on reading 'world news': apocalyptic narrative, negative nationalism and transnational...

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On Reading 'World News': Apocalyptic Narrative, Negative Nationalism and TransnationalChristianity in a Papua New Guinea SocietyAuthor(s): Joel RobbinsSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 42, No.2 (July 1998), pp. 103-130Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23166571 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS Issue 42(2) JULY 1998

On Reading 'World News': Apocalyptic Narrative, Negative Nationalism and Transnational Christianity in a Papua New Guinea Society

Joel Robbins

One of the salutary effects of anthropology's new-found will to look beyond borders

has been the recognition that the nation must be understood not only in relation to

subnational identities like those of region or (as they are often understood) class and

ethnicity, but also in the context of identities tied to larger imagined communities

that claim a transnational existence (Foster 1991; Gupta 1992; Williams 1991). The

effort to carry out fully the kinds of projects this recognition calls for is somewhat

hampered, however, by certain disjunctions between the literature on nationalism

and that on transnationalism. While studies of nationalism tend to focus on the

construction of national identities and the communal images that support them,

studies of transnationalism concentrate more on the sociological fact and cultural

representation of movement — be it of people, things, or images — with less

ethnographic attention than one might like paid to the way stay-at-homes (who still

constitute the bulk of the population in many of the places anthropologists study)

construct transnational identities for themselves. In this article I try to close this gap

by exploring the character of transnational identifications in a single ethnographic

case, that of the Urapmin of the Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea. The

Urapmin assumption of a transnational identity takes place in a context in which they

are also negotiating their relationship to racial and national identities that similarly

connect them to people living beyond their local borders. The play between these

three translocal identities is crucial to the definition of each of them. Hence, this

article has as its most general ambition the development of a means of analyzing the

ways various translocal identities are developed in dialectical relationship to one

another.

Central to this analysis is the argument that narrative is an important cultural site

at which translocal identities are formulated and put in to relation to one another.

Many scholars have recently stressed the importance of narrative in the construction

of the nation and in the development of social identities in general (Bhabha 1990;

Bomeman 1992; Foster 1995a; Gupta 1992; Somers and Gibson 1994). As com

pelling as these models of the narrative construction of identity are, however, what is

missing from them is a recognition of the way complex articulations of character,

plot, and temporality allow narratives to go beyond the elaboration of a single

identity to create structures that set that identity in relation to others and model the

resolutions of the contradictions that exist between them. The latter part of this paper offers an analysis of an Urapmin narrative that demonstrates that it plays an

103



important role in constituting their racial, national and transnational identities and in

setting up the interrelationships that link them.

In the course of developing this analysis, it becomes clear that there is a

significant weakness in contemporary anthropological conceptions of nationalism.

Anthropologists tend to assume that having a positive affective attachment to one's

nation is a necessary part of having a national identity (see below). Those who fail

to develop such an attachment are seen not to have a national identity, or to be

actively resisting one. Yet when one examines national identities in relation to other

translocal identities, it becomes clear that one can both hold a national identity and

harbor extremely negative views of the nation of which one is a part. I call this mix

of a felt sense of national belonging and a critical perspective on the nation "negative

nationalism". It is particularly likely to develop where people are able to examine

nationalism from the vantages provided by other translocal identities that they also

possess. In the Urapmin case, it is from the points of view of their Christian and

racial identities that they have formulated their negative nationalism. This article

thus has as a second goal the presentation of the Urapmin case as an example of a

kind of nationalism likely to be fairly widespread in a world where the nation is not

the sole extralocal arena within which people situate themselves.

Narrating the Apocalypse in Urapmin

For the Urapmin, the narrative that most potently calls forth a transnational solidarity

while at the same time crystallizing their nationalist sentiment is the Christian

apocalyptic one. I first encountered episodes from one version of this narrative very

early on in my fieldwork in Urapmin, even before I had begun to attend the local

Baptist church to which all Urapmin belong. I was walking on a deserted stretch of

the path that connects the villages of the community one Sunday morning when,

seemingly out of nowhere, a teenage boy caught up with me and asked me what was

happening with the Gulf war. The war had started the day I arrived in Urapmin and,

for reasons that had so far escaped me, the Urapmin were keenly interested in its

progress and in the possibility of its escalation. I had, in fact, already heard the boy's

question numerous times, and I gave him what had become my usual bland answer,

that the war was going on much as before. In response, he told me that the Urapmin

were praying that the war would not escalate.

All Baptists pray for this, but the Catholics pray that the war will get

bigger. Someone will be putting the triple six on people and taking over

the world. The Book of Revelation says that in 1993 [it was January

1991] 2000 Catholics from Australia will come to Papua New Guinea and

ask if you are a Christian. If you say 'no', they will give you the triple

six. If you say 'yes', you will die instantly. They give you the triple six

by stapling it on you. You will want to get it off, you will try, but you

won't be able to.

Throughout my time in Urapmin, I would hear much more about the Catholics,

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and about this "someone", a villainous figure who often enough turned out to be the

Pope1 who would lead an army and put the triple six on people. In different versions

of this episode, the details of the villain's rise would change. Sometimes, Urapmin

narrators claimed to have heard that he had access to a 'computer' (komputa2), a

'machine' (masin) that would initiate the slaughter of Christians at the moment he

pushed its 'button'. At other times, the Urapmin reported rumors that the beginning

of the villain's army's persecution of the Christians would be signaled by the advent

of a machine in a nearby mining town that would dispense the cash workers had

earned when they inserted some sort of identity card in to it. Other rumors were less

precise, suggesting ominously only that the "law" or the "money" will change. But

despite its shifting details, the basic narrative shape of this episode — the rise of a

villainous leader and his persecution of good Christians — remained quite constant.

Furthermore, it soon became evident that this was a fragment from a much larger narrative that was of extreme importance to the Urapmin.

Like the episode of the Pope's rise and persecution of Christians, the larger narrative also has a consistent structure. In general terms, the plot of the narrative

goes as follows. The Pope or some other world leader or leaders at work far from

Urapmin has begun to form a 'one world government' (wan wol gavaman) or a 'new

world order' (nu wol oda) that will soon take control of the world. Once this

government is in place, it will begin to persecute Christians, including the Urapmin.

But just as this persecution begins, Jesus will descend from the heavens. Playing

hero to the Pope's villain, He will hover above Urapmin and take his believers to

heaven before the Pope can persecute them further. Then he will descend one more

time to fight a bloody battle with the army of the new world order, vanquish its

leader, destroy the earth and damn to hell the unbelievers who had dwelled upon it.

This basic narrative outline is known to all but the youngest Urapmin and very much structures their understandings of their own lives and of the events that go on

around them. Yet, as my conversation with the young man quoted above suggests,

people often narrate only single episodes from the story. In fact, reductions of the

story most often take one of two partial forms. One form concentrates on the first

half of the narrative, laying out the story of the rise of the villainous leader and the

imminent beginning of the era of his persecution. When storytellers employ this

form, their primary interest is in reporting rumors they have heard or signs they have

seen that suggest that these events have begun to unfold. Narratives that take this

form often serve to spread a mood of millennial expectation among the Urapmin, and

such stories are frequently the proximate cause of periods of intense millennial

activity (Robbins 1997a).

The second popular form of the story ignores or greatly compresses its account of

the rise of the evil leader and instead focuses on Jesus's return and his rescue of his

believers. This form of the narrative is fed less by rumors from outside of Urapmin than it is by people's dreams and visions that picture these events and show who

among the Urapmin Jesus saves and who he leaves behind. Often, versions of this

form of the story report that Jesus saves very few Urapmin. These versions focused

105



on the second half of the narrative are constantly being told in Urapmin, both during

times of millennial enthusiasm and during those of relative millennial quiet. During

both periods, the import of these renditions bears on the Urapmin need to prepare themselves morally for Jesus' second coming. While narratives of the first type fascinate the Urapmin and are energetically told and retold, these later narratives are

greeted by a mood of somber reflection that often lends Urapmin millennialism an

almost mournful cast.

