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This paper addresses how Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, is deployed in response to gender‐based violence (GBV) in Papua New Guinea. It provides insights into the various ways the Catholic community, Church, and its clergy respond to and manage GBV. Focusing on a case study in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, the article reveals how Gender Equality Theology is used and received to address GBV in this region. What transpires is that despite supporting social change, Gender Equality Theology also advocates a particular status quo by essentialising gender relations, and thereby excluding non‐binary gender identifications and relations. The article will discuss this paradox, highlighting the importance of vernacularisation and how despite its conservatism, Gender Equality Theology provides victims, survivors, counselors, and activists with resources to respond to GBV and change gender inequality in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic premise of this paper is that oppressive and violent behaviour is not an essential aspect of the male identity. Seeking to comprehend the underlying causes of violence, specifically against women but also more generally, this paper examines some of the alternative ways of being a man that have accompanied Christianity. Through observation of some Pentecostals from New Ireland, I have concluded that new ways of being a man that are less oppressive and dominating for women are emerging. This phenomenon I argue is a step towards gender equality, since it involves creating more caring and equitable relationships and a step towards reducing violence both against women and in the community, since it embraces non-violent ways of being a man. Particularly useful in analysing the process of reforming men is Foucault's work on governmentality since it relates well to the Pentecostal emphasis on radical change in being 'born again'. Conversion for born-again Christians is more than simply abandoning sin; rather it involves the creation of a new self and becoming a new person. Similarly, Foucault argues that the individual practises the art of self-governance in re-forming her or himself as she or he desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 explores the conjuncture of Christianity and development in light of the establishment of a new Gogodala church in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. In the paper, I examine the ways in which members of this new church, the Congregation of Evangelical Fellowship (CEF), are utilising the concept of dance to comment on the failure of both expatriate missionaries and the dominant Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG) to prepare the Gogodala community for development. I trace how mission-instigated abstention from dance became emblematic of a Christian lifestyle, and remains central to the constitution and articulation of ‘Christian country’ in this part of PNG. The incorporation of dance into CEF services and conferences, then, posits a challenge to the expatriate mission and ECPNG. In the process, dance has become a metaphor for a communal search for development as well as a reinterpretation of the Christian and pre-contact past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Papua New Guinean imaginings of Israel as a potential development partner draw on Christian renderings of the Bible, but they also reflect an understanding of Israel as a modern, technologically advanced nation. As middle-class Papua New Guineans reflect on the failures of national development since gaining independence from Australia, they express ambivalence about the appropriateness of Western models of development for the Papua New Guinean context. However, the influx of Asian investment is also seen as lacking, or even threatening; therefore, Asian models of development alsofail to offer an appealing hope for the future. In this paper, I argue that these racialised understandings of modernity represent a 'post-colonial racial triangle', a discursive field within which the moral implications of development are understood and debated. Within this triangle, Melanesians are thought to have 'culture' and (Christian) 'morality' but lack 'development'. Australians or 'whitemen' are thought to have 'development' and 'morality' but to lack 'culture'. 'Asians' are thought to have 'development' and 'culture' but to lack (Christian) morality. Taking this moral framing of race into account, Israel emerges as a possible aid donor with the credentials to reconcile these three positions as it is seen to be the possessor of 'development', 'culture', and 'morality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2000s, a large group of Gogodala-speaking villagers in the Western Province (WP) of Papua New Guinea, led by a man I refer to as Henry, claimed to be members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Henry and his supporters arranged for the visit of Tudor Parfitt, then Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of London, to WP. In this paper, I suggest that an ongoing local interest in 'origins' has been framed in light of biblical teachings, and this more recent claim of a connection between the Gogodala ancestors and the Lost Tribes of Israel. I explore the generation of such ideas and claims through an examination of the significance of babala ('rules' or 'laws') as practices vital to the maintenance of village-based life, and biblical teachings on behaviour and practice focused on by the local Unevangelised Fields Mission. In this context, I explore the implications of the conjuncture of babala and the Bible, and the visits by Parfitt and his team, through the recent development of a 'Messianic Church' in Balimo with explicit forms of worship associated with Judaism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gambling and financial investment have a long shared history, with many convergences and many moments where each has defined the other as its opposite. In the contemporary Pacific, not least among evangelical Christians, gambling is often understood as wasteful entertainment and even as an irresponsible vice. Investment on the other hand is seen as a productive activity for both individuals and society at large. These moral concerns draw on discourses of proprietorship of the self, of money and of risk. This paper explores moral attitudes to gambling/investment among middle-class investors in a mass Ponzi scheme in Papua New Guinea ( PNG) and charts new valorizations of risk and investment as components of the construction of modern 'financial selves'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on fieldwork with middle-class investors in 'fast money schemes' ( Ponzi scams) to consider how Neo- Pentecostal Christianity may be mediating social and economic change in Papua New Guinea, particularly in relation to gender equality. Ideas of companionate marriage and the cultivation of an affective self imply masculinities that are more sensitive and less domineering. As these images of fulfilled modernity flow out from Pentecostal churches into broader Papua New Guinean society, they corroborate Taylor's theory of how change occurs within the modern social imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase 'two sides of the coin', money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of 'governance', with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as 'economics', a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U- Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi-magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver 'development'. