[ANU Pacific.Institute] Wednesday seminar on Sept 2 by Ryan Schram - 'Taparoro: Missionary and Christian Discourse in the Australia-New Guinea Colonial Contact Zone'

[Nicholas Mortimer]

The Wednesday Seminar for next week will be co-sponsored by Anthropology and by Margaret Jolly¹s ARC Laureate Project Engendering Persons, Transforming Things: Christianities, Commodities and Individualism in Oceania. The details of the seminar are as follows:

Taparoro: Missionary and Christian Discourse in the Australia-New Guinea Colonial Contact Zone
Speaker: Ryan Schram, University of Sydney

Abstract:
Taparoro and cognate words (tapwaroro,  tafalolo,  tapalolo,  tapwalolo, etc.) are commonly used to denote Christianity in a broad sense in many languages in Milne Bay Province and Central Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) today. The term taparoro was used widely by Australian, Polynesian and Melanesian missionaries and teachers from the first days of Christian missions in this region in the 1890s.

No missionaries claim to have coined it, unlike the many other calques for English and Koine Greek words for cosmological and ecclesiastical concepts. Nor do they explicitly cite an indigenous source, as they do for translations of Christian moral concepts like sin and soul. Indeed, more commonly in their writings they quote it Melanesians' speech to them as missionaries, juxtaposed with a translation. While it bears some relation to several indigenous lexemes for kneeling, bowing and magical speech, it has also been introduced into languages in which there is no such obvious etymological link. In other words, for many people quoted in the historical records of this period, the word was as meaningless as it was for the English-language audiences who read it. Circumstantial evidence points to an origin in Pacific Pidgin English as spoken by Melanesian indentured laborers in Queensland. Beyond this claim for the word's origin, though, this paper opens a larger question of why this term spread and eventually became meaningful. I argue that the meaninglessness of the word itself for all the parties in the intercultural encounter serves to evacuate prevailing interpretive contexts and establish an extracultural and nonsymbolic zone in which new categories can be established. While Protestant missions of this era saw themselves as bringing authentic, inward conversion of individual indigenous persons through accurate translations of Christianity, the retention of a word that belongs to no language shows how fraught this process is.

For those of you who would like to read Ryan¹s paper before the seminar, it is available online at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rumr3k2xwu7x5fq/Schram_Taparoro_05Aug2015.doc?dl=0
He asks that you not pass it on to others or cite it without his permission.

Date and time of seminar: Sept 2, 9:30-11:15

Venue: Seminar Room A/B, China in the World Centre. For the location see
http://ciw.anu.edu.au/contacts.php The seminar room is to the left as you
enter the courtyard at the place shown by the arrow on the diagram.

For a full list of the anthropology seminars for this semester see
http://anthropology.anu.edu.au/events
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