While these two popular ways of parsing the longer narrative have very different

social effects in Urapmin, it is important to note that those who hear either one of

them interpret them against the background of their firm knowledge of the outline of

the entire narrative. Tellings of the first form assume Jesus' return to give meaning

to their innovations on the theme of the rise of the evil leader. Similarly, tellings of

the story of Jesus' return hold the early part of the story constant while using the

second half to 'strengthen the belief (strongim bilip) of its hearers by commenting

negatively on the current state of social relations within Urapmin (Robbins 1997a). In this article, I focus on tellings of the first form of the narrative — those that

assume but comment little on Jesus's return and his salvation of his believers.

Barker (1990:10) has noted that Christianity in Oceania has both a local face and a

global one. Urapmin versions of the apocalyptic narrative that emphasize Jesus'

return and his salvation of Christian believers very clearly look inward toward the

moral condition of the Urapmin community. Those versions focused on the rise of

the evil leader, by contrast, look outward and help the Urapmm to negotiate their

relation to the wider world that now surrounds them. It is for this reason that an

examination these latter versions, those that dwell on the leader's rise, are crucial to

an understanding of the constitution of translocal identities in Urapmin.

Of course, Urapmin versions of the first half of the apocalyptic narrative are not

only in important respects about the Urapmin relationship to the world beyond their

borders, they also come to the Urapmin from that outside world. Those familiar with

Western dispensational premillenial Christianity have no doubt already realized that

the Urapmin are caught up here in a version of the apocalyptic narrative created in

the first instance by first-world Christians.3 The story of the rise of the Pope and of

his one world government is in fact one strand from a larger fabric of millennial

speculation that has its origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth century writings of the Englishman John Nelson Darby and the American C.I. Scofield. In contem

porary North America, it is associated most famously with Hal Lindsey, whose 1970

book The Late Great Planet Earth is widely reported to have been the best selling book in the United States during the 1980s (Boyer 1992). The New Zealand-based

evangelist Barry Smith has promoted similar ideas in Papua New Guinea in public

appearances at packed soccer stadiums in the larger towns and through a series of

books with such titles as Warning, Second Warning, Final Notice, and Postscript

(Smith 1980, 1985 n.d.(a), n.d.(b)). Lindsey, Smith, and others influenced by

dispensational premillenialism promulgate the kind of theology that finds the anti

Christ lurking behind the universal product code and the spread of bank cash

106



machines, and that worries over the possibility that the formation of the European

Economic Community may be a sign of the beginning of the end times. Many

Western dispensational premillennialists also took the advent of the Gulf war as a

sign that Christ's return was imminent (Boyer 1992:6,326ff). It was pieces of their

speculation in this regard that were circulating in Urapmin around the time of my

arrival, fueling local speculations about the war's apocalyptic import like the one that

a teenage boy shared with me on the path on that Sunday morning early in my

fieldwork.

I will consider later both how dispensational premillennialist discourse finds its

way to Urapmin and the importance of the very fact that it does find its way there

from a world they take to be far away. For the moment, however, I bring up the

foreign origin of premillenial discourse to raise the question of what the details of

this discourse could possibly mean to the Urapmin. The Urapmin are a group of 375

people living in a fairly remote part of the West Sepik Province. While their territory

is only three day's walk from Tabubil (the home of the Ok Tedi mine) and less than a

day's walk from the District Office of Telefomin, the Urapmin have no airstrip and

still live lives based almost entirely on subsistence gardening. While many Urapmin

men spent part of the early 1980s working short stints building the town of Tabubil,

theirs is not the world of bank cash machines, computers, the European Economic

Community or huge armies bent on mass slaughter. Similarly, although some

Urapmin do worry that the Catholic church that is established among some of their

neighbors in Western Province may try to take some Urapmin away from their

Baptist faith, few Urapmin attach much if any meaning to the figure of the Pope or

any other potential world leader beyond that supplied by these narratives themselves.

Given their lack of familiarity with many of the objects and people that continually

appear in the first half of this apocalyptic narrative, why is it that the Urapmin find

these stories gripping and potentially of ultimate import? What do they make of the

shifting details of this story that they continually tell?

The answers to these questions will ultimately take me back to the theme of this

article: these details that apparently can be little more than irrelevant to the Urapmin

will prove on examination to be signifiers of racial and national identities that are

arrayed within the overall narrative in such a way as to allow that narrative to assert

the ultimate erasure of those identities in favor of a more important transnational

Christian identity. Elaborate tellings of the first half of the Christian apocalyptic

narrative are, that is to say, the primary means the Urapmin currently use to adjudi

cate the relationships between these identities, and it is as a way of configuring these

relationships that this form of the narrative finds its value for the Urapmin. But in

order to see how the Urapmin read this narrative and its details in these terms, it is

necessary first to consider how the Urapmin understand their racial, national, and

Christian translocal identities.

107



Negative Nationalism and Race in Urapmin

There are two important things to say about Urapmin national identity: first, it very

definitely exists; second, it is a source of deep unhappiness for the Urapmin. The

approaches anthropologists generally take to national identity and to its existence in

Papua New Guinea make these two assertions far more complex than they might

appear on their face.

Consider first the fact that the Urapmin have a very strong national identity.

Much of the literature on nationalism in Papua New Guinea stresses its inchoate,

developing character (Foster 1995b, Otto and Thomas 1997). Indeed, the most

influential collection of papers on the subject is entitled Nation Making: Emergent

Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia (Foster 1995b) — both its title (nation making)

and its subtitle (emergent) laying emphasis on the recent fabrication and perhaps

tenuous nature of national ideas in the region. Many of the papers in the volume also

point to the novelty of national identities for most Melanesians and argue that the

people of the region actively resist these identities or hold them only weakly (e.g.

Jacobson 1995; Kelly 1995; see also Clark 1997). The shaky hold that national

identities have on the region's people supposedly follows both from their newness

and from the weakness of the post-colonial states that promulgate them but lack the

resources to wage truly effective campaigns of nation building. Citizens of states

that are both newly constructed and persistently weak, the argument goes, the people of Melanesia are unlikely to have developed strong national identities (Robbins

1998b). If interaction with the state and its ideological apparatuses is taken as a

prerequisite for a developed nationalism, the Urapmin certainly appear to be good candidates for having very little identification with the nation of Papua New Guinea.

They would readily concur with Worsley's (1996:vii) recent claim that as a "modern

nation-state .... Papua New Guinea is a singularly weak entity". This perception

persists despite the fact that the Urapmin do receive some services provided by the

state. The community houses a medical aid post (haus sik), for example, staffed by a

medical orderly employed by the state. Furthermore, largely as a result of money that has come to their district because of the opening of the Ok Tedi mine (Jorgensen

1996), the Urapmin also have a dirt-floor school in which up to three teachers (in

good years) teach grades one, three, and five or grades two, four, and six in alternate

years. Compared to other similarly remote groups without airstrips in other parts of

Papua New Guinea, one could argue that the Urapmin are well served by the state.

Yet they compare themselves not with other similarly remote groups, but rather with

their Min neighbors, most of whom receive a higher level of state services (for

example, access to vegetable marketing schemes and easier access to the

Government station at Telefomin with its large health center, agricultural

development staff and high school). By contrast with the people around them, the

Urapmin feel themselves to have been largely abandoned by the state.