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U- Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short-comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an ongoing dialogue about Christianity in light of the recent influx of HIV and AIDS into the villages of the Gogodala of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. I argue that a suggestion by a woman in late 2004 to 'build a wall' around the Gogodala region in Western Province in order to stop or slow the spread of HIV/AIDS reflects a recent concern with the sustainability of this rural Christian community, referred to in English as 'Christian country'. Understanding AIDS to be a threat posed largely from outsiders, whether Papua New Guinean or European, sections of these primarily village-based communities aim to create both a physical and metaphorical boundary between themselves and outsiders. At present, local prevention and intervention strategies concerning HIV and AIDS focus on conservative, evangelical narratives about the preservation of the principles and practices of Christian country, through the repudiation of unrestrained sexuality, for example, which is believed to be increasingly prevalent not only in their own area but throughout urban Papua New Guinea. A growing divide between rural and urban Gogodala, then, has become a major part of the local dialogue about AIDS and represents significant contestation over the practices and ideational basis of Christian country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea and the game's huge popularity and international profile has been used in recent condom promotion campaigns in the nation's fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I argue that the promotion of condom use through rugby league requires a national campaign strategy that includes understandings of condom use and masculinity at the rural level. I demonstrate this through a study of Gogodala men's understandings of the epidemic and condom use in Western Province. The Gogodala are a Christian-based society and many blame the national condom promotion strategy for an increase in promiscuity and for 'turning sex into a game'. Condom availability in this rural area continues to be restricted to a family planning program that promotes Christian values and excludes unmarried men. I explore the male condom dilemma where young men are more concerned with avoiding accusations that their sexual behaviour puts them at risk of contracting HIV despite acknowledging the preventative value of using condoms. In this context young men disassociate themselves from the disease and condom use through a process of calculated risk or risk minimisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the extent of knowledge about HIV/AIDS among young Yupno women and men. Local understanding of sikAIDS is shaped by cultural, moral and religious concepts and processes that are based on social values and practices. Difficulties these young people face in accessing information about HIV/AIDS and using it to implement preventative measures -- for example by obtaining condoms -- have to be seen in the framework of 'kastom' and a moral discourse coined and influenced by the Lutheran Church. As the research shows, there is an urgent need for a broad and contextually sensitive approach to sexual health, including information about conception, family planning methods, and sexually transmitted diseases when planning awareness campaigns for teenagers in rural regions. [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]

Endemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of discerning people's intentions. Established ethnographic and linguistic data from PNG meanwhile document witnesses as imagined to be embodied, interested, lacking a privileged relationship to truth, and thus susceptible to coercion. Recasting the PNG corruption issue in terms of witnessing foregrounds a perceived cultural conflict between inclusion and duty; it also reveals how and why the Christian God was invoked—using debt and obligation rhetoric—to end corruption at the national scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theoretical developments within the anthropology of Christianity have shifted away from conceptualising the uptake of Pentecostal‐charismatic Christianity in polarised terms of rupture versus continuity towards more inclusive, dynamic interpretations that appreciate both underlying cultural synergies alongside deeply felt projects of personal and collective moral and spiritual transformation. Drawing upon Marshall's concept of 'resonant rupture', I explore how a series of interconnected revivals that occurred in many places throughout Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea resonated with pre‐existing elements of indigenous religion and cosmology. At the same time, however, I show that, although a broad conjuncture between tradition and Pentecostal‐charismatic Christianity existed, the events that constituted these movements were understood by revival participants as unequivocally Christian, innovative and radically new, thus revealing the simultaneous processes of resonance and rupture at work. In support of my argument I focus upon reports of religious intensification during this formative period from three different ethnographic settings, namely, Malaita, Solomon Islands, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea and the Min culture area, Papua New Guinea, respectively. All of the examples vividly exemplify Melanesian Christians absorbing existing religiosity into their new worship while at the same time imposing a radical change on the level of asserted meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Sepik, names feature centrally in political and religious contexts. Esoteric knowledge about totemic names enables Nyaura men to achieve status and power and can set them in contact with spirits. A recently arrived Pentecostal/evangelical movement—Operation Joshua—claims to have found the true name of God, whom it presents as being radically different to the beings people's ancestors have known. At Lake Chambri, however, the Nyaura (West Iatmul) community Timbunmeli had accommodated Catholicism to their culture long before Operation Joshua came to their village. While Operation Joshua demonizes Nyaura spirits, the Catholic community understands God to be an ancestral being for whom different clans know different names. Taking a political ontology perspective, I analyze the encounter of Operation Joshua and Nyaura Catholicism in Timbunmeli in relation to cosmo‐ontological politics pursued by ambitious Nyaura men and different denominations. I suggest that denominational pluralism creates ontological pluralism in Timbunmeli, where different actors engage different truth claims concerning the being and reality of central Christian