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The objective of the paper is an analysis of selected historical events that took place in Uruwa Valley among Nungon people. The events – relocation of a village and religious conflict – still affect the life of the community. The author has partially reconstructed the events using archival materials, especially patrol reports, and printed documents. The course of reconstructed events differs from the local peoples' recollections of the same past. The article confronts different versions of the past without seeking the 'truth' of Nungon past events; rather, it aims to demonstrate the plurality of voices – local people and Australian patrol officers – and to present the importance of the past events for the life of the community. [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.

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]

A vast literature about the religions and histories of Papua New Guinea (PNG) exists, but less than a handful of items mention the history of Islam or Muslims in PNG. This paper contributes to an initial attempt to establish a comprehensive historical account of Islam in PNG's broader history by detailing the formal establishment of Islam there from 1976 to 1983. Beginning with Islam's expatriate Muslim founders, it examines the challenges and events that led to the religion's institutionalisation and consolidation. This period of early effort provided the basis for a self-sustaining and, of late, growing religion. The ideational, material and migratory effects of globalisation and decolonisation appear as factors in the growth of Islam in PNG, despite persistent Christian resistance to its presence. The paper draws upon numerous unpublished archival records and interview data collected during fieldwork to PNG in 2007. [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 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]

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]

The Australian Aid programme is currently valued at AUD5 billion. The majority of this aid flows to the Asia Pacific region with Papua New Guinea and Indonesia being the largest recipients. In addition to traditional delivery mechanisms-bilateral and multilateral-the Australian Government has piloted a small partnership activity with Churches in Papua New Guinea. This paper will consider this model and the benefit it brings. Possible extension of this partnership model to non-Christian religious faiths in other countries, such as Islamic nationwide organisations in Indonesia, is also discussed. © 2015 UNU-WIDER. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes some of the major events in the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea (PNG) following the Second Vatican Council, the 'self study' of the church in PNG in the 1970s, and the General Assembly of 2003–4. An outcome of the self study was the establishment of a national Catholic council in which Bernard Narokobi played a significant role. The article continues with a reflection on how Narokobi's promotion of Melanesian spirituality finds links with a Catholic theology of grace and sacrament and how these two contribute to his understanding of the dual pillars of the PNG Constitution with its noble traditions and Christian principles coming together in the ideal of integral human development. The article lays out different ways Bernard Narokobi was formally involved with the church over his lifetime and how his bringing together of Melanesian experience and Christian faith provided a model for the integral liberation he envisaged and expressed – both in his work in the church and in the National Goals and Directive Principles of the PNG Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2001 the Muslim population of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has increased from a modest 479 to over 5000 (approximately 500%) mainly as a result of a spike in conversions to Islam by indigenous Papua New Guineans. The evidence suggests that the recent growth of the Muslim minority in PNG is likely to continue in the future. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, Muslims in PNG will remain a small religious minority in a predominantly Christian country. Based on extensive fieldwork undertaken among this growing Muslim minority community in PNG, this paper discusses statistics, patterns and trends of conversion to Islam in a Muslim-minority country that borders Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority country. It provides a brief but important empirical contribution to the study of an emerging Muslim minority that appears representative of a broader trend of global Muslim population growth through religious conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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]

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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares versions of the same origin myth collected from the Anga people of the Morobe Goldfields in Papua New Guinea in the 1930s and 2000s. It aims to show that myth is a form of "indigenous historical analysis" that reveals how local communities creatively make sense of, and seek to shape, past and future relations with each other and the wider global order. It further seeks to highlight the complex ways Anga communities articulate the causes and legacies of colonization, and how these are also informed by current local disputes and by dissatisfaction with perceived marginality and decline in the post-independence order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hype about the potential for terrorism in Melanesia due to the region's weak and failing states has obscured some of the less newsworthy but equally important developments. One of these is the slow but steady growth in the popularity of Islam in Melanesia. This article reviews the limited literature on terrorism in the Pacific. It provides a brief historical overview of the growth of Islam in Melanesia on a country-by-country basis, and draws on a comparative case study and theories of culture and public goods to explore possible reasons for Islam's appeal. It argues that although Islam is likely to continue to grow, its growth is neither a necessary or sufficient basis for declaring terrorist threats to exist. The article emphasises the need to analyse the broader social factors behind Islam's growth as a basis for understanding the conditions through which potential threats to regional security might develop. [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]

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Among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea, dreams deemed true have motivated hunting expeditions, medical treatments, and religious conversion. In contrast, dreams deemed false have negligibly affected behaviour. The Asabano draw on multiple and changing opinions and theories of dreams and dreaming when assessing whether or not particular dreams accurately represented reality. Dreams conforming to several dream scenario genres routinely receive attention as potential “true” dreams. These scenarios concern hunting, illness, death, and since contact, Christianity. Analysis of subsequent waking events resolves ambiguous cases. Asabano dream theories have changed in response to enculturation, diffusion, and personal experiences. Theories and methods of evaluating remembered dreams influence agency and events. I argue that classifying particular dreams as true or false is an historical process because once a remembered dream is labelled “true” or “false” it motivates appropriately responsive action or inaction. [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]

Two new kinds of ritual offerings to the spirits of the land emerged among the Urapmin and Hamtai peoples of Papua New Guinea in the contexts of gold prospecting by a large mining multinational and of several decades of indigenous artisanal mining. Although these new rituals have an analogous form, their rationales and objectives are diametrically opposed. One reflects a disenchantment of the landscape that aims to dispossess the spirits of their land and turn the environment from a subject to be reckoned with to an object of subjugation and exploitation, while the other embodies a longing for enhanced reciprocal relations between humans and non-humans modeled on the morality of conjugality and affinity. These differences relate to historical variations in indigenous understandings of what constitutes moral behavior for humans and non-humans, and to the divergent impacts that Christianity and development, or lack thereof, have had on the Urapmin and Hamtai contexts, calling attention thereby to the complex and multidirectional ways in which mining is incorporated into, and transforms, indigenous Melanesian ecocosmologies. (Gold mining, Papua New Guinea, political ecology, religious change, ritual change) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the problems that face Papua New Guinea and the role of the Christian church in the country if only it were able to disentangle itself from more than a century of paternalism and racism. Definition of transformational development; Great Commission and social concern; History of Papua New Guinea; Possible roles of mission societies and churches.

Before contact with the West, the Asabano of Papua New Guinea treated human remains differently depending on the type of relationship survivors planned to have with the deceased. Traditional methods included corpse exposure with curation or disposal of bones, disposal of corpses in rivers, and cannibalism. Following their conversion to Christianity, Asabano burned or buried their bone relics and commenced coffin inhumation in cemeteries. These practices left distinctive memories and physical records that served as means to alter, enhance, or terminate relations with the deceased who are biologically but not, according to the Asabano, socially dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the globalization and contextualization of Christianity in line with the practice of religion in Papua New Guinea. Interaction between local Christian congregation and the National Lutheran Church in the island; Impact of Christian eschatology and Melanesian religiosity.