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‘Always been Christian’: MythicConflation among the Oksapmin ofPapua New GuineaFraser MacdonaldPublished online: 12 Mar 2014.

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‘Always been Christian’: MythicConflation among the Oksapmin ofPapua New GuineaFraser Macdonald

Across the world and throughout history, people have negotiated religious and social changeby marshalling the mythological resources at their disposal. In cases of conversion toChristianity, this dynamic has often taken the form of constructing an isomorphismbetween traditional mythical narratives and those learned from the Bible, amanifestation of the process I here call ‘mythic conflation’. In this article I explore howthe Oksapmin of the West Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, have conflated aspects ofBible stories with two of their traditional narratives in an attempt to overcomecosmological contradiction. From the etic perspective, this has partially collapseddifference in the construction of syncretic religious forms. From the emic perspective, byconstructing for themselves an ancestral precedent of this kind, the Oksapmin support aclaim of having revealed the mystery of Christianity’s local origin.

Keywords: Myth; Syncretism; Indigenous Christianity; Culture Change; Papua NewGuinea

Introduction

This article describes the process of mythic conflation among the Oksapmin of PapuaNew Guinea as an example of cultural innovation and creativity within the context ofsocial change induced by missionisation and conversion to Christianity. The argumentI advance is that mythic conflation, the fusion of two narratives through points of cor-respondence, is a particularly effective means through which the Oksapmin havemanaged the cosmological opposition produced through the introduction of Chris-tianity into their existing religious world. A broader aim is that this concept mayshed some new light on existing studies that have described equivalent processes butused a diverse, often general, vocabulary to analyse them.

Correspondence to: Dr Fraser Macdonald, Division of Social Sciences, University of Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province,

411, Papua New Guinea. E-mail: macdonaldf@uog.ac.pg

Anthropological Forum, 2014Vol. 24, No. 2, 175–196, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2014.886997

© 2014 Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia

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My point of departure is the observation that mythical narratives are definitivemechanisms for the storage and transmission of messages deemed of fundamentalsocial, cosmological, and moral importance (Barber and Barber 2004; Malinowski1954 [1926], 101). Their ability to continually encapsulate key cultural valuesdepends on their malleability. Social life and its conceptual substrate, while stable,are in perpetual flux, so for a myth to remain relevant, it too must be regularlyremade (van Binsbergen 2009, 314). But the real trick of myths in this respect is notjust that they fit changing circumstances but that they are invariably considered ofancestral provenance. Whatever the nature and origin of their content, myths are typi-cally seen as true, sacred, and foundational (Barber and Barber 2004, 145; Bidney 1955;Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

The transformation of myth has been a leading feature of the spread of Christianitythroughout the world. Wherever Christianity goes an often tense intercultural dialecticoccurs involving ‘both the indigenization of Christian forms and the retrospectiveChristianisation of indigenous forms of practice’ (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins2008, 1144; Lindenfeld and Richardson 2012; Macdonald 2013; Stewart and Strathern2009, 31). In the realm of myth, this mutual transformation takes the form of Biblestories and sermons being told with local content and stories of place being toldthat include Jesus, God, Mary, the Devil, and so forth. In either instance, a syncreticprocess of what I call ‘mythic conflation’ may occur.

I take mythic conflation to mean the process whereby the elements of mythic nar-ratives belonging to two different cultural traditions are rendered equivalent, identi-cal, or singular. The result is a syncretic product composed of elements taken fromboth cultural inputs. Further, the establishment of this isomorphism is, due to the tra-ditionalising properties of myth, emically recognised as beyond human agency. It is asystematic, yet often blind, merging, operating at the margins of awareness (cf. Bidney1955, 390; Stephen 1989, 52). Since it involves the creative synchronisation ofelements in the production of new syncretic forms, we might also think about it asa particular mode of bricolage (Kracke 1992, 38; Lévi-Strauss 1966).1 I follow Lévi-Strauss’ observation in this respect that a ‘characteristic feature of mythical thoughtis that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire’ (1966, 17) butextend it somewhat to show how, within this process, the identities and attributesof figures, places, and elements in local and Bible stories are made isomorphic orequivalent. Through conflation, two different mythic elements (what Lévi-Strausswould call ‘mythemes’), each with a different stratigraphy of meaning, are fused: a‘dynamic balancing between heterogeneous cultural inputs’ (Lindenfeld and Richard-son 2012, 15).

For conflation to occur there must exist what, following Stewart and Shaw (1994), Icall ‘correspondences’ between the two cultural traditions, points of conjuncture orsimilarity ‘which are presumed to favour synchronization and interpenetration’(1994, 16). So, for two mythic elements to be conflated they must share at leastsome common meaning or occupy a similar position in the narrative structure, other-wise the conflation may appear awkward or incongruent.

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The dynamics of mythic conflation are underpinned by a basic logic, the overallstructure of which is again given to us by Lévi-Strauss. He argued that ‘mythicalthought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution’(1963, 224). This statement serves nicely to illustrate the broader argument that mythsare ‘sources of imagery for expressing and resolving basic problems and contradictionsinherent in social life, or in the particular social patterns and cosmology of a culture’(Kracke 1992, 38; see also McDowell 2002, 44). The thrust is that, rather than beingtorn between two opposed and competing modes of organising life, people mayinstead seek to combine and reconcile them, thus simultaneously embracing thenew and preserving their history.So, what kinds of cosmological and religious contradiction does the incorporation of

Christianity produce? Wherever Christianity travels it encounters existing indigenousreligious systems; an opposition is thus instituted, often amplified by missionaries,between two means of constructing and establishing sacred meaning. How localpeople negotiate these basic cosmological and moral oppositions has emerged as thecentral problematic for anthropological studies of Christianity, particularly in thePacific (Robbins 2004, 2009; Rountree 2011; Scott 2005; Tomlinson 2009; Vilaça2011).In some instances, local people have been unable to extricate themselves from these

ontologically fraught situations. Demonstrated most famously by Robbins (2004) inhis study of Urapmin Christianity, people there have become trapped between twomoral systems, namely, a relational indigenous culture and an individualist Christianculture. Try as they might through various Christian ritual technologies to releasethemselves from this impasse, the Urapmin appear doomed to live in continuedmoral torment. This type of disjuncture between the Christian and local religiousrealms is found particularly often among Pentecostal and charismatic variants ofChristianity, which tend to encourage their converts to make a complete, radicalbreak from the past (see Knauft 2002, 167–168; LiPuma 2000, 229–232; alsoRobbins 2003, 224–227, for a good review of these cases).On the other hand, groups may instead seek out the commonalities and similarities

between the two religious worlds when converting, a particularly common approachwithin Melanesia. In his study of Christianity among the Arosi of Solomon Islands,Scott (2007, 269) reports how local people have,

with an exceptional degree of consistency, maintained both a theory and a practiceof finding and building on points of contact between indigenous culture and Chris-tianity and seeking to preserve the memory, and even in some cases the practice, oftheologically unobjectionable aspects of Makiran culture.