As Urapmin understand the situation, they are a small population that attracts

108



little government attention. Government officers only come to see them, the Urap min point out, on their yearly tax patrols. In response to this neglect, the Urapmin

Kaunsil, the man locally elected to represent the Urapmin to the Provincial

government and to represent the government to the Urapmin, has even turned the

government's local sleeping quarters (haus kiap) into a small tradestore, thereby

marking publicly the extent to which the Urapmin have ceased to expect the state to

play a significant role in their lives. Nor conversely have any Urapmin come to play a significant role in the life of the state. Urapmin are quick to point out that no

Urapmin man or woman holds a regular government job. While the groups around

them all have members who, with permanent jobs as teachers, police officers, or

medical orderlies, draw regular salaries from the state and provide remittances to

their families, there are no Urapmin who hold such permanent state positions.

Overall, as the Urapmin see it, they have little stake in the state, and it has equally

little interest in them.

Yet while the Urapmin certainly qualify as a group that has an only tenuous

connection to the state, the correlation of such a connection and a weak sense of

nationalism does not hold in their case. The Urapmin fully identify with the nation

of Papua New Guinea and recognize themselves as inescapably Papua New Guinean.

This identification has not come about in response to the nation building projects of

the Papua New Guinea state, however. In large measure, the Urapmin recognition of

themselves as Papua New Guinean is based instead on their firm belief that the

modem world is properly a world of nations. As the Urapmin understand it, there

exists a "national order of things", in Malkki's (1995) terms, in which everyone must

belong to a nation — be it Australia, Amelika, or Papua Niugini. And within that

order, the Urapmin have no doubt that they are citizens of Papua New Guinea.

It is difficult to trace the process by which the Urapmin came to accept the

inevitability of modernity's national order of things. There may be an important traditional template here, for the Urapmin in the past participated in the elaborate

regional ritual system for which the Mountain Ok region is famous (Jorgensen 1996).

Each of the groups that was part of this system was a well defined entity, put in place

by the creator woman Afek, but they were also interdependent in matters of ritual.

Hence, the Urapmin have some precedent for imaging a world of groups that both

interact with one another and remain clearly bounded.

But another important factor in the Urapmin understanding of the nation has been

their reading of the Bible. The New Testament in general, and the Pauline epistles in

particular by virtue of what Urapmin see as their nationally differentiated addressees,

models a world of separate nations that has for the Urapmin become completely naturalized. The book of Romans adds depth to this image by providing a biblical

basis for the legitimacy of the state. Second only to the book of Revelation in its

importance to the Urapmin, the statements in Romans that pertain to the divine

legitimacy of the state have become key texts in Urapmin attempts to think about

their current situation. The core assertion of Romans 13:1, "God put the govern

ments of the world in place"4, is a contemporary Urapmin cliche. The related

109



biblical claim that everyone lives 'under' (i stap ananit) a government feeds the

Urapmin belief that they are rightfully part of the nation governed by the state of

Papua New Guinea.

Yet to say that the Urapmin understand themselves to be inescapably Papua New

Guinean, that they are securely within the fold of the nation, is not to say that they are proud of or even content with their national identity. Far from it. Instead, the

Urapmin see their national identity as Papua New Guinean as a source of much that

they dislike and wish to reject in themselves. Theirs is thus a negative nationalism,

and this raises a second interpretive problem.

Despite the fact that it is empirically very well supported, the argument that the

Urapmin accept their national identity while at the same time evaluating it negatively

cannot but be a somewhat unusual one in the view of current anthropological theory.

For if contemporary anthropological students of nationalism agree on any one point, it might well be that in order to hold a national identity one must have a positive attachment to the nation with which one is identified. Consider some examples. Anderson (1991:141), arguing against those who focus on nationalism's ability to

produce "fear and hatred of the other", insists that we not forget that just as crucially "nations inspire love". Others write that having "emotional associations" with one's

country are a necessary part of national identity (Jourdan 1995:128), or point to

"emotional attachments", "national sentiment" (Verdery 1996:74), and "nationalist

love" (Alonso 1994:388) as crucial aspects of national identity (see also Gellner

1994:65). Laying bare the assumption that is at the bottom of these observations,

Handler (1988:36) asserts that "to be Quebecois one must love Quebec".

Given any serious thought, this position is clearly untenable. None of the other

identities that anthropologists study — racial, sexual, gender etc. — require that a

certain emotional state exist in those who hold them. Quite the opposite is true, as is

evident in the hope that pervades much of contemporary social science that people

may learn to love identities they hate or temper their admiration for those identities

they love in too exclusive and bigoted a way. Either nationalism is not an identity in

the sense of these other examples, or we have somehow become confused in our

thinking about its nature. The Urapmin evidence considered below suggests that the

latter is true; that we have been misled by our own ideas about patriotism (no doubt

grounded in Western liberal volunteerism) and have mistaken an emotion that

properly constitutes only a stance towards an identity for a necessary feature of it.5

I have taken pains to make this point because it is crucial to my argument that

readers do not imagine that Urapmin unhappiness with their status as Papua New

Guineans means that they do not have a national identity, or that their negative evaluation of that identity somehow amounts to a resistance against it.6 The

Urapmin do not imagine that in the present they can be other than Papua New

Guineans. They are in that sense as nationalist as any raving patriot. For both, their

national identity is an important and inescapable part of who they are. If this is not

understood, the force that the millennial narrative we are examining has for the

Urapmin will remain opaque.

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Having opened a theoretical space in which we can recognize a negative

nationalism that is still a nationalism, it remains for us to explore the basis on which

the Urapmin come to their negative evaluation of their national identity. While their

feeling that they are under-served by a weak government does contribute to their

disappointment in their national identity, when the Urapmin express their negative

feelings about Papua New Guinea they do so most often not in the language of

political failure but rather in that of race. For the Urapmin, the national order of

things is also a racial one in which black nations rank below white ones. Papua New

Guinea's weakness as a nation follows, in this scheme, directly from the fact that it is

a nation of black people.

With the exception of the pioneering if not uncontroversial work of Lattas (e.g.

1992), issues of "race" have received remarkably little attention in recent studies of

Papua New Guinea.7 Given the evident if as yet not well studied racism of the

colonial period, this is a striking oversight; for it is clear that colonial binaries have

come to play a profound role in local thinking in many Papua New Guinean

societies. This is true, for example, in Gapun, where Kulick (1992:ix-x) argues that

"skin color [has] acquired a fundamental metaphysical significance". It is also true

in Urapmin. Understanding the differences that follow from being black versus

being white is for the Urapmin one of their most crucial modern projects, as it is for

the Gapun. In these two and no doubt in other Melanesian societies the opposition of

black and white skin is now as important in organizing thought as are those other

classic dichotomies of male and female, kin and affine, or friend and enemy.

Among the Urapmin, the most fundamental fact about black and white skins (kal

im and tabalasep) is that those with black skins are overwhelmingly inferior.

Trompfs (1994:272) point that Melanesians evidence a response that borders on

"self-hate in the face of black-white disparities" holds well for the Urapmin.8 When

the Urapmin make a comparison between blacks and whites, it is almost always to

the detriment of the blacks. And almost any setting can provide the occasion for

such comparisons. When Urapmin quarrel with or steal from each other, commit

adultery or purposely kick each other during soccer games, people inevitably point out that whites show better self-control. When the Urapmin cannot agree to a

cooperative work schedule or bemoan their lack of development, people assert that

whites are better at getting things done (see Smith 1994). And furthermore, these

critics often add, blacks' lack of the knowledge and discipline held by whites

precludes the possibility that they might remake their world along white lines.

