The Shark God: A Modern Travel Narrative

December 31, 2007

It was an odd choice for my winter break reading, but I don't think I could have chosen better than The Shark God: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific by Charles Montgomery. I have a lingering fascination with the South Pacific and this book gave me a clear sense of what it would be like to travel through this area.. and it had the added advantage of an author who asked the kinds of questions that fascinate me: What do people believe? What stories do they tell? How do they understand their past?

Most impressive about this book is the path it charts toward a successful modern travel narrative. Montgomery refuses to spend all his time searching for a pristine vision of the past.. or bemoaning its absence. With equal success he does not fall into the postmodern trap of delighting in the cultural hall of mirrors or smirking at native attempts to profit from the past. The world of the 18th and 19th centuries may be gone, but that does not mean a complex and valuable cultural system cannot be discerned here.

The traveler today needs sharp eyes and a fine sensibility to spot the bloom of the new in the midst of a landscape marked by globalization and its homogenizing force. Even as a place comes to look like every other place, a certain mixed individuality can take root. Discovering this is a more difficult task than that which confronted earlier travelers that witnessed a novel culture with minimum outside contact. All that early explorer had to do was describe verbatim the world as he saw it.. and that record was historically valuable. The traveler today has to be understand the ways that the common forms of globalization are being manipulated and combined into novel patterns.

In the case of the South Pacific, the traveler must see that beneath the church attendance and Evangelicalization there are powerful local beliefs and values that are being maintained and transformed. Toward the end of The Shark God we get a passage that throws light on all this complexity beneath the surface of what seems like a homogenized world:

The central struggle in Melanesia was no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God had pretty much won the battle. Paganism was on its last legs. The old spirits survived only in a few last pockets of resistance, like the wounded remnants of an army at the end of a long siege... But the old way of thinking, the way of mana, had survived and flourished within the Christian churches. The real fight now was the tug-of-war between mana and mysticism; between those who tried to claim and direct supernatural power... and those who were certain that the heart of the Christian myth was self-sacrifice and divine love. [345]

This passage brings to a judicious conclusion observations made throughout the book. Sure there are churches that look and feel like churches all over the world.. and the Christian vocabulary may dominate the talk. But underneath that sameness is a difference in meaning. The Christian terms have been infiltrated by pagan values, but not to the degree that they are simple conduits for the old religion. No, by the mixture of old pagan values and traditional Christian vocabulary something new and complex comes about.

Parts of this book could be annoying.. let me grant that. I found the theory of myth that Montgomery developed to be not so helpful.. and the section where he breaks in with a Star Wars analogy involving Obi Wan Kenobi was terrible! But putting that aside he shows himself to have the patience to find layers of meaning in a place that presents itself as simple.. and that is valuable.