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This paper focuses on the history of relations between colonialism, schooling and social change in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Ireland, countries that were once part of the British Empire. It indicates that responses to schooling ranged from acceptance and tolerance, to modification and rejection, depending on the country, the issue, and the historical period. There were also differences in the historical connections in schooling between Britain itself and each country: regarding Australia, the relationship was predominantly unidirectional, from the centre to the Antipodes; in PNG British educational ideas which arrived were filtered through the Australian administration; while in Ireland, British initiatives in schooling contributed not only to social change there, but also helped produce loyal personnel to work in Britain and the colonies. Attention is also given to areas of interdependence and interconnectedness, and to illustrating how conducting such case studies is important in order to help counter alternative interpretations promoted by powerful sectors in society in the interest of reproducing their social privilege. (Contains 63 footnotes.)

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]

Cultural values and practices influence many aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights - from access to and quality of health education and services, to gender roles and responsibilities, to family planning and sexual freedoms. Culture is frequently marginalised in epidemiologically driven analyses of sexual and reproductive health and rights yet remains central to the ways in which inequalities within these fields manifest themselves and are engaged with in society. Using Papua New Guinea (PNG) as a case example, this paper sheds light on the enabling and restrictive role of culture in efforts to work towards equity and justice for gender and sexually diverse people. Drawing on four case stories, we offer insight into where culture can and has been deployed to redress serious inequalities in what is often a hostile environment. In these stories we illustrate how practical justice provides an innovative way to approach issues to do with sexual and reproductive health, particularly as they relate to enhancing the lives of people in visible, grassroots ways. In this way, given evidence, good normative judgement and the opportunity to do good and be fair, practical justice may be seen to be taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divine Word University (DWU) and DKA Austria are working together to identify the social perspectives of different age and gender groups in four communities from three provinces of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Four broad themes structure the analysis: 1) Marginalization and exclusion; 2) Influence of modernization on culture and traditions; 3) Violence in the community and families; and 4) Intergenerational conflict. In March 2022, a study was conducted in Sinsibai, Western Highlands Province as part of this project. The study draws on individual interviews, focus group discussions, questionnaires, surveys, and activities to identify perspectives from different age and gender groups, on social issues affecting their community. In total, 203 participants were involved in the study, comprising of 91 children, 77 adults, 10 young adults, and 25 grade 11 high school students. The study documents stories of safety and concerns, and hopes for the future for each gender and age group. The data generated from this project can be of use and interest to a range of audience, from the community to government and non-government agencies. The paper concludes with the authors' fieldwork reflections. [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]

Medical pluralism offers a long-standing means of analysing the different ways in which health and illness can be interpreted and responded to. It is not unusual for multiple health systems and meanings to co-exist at any one moment in time, offering different ways of understanding and responding to illness and disease. In addition to biomedical frameworks, religious beliefs offer another important means of facilitating healing. Based on qualitative interviews with 36 people living with HIV on antiretroviral therapies (ART) in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the ways in which people bring together and synthesise religious and biomedical therapeutic approaches to the treatment and management of HIV. For most, ART is viewed as a divine gift to complement a regime of spiritual salvation, and adherence to treatment carries with it strong religious undertones. At the same time, ART provides a sense of hope for those living with a virus that was previously associated only with death. Brought together, these narratives provide important insights into the meanings of ART and the role of religion, prayer and repentance for people in PNG. The study also provides new insight into how people with HIV actively synthesise different approaches to health and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically evaluates the 'transformative engagement' between expatriate missionaries and the Gogodala of Western Province, PNG, in light of a recent claim for Jewish ancestry and Israeli nationality. This claim is based on the contention that the original Gogodala ancestors, whose migration to the area is detailed in formal ancestral narratives or iniwa olagi, were members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In July 2003 this culminated in a visit by Professor Tudor Parfitt, Director of Jewish Studies at the University of London, to investigate. This paper examines the extent to which this claim for identification with Israel represents ongoing dialogue about the origins and nature of Gogodala Christianity, and outlines the extent to which Gogodala communities are substantially connected to places and people beyond their village, province and even country, blurring the boundaries between local and global through their engagement with Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At Lake Kopiago, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, women's public music-making is often restricted and men are the most visible performers. However, the introduction of Christianity has seen women become more visible in the musical landscape through their participation in church musical activities. Christian songs learnt by women in church are now spilling over into the secular realm, forming the basis for much community composition. Women are able to directly express their desires, and their anxieties, in music, using these newly introduced musical tools. This paper investigates the processes of women's composition in these terms, focusing on songs composed and performed by the Duna women of Lake Kopiago, Southern Highlands Province. [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]

