation to a series of social changes in Fiji over the past four decades, including the increase of Indigenous Fijians with good professional jobs in urban areas who do not come from families of traditional high rank in vanua—that is, the hierarchical, landholding community which is at the centre of Indigenous Fijian culture.
The key focus of the book is the Harvest Ministry’s transnational orientation and how it sends missionaries from its congregations in Fiji and Papua New Guinea to East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Sending missionaries abroad is part of a project to spread Christianity and economic development to what some of Brison’s interlocutors call the “unreached people” of the world (3–4). Through this outreach, the Indigenous Fijian professionals experience to transcend traditional customs, relations, and places and re-imagine themselves as spiritual guides for people elsewhere in the world. They are thus endeavoring to spread God’s kingdom on earth at the same time as they are fulfilling a sense of religious calling, and de-emphasizing their commitment to Indigenous vanua culture. Moreover, the transnational connections enable new Indigenous leadership roles for the Ministry’s leaders to progress in their own lives and in the world community at large, and who thereby may see themselves as superior to rural, place-based chiefs.
The book engages with a range of themes from the literature on Pentecostal Christianity in the Pacific and elsewhere. The appeal of the Harvest Ministry must for instance be seen in relation to the Methodist Church, the dominant denomination in Fiji and typically associated with Indigenous Fijian vanua culture. The Harvest Ministry, however, seeks to create a community that puts less emphasis on traditional protocols relating to vanua life, as some of such customs are found to be antithetical to professional success. In challenging the close association between Christianity, Indigenous Fijian identity, and the vanua, Harvest Ministry fits into the well-documented scenario where Pentecostalism becomes a break with existent sociocultural life, which is found limiting, and this includes the practice of the dominant churches.
In my view, the standout contribution of the book is its discussion of what we may call “global south to global south missionizing.” Even though such south-south missions have different dynamics than north-south missions, Brison demonstrates how they still reproduce a view of “the other” from an international hierarchy of essentialized stereotypes known from the Euro-American mission. The Fijian missionaries described see themselves as a spiritual and economically developed vanguard between the so-called unreached peoples and the wealthy nations of Euro-America and Southeast Asia. In this image, the unreached have a simple, childlike faith, are oppressed by evil spirits and witch doctors, and have no technology, access to clean water, medicine, or education. The Fijian missionaries therefore expect to be well-received when rescuing those unreached with both strong faith and contributions to building schools and health stations (92–97, 128). Common assumptions that Pacific missionaries are better to serve with “fellow black skins,” as one interlocutor puts it (107)—as they are used to hardship, have similar skin color, and may not be associated with the evils of colonialism—are part of this image. However, Brison demonstrates convincingly in both chapter 7 and 8 how Fijian missionaries encounter a number of problems, first in Papua New Guinea, then in Kenya and Tanzania. This complexity demonstrates how there is much more at stake for people in their life worlds than assumed similarities based on being Christians of the so-called global south—even though there is a common interest in looking to the church to increase one’s sense of agency at home and in a world community.
As part of Harvest Ministry’s outreach, Brison examines approaches to people in Europe and Southeast Asia who are viewed as materially wealthy but spiritually dead, and therefore also in need of mission. The section on this south-north mission is quite short, however, and I would have liked to see more about this part of the church’s transnational outreach as part of the discourse that the gravity of world Christianity is shifting from the global north to the global south.
The book consists of seven main chapters in addition to an informative introduction and an epilogue. While each chapter offers chapter conclusions that vary in length, I would appreciate a concluding chapter to pull the threads of the book together and make clearer its overall contribution. I also miss having an index. Notwithstanding, I find Brison’s new monograph a valuable contribution to the literature on Pacific Christianity, transnational Pentecostalism, and south-south missionization and recommend it to both researchers and students with an interest in these topics.
Tom Bratrud
University of Oslo, Oslo