Scott’s description is entirely consonant with my own analysis of Oksapmin Christian-ity (Macdonald 2013), where I demonstrated how Christianity and indigenous religionhave been conjoined across a wide range of contexts through a reciprocally transfor-mative process of ‘fusion’. Indeed, the meaningful alignment of Christian and

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indigenous cosmologies is widely reported throughout the area (for other relevantexamples, see Burt 1983; Jacka 2002; Reithofer 2006; Gewertz and Errington 1991).In all these and many other cases the intention of local people is to surmount the cos-mological and cultural oppositions produced through conversion to Christianitythrough seeking out commonalities between, and consequently joining together, theChristian and indigenous religions across a range of contexts.

If the key characteristic of mythical thought is to move from the recognition ofoppositions toward their resolution, then we ought to expect myth to occupy a pri-vileged place in this overall process of conjoining Christian and indigenous religion.Not only do we find this, but the local utilisation of myth to negotiate cosmologicalopposition has often taken the form of mythic conflation. We can thus take mythicconflation to be a particularly important mode of religious binding andconvergence.

The conflation of local and Biblical mythic content is a phenomenon that hasaccompanied the spread of Christianity throughout the world, from Africa to the Med-iterranean to the Caribbean (Meyer 1994, 53; Murphy 2012, 147–157; Rountree 2011,859). It has been described perhaps most extensively in the Pacific. Probably the mostfamous example we have is that of Captain James Cook with the Hawaiian fertility godLono, a process of ‘mytho-praxis’ described by Sahlins (1985, 104–135). It has alsobeen documented by Taylor among contemporary Sia Raga people of Vanuatu(2010, 420).

Within PNG, mythic conflation as a means of cultural innovation within contexts ofsocial change seems particularly widespread and lends support to the notion men-tioned earlier that Melanesian cosmologies are intrinsically malleable and eclectic.Examples have been documented from throughout the country that show howpeople have identified correspondences between their local myths and those foundin the Bible to then conflate them into a single version of sacred truth (see Gewertzand Errington 1991, 147–169; Hirsch 2008, 146; Reithofer 2006, 271). The stress inall these cases is upon eliding difference in the construction of mythic unity.

Much closer to my own field site, Jorgensen (1990, 2001), Lohmann (2000, 2008),and Robbins (2004, 2009, 2011) have explored the modification of indigenous cosmol-ogy in relation to the flux of historical events. Jorgensen shows how ‘the long run tra-jectory of Telefolmin myth is in the direction of reconciling Christianity andtraditional religion’ (Jorgensen 2001, 124). Lohmann has examined the transformationof myth as a result of conversion to Christianity among the Asabano, neighbours ofboth the Oksapmin and Telefolmin (2000, 236). The Asabano have equated figuresin their traditional stories with ones they have learned of within Christianity (2000,243) and, in other examples, combined elements of their cosmology together withthe Christian one in a way that composite understandings and beliefs emerge(2000, 244).

Notwithstanding these instances of merging, however, for the most part it is notcommonality with but difference from ancestral religion that the Asabano emphasisewhen constructing their identity as Christians (Lohmann 2000). As a result of a

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charismatic revival that spread throughout the region in the late 1970s, the Asabanomade a decisive break with their traditional religion and thereafter came to conceiveof it as a sinful past in relation to the moral Christian present, ‘a widely reportedconcomitant of Christianization throughout Melanesia’ more broadly (Reithofer2006, 263).This kind of religious rupture has been described in detail by Robbins for the neigh-

bouring Urapmin. Caught up in the same revival movement as the Asabano, theUrapmin rapidly Christianised their society without the mediation of existing culturaland religious structures, thereby creating an unsynthesised moral and cosmologicalduality out of which local people struggle to escape (2004, 332). This theoretical pos-ition was softened in subsequent publications, within which Robbins considers thesyncretic interactions between the two systems (2009, 2011).Now, what we might say about the Asabano and Urapmin cases is this. Firstly, there

are syncretic processes going on in both cases which approximate conflation. Thesecond point is that, while both Lohmann and Robbins mention these orientations,both state that the dominant local perspective and ethnographic reality is one ofrupture. This contrasts with the Oksapmin pursuit of congruence and isomorphismbetween the indigenous and Christian worlds (Macdonald 2013). The explanationfor this lies with the way in which Christianity entered these societies. Neither theUrapmin nor the Asabano had any sustained contact with Christianity until exposedto the revival in the late 1970s. It was within this movement that both groupsrapidly embraced Christianity at the same time as abandoning their existing religion.As Lohmann (2000, 195) describes, conversion to Christianity among the Asabano‘took the form of a charismatic outbreak, featuring public displays of ecstasy,dreams and visions of characters from Christian mythology, and ritual destructionof traditional religious paraphernalia’. Robbins (2004, 150), too, characterises conver-sion among the Urapmin as a process of local people ‘clearing out the ancestors’,whereby the existing indigenous religion was systematically dismantled and con-demned. In either case, there was limited local interest in systematically conjoining,or even favourably comparing, the two different worlds. The past was sinful andneeded to be practically disengaged from while the new was true and right andmust be rapidly embraced. By contrast, the Oksapmin and the Telefolmin were directlyevangelised by the Australian Baptist Missionary Society (ABMS) from the 1950s and1960s onwards respectively. As a result, they were able to work out a balance betweenChristianity and their surviving traditions before the revival swept through in the late1970s. For the Oksapmin, then, there was no sudden or radical religious rupture (Mac-donald 2013, 80). When converting to Christianity they had time to identify points ofconjuncture between Christianity and various contexts of their existing religion and tothen use those parallels in order to bind the two systems together. This more gradualincorporation of Christianity explains the Oksapmin discourse of continuity (despitethe actual transformations) and the Asabano and Urapmin emphasis on discontinuity(despite the persistence of certain indigenous religious forms and their accommo-dation to Christianity).

