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This paper explores the story of the formation and subsequent activities of a church women's group in Maisin villages and women's experiences of Christianity more broadly, in relation to the changing production and uses of traditional bark cloth ( tapa), a signature women's product which has become a marker of Maisin identity. While the influence of the local Mothers' Union has waxed and waned over the past 60 years, tapa cloth has had a continuing influence upon its fortunes. Tapa cloth has been the chief means for church women to raise funds to support their activities and the local church. However, we argue that, more fundamentally, tapa has shaped women's gendered Christian identities, experiences and history, mediating relationships with men, between generations of women, and with various sorts of 'missionaries' who have often justified their intrusions in terms of improving women's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his provocative critique of Geertz's 1966 definition of religion, Talal Asad (1993) suggests that the very project of defining the category of religion is rooted in the historical rise of Western secularism in societies formerly dominated by Christianity. In post-Mao China, there has been an explosion of activities that might be categorised as religious in the Geertzian sense, including church attendance, temple building, qi gong practice, pilgrimage, and geomancy. This paper examines two such activities, the participation of women in a Protestant church in rural Shandong and the recent protest by members of the Fa Lun Gong (Buddhist Law Qi Gong) society in Beijing, and asks what their emergence in a post-Maoist communist state tells us about the historical processes that frame the possibility of defining religion. Working with theories of religious participation from Geertz, Asad, Tambiah, and Feuchtwang, the paper develops a conception of 'symbolic participation' to illuminate the flourishing of religious practice in post-Mao China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifteen years the use of the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca has been reimagined in alternative healing circles of Western countries. This paper explores the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and examines ways in which acts of vomiting and ecstatic trance-visions involve heightened affective states and moral projects of healing. Aspects of everyday life are purged, rearticulated, and reconstituted in rituals where codes of conduct and discursive exchange encourage practices of personal evaluation and reflexivity that appear to index ideologies of individualism. Through exploring social and discursive prohibitions and forms of sensory organisation, the practice of drinking ayahuasca in Australia is shown to be constituted by ritual conventions that define the individual as autonomous and responsible in relation to ecstatic trance and articulations of wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world-view versus life-world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I seek to sidestep these organising categories to focus on Kemalism and Islamism as rival forms of the same social imaginary signification, and not as shorthand for these polarities. Using a number of representative texts, I argue that the extravagance of Islamist resistance in Turkey post-1980 brings to light the fantastical power of Kemalism itself, exposed as a project of the triumph of the will. This being the case, what has been written in anthropology about acts of 'self-institution'? The work of Nigel Rapport and Cornelius Castoriadis emphasises, in different ways, the arbitrariness and gratuity of social creation out of nothing or self-institution. Pierre Bourdieu's work, on the other hand, is radically contrary to Rapport's in its structuralist elaboration of agency as guided action. My analysis of processes of change within both the Islamist and Republican social movements in Turkey from the early 1990s to the present seeks a temporary rapprochement, at least in this case, between Rapport's methodological individualism and Bourdieu's methodological holism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'women's business' on Hindmarsh Island has had spectacular success although vital evidence had been kept secret 'in a sealed envelope'. This paper, drawing primarily on the author's own encounter with the native title claims procedure, discusses various formative processes involved in the contemporary construction of Aboriginal indigeneity in which religious belief is heavily valorised. Subjected to a process of rationalisation for a long time, religious traditions are now being used as a strategic resource in native title claims. In the endeavour to make best possible use of the jurisprudential opportunity offered, the maintenance of secrecy and cloaking of information emerges as an important strategy. Secrecy clearly is an integral part of traditional Aboriginal culture. However, cloaking in fact may not only privilege esoteric contents, but merge with attempts of deliberate deception. Yet, in itself this too might be considered an Aboriginal cultural tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Motu and the Hula, two south coast Papua New Guinea societies, are linguistically related, have similar social organisation and were economically linked before European colonisation. They were both introduced to Christianity by the London Missionary Society in the late 19th century, and each appeared to incorporate the new religion into their social life and thought quickly and unproblematically. More than a century later, however, generalities about the similar adoption of Christianity by the Mom and the Hula are no longer possible. Nor are generalities about the engagement with Christianity within one or the other group, as individual Motu and Hula villages have unique histories. In this regard, while Christianity has now arguably become part of putative tradition among the Motu, some