Contextualizing iconoclasm : early missionaries and the textuality of culture change in Polynesia

Abstract

With a focus on four sites in Polynesia, a region which hosted some of the most intense and dramatic episodes of iconoclasm known to correlate with conversions to Christianity, this interdisciplinary dissertation uses a textual methodology to examine mechanics and processes of culture change. After a study of divergent Protestant positions in theological aesthetics, this dissertation attends to the variegated and improvisational nature of early missionary activities in Polynesia. While Enlightenment-era missionary interventions into non-Christian cultures are often presumed to have resulted from imperialist strategies predicated on notions of cultural hierarchy, such impressions often emerge from reading narratives of missionary successes, overlooking the conditions which prefaced mass conversions to Christianity. Offering a new contextualization of Polynesian iconoclasms, this dissertation constructs a historical narrative of seldom-discussed missionary failures in Polynesia, before moving to an overview of Polynesian pivots to Christianity. Considering the fraught and tenuous position of early missionaries, including apostatized, murdered, and chronically ill missionaries, this dissertation argues that evangelical successes were not up to missionaries to engineer: material possessions endangered missionaries, and their “civilizing example” failed to persuade. Christianity massively transformed Polynesia, but not as a result of foreign imposition or material inducement. Beginning with the 1797 arrival of English-speaking missionaries in Polynesia, this dissertation analyzes early missionary activities in Tahiti, Tonga, and the Marquesas, and also considers the initial experiences of the first missionaries to Hawaiʻi, who arrived in 1820. While the introduction of the printing press and iconoclasms attended widespread conversions in the Society Islands, Hawaiʻi’s most significant iconoclasms occurred before missionaries arrived. The Marquesas are included to defy the temptation to construct a template for missionary success: by the end of the time period this research examines (1797-1830), no mission to the Marquesas had succeeded.

After a study of missionary failures and Polynesian pivots to Christianity, this dissertation contextualizes episodes of iconoclasm, examining visual and verbal representations, including both fiction and nonfiction texts, which narratively enshrine the erasure of certain material dimensions of culture. Divergent Christian and Polynesian theological aesthetics are related to the logic of cultural interventions and the impact of missionary printing presses in Polynesia, and these processes are connected to the preservation of samples of “idols” for museum exhibition in the West. This dissertation questions the relationships of divinity to material forms, and investigates the shifting meanings of objects narrated through new textual encodings, arguing that representations of missionary successes occlude a more complex history. By positioning iconoclasm against a prior context of missionary failures, the most visible phases of culture change appear as a horizon, rather than a central focus, with the forces impelling iconoclasm a key subject of investigation. This work advocates a reconsideration of missionary agency, exposing evidence that indigenous islanders were fully at the helm of cultural changes during the early years of missionary presence, first actively rejecting the Christian message, and then later embracing it on their own terms.