Prehistory of the study of religionsT
HE PREHISTORY OF STUDIES INreligion in Australia, New Zealand, and
the Pacific Islands begins as far in the past as human beings possessed the
ability to communicate, and wanted to communicate with others, by whatever
means, about abstract matters including ideas about extramundane realities
or religion.^1 Speaking to others outside of one’s immediate socio-cultural
group demands a framework for understanding oneself. In our own times, we
know that sacred stories differ among Australian Aboriginal people, for
example, or among the people of the New Guinea Highlands. How did
members of different groups speak to others of these differences in the past?
And when outsiders such as the Macassan fishermen and traders came to
Aboriginal camps, say in the Northern Territory of Australia, did they talk
about religious matters and tell their stories one to another, whether out of
curiosity or to better understand those with whom they were trading?
Storytelling might not be judged as attaining the same level of sophistication
as formal academic enquiry. However, to choose a story and then to tell it in
a fashion so that another person from a different tribe or cultural group
understands it, using whatever extra props might be appropriate to draw out
the meaning more clearly for those unaccustomed both to the story itself and
to conventions of storytelling readily understood in the originating group,
demands a sophisticated level of analysis of the problems in communicating
the story and subsequent problem-solving in order to tell it effectively. Here
the lines are somewhat porous between what one might identify as studies in
religion or religious studies and theology.
All three ‘sections’ of the geographical location under consideration here
have a similar relatively recent history of major European incursion into
indigenous territory. Major incursions came in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, with the focus on trade, political gain, or missionary effort. Not all
of the locations were of equal importance. The simple fact of the vast number
of islands and their languages made this a pragmatic choice. Breward (2001:
vii) gives the following figures for population and language varieties for this
region: ‘Populations vary from 2,000 in Niue to 4,000,000 in Papua New
Guinea, with substantial populations also in Fiji (775,000), Solomon islands
(368,000), the two Samoas (223,000), French Polynesia (218,000), and
Vanuatu (164,000)... The indigenous peoples of the region had c.1,500
languages... .’ Garry Trompf (Swain and Trompf 1995: 166) comments: ‘In
each great island complex, interchange with outsiders was typically concen-
trated on recognized ports-of-call, and various outliers tended to go unnoticed,
until missionaries were ready to show an interest in reaching new enclaves of
lost souls.’
When incursions came to these areas from European explorers, colonizers
and missionaries, the indigenous people were interrogated and observed1111
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