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Background

The Oksapmin are a group of approximately 10,000 swidden cultivators living aroundthe Sepik-Fly headwaters in West Sepik Province, PNG. My research was based in theTekin Valley in the village of Sambate (which takes its name from samba, a clayish mudfound on the surface (tei) of the ground where the community is based) where I livedfor 12 months between December 2008 and December 2009, a month in 2011, andthen another month from December 2013 to January 2014. Their high populationmakes them among the largest of those groups known to anthropologists as the Moun-tain Ok (a regional linguistic designation, see Healey 1964)) or Min (a regional culturaldesignation, see Jorgensen 1996), most of whom historically acknowledged Afek (whothe Oksapmin know as Yuan) as a paramount cultural ancestress (Jorgensen 1981;Craig and Hyndman 1990).

Traditional Oksapmin religion was a complex and variegated formation. Its corecomponent was the men’s initiation cult. Through several successive stages conductedover a roughly 20-year period, this ritual complex revealed to initiates a rich body ofsacred knowledge and skills, including a range of esoteric mythical stories describingthe origins and character of the human and natural environment (Barth 1987).Many of these stories focused on the legendary actions of Yuan together with eitherher siblings, or children (Jorgensen 2001, 112; Lohmann 2000, 85–111).

Another central part of traditional Oksapmin religion was a sacrificial ritual per-formed in honour of several local paramount cosmological actors, including Yuan,Atan (the sun), and Dahaplan (a local trickster figure discussed in detail below).The ritual entailed the killing, immolation, and distribution of human victims in thename of regenerating the biocosmos. Both Brutti (1997) and Macdonald (2013)have described this elaborate performance in detail.

Underlying these main religious institutions was an array of magic, taboo, and spiri-tuality which permeated everyday Oksapmin life and understanding. This includedhunting and gardening magic, witchcraft and sorcery, punitive restrictions on enteringcertain pools, streams, or stands of forest, as well as beliefs regarding death, the after-life, and the spirituality of nature.

Following Brutti (1997, 2000), what we might say about Oksapmin cosmology isthat it has historically been ‘dynamic and self-innovating toward both endogenousand exogenous factors of change’ (2000, 101), a characteristic also ascribed to Min reli-gious systems more generally (Barth 1987; see also Mead’s work on the ‘importation’ ofculture among the Mountain Arapesh, 2002 [1938, 1940]). Throughout history, theOksapmin have adjusted their cosmology, sometimes profoundly, in order tomarshal new flows of sacred power and wealth, thus rendering their religious worldan eclectic, composite structure made up of elements both indigenously created andexogenously borrowed. What I call ‘tradition’ in this paper, therefore, is not to beunderstood as a static cultural monolith punctiliously transmitted through the agesbut rather marks a point in history; it is the dynamic, heterogeneous structure thatthe ABMS first encountered upon arriving in the Oksapmin area. This also means

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that the cultural innovation I describe as mythic conflation is not the manifestation of anew process but rather likely marks the latest in a long historical series of cosmologicalchanges undertaken in response to intra- and inter-societal transformations.

The Evangelisation of the Oksapmin and its Impacts

Having established themselves in Telefomin in 1951, the Australian Baptist MissionarySociety (ABMS) moved into the Oksapmin area in 1962, creating a mission station inthe lower Tekin Valley. From this position they undertook a program of extensiveevangelisation with teams comprised of young Oksapmin men. According to theReverend Keith Bricknell, the first ABMS missionary in the area, the evangelicalapproach to the Oksapmin was to ‘tell them about Christianity and then basicallylet them decide what was culturally compatible with their new way of life’ (personalcommunication, 17/05/2010).But while the attitudes of the mission were probably respectful, the objective of mass

conversion was clear and rigorously pursued. Local religious institutions that stood inthe way of establishing Christianity were suppressed or condemned by the mission.The men’s ancestral initiation cult, the Yuan paramount sacrifice, as well as anythingelse that was obviously ‘religious’ was either suppressed by the mission or discarded bylocal people. This had the unintended consequence of allowing the Oksapmin toreproduce those aspects of their religion and cosmology that were not obvious, pri-vately undertaken or constituted primarily as ideas and beliefs. What remained was,among other things, the recitation of sacred mythology (the topic under considerationhere), witchcraft and sorcery, beliefs concerning death and the afterlife, as well asunderstandings of the spirituality of nature.The retention of these aspects of indigenous religion and cosmology occurred along-

side widespread conversion to Christianity. While initially circumspect, the Oksapminembraced Christianity quickly and in large numbers. Beginning with the first publicbaptisms in 1966, by 1970 there were 12 local churches with a collective membershipof around 800 people, and once the revival movement arrived in the late 1970s andearly 1980s most Oksapmin had in some way formally aligned themselves with Chris-tianity and taken over the leadership and management of their churches. As alluded toearlier, the impact of the revival in Oksapmin, therefore, was to deepen existing com-mitment to Christianity and not, as among the Asabano or Urapmin, to suddenly anddramatically introduce them to Christianity at the same time as rapidly discarding theirindigenous religious heritage.As the Oksapmin converted to Christianity, they attempted to fuse it together with

the surviving aspects of the traditional religion, an ongoing project carried on into thepresent (Macdonald 2013). There has occurred a reciprocal transformation of culturalmaterial, whereby indigeneity has been Christianised at the same time that Christianityhas been indigenised. The Oksapmin have sought to match parts of their Baptist Chris-tianity with parts of their history and traditions, across all contexts of their religiouslives: in witchcraft and sorcery, spiritual beliefs, myth, as well as in situations of

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church worship and prayer. The mythic conflation that I describe here is an importantaspect of this balancing project.

But, as mentioned earlier, there is little to no local awareness of this matching andconflation; it is considered natural. Even when stipulated in language within sermons,the isomorphism established between the two worlds is treated as given, the key com-ponent of an encompassing and fundamental worldview.

The Story of Dahaplan

The recitation of myth was an important component of traditional Oksapmin religionthat survived missionisation. One of the most important of these pre-Christian storiesis about Dahaplan, whose name means stil man (Tok Pisin: thief) in the local language(Oksap meng). The earliest recording of the story by an outsider was made by Perey,which he presented as ‘The Man with the Pink Skin’ (1973, 158–160) in his Ph.D.thesis.

Perey’s version, which I slightly abbreviate, is as follows:

Long ago, a man with pink skin lived in Oksapmin. He stole some food from thepeople’s gardens. There was a tree, a little short one, that would grow upward. Itwould grow high, quickly, and bend over, and come down in someone’s garden.The man would steal from this garden, and the tree would shrink back down(with the man riding back on it). Later the tree would grow up again, and go toanother garden, and the man would steal more.

Now this man liked opossums too; he liked to kill them. The baby opossums hewould send back, but the older ones he would kill and cook.

And two brothers of his went to hide in the woods. And the dog of the two went tohide with them also.