These invidious comparisons often arise in public meetings, and they

undoubtedly serve rhetorical purposes as well as expressing core Urapmin beliefs

about the racial order. More revealing of the extent to which racial beliefs organize

Urapmin representations of themselves and of the world were the constant comments

people made to me in private or in small groups. Many of these echoed those made

publicly, but others concerned the very intimate, sometimes bodily ways in which

Urapmin found blacks inferior to whites. Blacks gluttonously eat too much food at

one time, cannot control their feelings of lust, anger, and jealousy, have ugly skin,

Ill



hair, and other bodily features, and give birth to weak children who do not grow as

well those of whites and often die infancy (see also Lattas 1992). Many of the

various negative features of black people noted in this list come together in the

paradigmatic figure of black deficiency, the sorcerer, a person who personifies black

gluttony and lack of self control and who kills those of his own race in a malicious

fashion supposedly unknown among whites. While my own white skin undoubtedly

provided the immediate context for some of the observations made to me, their

constancy (despite my regular attempts to discredit them, 1 heard many hundreds of

such remarks during my fieldwork) and the very wide range of people who made

them indicated beyond a doubt that the nature of black/white differences was a

Urapmin preoccupation not solely related to my presence.

Just as the existence of nations is a fact about the world that the Urapmin accept,

so too is this racial order in which black people are inferior to whites. Furthermore,

these two orders also intersect with one another. When making invidious

comparisons between blacks and whites, the Urapmin often substitute the phrase 'us

Papua New Guineans' (mipela Papua Niugini, mipela man bilong Papua Niugini) for

'blacks.' When the Urapmin use this collective noun in making self-denigrating

comments, they express their assumption that they share their perceived deficiencies

with all of the other citizens of Papua New Guinea. As all of them are black, this

makes good sense in terms of the racial model Urapmin use in constructing their

view of themselves. As a nation of black citizens, Papua New Guinea is a nation

made up of relatively impotent beings (unangtanum mafak — lit. bad people) who

like themselves lack self-control.

This impression is only reinforced when the Urapmin hear of problems in other

parts of Papua New Guinea such as resurgent tribal fighting in the highlands, the

depredations of criminal raskal gangs in the cities, and corruption in the national

government. It is also rooted in images that the Urapmin formed during the early colonial period. Colonial government patrols to Urapmin were invariably accompan ied by native policemen from other parts of Papua New Guinea. As the Urapmin tell

it, these policemen abducted local woman and threatened or beat local men who

attempted to stop them (Robbins 1998a). This is for them important proof of the fact

that all Papua New Guineans are willful and corrupt. It is worth noting here the way

in which the Urapmin reading of this evidence provides an ironic inversion of

Anderson's (1991:53ff) argument about the role of the pilgrimage in the construction

of a national consciousness. In Anderson's analysis of pilgrimage, civil servants

who travel the country develop a connection to their fellows and an image of the

country's territory both of which serve an emerging positive national consciousness.

In the Urapmin case, by contrast, it was by having a violent group of men from

elsewhere in what would become Papua New Guinea parade before them that the

Urapmin were able to confirm their developing sense that blacks were willful and

rapacious and could not help but build a violent and disorderly nation.

All of this evidence makes it clear that when the Urapmin version of nationalism

envisions a homogeneity that "overrides difference" (Handler 1988:6) among its

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population, it pictures a homogeneity of black people displaying all of the

deficiencies they believe such people to possess. This is the imagined community as

anomic community. In the Urapmin racial binary, where negative qualities are

overwhelmingly gathered on the black side, a black nation is destined to elicit little

positive affect. This is the basis of their negative nationalism.

To summarize, the Urapmin accept the state form as necessary on the basis of

their understandings of Christianity and of the nature of the modern world in which

they participate. They also understand that they ineluctably belong to the nation of

Papua New Guinea. To this extent, they are clearly nationalists, and they harbor no

separatist or revolutionary dreams. Yet they also believe that the nation of Papua

New Guinea is an inferior one. On the basis of their elaborate understanding of the

differences between black-skinned and white-skinned people, they hold that a black

nation is destined to be a weak one full of trouble and ultimately incapable of

guaranteeing its citizens a future that is better than the present. But while the

Urapmin do not imagine that they will ever enjoy a better future as Papua New

Guineans, nor that their nation can ever close the gap between blacks and whites,

they are confident that things will change radically in the future, and that they may

well change for the better. They base this confidence on their Christian belief. But

Christianity, I will argue in the next section, not only offers hope that the current

racial regime will be transcended in the future, it also allows the Urapmin to identify

in the present with a Christian identity that connects them with a white transnational

community far more powerful than that of the nation of Papua New Guinea.

Christianity and Transnational Identity

In relation to Urapmin national and racial thinking, their Christianity is in many

ways a counter-discourse. Against a nationalism that argues that people's most

important identities are those they share with their fellow citizens, Christianity offers

the Urapmin an identity that links them to a larger community that exists beyond

Papua New Guinea's borders. And against the binarism of Urapmin racial thinking,

their Christianity suggests ways in which the differences between blacks and whites

need not preclude either relationships between them or the possibility of black moral

improvement. Just as ideas about race and nationalism combine to create Urapmin

negative nationalism, so too are both sets of ideas transformed by the Christian

thinking that allows the Urapmin to imagine the transcendence of their racially coded

national identity.

For the Urapmin, their Christian identity links them to a community that they

imagine is far more successful both morally and materially than their national one.

One of the prominent features of this community, and the one most responsible for

its overwhelmingly positive character, is the fact that the vast majority of its

members are white. Christianity creates this largely white community because it is

in several respects a "white religion".9 First, as Urapmin are quick to point out,

Christianity is a white religion because it was first practiced by white people, and it

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was white people who brought it to Papua New Guinea. Furthermore, most of the

people who lead the various Christian missions, according to the Urapmin, are white,

as are most of the people who belong to them in Australia, America, and the other

white countries from which these missions hail.10 This last assertion borrows on the

logic of the racially inflected Urapmin reading of the national order of things: since

these missions are housed in white countries, they must be institutions populated

primarily by whites. The logic of racial nationalism is even more starkly in evidence in the idea that

constitutes the second way in which Christianity is a white religion: the idea that

Jesus himself is white. This is true in a mundane sense; as I was told many times

and in many ways, Jesus is white like me. And it is true for mundane reasons —just like me, Jesus was born in a white country. As one man explained when I asked

about the color of Jesus' skin, "He is not from here, is he?" The implication being

that Jesus was born in a white country and was thus white. Another person put it

more plainly, telling me that Jesus "was born in Bethlehem, that is a white place".

Christianity is thus white not only in its primary following, but also in its very

cosmological make-up.

The import of Christianity for the Urapmin is not exhausted by the fact that it is a

white religion, however, for of equal importance is the way in which Christianity

offers to connect the Urapmin to the white community from which it comes. In

considering this aspect of Urapmin Christianity, we enter a realm of elaborate com

munal imaginings that lend purpose to and gain meaning from a wide array of

concrete practices. As I will show later, these practices and the imagined community

in which they unfold become most vivid in Urapmin millennialism. In order to put that millennialism in its appropriate context, however, we must understand a variety

of other, more quotidian ways in which Christianity allows the Urapmin to grasp

their own lives in the context of a larger, global Christian community.

