Conversion and culture change: narrating failures and impacts of early English-Speaking Christian Missionaries in Polynesia

Abstract

Tourist guidebooks to Hawaii frequently lament that “the missionaries” swathed carefree Hawaiians in mu’umu’us, banned surfing and the hula, and in the process, drained the joy out of Polynesian life, while conceding the benefits of literacy introduced by missionaries. Emphasizing Hawaii, Tahiti, and Tonga 1797-1830, this paper tests these assertions of cultural intervention. While literary scholarship has targeted missionary successes celebrated in the published accounts of missionary legends John Williams and William Ellis, around whom a veritable hagiography developed in the wake of Polynesian mass conversions to Christianity, this paper hones in on the decades of missionary failures in Polynesia which preceded spectacular episodes of iconoclasm. With an examination of visual and textual narration of missionary impact, comparing published and unpublished sources, this paper argues that early missionaries did try to change culture in Polynesia – and failed; the civilizing intent of the mission backfired until after extensive patient conversations kindled a situation receptive to the textual logos of evangelism rapidly expedited by the establishment of the printing press. In the South Seas, initially material possessions impeded the work of evangelism, and later cultural impacts of missionaries in architecture, agriculture, fashion, manufacturing, medicine, and other domains included a large measure of indigenous agency, which initially operated as outright rejection. By attending to the details of early failures, monotonous archival descriptions of the mechanics of evangelism frequently bypassed in favor of more salacious content, and the dynamism of culture change through additional vectors, this paper reconfigures missionary impact on culture during the years surrounding Polynesian mass conversions to Christianity.