After he killed [the possums], he jokingly danced. He was dancing on, and somemen were singing and dancing nearby. He was singing above, on the mountainslope, and they were singing below.

They began to come up. At dawn, they took all the opossums out of the earth ovenand shared them out to everyone.

He told them, ‘All the men of Arinim, the whole community, want to kill me. I justran away and came to your territory’. Then he said nothing.

After a pause he asked about one of their pigs. ‘Let’s kill this pig of ours. Then we caneat it and run away’, he said. His older brother told him, ‘We have to ask the womanwho reared the pig’. They talked to her, and to their own mother, and the womanwho raised the pig began to cry. Then their own mother had feelings for them, andshe began to cry.

As can be seen, Perey’s version exhibits a paucity of detail. No characters or places arenamed; events are described only superficially; and the narrative ends without properlyconcluding. This leads me to think that the full details of the story were withheld fromPerey due to the fact that at the time of his fieldwork in 1968, just a few years after theintroduction of Christianity, the story was still considered highly sacred and thus not

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freely divulged to outsiders. In 1995, Lorenzo Brutti collected a more complete anddetailed version of the same story, later presented in a paper discussing the role ofthe pig in Oksapmin mythology (Brutti and Boissiére 2002:142–145). His access tothe full story I think relates directly to the fact that, by this time, the restrictions tra-ditionally hedged around this narrative had, because of the institution of Christianityin the area, been significantly relaxed. Why the Trangap Oksapmin retained a ‘pré-chrétienne’ (2002, 142)2 version of the story while the Tekin Oksapmin later Christia-nised theirs I think is due to the fact that the ABMS mission was based in Tekin, whileTrangap has historically been the centre of government. The Tekin Oksapmin amongwhom I worked, therefore, had a much closer relationship with the mission and Chris-tianity, which explains why a lot of their myths have been creatively reconfigured.Rather than present Brutti’s pre-Christian version in its entirety it is more appropri-

ate to instead make mention of two details of the original either overlooked or not toldto Perey that figure importantly in my discussion of conflation below. Firstly, in itsopening phases the pre-Christian narrative also contains information regarding Daha-plan’s birth. As Brutti describes, Dahaplan’s mother asks her sister to fetch water from astream or river in the Tekin Valley (2002, 143). According to versions of the story I col-lected and also the opinions of my informants, this stream is known as Gumut, and lieshalfway between the Sambate and Ranimap areas in the lower Tekin Valley. The secondcrucial detail omitted by Perey is that Dahaplan, after travelling throughout theOksapmin territory with two of his brothers, arrives in the Lembanap area, where heinstructs his companions to kill him. He grasps two trees and at the moment whenhis brothers release their arrows he suddenly descends into the spirit world. The twobrothers accidentally kill each other and consequently join Dahaplan (Brutti andBoissiére 2002, 143). With this small, yet vital, supplementary information on thepre-Christian version of the story in place, I now consider the version told to me.The version of the story I collected was composed of three interwoven narratives

which together made up a total account of Dahaplan’s existence. Each of thesestories was known only by certain individuals within particular Oksapmin clans. Ihad to travel to the farthest corners of the Oksapmin territory and beyond toconsult these indigenous cosmologists and record their knowledge. The story of Daha-plan’s birth was told to me by an elder of the Waul clan; his life and death weredescribed to me by Ninsan of Mitianap; while an account of his death and afterlifewere given to me by Witi, a Towale (Akiapmin) elder living at Bopiago, a mixed com-munity of Asabano and Towale north of the Om River. Once back at my house inSambate, I painstakingly transcribed these recordings from the spoken Oksapmin orig-inal into written English with the assistance of my primary field assistant, JohnManden. Of the three written texts thereby produced, here I employ the first two,paying special attention to the second one describing the life and travels of this mythi-cal prophet, decisions made with respect both to the content as well as length of thenarratives. The first is presented in greatly abbreviated form and then, where noted,concatenated to the second, also somewhat abbreviated, which comprises the bulkof my account here.

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But first a note on context. The situations within which these stories were told to mewere of my own making; I sought out the individual concerned, arranged in conjunc-tion with them the time and place to meet, and then recorded their recitation. Mostoccurred in private settings with only four or five individuals present, often all male.The stories were told with the utmost gravity, in hushed yet earnest tones. These con-ditions prevailed whenever I heard a myth told by the Oksapmin, thus suggesting thesetting, mood, and audience I describe were typical of the genre more generally.

One day a woman named Apelya gave birth to a baby boy at a place called Gelhrumin the Bak Valley. She named the boy Titomyap [Dahaplan’s birth name]. News ofTitomyap’s birth spread through the Oksapmin area and in due course reached fourwomen: Filinip of the Waul clan, Waninip of the Nianing clan, Mahtia of the Diveheclan, and, lastly, Koasep of the Yentan clan. The four women travelled to Gelhrum.When they arrived, Apelya told the group to go and fetch water from Galilee, astream in the Tekin Valley.3 The four women carried out her request, travellingto Galilee, filling several containers from the stream and then returning toGelhrum. Once back in Gelhrum it became apparent that the substance thewomen had collected from Galilee was not water but oil [petroleum]. The fourwomen then returned home. Filinip, Apelya’s principal carer, married a mannamed Babylon after returning home.4

Once he had grown up, Dahaplan settled with his two brothers Isnom and Asnomand their dog Kulom at Yente, within the lower Tekin Valley. Each night beforegoing to sleep, Dahaplan would ask his brothers not to disturb him. The reasonfor this was that during his sleep Dahaplan would make spiritual travels betweenYente and Lembanap [the Oksapmin name for Lembana, an Om River settlementof a single great house of the Lembana people, who speak their own language(Lohmann 2000, 217)]. These subterranean travels were made via Galilee.5

One day, Dahaplan instructed his brothers to hunt for possum together with Kulom.Isnom and Asnom instead chose to hide at Sinwanet and watch their brother. Daha-plan began to climb a tree. As he moved up the tree, it grew taller, until it reached atremendous height. Using the tree’s flexibility, Dahaplan bent down to and visitedvarious communities in the area, where he stole taro, sugar cane, vegetables, andpossum. He then descended the tree and prepared a cooking pit (mumu).

After the mumu had finished cooking, Dahaplan climbed onto the roof of his houseand announced to all of his relatives and friends that many local people consideredhim a thief and wished him dead. These accusations made Dahaplan so ashamedthat he wanted to end his own life. Dahaplan’s kin proceeded to remove thecooked food from the mumu. To their astonishment, they saw that the small taroand possum earlier obtained had increased dramatically in size.

