Christianity as future: constructing the religion/ culture dichotomy
Keane (2007), in his study of the Protestant missionary endeavour in Sumba, Indonesia, argues that it rested on a specifically modernist conception of Christianity as a religion, in contrast to the assumed ‘culture’ of peoples that, in the case of Sumba, materialized in practices of ‘fetishism’. Keane’s perspective helps us to understand how Il Chamus Christians speak about their Christian faith and how in doing so, they discursively position themselves within the broader Il Chamus society.
Il Chamus Christians describe themselves as those who ‘follow God’s word’ and belong to
kanisa, which is the Swahili term for ‘church’. As we saw, they portray themselves as forward-looking Christians, who, in contrast to ‘those who do culture (
lkwaak)’
1 Payne and Ole-Kotikash (2008) translate l-kuaak as behaviour, character, habit. are intent on personal growth (
peebulu ltung’ani, from
abulu, ‘growing’), and on advancing their families, particularly their children. While people use the Maa term
lkwaak to refer to culture in a more general sense and in contrast to
kanisa, church, they also employ two other terms that reference what they consider two main aspects of culture:
ntasim (‘ceremony’) and
sikar, which refers to attire traditionally worn by men and women in ceremonies, such as clothes and beads. Those Il Chamus who stress their continued attachment to ‘culture’ use the expression ‘those who like culture’,
lsikarani (sing., male) and
kaisikarani (sing., female), expressions that draw on the etymological root of
sikar.
2 They, too, contrast lkwaak to kanisa.When asked to define how they set themselves apart from ‘those who like culture’, Christians often singled out ‘ceremony’ (ntasim) as a main marker of difference. This resonates with Keane’s argument that Protestant missionaries employed ‘culture’ to denounce all kinds of practices and rituals they considered as antithetical to acceptable ‘religion’.
Il Chamus Christians narrated their histories as a journey, through spatiotemporal metaphors, such as ‘growing toward’ the church, ‘leaving culture behind’, and ‘backsliding into culture’. Their spatiotemporal mapping of ‘church’ and ‘culture’ enables a teleological narrative of moral advancement, which reiterates the earlier-mentioned Maa conceptualization of personal advancement as ‘growing’ (Maa, abulu). It is also used by Il Chamus who declare their persistent attachment to the ‘culture ways’. The neat mapping of ‘culture’ and ‘church’ does not exclude that in their actual practices, Il Chamus Christians blur the divide between the two realms. For instance, while Christian Il Chamus rhetorically contrasted ‘church’, as the path toward a better future, with lkwaak, as the realm of obligations and practices that impedes people’s ‘growing’, some of them maintained that becoming a proper Christian does not require a wholesale rejection of ‘culture’, but instead a capacity to discriminate between, on one side, admissible elements that Il Chamus need to retain for matters of self-worth and ethnic identity, and, on the other side, those ‘contradicting the Bible’, such as any engagement with the world of deceased family members and other invisible entities. The actual default line thus runs within the realm of lkwaak.