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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on ethnographic analysis of Christianity in a Papua New Guinean hospital in order to develop a theory of belief as ‘relational action’. It argues that patients' engagements with Christianity in the hospital derive from a concern with medical efficacy rather than a search for meaning. Patients experience the hospital as a space of stasis in which they are unable to establish relationships effectively with either kin or doctors. Through relationships with God, patients hope to become active Christian agents and yield positive material effects on their bodies. There is a growing anthropological consensus that propositional theories of belief are inadequate to describe Christian and non-Christian religious practice. However, there is still a tendency to contextualize belief within wider cultural wholes. This article argues that patients' practice of belief as ‘relational action’ should be interpreted not as an attempt to construct moral and cosmological order in the face of change, but as an attempt to realize themselves as new kinds of social agents in the face of social failure. Résumé Le présent article s’appuie sur l’analyse ethnographique du christianisme dans un hôpital de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée pour élaborer une théorie de la croyance comme « action relationnelle ». L’auteur affirme ainsi que l’engagement des patients dans le christianisme à l’hôpital est davantage motivé par un souci d’efficacité médicale que par une recherche de sens. Les patients perçoivent l’hôpital comme un lieu de stase où ils ne peuvent pas établir de relations efficaces, que ce soit avec leurs proches ou avec les médecins. Ils espèrent, par leurs relations avec Dieu, devenir des agents chrétiens actifs et produire des effets matériels positifs sur leur corps. Les anthropologues s’accordent de plus en plus à dire que les théories propositionnelles de la croyance ne conviennent pas pour décrire la pratique religieuse, qu’elle soit chrétienne ou non chrétienne. Il existe pourtant toujours une tendance à contextualiser la croyance au sein d’un tout culturel plus large. L’article avance que la pratique de la croyance comme « action relationnelle » par les patients doit s’interpréter comme une tentative non pas de construire un ordre moral et cosmologique face au changement, mais de se réaliser eux-mêmes en tant que nouveaux agents sociaux, face à une situation d’échec social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]