From Sinwanet the brothers could see the feast unfolding and decided to return. Thedog bounded ahead of the two brothers, and was greeted by Dahaplan. He asked thedog, ‘Have you all been hunting in the bush as I instructed you?’ He then betrayedtheir secret,‘No! You’ve all been hiding at Sinwanet!’ The brothers arrived, andbegan to eat. Dahaplan told them of his intention to die and his wish for them tocarry out the act.

At Dahaplan’s request, the group then travelled to several locations to commit thedeadly act only to have Dahaplan at each place lament that his brothers cannotkill him lest they offend local clans. Starting at Yente and moving north toward

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Lembanap, this dynamic was repeated at several locations before eventually arrivingat Kangdup, the entry point to the hanip da apti [spirit world]. Here he stood astridea small fissure in the earth and, grasping a tree with each of his arms, assumed theposition of a crucifix, with his two brothers standing on either side. Dahaplan issuedfinal orders to Isnom and Asnom to shoot. They counted down, ‘three, two, one’,and then released their arrows. However, right at that moment Dahaplan disap-peared into the earth, descending into the spirit world. This proved fatal forIsnom and Asnom, as the arrows intended for their elder brother instead crossedmid-air, Isnom’s killing Asnom and Asnom’s killing Isnom. The two younger broth-ers thus joined Dahaplan in the spirit world.

The content and local interpretations of this present-day narrative represent a confla-tion of elements of the original myth (collected by Perey and Brutti) with elements ofBible stories. Whether achieved through tacit association or overt explanation, parts ofthe two cultural traditions have been rendered isomorphic, thus creatively circumvent-ing the oppositions between indigenous and Christian religion presented by missioni-sation. The most important way that this takes place in this story is through theidentification of Dahaplan with Jesus. This is the main ‘correspondence’ betweenthe Bible and the original myth; both share a male protagonist around which thestory revolves. It is thus in and around this point of juncture that the most rigorousconflation has occurred.In the story and its interpretation by local people, the two figures are considered one

and the same; the Oksapmin have taken Jesus from the Bible and Dahaplan from theirpre-Christian story and fused them. Establishing an isomorphism between local ances-tral figures and Jesus has been one of the defining features of mythic conflationthroughout Melanesia (for other examples, see Gewertz and Errington 1991; Jorgensen2001; Rutherford 2006; Taylor 2010), and similar kinds of ‘identification’ betweenlocal and Christian figures have been identified across the world (Meyer 1994;Murphy 2012; Rountree 2011). The process of equating the two occurs both implicitlyand explicitly, and on a number of levels. That the two are often thought about as iden-tical was expressed to me by one local Oksapmin woman who stated to me that:

Jesus resides at Lembanap within the hanip dä äpti. Jesus is Dahaplan. Dahaplan isJesus. There is no difference between the two. I believe in the Bible, but I also believethat Dahaplan is real and is here.

This statement shows that the two figures have been conflated. As a direct result ofconverting to Christianity, the Oksapmin have equated the most important elementsof two different traditions—the prominent mythological figure Dahaplan with theMessiah, Jesus Christ—and thereby successfully negotiated mythological opposition.In the process, they have constructed a syncretic myth composed of both elementswhich emically transcends historical change.Ninsan, the man who narrated most of this story to me, also constructed an inter-

esting isomorphism between the two, in this case regarding the spiritual implicationsof their respective deaths for humankind.

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Dahaplan’s debt? It’s our responsibility. We owe him. Jesus, who died on the cross?He died for us. Dahaplan also died for us. He told us that through his death we haveincurred a great debt to him. When he died he took our lives and he went forever.

How or why Dahaplan’s death incurred a spiritual debt for humankind was notexplained to me by Ninsan and, from my perspective, certainly wasn’t an obviousdeduction from the narrative. But while from the content of the story it cannot beeasily shown that Dahaplan died for anyone, the fact remains that Ninsan, andlikely others, consider that his death, like Jesus’, did produce a debt for humankind.Again, we see aspects of the two characters’ lives conflated with each other; Dahaplanand Jesus merge towards a single figure, the difference between them is dissolvedthrough imputing to the former crucial characteristics of the latter. Dahaplan’sdeath and Jesus’ death are conflated into the final syncretic product which reveals evi-dence of both. What is happening is more than simply updating an existing story withChristian content; it is finding points of correspondence between the mythic traditionsand using them to make two initially separate entities into one.

We also see that this conflationary process acts at the margins of awareness (Stephen1989); it is posited as given, not as the result of any mixing or matching. When I askedNinsan, or any other person who happened to have been listening, about the Christiancontent of a myth, the reply was invariably ‘This is the way the myth has always been,since the time of our grandfathers, long before the missionaries came’. It is thereforeplaced outside human provenance and embedded in the ancestral past. Further, sincelocal people consider their stories in this way, they also feel they have always known ofChristianity.

Dahaplan is conflated with Jesus also in the story’s content. The pre-Christian nar-rative describes how, in anticipation of his death, Dahaplan grasped two trees, armsoutstretched, before descending into the spirit world. The Bible describes how Jesuswas nailed to a wooden cross, referred to in the Tok Pisin Bible as ‘diwai koros’.These two corresponding events, I argue, have been conflated in the present-dayversion of the narrative I collected. The outward appearance of Dahaplan’s deathhas not changed from the original story, but its local interpretation has rendered itequivalent to Christ’s. When telling me the story, Ninsan explicitly posited this confla-tion through stating that Dahaplan died on a ‘diwai kros’, the phrase found in the TokPisin Bible for the cross on which Jesus was nailed. This syncretic ‘mytheme’ thusdemonstrates the conflation of two corresponding mythic elements. Again, what wesee is that elements of Dahaplan’s death and Jesus’ death are conflated, thus creatingthe current singular composite element. This particular example can be usefully com-pared to how the neighbouring Telefolmin constructed their own isomorphismbetween Jesus and the mythical figure of Tibulam through focusing on similaritiesbetween the crucifixion and the latter having been bound to the yet tree when killed(Jorgensen 2001, 115).

