The Kula of the Gospels: Christianity, Magic, and Exchange in the Trobriand Islands Sergio Jarillo INTRODUCTION:CONTEXTUALIZING CHRISTIANITY IN THE TROBRIAND ISLANDS Engaged in regular trade with Europeans from the nineteenth century, the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea have an ongoing tradition of intercultural encounters (Connelly , ). 1 Whalers, explorers, trad- ers, colonial officers, tourists, and missionaries have been weaving rela- tional networks with Trobrianders for well over a hundred years. Early accounts are witness to the Trobrianders’ predisposition to exchange things with dimdims, as foreigners are known in Kiriwina, the main Trobriand Island. 2 These exchanges, though, are not to be seen as simple transactions in artifacts and commodities. They also involved concepts and schemas attached to the things exchanged, transforming along the way those very objects that circulated together with people. Cultural encounters entail not only physical and conceptual mobility but also reciprocal efforts of translation and adaptation to prepare a common ground of interaction where difference and similarity can meet. The Trobrianders’ capacity to adopt and adapt foreign sociocultural elements encompasses material forms and more abstract ideas, ranging from local objects that imitate foreign ones (Jarillo ) to native versions of Western socioeconomic structures and practices (Kasaipwalova ; Leach , ). These appropriations are best epitomized by the appro- priation of cricket, the British colonial game par excellence. Brought in by Methodist missionaries, cricket was soon turned into an affirmation of The Contemporary Pacific, Volume , Number , – ©  by University of Hawai‘i Press 