An examination of the way the Urapmin construct this transnational Christian

community can begin with the whiteness of Jesus. While he is white in a mundane

sense, Jesus is also different from other whites with whom the Urapmin have had

contact in that they are able to have a significant relationship with him. Unlike other

whites who dwell on the deficiencies of the Urapmin and other blacks and on the

basis of those deficiencies refuse to relate meaningfully to them, Jesus, the Urapmin

say, "came for the sinners" like themselves. Jesus is willing to accept their

'friendship'" in a way that other whites are not. Through that friendship, the

Urapmin form the one close bond that they have to any white being. Given the racial

reading the Urapmin give to nationalism, and the negative reading they give to the

fact of their race, any transnational bond worth having has to be this sort of

transracial one as well. Their transracial bond with Jesus constitutes a first such

connection around which a larger transnational community has grown.

The larger Christian transnational community is one in which the Urapmm have

ties with many white fellow Christians. In the round of daily life, however, the ties

that bind this community are vague, and the inequalities that persist between its

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white and black members are rarely far from Urapmin consciousness. Even as an

imagined community, this is one whose future promise is greater than its current

achievement. But on specific ceremonial occasions the lines of connection that bind

the community are drawn taught and the community itself comes to life most vividly

in the minds of the Urapmin. The most frequent such occasion is the Sunday

morning church service. When the Urapmin attend church on Sunday morning they

assume they are part of a world-wide, largely white community of people doing the

same thing (cf. Anderson 1991). This conception of a unified community of

members simultaneously at work toward the same goal was given voice in a prayer

one Urapmin man offered at a Sunday service; "God", he began, "people everywhere

are praying to you". The Urapmin hold church services far more often than once a

week, indeed they often hold two services per day, but because the Sunday morning

service is the one that the Urapmin understand to be universally practiced throughout

the Christian world, it is that service that most potently unites them with their fellow

members of the Christian transnation. On Sunday morning, as they pray and listen to

sermons, the Urapmin become primarily Christian, and far less saliently citizens of

Papua New Guinea.12

Yet even on Sunday morning, the Urapmin do not let themselves completely

forget the qualities that mark them as blacks and as Papua New Guineans. There is,

in fact, a profound tension at the heart of such services that provides much of the

energy that drives Urapmin millennialism. The tension is based on a contradiction

between the nature of the service as a kind of action and the content of that service.

While the service itself as a transnationally shared form of action allows the Urapmin

to take their place in the wider Christian community, the content of their prayers and

sermons continually draws their attention to the failures the Urapmin see as

particularly linked to their race and hence their nationality. Church services are

regularly dominated by lengthy harangues about people's lack of self-control and

their failure to heed God's will by avoiding sin. Not surprisingly, these harangues

develop all of the ideas about black gluttony and willfulness that dominate Urapmin

racial thinking. Self-control is, in fact, the single most important thing whites

possess and blacks lack.13 With these harangues, Urapmin point to what divides

them from whites in the midst of the very ritual that most fully integrates the two

groups.

But even as Urapmin Christianity foregrounds the notions of personal deficiency

upon which their racial ideas are founded, it decisively parts company with that

racism by suggesting that with God's help and their own proper effort the Urapmin

can improve themselves and eventually become the equal of whites. Unlike their

racial nationalism, which asserts that the Urapmin are condemned to forever remain

citizens of a second class nation, Urapmin Christianity emphasizes their capacity to

change and to thereby become more worthy members of the Christian transnational

community. The ultimate expression of this idea of black perfectibility is the

Urapmin idea of heaven, a place where those Urapmin who have improved

themselves will live in the style of whites and in community with them. Indeed, in

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heaven the Christian transnation will take on a substantial form that at present, it

only imperfectly approaches. One reason it will be able to take on that form is that

the Urapmin will have finally mastered themselves and made themselves fit to be full

members of such a realized transnational community. In heaven, the tension

between racially shared practice and unequal moral worth that haunts the Urapmin

church service will finally be resolved.

Because the imagined transnational community relies on the idea of a coming

heavenly eschaton to give it force, we must return now to the role that the Christian

apocalyptic narrative plays in Urapmin life. Obviously, the conclusion of that narra

tive envisions the establishment of the realized Christian community of heaven and

so carries the theme of black perfectibility to its highest point. Before turning to an

analysis of that narrative, however, I want to look at how the Urapmin receipt of

information about it and about the coming of the apocalypse that it projects serves to

establish another tie between the Urapmin and the larger white Christian community.

I have already pointed out that Urapmin millennialism is largely fueled by bits

and pieces of the Western discourse of dispensational premillenialism. Rumours,

like the one about the how a new leader, allied with the Catholics, is rising to power

and preparing to put the "triple six" on people, reach Urapmin by several paths.

Urapmin who visit the mining town of Tabubil or the District Office at Telefomin

often return with such stories. Similar accounts are also brought to Urapmin by

people from neighboring groups who have visited these centers. But the Urapmin are quick to point out that this news does not originate in these regional centers. On

the contrary, this information comes from the wider, white Christian world. It is, the

Urapmin say, formulated by highly trained 'Bible doctors' (Baibal dokta) living in

countries other than Papua New Guinea. Urapmin call the general category of

apocalyptic rumour 'world news' (wol nius), and this designation itself highlights the

sense they have that it comes from outside of Papua New Guinea and pertains to

goings on closer to the center of the global Christian transnational community.

As world news, these rumours interpellate the Urapmin as Christians, rather than

as Papua New Guineans (Althusser 1971). The Urapmin understand their receipt of

such world news as the final point of an exchange in which white Christians reach

out to them with a gift. This is most obvious when, as sometimes happens, world

news reaches Urapmin or one of their neighbors in the form of a tattered tract or a

photocopy of such a tract. These tracts are always greeted with serious interest, and

they are more likely than mere verbal rumours to push Urapmin millennialism to a

movement-like pitch (Robbins 1997a). The Urapmin understand these tracts them

selves as items sent specifically to the Christians of their region by members of the

transnational Christian community. They are often called 'letters (pas, sukon), a

usage that highlights the idea that their authors have specific addressees in mind.

One rumor was thus sourced to a letter sent to the District Office in Telefomin by

"English and Australian Baptists because they know we are Baptist". Another tract,

this one detailing how a man had risen up and changed his face, changed the law,

and assembled an army that was ready to fight the Christians of the world, was

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supposedly found between the two rows of cans in a carton of tinned fish sent to a

tradestore among a neighboring group. The appearance of this message in the carton

was explained as follows: "A friend, a Christian man, made the fish and put the

booklet (buklet) in so that whatever church opened it would know that now the time

[for the last days] has come". The paradigmatic 'letter' has here become a 'booklet'

and so too in this case has the addressee become broader. No longer addressed

simply to Baptists, all Christians are now the recipients of this message. But in both

cases the emphasis is on the fact that members of the larger Christian community are

in direct communication with the Urapmin, and that they have sent this information

to the Urapmin because of the bonds that link the two groups. When they hold world

news in their hands, the Urapmin can weigh the tangible truth of their participation in

the global Christian community. And when they ponder the message of the world

news, they are reminded that for those who are able to cleanse themselves of sin, a

fuller participation in the heavenly form of that community is not far off.

The material in this section establishes the fact that for the Urapmin their

Christian identity is a crucially important one that connects them to a transnational,

largely white community. This Christian community, constituted out of several

kinds of transnational and cross-racial links, already represents for the Urapmin the

setting of their fondest hopes for the future. As such, it elicits from them the kind of

intense positive emotional attachment that anthropologists assume properly belongs

only to the nation. Built on the promise that the inequalities of race can be

transcended and the burdens of negative national identity overthrown, the Christian

transnation thus virtually encompasses the Urapmin nation in the Urapmin

imagination. Indeed, the story of the coming of the last days is a forceful and

symbolically rich narrative account of how this encompassment will unfold in the

future not in the realm of the imagination, but in reality. It is because it takes up

these issues of black perfectibility and the Christian encompassment of the nation

that the apocalyptic narrative demands to be read as a treatment of the nature of and

relations between the translocal identities in play in Urapmin life. It is to that

reading that I now turn.

