2010. Foreword. Asia-Pacific Forum [Special issue: Christian Polymorphism in Oceania, Astrid de Hontheim (ed.)]: 1-7. (original) (raw)
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The Encounter Between Christianity and Asante Culture: Impact and Repercussions
2019
The Asante Traditional Religion was in existence and the home of many Asantes long before Western missionaries introduced Christianity and Islam into Asanteman. The Asantes believe in the Supreme Being, spirits, ancestral veneration and life after death. However, with the introduction of Christianity and Western education, Western missionaries condemned Asante culture and religion and taught Asantes to abandon their culture and religion, and convert into Christianity. Some Asantes who converted into Christianity were asked to imbibe Western European culture and religion and to become like Western Europeans in thought and action. They were to assume the names of European saints and abandon some of their traditional names and practices which were considered pagan. Christian rites of passage were introduced to replace the time-tested Asante rites of passage. With the introduction of Christianity and Western education, many young Asante converts abandoned their culture and traditional r...
What I found most exciting about this volume is that it brings together studies on religious and ritual change by scholars doing research in Taiwan, and scholars working in Melanesia. This is the result of a longer project of Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart in which they attempt to explore similarities and differences in and between Austronesia and non-Austronesian worlds. The volume addresses this theme most constructively in the Introduction, in which the editors draw rather heavily on the Duna and Hagen people of highland Papua New Guinea, where Strathern and Stewart have done most of their fieldwork. This emphasis on their own work means other studies, such as the one by Pey-yi Guo on space and power in Christianity among the Langalanga people of Malaita, Solomon Islands, are often taken as illustrating Stewart and Strathern’s analyses of similar topics in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In a concluding chapter to the book, Stewart and Strathern again discuss the highlands of Papua New Guinea in a theoretically broad and ethnographically impoverished discussion of conversion among people of the Mount Hagen, Pangia and Duna regions.
Trajectories
Research by anthropologists engaged with the Comparative Austronesia Project (Australian National University) has amassed an enormous data set for ethnological comparison between the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies, a language group to which nearly all Indonesian societies also belong. Comparative analysis reveals that ancestor veneration is a key-shared feature among Austronesian religious cosmologies; a feature that also resonates strongly with the ancestor-focused religions characteristic of East Asia. Characteristically, the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies focus on the core idea of a sacred time and place of ancestral origin and the continuous flow of life that is issuing forth from this source. Present-day individuals connect with the place and time of origin though ritual acts of retracing a historical path of migration to its source. What can this seemingly exotic notion of a flow of life reveal about the human condition writ large? Is it merely a curiosity of the ethnographic record of this region, a traditional religious insight forgotten even by many of the people whose traditional religion this is, but who have come under the influence of so-called world religions? Or is there something of great importance to be learnt from the Austronesian approach to life? Such questions have remained unasked until now, I argue, because a systematic cosmological bias within western thought has largely prevented us from taking Ancestor Religion and other forms of "traditional knowledge" seriously as an alternative truth claim. While I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Ancestor Religion in reference to my own research in highland Bali, I will attempt in this paper to remove this bias by its roots. I do so by contrasting two modes of thought: the "incremental dualism" of precedence characteristic of Austronesian cultures and their Ancestor Religions, and the "transcendental dualism" of mind and matter that has been a central theme within the cultural history of Western European thought. I argue for a
Vol. 32, No. 1 2016 Melanesian Journal of Theology.pdf
Ghora killing in the Rigo inland of the Central Province of Papua New Guinea is a deeply rooted spiritual problem. Out of hatred or jealousy people engage the services of a ghora to kill people through supernatural means. A person must go through vigorous physical and ritualistic training to become a ghora. Others train to become babaraus to bring justice to those who suffer from ghora killing. But, whether they bring harm or justice, the Bible is clear that both ghoras and babaraus are empowered by the same source – satanic demons – with whom they share many characteristics. Three case studies discuss the various community responses (wui-ita, karva-ghabi, and toe-yawa) to the problem of ghora killing from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Two of these solutions were condemned by earlyand later Seventh-day Adventist missionaries as satanic in nature because the sources used to counter ghora killing were the same sources the ghoras used. However, the latest practice, toe-yawa, has not been condemned. God-fearing Christians in the Rigo inland are challenged to rekindle the strong advocacy of the early and later Seventh-day Adventist missionaries against all uses of satanic power.
Culture Does Affect Our Spirituality Observations from the South Pacific
Spirituality in Mission: Embracing the Lifelong Journey, 2018
Throughout the South Pacific islands, especially in nations such as Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the practice of traditional religion (animism) can be found. Into this milieu has come the acceptance of the gospel of Jesus Christ. David Bosch makes the case for openness to theological methods that are different from the prevailing views of how theology should be done. In other words, he notes that “the experience of the [global South] as a source of theology must be taken seriously.” Since the South Pacific is diverse, my focus is primarily on Melanesia. I observe two aspects: Melanesian Christian spirituality is essentially experiential; and it is influenced by animism, not so much from a syncretistic perspective, but an understanding of the spirit world has enabled Melanesian Christians to appreciate the role and work of the Holy Spirit more naturally. These and other factors mean that Melanesian Christian spirituality has a missional contribution to make to the global church.