‘God Was Here First’: Value, Hierarchy, and Conversion in a Melanesian Christianity

MacDonald, Fraser

doi:10.1080/00141844.2018.1456477

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…While I am not the first to have argued for continuity within processes of religious change (e.g. Lawrence 1964;Macdonald 2014Macdonald , 2017Mosko 2010a;Otto and Borsboom 1997;Reithofer 2006;Telban 2017), I suggest that my material adds a new dynamic to be considereda re-empowerment process in which local ontological premises inform the direction the appropriation of Christianity is taking. The Nyaura at Lake Chambri are currently experiencing a confirmation of their beliefs and practices in their intersubjective experiences with Christian spirits understood to be local spirits.…”

Section: Conlcusion: Personhood Onto-praxis and Religious Changementioning

confidence: 87%

“…In contrast to the Catholic Church, Pentecostal and evangelical forms of Christianity have taken a more radical approach, engaging in spiritual warfare against local spirit beings, whose existence they do not deny but demonise ( e.g . Jorgensen ; Robbins , ; Macdonald ). Thus, during the process of conversion, beings that traditionally held important roles in local cosmologies become reinterpreted as negative forces that converts have to combat or ignore.…”

Section: Religious Change At Lake Chambrimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, during the process of conversion, beings that traditionally held important roles in local cosmologies become reinterpreted as negative forces that converts have to combat or ignore. Macdonald (:5), for example, states for the Oksapmin (Sandaun Province):

they not only assign a negative value to the figures who traditionally organised the emergence of their world, but they specifically see them as having originated as a result of Satan's expulsion from Heaven, an overall process of critical evaluation done in relation to the omnipotence of the paramount Christian God.…”

Section: Religious Change At Lake Chambrimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Thomas Souls Ministry – Onto‐praxis, Dividualism, and Charismatic Catholicism at Lake Chambri, Papua New Guinea

Falck

2019

Oceania

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The Thomas Souls Ministry is a prayer group founded by Catholics from the middle Sepik. It is led by a spirit of the dead called Thomas who takes possession of a Nyaura (West Iatmul) woman to preach, prophesy, counsel, and heal. While a prominent debate within the Anthropology of Christianity argues for radical change and rupture with the pre‐Christian self and society, I suggest that continuity within change is found in the way my interlocutors have made Christianity their own. I argue that the local concept of the person defined by aspects of dividualism and reflecting ontological premises of people's lifeworld has strongly influenced the way Christianity was appropriated. In current religious practices people put these premises into action and reinforce them in intersubjective encounters with the divine other. Analysing people's ‘onto‐praxis’, I argue that the Thomas Souls Ministry can be understood as part of a re‐empowerment process that re‐appropriates local meanings, spirits, and practices despite, and in fact against, the influence of the Catholic mission proselytizing in the region.

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Section: Conlcusion: Personhood Onto-praxis and Religious Changementioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Religious Change At Lake Chambrimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Religious Change At Lake Chambrimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Thomas Souls Ministry – Onto‐praxis, Dividualism, and Charismatic Catholicism at Lake Chambri, Papua New Guinea

Falck

2019

Oceania

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“…José Casanova notes that Pentecostalism in general is ‘leading an unabashed and uncompromising onslaught against their local cultures’; their ‘attitude is neither compromise nor denial but frontal hand‐to‐hand combat, what they call “spiritual warfare”’ (Casanova, 2001, p. 437; see also Robbins, 2003, p. 222; Meyer, 1999, p. 171). The expression ‘make a complete break with the past’, first used by Birgit Meyer (1998) in reference to Pentecostals in Ghana, is now reported for many ethnographic contexts, including the Pacific (Lohmann, 2003; Macdonald, 2019, p. 527; Robbins, 2003, p. 226, Robbins, 2007, p. 11), Africa (Daswani, 2013, p. 467, 2015, p. 4; Engelke, 2010, p. 177; Maxwell, 1998, p. 354; Meyer, 1998; van Dijk, 1995) and elsewhere (Lindhardt, 2014, p. 95; Marshall, 2016; Vilaça, 2016). Recognising this, but also to reject the anthropological predilection for finding persistence beneath seemingly radical change, Joel Robbins has advocated a focus on rupture and discontinuity in the anthropology of Christianity (2003, p. 230, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The perils of ‘yo‐yo’ thinking: Positioning culture in Pentecostal healing

Eves

2020

Australian J of Anthropology

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Like other Pentecostals, the Lelet of central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, are urged to reject significant aspects of their cultural tradition in order to become born-again Christians. Most Lelet Pentecostals say that all use of magic must be abandoned. I use the example of healing to show how commitments to break with the past are influenced by life's exigencies, such as illness. Pragmatic responses to illness may see people move between forms of therapy that are considered mutually exclusive-that is, between Christian healing and magic. Some judge this wavering derisively as "yo-yo" thinking. I suggest that a more subtle and open-minded appreciation of the Pentecostal stress on breaking with the past is to see this as situational-that is, as necessarily influenced by contingencies. Despite the rhetoric of absolute rupture being widely proclaimed, putting this into practice while negotiating the exigencies of life is a decidedly more complex and fluid matter. Lelet pragmatism sometimes stands in the way of the radical idealism of Pentecostalism.

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“…Anthropological studies of evangelical Christianity, including P/c, do not furnish us with an abundance of options. The overwhelming thrust of theoretical debate within the Anthropology of Christianity since its emergence, especially of evangelical variants of Christianity such as P/c, has been towards rupture, breaks and discontinuity (Meyer, 1998; Robbins, 2003, 2004), whereby traditional religion is ontologically preserved only to be diabolised and combated through spiritual warfare (Meyer, 1999; Jorgensen, 2005; Macdonald, 2019b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%