National Villains, Transnational Heroes, and the Apocalypse

The evidence presented thus far demonstrates that the Urapmin currently hold three

translocal identities that situate them in different ways within the post-independence

world. They are linked to other blacks by a racial identity that is constructed around

their inferiority to whites. They share with other Papua New Guineans a national

identity that is grounded in a God-given ordering of the world but that is also inferior

to similar identities held by members of other nations, such as Australia or the

United States. Finally, the Urapmin participate with other Christians in a

transnational imagined community that offers them support for their efforts at moral

self-improvement. Furthermore, we have seen that these identities are also defined

in relation to each other. Thus, Papua New Guinea is an inferior nation because it is

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a black nation. The Christian community is both powerful and transnational by

virtue of the fact that it is a largely white community, and the self-improvement

Christianity promotes is important because it alone guarantees a person permanent

citizenship in that community. This is the structure of relations between translocal

identities as it currently stands in Urapmin. I have presented this structure in

relatively abstract terms by discussing a variety of beliefs the Urapmin hold and the

practices in which those beliefs are embedded. For the Urapmin themselves,

however, the nature of and relationship between these identities is modelled most

explicitly in the unfolding of the Christian apocalyptic narrative.

The narrative itself is structured around three sets of oppositions, two of which

the narrative furnishes with explicit mediating terms. There is a temporal opposition

between the recent past (when the evil leader began his rise) and the future (when

Jesus returns), and this is mediated by the shifting present of the story's telling.

Correlated with this temporal opposition is a spatial one between a place horizontally

far from Urapmin (where the leader forms his army) and a place vertically far from

Urapmin (heaven), which is mediated by the space of the Urapmin territory itself, or

the sky just above that territory, where Jesus will rapture his believers.14 Finally,

there is the opposition between the narrative's villain (the leader) and its hero

(Jesus). In simple terms, it is appropriate to assert in structuralist fashion that the

narrative sets up homologous relations between these oppositions such that

past:future::horizontally distant:vertically distant::villain:hero. Yet such a rendering

leaves two outstanding questions unanswered. First, why does the narrative go to the

trouble of introducing important mediating terms in the temporal and spatial

registers, if a clear opposition is all that is required by its structure? Second, why is

there no mediating term between the hero and the villain? The answers to these two

questions are crucial to understanding how the narrative works to construct and relate

Urapmin racial, national, and transnational identities.

The necessity of the mediating terms that appear in the temporal and spatial

registers — the Urapmin present and the Urapmin territory respectively

— is

relatively easy to explain. It is these elements of the narrative that allow it to encom

pass the Urapmin as characters and to make itself relevant to their lives. Without

these moments in the narrative, its movement from past to future and from earth to

heaven would leave the Urapmin behind in the same way as do many other modern

narratives, such as those of development or of the origin of Christianity itself. But

with these mediating elements in place, the narrative is firmly anchored in Urapmin

time and space.15 The idea that part of the narrative, that part called 'world news'

that treats the recent past, reaches Urapmin in 'letters' addressed to them or their

neighbors illustrates concretely how this mediation is accomplished. Letters, after

all, are themselves mediators, tying together different times and different places. The

book of Revelation itself was constructed as such a mediator, a letter from John to

seven churches in the province of Asia (Bauckham 1993:12). When the dispatches

of world news that expand on the messages of that Biblical book similarly reach

Urapmin as letters, it makes the Urapmin themselves characters in the narrative those

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dispatches have begun to unfold. Just as the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, etc. are

players in the narrative of the original book of Revelation, so too is the Urapmin

church involved in the extended narrative that connects the biblical apocalyptic

narrative to the present. When that narrative then goes on to project a future, it is a

future in which the Urapmin have a place.

But if mediating terms between the poles of the spatial and temporal oppositions

anchor the narrative in the Urapmin world, what are we to make of the hero/villain

opposition and its lack of a mediating term? How but at a great distance are the

Urapmin to participate in the worlds of these two characters? I want to suggest that

in fact there is an implied mediating term here and that it is somewhat invisible

because it is precisely what is being contested in the symbolic terms of this narrative.

In fact, there are two potential mediating terms between Jesus and the Villain: one is

the transnational Christian community, a community where mortal beings take on

some of the characteristics of Jesus; the other is an anomic national community, not

unlike contemporary Papua New Guinea, whose citizens share their negative

qualities with the villain who leads them. These are appropriate mediating elements

because the Urapmin already participate, I will argue, in versions of both of these

communities. The question that remains open for the Urapmin is which of these

communities will ultimately be the one to tie them into the apocalyptic narrative.

The drama of the narrative for its listeners turns in large measure upon that way it

poses this question and suggests possible answers to it.

Let us explore these two potential communities further. From the forgoing

discussion, Jesus' connection to the transnational Christian community is clear. His

sacrifice makes membership in that community possible for the Urapmin.

Furthermore, it is through him that the Urapmin make their first link to that

community, and the fact of his whiteness allows them to imagine establishing

relations with the white people who constitute the bulk of its membership. As the

Urapmin often say in their prayers, they approach God in the name of Jesus (long

nem bilong Jisas, Jisas ami win diim). Similarly, their relationship with Jesus is

what renders plausible for them the possibility of their inclusion in the Christian

transnational community.

But if the Jesus of the narrative clearly represents the hope of the Christian

transnation, the sense in which the villain can stand for an analog of the national

community of Papua New Guinea is less straightforward. After all, in world news

the villain always comes to Papua New Guinea from somewhere else. Yet there is

compelling evidence for a reading in which the villain does represent the nation.

Consider the confusing details about the villain that I mentioned above. The rise

of the villain is often signaled, you will recall, by seemingly meaningless narrative

elements involving the advent of bank cash machines, the plan to issue identity

cards, or by more general intimations that the money system will change (mani bai

senis). Other signs of his impending attack include his raising of a large army, and

rumors that he has set out to change the law (lo bai senis). While each these details

taken alone appears so fantastic in the Urapmin context as to be an almost

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meaningless signifier without a signified (the cash machine, something no Urapmin

has ever seen, or the idea that a shadowy figure is assembling a large army in order

take over the world, etc.), and while this sense of meaninglessness is confirmed by

the fact that as individual narrative elements each of them seems to be present or

absent from any given piece of world news in a random fashion, considered together

they all appear as the kinds of things done by states. It is states that create money

systems, raise armies, issue laws and fix identities. The Urapmin know this because

they have already watched the Australian colonial government establish itself and

then leave, bringing and then taking away its money, its army, its laws and its

enumerating apparatus. Further, they have seen another state, this one established by the independent government of Papua New Guinea, come and establish new versions

of each of these institutions. Well schooled in the way states come and go, the

Urapmin are willing to credit the idea that the villain of the narrative is in fact

working to establish a new version of the kind of state with which they are familiar.

What is more, as the narrative of world news has it, the villain is determined to

embark on a particularly brutal campaign of nation building. This is the import of

his violent tour throughout his domain. He will come to Urapmin to ferret out those

who, as Christians, are not part of the national community he is working to establish.

Those who do not accept citizenship, he will kill. Those who do accept citizenship will have it marked forever in the form of the 666 on their skin. For the Urapmin, as

for many Melanesian groups, the skin reveals a person's otherwise invisible inner

states, including their moral bearing (see Lattas 1992; O'Hanlon 1989; Robbins

1997b; Strathern 1996). Hence, the fact that one's citizenship in the villain's

national community will be displayed on the skin suggests that membership in it

demands to be understood as constituting a primary and permanent identity. It will

claim a centrality in the lives of its citizens that the Papua New Guinean nation at

present hopes but largely fails to achieve. But then the villain's nation is not yet

successfully established either, and the narrative should be taken only as representing the pretensions of national communities to dominate the lives of their citizens, not

the full success of those pretensions.

