Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2022. xxvi, 249 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$45.00, paper. ISBN 9781531023799.
In Singing Samo Songs, Daniel Shaw reflects on his lifetime of work as a Bible translator, anthropologist, and missionary with the Samo people of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Western Province. Samo people live in a remote part of PNG that was not brought into sustained contact with Australian colonial officers or missionaries until the late 1960s. Shaw and his young family were posted to Kwobi village in Nomad District in 1970 by the Summer Institute of Linguistics—an evangelical Christian organization dedicated to Bible translation— and led the first translations of Biblical material into the Samo language. The fifty-year scope of Shaw’s ethnographic engagement with Samo people is remarkable. He has observed (and perhaps precipitated) dramatic social changes over that time, while remaining sensitive to the cultural continuities that guide Samo responses to shifting circumstances. The warmth of his long-term engagements with his interlocutors, friends, and adopted family comes through strongly in the book’s thick descriptions of Samo life and debates about changing practices such as social affiliations and marriage (also systems in flux in neighbouring areas, as documented by Monica Minnegal and Peter Dwyer in Navigating the Future: An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea, ANU Press, 2017).
Singing Samo Songs is a history of Christianity among the Samo from early conversions in the 1960s to the present day. Each era of this history is presented as a chapter on the relevant decade and the types of songs that characterized Samo Christianity in that period. As a further means of bringing his analysis into line with Samo “schemas,” Shaw takes the sequence of traditional three-day initiation rituals as a way of structuring the content of each chapter and illustrating shifts in cosmology, community relationships, and spirituality. Through his ethnography, we learn about traditional ideas of the spirit world and shamanism (or spirit mediumship) as a means of communicating with dead ancestors who look out for the material and spiritual well-being of Samo people. As Christianity was introduced to the Samo, these ideas and practices shifted, gradually incorporating Christian themes into Samo schemas.
At the heart of the book’s argument is a defense of a model of missionary work that prioritizes indigenous schemas of understanding both the material and supernatural world, and for maintaining the right kinds of relationships within communities and with spiritual beings. Anthropologically informed missionaries and linguists like Shaw worked within this model, taking the view that once people like the Samo could read the Bible for themselves, then they could make decisions about how best to respond in terms of ethical practice and in the development of their own integrated rituals.
For Shaw, the tragedy of the shift from expatriate missionaries and translators to the leadership of national pastors of the Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG) is that a dynamic, culturally grounded form of faith has been undermined by a more moralistic and formulaic style of institutional Christianity that is actively hostile to indigenous knowledge. When ECPNG pastors condemn Samo Christian adaptations of spirit seances as synchretism or worse, Shaw sees a spiritual tone deafness that he believes has encouraged nominalism and undermined the liveliness and moral relevance of Christian faith within Samo communities. With the replacement of mission pastors by Samo pastors (usually married couples), the opportunity has returned for Samo to explore their spirituality in an idiom that understands and values Samo language, culture, and social concerns. This “revitalization” of the Samo church is much more celebratory in character and interactive in practice than the standard ECPNG model (183ff).
There is much about the Samo spiritual journey that is important for the anthropological study of Christianity. Missiologists and theologians will also find the book stimulating and perhaps inspirational. As Shaw notes, it is difficult to satisfy both the anthropological and the missiological audiences in the same book. Writing as an anthropologist who has recently begun fieldwork in Nomad District, I found the ethnography of Singing Samo Songs illuminating for my own reflections on experiences with the neighbouring Kubo and Febi people. For example, the value of Samo initiation is mirrored in contemporary Kubo discussions of the need to revitalize a Christian form of initiation for young people.
Conceptually, Shaw offers contemporary anthropologies of Melanesian Christianity a counter-example of evangelical faith that is quite different to the experience of cultural humiliation elaborated in Joel Robbins’s influential book Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press, 2004). For Shaw, the Christianity facilitated by his culturally sensitive Bible translation allowed Samo people to engage directly with God’s word, integrating it with their own cultural schemas, and so reinforcing the value of Samo culture—not demonizing it, nor seeing it as morally bankrupt. For Shaw, the roles of shaman and pastor are not oppositional but represent an authentic Samo continuum of spiritual mediation.
The integration of Samo culture and Christianity described in Singing Samo Songs is a triumph of indigenous agency in the face of foreign (and national) forces of change. Yet some theological and social questions remain unanswered. If Samo Christians accept the reality of the ongoing presence of malign spiritual beings from their traditional cosmology (e.g., bush spirits), how then will the community deal with sorcery accusations and the resultant retaliatory violence that arises around PNG, and among Samo neighbours such as Kubo people? How will Samo Christianity translate to life in Kiunga or other towns where people tend to be less observant of Christian practice without the social cohesion of village life, and where more orthodox articulations of evangelical Christianity are prevalent?
Shaw’s book provides an important example of the diversity of Christianity, even within the evangelical tradition. However, the reader would be helped by a more explicit locating of his position on theological enculturation within a broader family of missiological approaches, understood historically, rather than as an assumed faith in the transformative power of the Bible as a durable and coherent medium of God’s word. Many readers of Singing Samo Songs will share this faith, but, for those who do not, Shaw’s own theological position needs further contextualization. As Shaw notes (221ff.), engagements between theologians and anthropologists have been highly productive and Shaw’s ethnography is a welcome addition to these ongoing conversations.
John Cox
The University of Melbourne, Parkville