Then there is the presence in the story of a name taken directly from the Bible. It willbe recalled that after giving birth to Dahaplan, Apelya instructs her four carers to go

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and fetch some water from a stream called Galilee. This is the name of the area withinwhich Jesus’ ministry was undertaken in the Bible. In the original story (and in every-day life), this stream is known as Gumut. It is an unusually deep, dark, cold, and stillbody of water which the Oksapmin believe to possess special magical qualities. On theone hand, a dip in Gumut is thought to heal and replenish the sick but, on the otherhand, many Oksapmin fear the stream as an abode of supernatural forces (sup). In anycase, it is thought to be a special place imbued with considerable sacred power. Withinthe Bible, Galilee is considered to be a place of paramount spiritual importance and,like Gumut, is an area within which feats of healing took place, most notably whenJesus cured a blind man. Seizing upon this vivid correspondence, the Oksapminhave conflated Gumut of the original story with the Biblical Galilee, thus creating apowerful magical synergy between the two places as well as establishing an ancestralprecedent for Christianity in the Oksapmin mythical past. Two correspondingelements are rendered isomorphic, in the process creating a new syncretic mythicform, namely, the Galilee/Gumut referred to in the current story. Working correspon-dences are identified and then exploited by conflation as a means of collapsing cosmo-logical opposition. Gumut and Galilee become fused, with their shared sacredattributes acting as the cultural glue.A final point concerns the way in which the three brothers entered the Oksapmin

spirit world, or hanip da apti. The pre-Christian narrative states simply that Dahaplantactfully deceives his two brothers who end up shooting each other and all three thendescend together into the spirit world. Then consider that in Matthew 7, 13–14, Jesusinstructs his followers to ‘(13) Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate andbroad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. (14) But small isthe gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it’. Both sets ofmythic material thus offer explanations about how their respective actors enter theafterlife. These corresponding mythemes have been conflated in the minds of someOksapmin. After telling me the story, Ninsan explained to me that there are two‘roads’ leading to the hanip da apti, one wide and easy to follow, the other narrowand difficult. Dahaplan and his two brothers had apparently followed the latter.Ninsan’s interpretation of the current story thus represents the conflation of the cir-cumstances of Dahaplan’s death in the pre-Christian version with Christ’s as describedin the Bible. Dahaplan, the indigenous Jesus, enters a local Heaven by means identicalto those stipulated by his Biblical equivalent.From the above discussion it should be clear that the Oksapmin have used various

mechanisms, ranging from retrospective interpretation to narrative reconstruction, toconflate elements of the story of Dahaplan with elements of the Bible. Correspondingfigures, important places, and story events are the points of juncture through whichconflation occurs. Both traditions have a key male protagonist and we see that thetwo are rendered isomorphic; both also have places of sacred power that are madeidentical, and so forth. It is not a perfect symmetry of form or meaning, but adequatefor joining two sets of otherwise opposed cultural material. Out of the process of con-flation is created new syncretic elements revealed in the current story. But to truly

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understand what is going on we need to look at the situation through local eyes. LocalOksapmin people do not acknowledge that any conflation has taken place: mythic con-flation has produced its own erasure. The syncretic product is not seen as the result of aprocess, but is expressed as unquestioned reality. The myth, its content, and thus thefusion of Christianity and indigeneity, are considered traditional and encompassing.

The Story of the Sun

Similarly intriguing ties between the Christian and local worlds have been constructedin another of the main traditional Oksapmin stories, ‘the story of the sun (atan)’. TheTelefolmin also have several myths that feature the sun (Telefol: atanim), and thereappear to be interesting commonalities between their stories and those of the Oksap-min which I point out later in the discussion (Brumbaugh 1990; Jorgensen 2001, 114–115). Perey recorded a version of the pre-Christian story during his fieldwork, whichhe presented in his Ph.D. thesis as ‘Why the Kweptana People are Called Children ofthe Sun’ (1973, 154–157). In abbreviated form, it is as follows:

There was a famine. After it a brother and a sister were still alive. The brother wentto work in the garden every day, but the sister stayed at home making herself lookpretty. The brother was suspicious of her, and watched her.

She went to the Om River. She went to a place where there was a big stone. She hadleaned on the stone, and was moving against it. There was a man in the stone whowas making love to her.

The brother ran back to his house. Then the sister became pregnant, and had a child.

Soon she went to Ketaba, and one man said to her, ‘It is good that you came, becauseyou would light the torches to help me hunt frogs at night? And who would givethem to me? Now you go light the torches and I will stay with the baby’.

She killed many frogs all night until dawn. Then she returned and asked, ‘Where ismy baby?’

He said, ‘It is under the house’.

‘You can go get it’, he said. She went to get it, and when she picked it up, the back ofits neck was as hot as a fire.

He grew up – killed men of Ogbei and ate them.

The men of Ogbei tried to kill him. But he took one of their women and his sisterand came back to the Bak River near Kweptana. The place was Yeliga.

At this place he said, ‘The Ogbei men want to kill us, so we ran away’.

He built a sacred house [awam ap; haus tamberan] and said, ‘You Yeliga people gointo the house, and I will stay outside’.

They all slept that night in the sacred house. It began to stink. They looked under thehouse and saw a dead body. The man had killed a Lindana man.

All the people said ‘This is not a good man! He kills and eats people. We will killhim!’

He heard and ran away. He went up the mountain there, and went to the sky. Hewent to the sun. His rope remained behind, though. Kweptana, Lela, Gektama,are settlements of the children of the sun.

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The version I recorded is similar in overall structure to Perey’s but the evidence ofChristianisation is immediately apparent. Ninsan was again the narrator on thisoccasion, telling the story late one night in a relative’s house, where myself and anumber of other men had gathered.

There was a woman called Maria. She lived at Bukte with her brother [unnamed]. Atnight, Maria would sneak out of the house to a cave known as Daklap. Her brothereventually decided to spy on her.

One night, Maria arrived at Daklap unaware she was being observed by her brother.From out of the cave irradiated an immensity of light. Upon closer inspection thiswas revealed to be Maria being penetrated by God’s gigantic phallus. During sex,God deposited a Bible inside Maria’s body, placing it immediately next to, or as asubstitute for, her heart. Maria later delivered this Bible as she would a child. Atdawn, Maria’s brother started his journey home. At sunrise, his sister returned. Iteventually became apparent that Maria was pregnant.

Several evenings later, Maria absconded. Maria’s brother grew cold and went outsideto break some firewood. He heard Maria’s calling for his aid. He ignored her andwent to sleep. He awoke the next morning and walked to the main settlement toask about Maria. The people referred him to the settlement of Damabut as alikely source of reliable information. This was repeated at several places. Then thepeople of Lakasa informed Maria’s brother that he should ask the people ofKunte. This group said she was within the immediate vicinity. Her brotherlearned that she had been prohibited from settling in the main camp and wasinstead offered a shelter used to house pigs. Maria’s brother walked to the house.He entered to see Maria seated on the floor with a baby boy cradled in her arms.