World news also sets up homologies between the villain's political project and

that of the current nation-state by having the villain work to establish his new

community in just those areas in which the Urapmin find the Papua New Guinea

state most intrusive. As I argued earlier, the Urapmin accept the state as inevitable.

This does not mean, however, that they do not find its demands onerous. They

particularly regret their loss of control over the legitimate means of violence, and

they resent the fines and jail sentences meted out by the state. Yet the villain

promises to put much of his energy into furthering the state monopoly in just those

areas, changing the law to suit his interests and commanding a large army to enforce

it. Furthermore, the lack of money available to the Urapmin is the basis of what is

perhaps their strongest complaint against the government: in failing to develop the

Urapmin, the state has failed to assure them a place in the money economy. Here

too, the villain is set to intervene, demanding that people use his own currency and

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rigorously controlling access to it through as system of identification cards and town

based money machines. The villain, then, not only represents a version of the

modern state and its nation, but he also represents them in their most intrusive form.

A final aspect of the villain's prospective nation-state warrants comment for the

way that it echoes the themes of Urapmin racial thinking. In the apocalyptic

narrative as it is told in Urapmin, the opposition of black and white is absent. The

villain is not explicitly black, nor do the Urapmin remark on the possibility that their

own skin will be white once they have ascended to heaven. Yet hints of the way race

is understood in Urapmin are present in the narrative, both in the figure of Jesus, who

is white, and in the way his opposite number, the villain, is described. The villain is

always represented in world news as an extremely violent and rapacious person.

Indeed, the villain himself, with his excessive demands for fidelity and his quick

trigger finger evidences many of the traits of willfulness the Urapmin ascribe to

Papua New Guineans as blacks. Those under his control, his army (echoes of the

early colonial police force?), share these characteristics with him. The government

that the villain will set up as he rules over those with the triple six on their skins will

undoubtedly foster an anomic, strife-torn national community like that of the present

day black nation of Papua New Guinea. Hence, the behavioral characteristics that

give Urapmin racial notions their content remain in play in this narrative. Black or

white, the villain and his followers will establish a nation that, like Papua New

Guinea, can only be evaluated negatively. It will be, that is, an analog of the existing

black nation of Papua New Guinea.

As potential mediating elements between the narrative's villain and its hero, the

images of the villain's nation and the Christian transnation serve, like the narrative's

other mediating elements, to allow the Urapmin to inhabit the unfolding story. Only

in this political register, the Urapmin place is unsettled. Will they join the villain's

community or that established by Jesus? In its indecisiveness on this point, the

apocalyptic narrative mirrors perfectly the open character of the Urapmin present.

The Urapmin are caught between a national identity that they dislike but cannot yet

escape and a valued Christian transnational identity that they are always in danger of

losing by dint of their own moral failings. Their efforts as Christians are all aimed at

transcending the negative qualities they ascribe to their racially understood national

identity so as to make themselves better members of the Christian transnation.

Hence, the contest between the hero and the villain, and thus between the

communities that connect those figures to the Urapmin, represents a contest the

Urapmin stage 'within their own hearts' (aget lem).

But the apocalyptic narrative not only has a structure, it also has a telos. In this

story, the victorious hero saves those who follow him from life in the villain's evil

nation. While this narrative leaves the Urapmin to decide their own fates, it also

assures them that if they cleave to their Christian identities they will soon be able to

transcend the entire question of a national identity. In heaven, the Christian

transnation will be fully realized, and when it is it will render its member's national

identities (and implicitly their linked racial identities as well) completely

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superfluous. Indeed, the order of nations will be destroyed. At that point, the

Christian encompassment of their nation will be complete. In suggesting this

conclusion, the apocalyptic narrative not only constitutes the Urapmin translocal

identities and sets them in relation to one another, it also suggests the ways in which

the contradictions between those identities will be resolved. In doing so, it provides

the Urapmin with a powerful argument in defense of the sense they already have that

among their many identities, that of Christian is the most consequential.

Conclusion

Ethnographically, this article can rest where I left it in the last section. I have argued

that the Urapmin have a strong sense of transnational connectedness that is based on

their identity as Christians. This identity complements their negative identification

with the nation of Papua New Guinea and with the race of black people that

constitutes that nation. What gives these translocal identities of nationality, trans

nationality, and race their salience in Urapmin life is not, however, their simple

existence. It is rather the relationship between them constructed in the apocalyptic narrative that gives these identities their purchase on Urapmin attention. That narra

tive suggests that the Urapmin, through assiduous efforts at self-improvement, will

be able to transcend their racial and national identities by taking up residence in the

fully realized, heavenly Christian community of the future. Anchored in the

Urapmin present by virtue of the mediating elements discussed above, the

apocalyptic narrative structures the Urapmin understanding of the ultimate meanings

of these identities and guides the actions the Urapmin take in regard to them. The

apocalyptic narrative is one the Urapmin live, in Young's (1983) sense, and it is

through living it that they give life to the national, transnational, and racial identities

that they hold far from the Western or westernized centres in which these identities

find their usual homes.

Theoretically, there are several concluding points that remain to be made. The

first involves what might be called, following the lead of the strong program in the

sociology of knowledge, an attempt to introduce some symmetry into the study of

nationalism and transnational ism (Bloor 1976; Latour 1993). "Symmetry" here

refers to the idea that we should be able to discuss or explain nationalism in the same

terms we use to discuss transnationalism. A barrier that stands between us and that

symmetrical treatment follows from the fact that while nationalism is often studied as

a matter of identity, transnationalism is more often treated as a sociological fact to be

registered. Concerned with the flows of people, things, and discourses, we have

neglected to attend to how transnationalism also involves people in forming

identities that constitute them as actors in the larger world these flows create. Even

those deeply entrenched on the margins of the world of global flows can create such

identities — all that is required is the same kind of social imagination that comes into

play in the construction of national identities and the communities to which they are

tied.

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As noted in the introduction, many scholars have argued that the social

imagination of the nation is embedded in narrative. Once we understand that

transnationalism too creates identities, we can take the further step of examining the

way these identities are constituted in narrative. The way is then open for the

symmetrical study of national and transnational identities. And this symmetrical

approach pays dividends beyond those of consistency. For it is one of the assertions

of this article that once we become aware of the possibility that narratives construct

and negotiate the relationships between multiple identities, the way is open for us to

bring to bear on questions of identity more complex methods of analyzing narrative.

Many accounts of the role of narrative in the construction of national identity alone

concentrate primarily on straightforward content analysis of the narratives they

examine. Here, I have explored the ways in which the Urapmin version of the first

half of the Christian apocalyptic narrative manipulates the domains of time and

space, as well the relation of its hero and villain, in the service of its goal of

constituting a field of relations that are weighted in different ways and that portend

different futures. Narratives that construct multiple identities elsewhere are undoubt

edly structured differently, but it is likely that all of them share with the Urapmin

version of the Christian apocalyptic narrative a tendency to rely on complex

structurings of time, space and character that require careful examination.

