ABSTRACT
This chapter is a fairly distant offspring to a long article of similar title published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society (1989). The article came out of a paper I gave to a La Trobe University conference on Lawrence and Meggitfs differentiation of the relative religiosity of Highlands and Seaboard societies in Papua New Guinea. The paper developed their passing insight (1965: 22–3) that the kinds of ritual practised in different societies, and associated expectations, might have parallelled contrasting notions of proper relationships between human beings and spirits, and differing roles attributed to the latter in human affairs—hence “autonomous and controlled spirits”. The paper likewise picked up well-matured themes in my teaching the history of indigenous encounters with Christianity in the Pacific Islands: that indigenous religious ideas were cardinal, and that Christian concepts and practices—like novelties generally—were always, if unevenly and idiosyncratically, domesticated by Islanders, not only in “conversion” but also in negative and ambivalent engagements with Christianity and its bearers.