Maria procured a long worm from her thigh and placed it on her brother’s chest.This turned out to be a ruler. She subsequently obtained a leaf of the kindwomen usually sit upon when delivering children, which she also gave to herbrother, who then returned to Bukte with the two items. News of Maria’s pregnancyreached her two younger sisters Martha and Mandala, who decided to cook somewild pandanus for mother and child. Back at Kunte, Maria’s infant son expressedhis wish to visit his uncle (Maria’s brother). He asked her to make for him astring bag (ung) and a bow and arrow. Maria presented to her son the bow andarrow. While giving it to him it changed into a shotgun. He then announced thathe wished to go and visit his uncle at Bukte.

After the boy had left, Martha and Mandala arrived. When Maria informed the pairof the boy’s excursion, they insisted the three of them immediately depart for Bukte.On arrival, the women asked: ‘Has the boy come?’ One individual replied in theaffirmative and pointed to a noisy crowd. The three women beheld the youngboy seated amidst an attentive audience. They then overheard Maria’s son questionhis audience: ‘All of you, the family of my uncle, call the name of the leaf belongingto the tree from which you collect the posts for your houses’. He also asked them thename of the floor and doorway of houses. The group feigned ignorance and refusedto answer. The boy then proceeded to tell them that the leaf of the tree from whichhouse posts were typically obtained he named tesde faste. The floor of the houses inwhich people lived he named Galilee. The doorway of a house he namedGesthemane.

The boy then bade farewell to his mother and proceeded to climb a large tree knownas beek. At the top, he stated he would now return home to the place where the sun

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sets. Through his ascent, the boy had described to the people the arc of the sun’sdaily path, moving to the height of the sky before descending to the horizon. Hethen said ‘I am now going to Kulamul [a settlement within the Tekap area, in theextreme west of the Oksapmin territory]’, and then disappeared.

At Kulamul, the boy took a handful of corn seed and said that ‘wherever I cast theseseeds the Kweptan clan shall proliferate’. He then flung the seed a great distance inevery direction. From Kulamul he traversed south into the Bak Valley, which he fol-lowed east to Duban [a settlement situated nearby the Strickland Gorge in the south-east corner of the Oksapmin territory]. Once at Duban he ascended to the sky, wherehe became incarnated as the sun.

It is obvious that we are dealing with a very different story than that collected by Perey.Firstly, it can also be seen that almost all names have been changed. On the one hand, alot of the names refer to local places within theOksapmin area. But, on the other hand, itis obvious that some of the nameswithin the story I collected represent amore profoundkind of mythic transformation of the original. Maria, Martha, God, the Bible, Galilee,and Gesthemane; this collection of names and objects draw attention to the cosmologi-cal shift produced by Christianity. It is also important to note the mention of both ashotgun and a ruler, symbols of Western force and knowledge. The mere presence ofthese people, places, and things in the story is enough to support the argument thatChristianisation has occurred but we need to leave this general level of analysis andinvestigate the character and implications of these transformations.

The story’s most important character is Maria, named from the Tok Pisin word forthe Virgin Mary, Jesus’ mother. The leading female character in the original story hasbeen conflated with the Virgin Mary of the Bible to create the Maria that appears in thecurrent version of the myth. In the story we also learn that Maria has three siblings: anunnamed brother and two sisters, Martha and Mandela. The gospels of Luke (10, 38–42) and John (11, 1–7, 12, 1–3) contain brief mention of Mary and Martha, a pair ofsisters living at Bethany with their brother Lazarus. In the pre-Christian story collectedby Perey, the main female protagonist has two siblings, a brother and a sister. Thesesibling relationships thus constitute an important correspondence between the twomythic narratives and have consequently been conflated in the current version ofthe myth, at the same time making Mary of Bethany synonymous with the VirginMary. However, rather than making one-to-one equivalences as in the case of Daha-plan and Jesus, here the Oksapmin have conflated sets of relationships; it is not twoindividuals being conflated but two sibling groups, at the same time substituting thetwo Biblical Marys. The group of siblings in the original story are fused with the modi-fied sibling group of the Bible. This process has generated the syncretic set of characterswe see in the contemporary narrative. Through this complicated act of mythic confla-tion, the Oksapmin negotiate cosmological opposition as they establish an ancestralprecedent for Christianity; they reveal to themselves through this myth that the char-acters described in the original story are actually identical to their Biblical equivalents.Similar kinds of narrative reconstruction using these figures have been described byReithofer for the Somaip (2006, 345).

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More intriguing are Maria’s relationships with other characters in the story, particu-larly God and her son, since it is within these interactions that the key events unfold. Itwill be recalled that Perey’s account describes a woman moving against a stone, withinwhich a man made love to her, consequently making her pregnant (1973, 154–155).Then consider that the Bible describes how the Virgin Mary is miraculously ‘foundto be with child through the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 1, 18–21). As with the otherexamples discussed throughout this article, here again we see a vivid correspondencebetween the two mythic narratives, namely, the lead female character becoming preg-nant by supernatural means. These narrative correspondences have consequently beenconflated, thereby generating the current syncretic form of Maria and God copulatingin the cave. This aspect of conflation thus operates in conjunction with Mary’s intro-duction into the sibling relationships mentioned immediately above.As described in the Bible, the principal result of Mary and God’s union is the birth of

Jesus Christ. The Oksapmin rendering of this event complicates things somewhat,firstly because the son that Maria bears, while prodigious, is not considered to be anequivalent to or antecedent of Jesus and, secondly, because in addition to a son,Maria also gives birth to a Bible. But even if the Oksapmin did not conflate Maria’sson with Jesus, certainly they attempted to recreate the same context of his birth. Itwill be recalled that when Maria arrives at Kunte, she is settled in a pig house,where she later gives birth. The connection between Maria giving birth in a housefor pigs and the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus in a manger is far from accidentaland marks another way in which synergies have been constructed between traditionaland Christian mythology. The pattern of conflation is again reproduced, whereby suf-ficiently similar attributes of the respective stories are used as points of fusion throughwhich cosmological contradiction is circumvented. The woman giving birth in theoriginal story becomes conflated with the birth of Christ in a manger. The endresult is an Oksapmin nativity scene depicting Maria giving birth to the Bible in theOksapmin bush.The issue of the Bible is more complex and, while a digression from our main argu-

ment of conflation, is one worth briefly pursuing. According to both the narrator andthe audience of the myth, this Bible is seen as an indigenous manual for completesocio-economic development. In it people could learn not only how to lead goodlives but also how to build planes, cars, large houses, roads, and so forth.Why, then, is there such a conspicuous absence of this material wealth among the

Oksapmin? ‘Because the book was stolen from us’, my informants collectively retorted.Not only did they maintain it was stolen, but they identified its thief as Keith Bricknell,the ABMS missionary that first evangelised the Oksapmin.6 An interesting sub-plotthus begins to emerge: From the union of God and Maria in our ancestral past wasproduced a Bible. That Bible contained the guidelines not only for a moral life butalso a materially prosperous and technologically complex one. However, this bookwas unfairly taken from us by a white outsider. Ever since we have been resigned toleading the lives of subsistence farmers while the wealth and technology describedin our Bible is enjoyed by white people.

