Abstract
In a previous review of mine about Hilary B. P. Bagshaw’s Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin: Reason and Faith (2013) I argued that Bagshaw had offered a rather one-sided account of Bakhtin’s oeuvre and drastically misconstrued the notion of “dialogism” and its value for the study of religions. Serendipitously, the next book in the scattered and rather disorderly pile on my desk is interested, with Bakhtin, in language in motion and performance or, in Bakhtin’s terms, in “dialogue” (3, 8–10, 92–93, 103, 111). More precisely, Matt Tomlinson’s interests are in speech and speech patterns and their capacities for illocutionary and perlocutionary affect. In the preface he states that his main ethnographic research method is “to record and analyse speech” concentrating particularly on “textual patterns” (ix). Elsewhere, he summarizes his approach as one concerned with “understand people’s expectations of ritual effectiveness,” paying close attention “to the distinct patterns people create as they articulate signs and texts in performance” (1). Tomlinson specifies four such constitutive patterns: “sequence, conjunction, contrast and substitution” (2). Through an ethnographically rich analysis he invites the reader to explore complex discourses that point to the implication of Fijian Christianities in debates about indigeneity, authenticity and ethnicity, power, authority, colonialism and mission, and the ways in which particular forms of address interpolate different audiences, subjects, and publics.
However, the book is also an exploration of ritual and Tomlinson focuses not on ritual as a code that is performed by locals (and then deciphered by anthropologists) but rather as a site and occasion of “motion” in which speech “patterns emerge interactively in performance” (10). Based on field work conducted in Fiji off and on between 1996 and 2011, this is a sophisticated contribution both to the growing field of the anthropology of Christianity and to wider debates in anthropology on ritual—but also to history, religious studies, and sociology. In the remainder of this review I will flesh out further the four sites and occasions chosen by Tomlinson to exemplify the four patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution before concluding with some further remarks about Tomlinson’s productive engagement with the work of Bakhtin.
Tomlinson draws on fieldwork he conducted at a Pentecostal rally in Suva in late 2008 to explore the speech pattern “sequence.” He conducts a close analysis of the sermon delivered that evening by Brother Kenneth Colgrove and identifies a consistent pattern of “declaration–promise–action” (25). Tomlinson describes the pattern in terms of loops, oscillations, and cycles that “lays the groundwork for his own [Colgrove’s] performative authority and the audience’s response to it” (26). He argues that the spinning structures that Colgrove’s sermon generates need to be understood as an instance of “entextualization” (47) whereby the sermon itself becomes a transposable structuring structure that can be moved and redeployed in new contexts.
To approach patterns of “conjunction” or what he also terms “chiasmus” (50), Tomlinson explores the complex interpolations of communion and kava-drinking. In communion the body of Christ is incorporated into the participant just as the participant is incorporated into the body of Christ. Likewise, in kava-drinking the participant ingests a key symbol of Fijian cultural ordering and in doing so they incorporate themselves into that order through drinking the kava. The fact that kava-drinking is generally not seen as a legitimate substitute for communion (and vice versa) reveals some of the complex tensions between indigenous culture and Christianity and some of the strategies Fijians utilize to manage these tensions (e.g. 66–67).
To explore the speech pattern “contrast” or, specifically “a fractally recursive pattern of entextualization” (72) (as found in the pairs public/private and life/death), Tomlinson takes late 19th-century missionary accounts of “good deaths” as his point of departure. A good death was one where, on the death bed, the Fijian Christian convert attended carefully to the words spoken before expiry, thereby creating and pointing to a specific relation of words to inner states. Accounts of generic good deaths circulated among metropolitan publics while stories about bad deaths (and ancestral spirits) were compelled to travel along private routes of circulation.
Finally, to explore the speech pattern “substitution” Tomlinson explores the discourse of Commodore Vereqe “Frank” Bainimarama, coup-leader and now self-appointed Prime Minister of Fiji. Central to this “monologic” discourse in the service of arbitrary state power is the notion that if everyone says the same thing, soon enough they will think and act the same (93). Monologue of course must always betray its dialogic origins precisely in the speech-acts, utterances, and discourses it wishes to silence or obliterate.
It is here that Tomlinson draws most heavily from Bakhtin’s work, although the citations are crafted in such a way as to contribute to the analysis of “substitution” rather than point to any broader applications of Bakhtin to the study of religions. Nevertheless, Bakhtin’s productive deployment in a discussion of ritual speech-acts framed in terms of dialogic performativity points both to Tomlinson’s skilful analysis of complex ethnographic materials and to the generative import of Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue to ongoing debates in the study of religions. This is a well-written and accessible book, which belongs in any anthropology course addressing ethnographies of Oceania or Christianity or indeed courses that address foundational terms in the study of religion such as ritual.