Abstract
This chapter explores the transnational ties of a Christian evangelical religious movement called Deep Sea Canoe that is popular among Melanesian To’aibata speakers on the Island of Malaita, Solomon Islands. Solomon Islands is a Melanesian and pervasively Christian country in the Southwest Pacific that has a dynamic history of missionisation since the mid-nineteenth century and has seen the subsequent evolvement of a variety of ethno-religious movements. The example in this article illustrates a tendency of embracing modernity and the wider world through terms that are specific to To’abaita culture: pathmaking and straightening. By examining the present-day role of these terms in the ethno-theology of the Deep Sea Canoe Movement I will show that the urgency of millennial Christianity inclines To’abaitans to actively seek a straight path to Jerusalem instead of becoming recessive agents as documented for other Melanesian groups.
Fieldwork for this paper was undertaken between December 2005 and March 2006, with the permission of the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and chiefs in North Malaita. I am particularly grateful to George Hoa’au, David Suata, Adam Ulufa’alu, Francis Iro, Steward, Lawrence Luiramo, Peter Kwanairara, Frank Daifa, and Terry Brown.
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Notes
- 1.
To’abaita is the most common spelling for this ethnonym. In a recent linguistic study of the Austronesian language spoken by To’abaita people alongside general fluency in Solomon Islands Pidgin, Lichtenberk (2008) spells the language as Toqabaqita.
- 2.
For a slightly different account of this vision, see Maeliau (2006, pp. 17–19).
- 3.
There is a wide body of literature that engages with the concepts of path, roads, and ways of which a discussion is beyond the scope of this article. Some prominent pieces include Sahlins in Islands of History on barkcloth as the path of god (1985, p. 85); Toren (1984) on the self-seeking individualist “path of money” and Fijian traditions; Katz (1993) on healing and straight paths in Fiji; and Robbins on fidelity among Urapmin as “walking straight on the path” (pp. 227–230), following Jesus’s road to become a straight man (p. 272).
- 4.
Andrew Lattas (1998) devotes a chapter to straightening the dead in his book on Bush Kaliai’s culture of secrecy. In their cargoistic logic, Bush Kaliai think that the dead want to know why the living get killed. “Those who had been murdered would hold those now residing above ground responsible for stretim (straightening, compensating for) the sins of their grandparents, and they would not allow the cargo to come until their grievances had been addressed” (1998, p. 134).
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Timmer, J. (2012). Straightening the Path from the Ends of the Earth: The Deep Sea Canoe Movement in Solomon Islands. In: Manderson, L., Smith, W., Tomlinson, M. (eds) Flows of Faith. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2932-2_12
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