Hula are experiencing conflict between Christianity and their sense of tradition. In particular, while in the Motu village of Pari Christian virtues are appealed to as part of Pari's conception of itself as a 'traditional' Motu village, the situation in the Hula village of Irupara is more or less the contrary. Many people in Irupara are now lamenting 'tradition' as something lost, a forgotten essence destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Based on fieldwork in both villages, this paper discusses some differences in their engagement with Christianity and compares contemporary perceptions of religion, tradition and identity in both societies, informing a commentary on notions of tradition and anthropological representations of the Melanesian experience of Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of what role beliefs play in the description of a culture or a religious system, and whether beliefs as such can be 'tested', arose during a dramatic State Royal Commission into an Aboriginal sacred site claim in South Australia in 1995 focused on the proposed Hindmarsh Island-Goolwa bridge. In this paper I examine some aspects of the legal and anthropological defence of the claim and suggest that insufficient distinction was made between belief as an interior subjective state, and as a gloss on a certain disposition to behave that is conventionally defined. Further, the issue of the social testing of belief statements was obscured by re-phrasing the Royal Commission as an attack on the Aboriginal claimants' right to religious belief. Appealing to Needham, Sperber and Quine, and utilising comparative analysis of a similar court case in North America, I suggest an anthropological approach to belief that side-steps some of the critical problems in the anthropology of religion created during the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the syncretic accommodations made by North Mekeo (PNG) villagers arising from recent historical encounters with Catholic (Sacred Heart) missionaries over issues of ritual authenticity and effectiveness, personhood, and agency in a wider field of Christian evangelism and globalisation. Through a careful examination and comparison of pre-existing ritual notions and practices (e.g., sorcery techniques, mortuary ritual performance, gender rituals) and the recent trends of commodification and enthusiastic Catholic charismatic performance, what might appear to be incongruous religious beliefs and practices are shown to possess numerous remarkably compatible similarities at the level of explicit cultural categorisation and ritual enactment. In accord with long-standing anthropological arguments, recent North Mekeo syncretism thus consists of an integrated, albeit transformed rather than 'confused', mixing of indigenous and exogenous religious elements. Further, in this analysis of recent Melanesian religious change syncretism implies a novel conceptual convergence between syncretic processes and the dynamics of personhood, sociality and agency as construed in the framework of the 'new Melanesian ethnography'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on preliminary ethnographic research in five Javanese communities with major Hindu temples, I explore the political history and social dynamics of Hindu revivalism. I reject formalist approaches to the study of religion, including the notion of 'syncretism' and instead, treat the Hindu revival movements as an illustration of how social agents employ religious or secular concepts and values in their strategic responses to the particular challenges and crises they may face in a specific cultural, social, political and historical setting. Expectations of a great crisis at the dawn of a new golden age among followers of the Javanese Hindu revival movement are an expression of utopian prophesies and political hopes more widely shared among contemporary Indonesians. These expectations are set to shape the prospects of Indonesia's fledgling democracy. The paper reflects on the historical conditions under which these and similar utopian expectations and associated social movements may either incite violent conflict or serve a positive role in the creation or maintenance of a fair society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no authorisation in the Qur'an for the interdiction on music. That interdiction, when it is voiced, is the product of a conviction among some Muslims, supported by hadith Oust as it is opposed with hadith) that Islam does not countenance music. In a country such as Pakistan, with a strong tradition of devotional music which (taken with the poetry, with which it is always associated) has become entwined with the identity politics of the provinces or sub-'nations' which make up the vaster nation, a comprehensive ban on music would be impossible to enforce, though there are 'ulama and sectarian parties who desire it. This paper focuses on an instance where music is even harder to extricate from an accompanying text: the recitation of the Qur'an. In the eyes of Muslims, Qur'anic recitation is not music. This denial raises further questions about the nature of music and, in particular, its involvement with the 'extramusical'. Adorno's observations on the relation of music to language, and the anthropologist Friedson's complaint that ethnographers focus on text, at the expense of music, are examined in the light of the circumstance that the world over, music is associated with texts of one kind or another. Even when, as in the case of the 'curing' ritual described by Friedson, words are unimportant, or missing, music is seldom a phenomenological whole. Music 'leans', or is 'leant on': it lends its unrivalled 'eloquence' to many a cause, from commodity marketing to the structured working out of ritual, or, among lovers, to the remembered quality of experience. All these potentialities of music are relevant to the question of its interdiction and to the Muslim denial that the recitation of the Qur'an is music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]