Tradition and Christianity: The Colonial Transformation of a Solomon Islands Society

Tradition and Christianity explores the way a Pacific Islands people, fiercely attached to the tradition of their ancestors, have transformed their society by changing their religion. Taking a perspective from the culture of the Kwaraae people of Malaita island, it traces a century of colonial history to show how and why they rejected the religion of their ancestral ghosts to become Christians. This is a story of resistance and compromise, from the 19th century labour trade through colonial subjugation and Christian conversion, to the anti-colonial Maasina Rul movement of the 1940s and the efforts of Kwaraae leaders ever since to regain their self determination by reaffirming traditional values under Christianity.
Christianity has played a crucial part in the colonial transformation of the Pacific Islands. This book presents an unusually detailed local history to show how a fundamentalist mission contributed to the development of a distinctive indigenous Christianity with strong but ambivalent foundations in Kwaraae traditional culture. An anthropological study of a subject more familiar to missiologists and historians gives valuable new insights into the continuities and contradictions between traditional culture and Christianity in the contemporary Pacific.

Ben Burt is Education Officer at the Museum of Mankind (British Museum) in London.