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This kind of thinking is definitive of cargo movements across Melanesia (Lawrence1964, Lattas 1992). Throughout the region local people have sought to explain the discre-pancy in wealth between themselves and Europeans by claiming that the latter haveunfairly taken and prospered from knowledge and skills that were originally theirs. Thisis not an isolated case in the Min area either. Jorgensen has described a similar cargoisticmythic transformation among theTelefolmin,whereby the errantbehaviourof themythi-cal actor Tibulam left local people in the same kind of predicament (2001, 110–111).

In this respect it is useful to recall the point atwhichMaria creates a ruler and shotgun. Inthe sameway that theOksapminconstruct the local originsof socio-economicdevelopmentas embodied in their own Bible, they make a similar claim for the origins of modern edu-cation and force through the interposition of both the ruler and shotgun. These items, likethe systems they stand for, namely Christianity andwesternmodernity, originally belongedto the Oksapmin. Their subsequent institution under colonisation and missionisation arethus locally seen as the elaboration of a latent essence that was there all along.

Returning to the main argument, the final aspect of the story that warrants attentionin terms of conflation is the enumeration of names by Maria’s son. During his speech,the boy reveals to the gathered throng that the floors and doorways of their houses arecalled Galilee and Gethsemane. Galilee is a name already used by the Oksapmin in thestory of Dahaplan, while Gesthemane, the garden to which Jesus and his disciples retireafter the Last Supper, appears for the first time. This act of naming reveals the confla-tion of these Biblical places with the names in the original story. Since the originalnames were not collected by Perey, it is impossible to determine the kind of conflationthat has taken place and what type of correspondence has been utilised. Precisely whythese two names appear in this context and linked to structural attributes of Oksapmindwellings is thus unclear, though the cosmological significance of domestic space iscertainly a relevant consideration (cf. Bourdieu 1973).

Conclusion

The thrust of this article has been to describe and analyse the process of mythic con-flation among the Oksapmin and to thereby shed some new light upon understandingsregarding the relationship between myth and religious change more generally.Throughout the world, missionisation and evangelisation has precipitated theabrupt encounter between Christian and indigenous religion. The Oksapmin havenegotiated this meeting by emphasising and constructing commonality between thetwo worlds. This contrasts with their Urapmin and Asabano neighbours, and theglobal Pentecostal and charismatic Christian community more generally, who haveeither ‘adopted [Christianity] rather than attempt to assimilate it or put it in theservice of a transformative reproduction of their own culture’ (Robbins 2004, 32) oracted ‘zealously to repudiate all ceremonial life’ (Tuzin 1997, 33). So, although theOksapmin emphasis on congruence between competing cosmological traditions isnot new or unique, it provides an interesting counterpoint to recent disciplinary incli-nations toward interpreting conversion to Christianity in terms of rupture.

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In a similar way it also figures interestingly in relation to Robbins’ argument thatanthropology has historically been a ‘science of continuity’ and that to adequatelyunderstand breakages and ruptures of the kind introduced through Pentecostal Chris-tianity it must develop a vocabulary to conceptualise discontinuity also (2003, 222).While Christian worship in Oksapmin is not particularly charismatic, in these termsI might still be seen as pandering to the continuist spirit within anthropology. Ihope my analysis of Oksapmin mythic conflation has largely negated a debateframed in this way. Indeed, to understand the material as evidence of either continuityor discontinuity is to overlook the fundamentally creative and innovative nature of theconflationary process and of social change more generally (Lohmann 2010). Continu-ity and discontinuity occur simultaneously as new cultural material emerges out of thesystematic collision of two cultural worlds.Another key point to have emerged from my discussion is that the syncretic pro-

ducts of conflation are treated by the Oksapmin as ancestral and beyond directhuman agency; ‘this is the way it’s always been’; ‘this is how my grandfather told itto me’; it was these kinds of answers that were given to me whenever I enquired asto the origins of a myth’s obviously (to me) Christian content. So, if throughmythic conflation the Oksapmin, like other groups, have created an ‘ancestral pre-cedent’ for Christianity, then in important respects they are also claiming to havingalways been Christian (Taylor 2010). As Eliade famously stated, ‘to relate a sacredhistory is equivalent to revealing a mystery’ (1957, 95); the origins of contemporaryOksapmin Christianity become manifest is an array of condensed and vivid mythicalimagery. Rather than conversion entailing a repudiation of tradition, it has ratherrevised and validated it in conjunction with Christianity.Mythic conflation to overcome cosmological opposition is not new; but, there

seems to be an apparent lack of conceptual unity surrounding its analysis, as withsyncretic forms more generally (Fardon 2000; Robbins 2004, 5). It appears that inmuch of the literature on syncretism it is conflation that is taking place, but anthro-pologists have often devised their own vocabulary to understand it. The terms usedsometimes lack processual specificity; we hear of merging, blending, integration,matching, hybridity, and so forth, but we less frequently are shown exactly howtwo cultural worlds are being synthesised. With ‘mythic conflation’ I have thustaken up these authors’ directive to move beyond describing syncretism to actuallyunderstanding the mechanisms through which such cultural innovation operates.I simply suggest that it be considered a relevant term that anthropologists mightdraw upon to shed new light upon a specific kind of mythological transformationwithin contexts of social change, particularly as conduced by the introduction ofChristianity.

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited greatly from the comments received upon earlier drafts by Roger Lohmann,Alan Rumsey, and the journal’s referees.

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Notes

[1] Throughout the text, Tok Pisin terms are underlined while those in local languages appearitalicised.

[2] Of course the possibility exists that the ‘pre-Christian’ version collected by Brutti in some waymodifies that collected by Perey 30 years earlier, but the essentially similar narrative structuresuggests whatever change took place was minimal and that Brutti’s version is simply a ‘better’version of Perey’s.

[3] A small, deep, and very cold stream in the Tekin Valley called Gumut.[4] This first paragraph constitutes an abbreviated version of the first narrative told to me regarding

Dahaplan’s birth. All of what follows is taken from the second narrative recited by Ninsan con-cerning the prophet’s life, travels, and death. As can be seen, neither story describes Dahaplan’sadolescence.

[5] This relates to the Oksapmin belief that spiritual beings often travel along rivers and streams.[6] Bricknell has stated to me that he does not know of the existence of such a book.

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