Melanesian Religions Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The thesis explores lines of cultural continuity and change in the Nyaura (West-Iatmul) village Timbunmeli, situated at Lake Chambri at the middle Sepik (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea). The thesis examines how people appropriated Christianity, and especially charismatic Catholicism, as well as mobile phones. It argues that persisting ontological premises have influenced the way people made these new things their own, thus stressing continuity within change. Via prayers, spirit possessions, and phones villagers currently call on spiritual others who are an intimate part of their lifeworld.
While Christianity has been influencing Sepik lives since the first half of the last century, mobile phone technology has only recently been introduced. In 2010 Timbunmeli village received access to the mobile phone network. Most villagers use mobile phones to talk with relatives and friends in other places, but some villagers also started to use them to talk with dead relatives. This development can be understood in relation to the influence of a charismatic movement that during the 1990s shaped people’s religious practices. Charismatic prayer groups started in which people, guided by spirits possessing them, receive the talk of God. The thesis’ theoretical approach is inspired by existential phenomenology and practice theory, stressing a dialectic relationship between culture and human agency. Assumptions about human existence and relations between different kinds of entities develop over time in intersubjective experiences and interactions between self and other. They influence the way humans act and perceive themselves, things, and the world. However, although people are influenced by mutual understandings of their experienced world, they also influence their lifeworld through their actions. They shape it and may change it through their practices in dialectic interaction between what is given and what they actualise by engaging with others and things in the space constituting their lifeworld.
The data for this thesis was collected during a 14 months long fieldwork in Timbunmeli. The main method of data collection was participant observation, supplemented by interviews and group discussions, a household survey, a study about female fishing activities, and a mobile phone network analysis. While focussing on the analysis of people’s perceptions of and engagements with each other, Christianity, and things, the thesis also strives to provide insight into socio-political, and socio-economic change in Timbunmeli. Furthermore, the thesis includes personal and methodological reflections about experiences the anthropologist had with her interlocutors that have strongly been influenced by her being perceived as a dead person from the village who had returned in a white body.
The Timbunmeli’s understanding of their lifeworld and themselves is characterised by a close connection between the visible and invisible. The spiritual other is crucial for people’s wellbeing and strength. Spirits live in an invisible realm that is part of the same existential space as humans’ visible realm; from there they influence people’s lives. Furthermore, the local understanding of personhood assumes that a spiritual substance, called kaik, is crucial for life. Persons in Timbunmeli are composite beings, embodying different entities and identities. They are composed of maternal and paternal matter, names, as well as kaik that intimately connect them with past and present beings, their cosmos, and its creator, who today is called God. If the connection with the invisible gets disturbed or lost, sickness, death, and destruction of people’s environment may be the consequence. For example, present environmental change is perceived as being a punishment from God and a lost connection to one’s kaik will lead to sickness and death.
A discussion of people’s perceptions of death, rituals of death, and relations with the dead, shows that death does not end Being in Timbunmeli. The kaik comes from the invisible spiritual realm and is embodied in a person’s body during life. After death it returns to the invisible part of the world as a spirit of the dead. From there it might return to the living to communicate with them via mediums or to visit them in a new, usually white, body and deliver messages, money, and goods. The dead remain an active part of people’s social relations. In fact, people have established a lived relation to the realm of death that seeks to access the dead as a source for change. This is reflected in practices of prayer groups that aim at strengthening their relations with the dead via prayers and offerings. People have always had different techniques to communicate with spirit beings, but today also prayers and mobile phones are means to bridge over into the invisible realm and communicate with dead relatives, who nowadays are understood as being spirits of God.
After converting to Catholicism people had temporarily distanced themselves from former practices and beliefs and came to perceive their own traditional spirits as evil. However, currently a re-interpretation process is taking place that re-legitimates their own spirit beings as spirits of God, and in fact understands God as being an ancestral being as well. Furthermore, a persons’ life-spirit (kaik) has been reinterpreted as coming from God. With that the spiritual other is not only part of people’s lifeworld, but also perceived as being part of each person – the expressions ‘God is in each one of us’ or ‘God is each one of us’ stresses people’s claim to be active participants in what they call God’s work, an ongoing creation process shaping their world.
The way people engage with God and His spirits shows continuities to their interactions with local spirits in seances and healing rituals of the past. However, while in the past only initiated men were entitled to handle powerful spirits, nowadays mainly women are possessed by spirits of the dead, reinterpreted as God’s souls and saints. Women deliver the talk of God, who works through His spirits in their bodies to heal, preach, and talk prophecy. Currently an egalitarian process is taking place, concerning the access to and representation of the spiritual sphere, that offers women and uninitiated men the possibility to extend themselves into a domain that was formerly only inhabited by initiated men; a process that has engendered intensified struggles for male leaders.
By studying practices such as healing ceremonies, rituals of death, prayer meetings, spirit possessions, and the appropriation of the mobile phone and other things, by analysing myths and stories, by listening to, observing, and participating in people’s experiences with the visible and invisible other, the researcher has encountered implicit and explicit assumptions that characterise Timbunmeli people’s lifeworld and their sense of Being. These premises have influenced the way people in Timbunmeli have made Christianity and mobile phones their own and have to be considered as being rather stable factors in processes of change.