The argument that contemporary examples of witchcraft belief demonstrate an alternative form of modern subjectivity has been doubted by many anthropologists, who claim that so‐called modern witchcraft is often only a reflection of traditional cultural epistemologies. In Auhelawa (Milne Bay province, Papua New Guinea), new beliefs about witchcraft suggest that the epistemic basis for knowledge is changing. Auhelawa believe that Western society and its wealth and technology were created by the renunciation of witchcraft. Conversely they believe that their own relative material poverty is sustained by the recalcitrance of witches who are holding back their invisible wealth. I argue that witchcraft imagery takes this form because Christianity has reshaped the cultural conception of personhood, space, and time, detaching witchcraft from the ethos of kinship. In this context, Western wealth symbolizes witchcraft as a moral failing. Résumé De nombreux anthropologues ne sont pas d’accord avec l’affirmation que les exemples contemporains de croyance à la sorcellerie démontrent une forme différente de subjectivité moderne. Ils affirment que cette sorcellerie dite « moderne » n’est souvent que le reflet des épistémologies culturelles traditionnelles. À Auhelawa (province de Milne Bay, Papouasie‐Nouvelle‐Guinée), de nouvelles croyances entourant la sorcellerie suggèrent que la base épistémique est en train de changer. Les Auhelawa croient que la société occidentale, avec sa fortune et sa technologie, a pu naître grâce à la renonciation à la sorcellerie. À l’inverse, ils croient que leur propre pauvreté matérielle est entretenue par le refus des sorciers de se dessaisir de leurs biens invisibles. L’auteur affirme que l’imagerie de la sorcellerie prend cette forme parce que le christianisme a remodelé la conception culturelle de la personne, de l’espace et du temps, détachant la sorcellerie de l’éthos de la parenté. Dans ce contexte, la fortune occidentale symbolise la sorcellerie comme une défaillance morale.
In Melanesian pidgin languages, wantok means someone with a similar origin as oneself, and connotes a familiarity and mutual solidarity. Wantok has also become a watchword of politics and elite discourse on the Pacific Islands' political and social development, where it is a figure of corruption, clientelism, and the lingering influence of tribal identity. Even among grassroots people, wantok sociality is common, especially in urban places, but wantok talk tends to paint the wantok as a drain and burden. In this paper, I argue that when people perform wantok status they juxtapose village and town as inversions. They thereby create familiar relationships in uncertain situations, but also posit intimacy as inimical to the idea of modernity as embodied in towns. This suggests that the wantok idiom draws upon a particularly segmentary logic of relatedness in which solidarity is relative to difference of varying scales. In so doing, wantoks transform the nature of the kinship ties which inform them. As evidence, I examine debates over urbanisation in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and ethnographic observations of a ruralurban nexus of Normanby Island and Alotau in Milne Bay Province, PNG.
The Auhelawa people of Normanby Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) typically observe the death of an individual through a series of feasts in which the lineage of the deceased and its lateral relatives exchange food and perform rituals of mourning. Recently, a number of people have decided to reject all forms of ‘custom’ in favor of a practice of ‘Christian custom’ in which no food is exchanged and no rituals are performed. This paper examines the way people view custom and its Christian alternative. It argues that the basis for Christian forms of mortuary feasting is a shift away from thinking of feasts in terms of reciprocity and towards thinking of them in terms of traditional customary rules. In this context, active church members have begun to represent the absence of markers of custom as itself a marker of an alternative Christian custom. I argue that this reformulation of the relationship of custom and change is meant to give concrete form to the value of Christian individualism as the basis for sociality. The paper then concludes that in order to explain historical changes in ritual systems, the study of ritual needs to examine ritual in relation to the values that underlie it.
This article examines the relationship between Christian worship and the production of religious identity among Auhelawa speakers of Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea. Auhelawa people live in a society in which a locally developed form of Christianity has emerged from a long engagement with missionaries. In the colonial era, missionaries spoke in terms of light and darkness to mediate their contradictory aims of both authentic personal conversion and total social change. Today Auhelawa believe that their society has been changed, and that this change entails a new way of thinking as well as acting, though like the missionaries they also struggle to express the relationship between the two. Viewing themselves as already converted, Auhelawa today use an ideology of ‘one mind’—unity in purpose which is subjectively felt and outwardly expressed—to resolve how their collective worship relates to individual belief. This framing of ritual, embedded in church prayer and music, however, is always incomplete. I argue this not only points to an important step in the process of formation of congregations, but also suggests why Christianity globally is both unitary yet also so strikingly diverse.
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