There is also a second symmetry I have tried to introduce here. This one

involves questioning a certain exceptional characteristic that analysts have perhaps

unwittingly attributed to national identity. This characteristic is the love and loyalty

national identity is by definition supposed to inspire. I have presented theoretical

arguments in favor of abandoning the assumption that national identities must inspire these emotions, and the case of the firmly held but negatively evaluated Urapmin national identity provides an empirical counter-example. By stripping nationalism of

its exceptionalism in this regard, we open up the possibility of exploring the

complexity of its relations with other identities. Treated theoretically as symmetrical with other identities, national identity can form any number of relations with them.

It can even, as it does in the Urapmin case, play the role promoting self-hatred and

unhappiness in the face of the better world constituted by a transnational identity. At

least when one is looking beyond the most local of boundaries, home may be the

largest of the worlds one inhabits, not the smallest.

The call for an approach that does not confuse national identity with positive

evaluation leads to a final concluding point. Scholars have recently begun to argue that Christianity provides support for nationalism in many parts of Melanesia (Jolly

1992:342-3, 1997; Latiikefu 1988; Young 1997:91). Yet the Urapmin case demonstrates that this positive linkage does not always

hold between the two. Through their embrace of the apocalyptic narrative and the

broader Christian commitment of which it is a part, the Urapmin have in some sense

cast their lot with the white transnational Christian community that will, the narrative

asserts, ultimately allow them to escapc their national identity. In the narrative itself,

this point is made in martial terms: the white, transnational figure of Jesus will

123



defend the Urapmin against the encroachment of the black nation-state that

surrounds them and that is represented by the nation-state that the villain has set out

to construct. The situation in which people identify with a distant ally whom they

imagine will protect them from a less distant but still not local enemy may well be

widespread in places where people are negotiating the relationships that between

their several translocal identities.16 If this is so, the examination of such situations

will require that anthropologists jettison limiting notions that tie nationalism too

closely to positive sentiment and that they begin to look at the kinds of complex

concatenations of translocal identities that I have analyzed here in the Urapmin case.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on research carried out between January 1991 and February

1993 supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant 5026), the National Science

Foundation, and the University of Virginia. I thank the anthropology department of

the University of Papua New Guinea, the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, and

the government of the Sandaun Province for affiliating and helping me during this

period of research. This article grew out discussions held in a study group on

"heroes out of place" that included Peter Metcalf, George Mentore and Cathy

Cutbill. An early version of the paper was presented at panel on this subject

organized by Peter Metcalf for the AES meetings in 1996. I thank all of these people

for their extensive comments on this work. I have also presented versions of this

paper at Reed College, the University of Chicago and at the University of California,

San Diego and I am grateful for the many helpful comments I received on those

occasions. I also thank Sandra Bamford, Tom Biolsi, Robert Brightman, Richard

Handler, Dan Jorgensen, Miyako Inoue, Bruce Koplm, Rose Passalacqua and Rupert

Stasch as well as two anonymous readers for Social Analysis for comments on

various drafts.

NOTES

1. He is also at times called simply 'a man' and sometimes a 'wild animal' (wel abus —

see note 2 below) from the Tok Pisin Bible's translation of "beast". At other times, the

Urapmin do not speak of a single figure at all, referring instead only to the rise of "a new

government".

2. In this article terms in Tok Pisin (Neo-Melanesian), the most prevalent lingua franca

in Papua New Guinea, are underlined. Terms in the Urap language are given in italics.

3. The details of Western versions of dispensational premillenialism need not concern us

here. 1 consider some of them in relation to Urapmin apocalypticism in Robbins 1998a.

Important sources on the nature of the doctrine include Weber (1987) Boyer (1992) and

Harding (1994).

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4. This is my translation from the Tok Pisin edition of the New Testament most

frequently used by the Urapmin, the Nupela Testamen na 01 Sam published in 1978 in

Port Moresby by The Bible Society of Papua New Guinea.

5. Thomas (1991:202) makes a somewhat similar argument in pointing out the falsity of

the assumption often made in discussions of the invention of tradition that one must

evaluate positively a tradition one fabricates for oneself.

6. I stick with the term "nationalism" here, rather than follow Otto and Thomas (1997:1)

in distinguishing between an affirmative "nationalism" and a neutral "nationality", for

reasons similar to those that lead me to point out the dangers that follow from claiming

that the Urapmin either do not have or actively resist having a national identity. Urapmin

ideas about their national identity have the intensity that we associate with nationalist

notions and are clearly analogs of more positive forms of them. The comments I make in

the conclusion of this article about symmetry explain more generally why 1 think it would

be a mistake to explain away the theoretical issues raised by the notion of negative

nationalism as nothing more than a matter of terminology.

7. Perhaps the only studies to have given the kinds of 'racial' ideas I discuss here

serious consideration were the early studies of cargo cults by Burridge (1960) and

Lawrence (1971). While this is not the place to consider the usefulness of the Western

term 'race' in discussions of Melanesian ideas, I rely on it here not only as a heuristic but

also to remind readers of the colonial background of these ideas. We badly need a study

of how Australian racial ideologies (and perhaps those of the earlier colonizers) were

conveyed to Melanesians. For too long, we have assumed that the black/white contrasts

drawn by Melanesians were based solely on their 'observations' of, on the one hand,

differences in skin color and, on the other, the material/technological superiority of the

colonizers. It strikes me as far more likely that European racist ideas helped to shape

whatever 'observations' Melanesians made into the elaborate racial schemes we currently

find among Melanesians. Urapmin stories of how Australian government officers berated

them by telling them that their ancestors were cassowaries and wild pigs give a glimpse

of the sorts of practices that have surely influenced the development of Melanesian racial

consciousness.

8. Along with Trompf (1994), Kulick (1992), Lattas (1992), and Smith (1994) are works

that suggest that the Urapmin sense of black inferiority exists in many Melanesian

societies. In an interesting recent article, Wood (1995), while presenting some evidence

of ideas of inferiority similar to that I present here (e.g., p. 33), argues that the Kamula

have been largely able to "incorporate" whites by bringing them into their domain and

understanding some of them as their own reincarnated dead.

9. This idea is discussed more fully in Robbins 1997a (see also Latukefu 1988).

10. Generalizing what they know about the organization of Christianity in Papua New

Guinea, the Urapmin assume that most if not all whites belong not too specific churches,

but rather to specific missions.

11. There are Urapmin and Tok Pisin words for friend (dup, dufin, poroman, pren) that

people sometimes use to describe their relationship to Jesus, especially when preaching.

125



Yet the Tok Pisin word that comes closest to carrying the sense of the English 'friend' 1

am evoking here is actually bilip, the word for belief. By 'belief' in Jesus the Urapmin

refer to their confidence that he will deliver to them what he has promised to give them in

return for their acts of fidelity to him. That is, belief is not itself what is given, but is

rather a faith that what is given (primarily obedience) will be reciprocated. In this sense,

what the Urapmin believe is that Jesus will repay their friendship along the kinds of

reciprocal lines that the Urapmin use to repay each others' friendship. They believe he

will do this despite the fact that other whites often ignore their obligations in these

matters.

12. My use of the idea of the contextual salience of various identities draws on

Chodorow's (1989:196 and passim) discussion of "gender-salience".

13. I discuss the theme of self-control in greater detail elsewhere (Robbinsn.d.).

14. While many Urapmin will, when directly asked, state that Jesus' return and the

ensuing battle between him and the narrative's villain will take place everywhere, their

own imaginings focus on its character as a local event. An Urapmin man once told me

that if I was curious about what apocalyptic event would happen in the year 2000, I

would have to arrange to be in Urapmin at the time so that 1 could find out.

15. I consider the temporal elements of this narrative more fully in Robbins 1998a.

16. The session of the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society in which

this article was originally presented also included papers by Peter Metcalf and George

Mentore that discussed this pattern of alliance with distant powers against more

proximate enemies in other parts of the world.

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