There is growing recognition of the importance of religion and religious beliefs as they relate to the experience of HIV, globally and in Papua New Guinea in particular. Based on 36 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with people living with HIV receiving HIV antiretroviral therapy in 2008, this paper examines the cultural aetiology of HIV of in Papua New Guinea, the country with the highest reported burden of HIV in the Pacific. Narratives provided drew upon a largely moral framework, which viewed HIV acquisition as a consequence of moral failing and living an un-Christian life. This explanation for suffering viewed the individual as responsible for their condition in much the same way that neo-liberal biomedical discourses do. Moral reform and re-establishing a relationship with God were seen as key actions necessary to effect healing on the material body infected with HIV. Religious understandings of HIV drew upon a pre-existing cultural aetiology of dis-ease and misfortune widespread in Papua New Guinea. Understanding the centrality of Christianity to explanations of disease, and subsequently the actions necessary to bring about health, is essential in order to understand how people with HIV in receipt of antiretroviral therapies internalise biomedical perspectives and reconcile these with Christian beliefs., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

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]

This paper considers the assumption that the long-term success of the Christian Churches in some parts of Papua New Guinea (PNG) will eliminate or even regulate the magical practices that are nowadays commonly described as ‘sorcery’. Among the Vula'a of PNG men seeking prestige and influence turn to the Church, and some of them are said to be sorcerers who ‘hide behind it’. Most deaths continue to be attributed to sorcery, and fear of sorcery and the need to counter it with other sorcery eclipses Christian proscriptions. It is power - rather than the introduced concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ brought by Christian colonizers that dominates current discourse - that contributes to the persistence of sorcery albeit in a variety of new and introduced forms. Sorcery is effective because it creates a culture of fear. I conclude, then, by applying Heidegger's analysis of fear to Vula'a sorcery to suggest that an anthropology of fear will contribute to a better understanding of sorcery in contemporary PNG. [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]

Papua New Guinea has experienced a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Christian Churches have played a vital role in responding to HIV, through community support, encouragement and social change. Strong, effective Church leadership can help create safe environments of care and support for those infected and for prevention of HIV. Method A series of trainings in capacity development for clergy were undertaken by the National AIDS Council Secretariat (NACS)/National HIV/AIDS Support Project (NHASP). Results A model "Church's Response to HIV and AIDS in a Care Continuum" was developed to assist the training. This paper discusses the model and the lessons learned.

At the local level, globalisation has often been interpreted as being passively accepted or heroically resisted. In the specific context of Christianity in the Lihir Islands, Papua New Guinea, this paper challenges both conceptualisations. The trajectories of the Catholic and United churches in Lihir began similarly but have diverged: neither can be cast simply as localised or globalised. To understand the complex historical, local, regional and global manifestations and interconnections of Lihirian Christianity I draw inspiration from Tomlinson's suggestion of 'complex connectivity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork in 1990-1 and 1995-6 in Pairundu (Papua New Guinea), the paper examines local Christianity as a form of local modernity which results from processes of mutual influence between the global and the local. So far, scholars have stressed opposed, but complementary aspects of such processes (the disappearance of cultural differences versus their increase, people attempting to break with tradition versus people acting in continuity with it) while seeing local modernity or local Christianity as overly homogenous. Yet, the example of Pairundu shows that men and women, older and younger generations as well as big men and 'ordinary' men have been competing with each other by adopting Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist forms of Christianity. While 'intra-cultural' differences, tensions and antagonisms may be particularly obvious in such a situation of denominational pluralism, there is no reason to believe that they must be absent where one denomination enjoys a religious monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vula'a people of south-eastern Papua New Guinea have been Christians for more than a century. Through a phenomenology of the transformation of their song and dance styles, this paper sheds light on the nature of the engagement between globalising religions and localised practice. It draws attention to the importance of the appropriation of the Polynesian prophet songs (peroveta), initially as part of the process of conversion undertaken by the London Missionary Society, and presently as an expression of local Christian identity that is shaped by 'traditional' exigencies. Song connects the living community and extends the bounds of that community to the non-living, promoting an existential plenitude. I argue that the Christian song styles which replaced traditional dances reproduce a distinctly Melanesian ontology. Further, the instrumental position of early Polynesian mission teachers, both as agents for the new religion and their self-representation as geographically distant 'kin' of the Vula'a problematises any easy division between the local and the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intensifying global spread of apocalyptic forms of Christianity, now well established in Papua New Guinea, has popularised readings of the Bible that stress a cataclysmic end of the world from which only the faithful will be saved. This paper examines the way that this apocalyptic discourse is being embraced by the Lelet of central New Ireland, taking the case of an earthquake that occurred during the year 2000. Apocalypticism is increasingly the operative explanatory framework for unusual events that are seen as signs. However, recourse to it varies between individuals. Signs are very carefully examined and various theories, new and old, are considered before an explanation is finally accepted. I argue that the acceptance of new beliefs does not always depend on the existence of prior similar beliefs, and neither are older beliefs simply displaced by the new. [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]