figures in their world‐making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, we returned to Karavar, one of Papua New Guinea's Duke of York Islands. Since our last visit 28 years earlier, many with whom we worked had died. However, their children knew about us and were eager for our recollections about the lives and times of their parents. We, in turn, wished to learn about current lives and times. Our conversations, thus, often focused on multi‐generational changes. Significantly, most Karavarans thought that these changes had been for the better. Indeed, they seemed relatively satisfied with their present circumstances. In contrast, the Karavarans we had earlier known were frequently fired up with grievance, disappointment, possibility, and occasional exultation. Here we consider how contentiousness turned into contentment; how, what Karavarans had been, approached what they wanted to be. In understanding this historical process, we consider several ramifying 'events': happenings that Karavarans recognized, whether immediately or in retrospect, as interrupting business as usual and, ultimately, as challenging assumptions about the workings of their world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Vula'a villages of south-east Papua New Guinea, the experience of more than a century of Christianity has been incorporated into local understandings of identity and tradition. Church-building (in both the architectural and ideological sense) is at the centre of village life. Even though it was a general policy of the London Missionary Society to build a church in every village in which conversion was undertaken, they did not build a church in the Vula'a village of Alewai. In 2001 the fact that Alewai did not have a church initiated a chain of events that draws attention to a situation of current relevance for Papua New Guinea, as evangelists no longer work to convert the 'heathen' but to convert Christians from one denomination to another. As a case study the article is focused on the pastors and deacons of the United Church and thus also serves to document some of the changes that have occurred in male leadership since the early colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [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]

This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender-based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's 'journey of violence' reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between 'tradition', Christianity and 'modernity', Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self-analysis and self-transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses a group of Gogodala Christian women in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea who are referred to as 'Warrior women' and who pray, sing and call upon the Holy Spirit to cleanse their own bodies and 'turn their eyes', so that they are able to see those who threaten the health and well-being of the wider community. These women have focused primarily on bringing male practitioners of magic -- iwai dala -- shadowy and powerful men who operate covertly and away from the gaze of others, out into the open. Whilst this has been happening for many years, the spread of HIV and AIDS into the area, fuelled by what many in the area believe is the rise of unrestrained female and male sexuality and the waning of Christian practice and principles, has meant that those perceived to bring harm to the community through their sexual behaviour have become recent targets for Warrior women. HIV/AIDS, referred to in Gogodala as melesene bininapa gite tila gi -- the 'sickness without medicine' -- is understood as a hidden sickness, one that makes its way through the community without trace until people become visibly ill. Warrior women seek to make both AIDS and those who, through their behaviour, encourage or enable its spread more visible. In the process, however, a small number of them are overcome by the Holy Spirit, so much so that they become daeledaelenapa -- mad -- their behaviour increasingly characterised by childishness and uncontrolled sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the way Gogodala men in Western Province experienced colonialism and change not simply in terms of alienation or emasculation but as a dynamic process that reinforced many aspects of their work ethic, bodily capacities and lifestyle. Through an analysis of local narratives and colonial reports encompassing the way Sosola, a Gogodala leader, instigated and negotiated European contact, I discuss how, despite colonial changes, he continues to embody the male way of life or dala ela gi. As the only 'faith' based mission to enter Papua prior to World War II, I propose that the Unevangelized Fields Mission's muscular approach to evangelism enabled Gogodala men to determine their own response to Christianity. The early evangelical missionary disposition of demonstrating faith through action, through a reliance on the virtues of physical strength, work and tenacity rather than theological knowledge, resonated strongly with a Gogodala masculinity that was epitomised by displays of strength through work. Rather than rendered powerless by colonial authority, I discuss some of the ways men have experienced and interpret the colonial past in ways that assert the continuing dynamics of dala ela gi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between money, the nation, and new imaginings of apocalypticism in Papua New Guinea. Robert Foster has argued that money played an important role in the Australian administration's efforts to promote a sense of nation at the end of the colonial period. I explore the effects of the new imaginings beyond the nation that are occurring as Christian apocalypticism becomes a dominant framework for interpreting the world. New meanings and values are being attached to money, resulting in the destabilization of the strong link between money and nation that was observed by Foster. I argue that, within this new world-view, money is losing its symbolic potency, that new forms of identity are emerging, and that people's attachment to the nation is being weakened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a commentary on historicity in Papua New Guinea. Narratives of pre-colonial cultural impact; Aspect of substitutability; Importance of forms of Christianity in the contemporary world in Papua New Guinea.

In this article, I examine the continuities between early-contact cult activities and present day Christianity among the western Enga and eastern Ipili of highlands Papua New Guinea. Christians today see the cults as early attempts to ‘open the road’ for the coming of whites and missionization. Cult leaders are currently understood as prophets who had received messages from God and were sent out to herald the coming new era of social change. The ritual killing of a young man in the 1940s by cult leaders is conceptualized as the local version of the crucifixion of Jesus. The data herein illustrate the creative means by which Ipili and Enga in this region have indigenized Christianity and located their own regional histories and practices in the broader scope of world history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]