This paper explores some of the issues evoked in recent attempts by the Vula'a people of south eastern Papua New Guinea to document their history. Drawing on ethnographic research and Heideggerian philosophy it investigates the complex of myth, history and Christianity manifest in their representations of the past. The Vula'a lifeworld accommodates what might commonly be perceived as contradictions - multiple versions of significant local stories, and an acceptance of Christianity without the forfeiture of pre-Christian cosmology. I suggest that if we are to understand this lifeworld we must move beyond simple distinctions between history and myth, truth and falsity. Western ideas about truth and rationality are thus questioned in light of Vula'a experience. I propose we see myth as a mode of being and, consequently, as a form of truth. This is not, though, the truth of Western science, of proof and explanation. In Heidegger's terms it is "essential" and therefore beyond the realm of provability. [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]

There has been little research into how the diverse cultures within Papua New Guinea interpret, represent and understand the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Using qualitative ethnographic research, this study examines how incoming ideas about AIDS relate to the existing cultural frameworks of a rural Christian community. Although L, elet respondents in New Ireland have recourse to indigenous conceptions, apocalyptic Christianity is the most influential framework in their understanding of AIDS. Two interconnected issues are examined: how the epidemic is understood in apocalyptic terms, and how this affects practical approach to the disease. The paper indicates a need for more research into the stances taken by different Christian groups towards HIV/AIDS. This is especially important in the Pacific, where Christianity is the dominant worldview and where there has been a rapid spread of apocalyptic forms of Christianity, which may have particularly significant consequences for the epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore the view that efficacy in Pentecostal healing depends on confidence, or unwavering belief. My focus is on emic notions of failure – how people explain failures of therapy in their own terms – rather than on failures in the procedure employed or the inadequacies of the healer. Although anthropologists have criticised the notion of belief, my ethnographic example suggests that it remains useful, particularly since in this case it is central to the assessment of failure. The Pentecostals discussed here see belief in a more material way, as embodied and intimately bound up with the reformative project of becoming a born again Christian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim The aim of this research was to understand how health workers in developing countries reach diagnostic and treatment decisions. In developing countries, health workers are often forced to make diagnostic and treatment decisions based on limited knowledge, unhelpful information, infrequent and low technology back-up services and without the support of more senior staff. Yet patients continue to be treated. This paper investigates how primary healthcare workers in such contexts reach these diagnostic and treatment decisions. Method Using a qualitative methodology, 58 primary healthcare workers from the three primary healthcare facilities in Papua New Guinea - aid posts, sub-health centres and health centres - participated in an in-depth interview, in order to investigate how diagnostic and treatment decisions were made. Results Although participants were originally trained in the biomedical model, they lived and worked in a context where other belief systems operated to diagnose and treat illness. This led to the coexistence of at least three models of treatment: the biomedical model, traditional indigenous health practices and Christian beliefs. Thus, a homogenous biomedical understanding of health and well-being was not possible in this setting, and treatment options did not always follow the biomedical recommendations. Conclusions In developing countries where competing medical frame works exist, evidence-based practices may be more difficult to implement. Although the skill and knowledge of the provider and availability of treatment resources are still important, belief in the accuracy of the diagnosis and the potency of the treatment by the patient and the patient's community as well as the health provider may be just as significant. [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]

This paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Lelet of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. It draws on qualitative interviews with Pentecostal Christians intended to examine their understanding of Christianity and how this relates to their cultural practices – in this case, how their Pentecostalism affects their therapeutic beliefs and practices. The frequent observation that therapeutic repertoires are becoming less discrete is substantiated by the Lelet case, for in their search for therapy, the Lelet often cross the borders of different repertoires, seeing no contradiction, for example, between combining a vernacular therapy with biomedicine. With the advent of Pentecostalism, the issue has become far more complex. The Lelet therapeutic culture remains pluralist, but the research shows that Lelet Pentecostals are increasingly viewing their own Christian-based forms of healing as in competition with other therapies, especially vernacular therapies. This competitive outlook has brought a demonization of vernacular therapies, which are labelled 'satanic' and their use discouraged. In fact, Pentecostalism is refashioning the realm of therapy: rather than border crossing and mixing of therapeutic repertoires, the situation is increasingly dominated by notions of mutual exclusivity. In order to comprehend the full complexity of medical pluralism, it is now necessary not only to examine how the borders of the different therapeutic repertoires are blurred, destabilized or reconfigured but also how they may be demarcated and policed. In other words, we argue that medical pluralism is being eroded by its interaction with Pentecostalism. • Healing is an important aspect of Pentecostal Christian practice in Papua New Guinea. • Pentecostals see their forms of healing as in competition with other therapies. • Pentecostals seek to regulate the borders of their therapeutic repertoire. • The rejection of vernacular therapies is a marker of born-again Christian identity. • Biomedicine is increasingly seen in mutually exclusive terms by Pentecostals. [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]

Copyright of Mission Studies: Journal of the International Association for Mission Studies is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The emerging field of the anthropology of Christianity appears suspended between two poles: a concern with understanding the continuous and relatively coherent traits of the religious tradition as a whole (the "One"), and the documentation of the highly contingent forms found in local communities (the "Many"). This tension, in turn, feeds sometimes intense debates about whether conversion to Christianity along the modern missionary frontier is best understood as rupture from or continuity with indigenous cultural forms and understandings. While such binaries have been highly productive, they are still misleading, because many if not most Christians do not experience the religion in such terms but rather largely in the context of institutionalized rituals, dogmas, and church organizations. I illustrate this point by examining the ways the Maisin people of Papua New Guinea have both adjusted and adapted to Anglicanism over the past century through three modes I describe as "accommodations," "repurposings," and "spandrels." Studying such institutional configurations, I suggest, provides anthropologists a strategic point to consider local versions of Christianity as both One and Many. [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]

The recognition that HIV prevention materials need to be adapted to local cultures is not often sufficiently understood and applied. Counter discourses and determined disputation about the best means of HIV prevention show that success is not simply a matter of mindfully translating globally sanctioned knowledge and presenting it to receptive audiences. Beliefs contrary to global AIDS knowledges will not be displaced inevitably by scientific facts. As this study of born-again Christians in Papua New Guinea shows, there is incommensurability between the globalized approach preferred by the government and the approach of these Christians. The answer may lie in two words: respect and dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a growing consensus that money and the market principle have not led to a great transformation into modernity. Rather, market exchange is everywhere socially embedded. But what does this embedding consist of, structural limits, tactics of resistance, or moral boundaries? Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) have incorporated money into their local economy in a variety of ways which keep the logic of the market in check. The comparison between two modes of accumulation - business and charity - sheds light on the precise nature of embeddedness. Local entrepreneurs describe themselves as navigating dilemmas which arise from contradictions between accumulation and reciprocity. Church congregations, however, appear to have transcended this conflict by representing their charitable contributions of money as love-gifts which are not subject to reciprocity. While charity, like business, is an embedded form of accumulation, I argue that it creates links to an alternative hierarchy of values, and thus contains the potential to create a great transformation of its own. [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]

In his 2004 monograph, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Joel Robbins argues that the Urapmin, a small group of newly converted Chistrians in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, are trapped between two conflicting systems of values, namely the relationality of indigenous culture and the individuality of Christian culture. Yet, Robbins suggests that the Urapmin are troubled not only by conflicting values, but also by the fact that they have embraced a new ideological system without changing the material base of their lives, that is, subsistence agriculture on land owned by kin groups. Drawing on Robbins's work on the Urapmin and my own research on two different Christian denominations in the Western Solomon Islands, I bring a political-economic dimension to discussions of subjectivity, cultural change and ideologies of modernity that have arisen within the anthropology of Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]