Village Inventions: Historical Variations Upon a Regional Theme in Uiaku,Papua New Guinea

Anthropologists have come to realize that even the most ‘traditional’ Melanesian practices and ideologies may be historically shaped by the people's experiences within encompassing regional systems. This article examines the reshaping of local understandings of the village among the Maisin people of Oro Province over the past century. I distinguish three contexts within which Maisin notions of the village have been formed: colonial models of village government imposed before the Second World War; Christian village cooperatives in the post-war colonial period; and village meetings in the 1980s. The paper shows that the idea of the village has a complex evolution, shaped within overlapping dialogues between villagers and significant outsiders and between elder and younger village leaders who have had differing experiences of the outside world and the place of their own community within it.     

Healing,Entertaining, and Accumulating Merit: The Circulation of Medical Recipes from the Late Ming through the Qing

This article examines the circulation of medical recipes through vernacular literature and personal networks from the late Ming through the Qing. During this period, vernacular texts played a leading role in circulating practical instructions for everyday healing techniques, especially in the form of recipes. Recipes became a versatile textual form for recording and transmitting experience in quotidian practice. They moved among different genres of texts, providing information about healing, offering advice for entertainment, and delivering moral lessons. Literati sociability as well as philanthropic and religious commitments motivated people of varied social means to distribute vernacular texts bearing healing information to a broad audience. Recipes acquired legitimacy and authority by clearly marking their provenance and thus its relationship to particular social networks and, sometimes, a religious purpose as well.     

From Revolution to Dissolution: The Quai d'Orsay,the Banque Russo-Asiatique,and the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1917–1926

This article explores the use made of Christianity during the Second World War and the dilemmas created for the Allies by Stalin's religious record. It is particularly concerned with the way in which Christianity appeared for a while to become a bridge between East and West, with the explicit promise of continued post-war co-operation. However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglo-American policies in particular switched from using Christianity to rehabilitate the adverse image of the Soviet regime to what had been the inter-war policy of using religion to demonise it. Inter-war demonisation held up the Soviet Union as a model not to be emulated. Post-war demonisation pointed to the Soviet Union as an expansionist threat bent on world domination. The article examines Stalin's responses, and Allied perceptions of those responses, to the changes in Western religious policy and propaganda from the Second World War to the emergence of the cold war. The article seeks to show how both sides used religion for political purposes, but that in the final analysis Western reluctance to relinquish what was perhaps its most emotive means of indicting and containing Communism meant that Christianity, instead of becoming a bridge, became a divisive factor that contributed to both the onset of the cold war and public acceptance of it.     

Shamanism,Sorcery and Cannibalism: The Incorporation of Power in the Magical Cult of Buai1

This article explores aspects of bodily belief and embodiment among the people of the Lelet Plateau of central New Ireland (Papua New Guinea). Far from being merely a surface upon which power relations are inscribed, as is suggested by some Western theory, the body, for the Lelet, is a central and active site for the appropriation of power. Power can be incorporated into the body through ingestion of substances, and acts of power over others can involve incorporation of their vital organs. Such acts of incorporation, whether to obtain power or to wield it, denote the significance of the boundaries of the body. I examine these conceptions of power as they occur in Lelet belief and in the practices of the shamanistic magical cult called Buai that has been imported from other parts of New Ireland and New Britain. This article examines the acts of incorporation and ideas of embodiment that are deployed in this cult and in the powerful forms of cannibalistic sorcery associated with it. I focus upon bodily practices through detailed ethnography in order to elucidate the complexity of the Lelet's understanding of their world.     

WOMEN'S FACIAL TATTOOING AMONG THE MAISIN OF ORO PROVINCE,PAPUA NEW GUINEA: THE CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF AN ANCIENT CUSTOM

The Maisin women of northeastern Papua New Guinea are among the last coastal Papuans to tattoo their faces. This article first describes the techniques and social process of Maisin tattooing. We then examine the resilience of the custom in light of changes in puberty rites and notions of gender. We argue that these contexts have lost their cultural salience as a result of the Maisins' incorporation into the larger Papua New Guinea society. Tattooing has acquired new significance as a marker of cultural identity in a multicultural setting and as a sign of the Maisin people's commercial success as makers of indigenous art.     

Yangjiao or the ��Other��? Christianity and Chinese society in the second half of the nineteenth century

This article explores the relationship between Christianity and Chinese society in the second half of the nineteenth century by re-examining the primary sources of anti-Christian movements. The first part shows how Christian churches broke the dominance of the Qing government over local society. Conflicts between Christianity and Chinese religion were often transformed into political confrontations between churches and the Qing bureaucracy. The second part analyzes how Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism interpreted Christianity, with an emphasis on how to understand the perception of Christianity in Chinese society. Exploring broader societal perceptions of Christianity—and not just those expressed in the writings of the Confucian literati—allows for a more nuanced understanding of Chinese interpretations of Christianity. The third part studies the relationship between churches and Chinese religious sects. On the one hand, in the language of anti-Christian movements such as those of the Zaili and Cai sects, Christianity was the hateful “Other.” On the other hand, in the process of preaching Christianity, churches themselves experienced a period of transmutation: they recruited into the church not only non-religious civilians but also the followers of popular religions. For a long period, Christianity was called yangjiao, the “foreign religion,” making it the “Other.” Missionaries started to feel an urgency to reject their identity as the “Other” after the harrowing experience of the Boxer Movement.     

Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Zizek's Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis

Abstract

In the closing chapter of Living in the End Times, Slavoj Zizek endeavours to "look for traces of the new communist collective in already existing social or even artistic movements." This article explores what Zizek might see if he were to turn his cultural-critical gaze towards emerging Christianity, which is presented as an artistic and social, as well as religious (or irreligious), "movement." His work is increasingly used by emerging church practitioner Peter Rollins to retrospectively explain his own thought and practice. This article examines some of the ways in which Zizek's atheological speculative philosophy and John D. Caputo's theology of the event are impacting contemporary Christian praxis.     

Rejuvenation after encounters between different artistic forms: a synopsis of studies of indigenization of Christian art in China

Religion and art are symbiotic. The ecumenical propagation of Christianity inherently entails a mission of indigenization. Since it spread to China, Christianity has produced many renovated art forms which combined indigenization and local artistic expression on the one hand, with original religious notions and Western art on the other. This article reviews Chinese scholarship on the indigenization of Christianity in modern China and emphasizes that the renovated Chinese architecture, music, and fine art, after integrating with religious ideas and techniques, largely promoted the modern transformation and rejuvenation of traditional Chinese art.     

Public Faith and the Common Good A Radical Messianic Proposal

Abstract

The article inquires into the implications of Christianity not being a religious perspective among others in the contemporary Western debate on religious pluralism. A quick glance at a recent debate in Sweden serves to demonstrate how Christianity, although marginalized in its traditional forms, remains a dominating cultural interpretative scheme that continues to influence the majority’s view on private and public, individual and collective, rational and irrational. Against this background, the author argues, it is imperative that any Christian theologian who engages in the question of religion in the public sphere in the Western world, also must critically confront the question of Christianity’s particular status. Not least in light of contemporary right-wing rhetoric about the West as an exclusively “Christian civilization,” theologians need to reflect on how to avoid articulations of the Christian vision of the common good that manifest themselves at the expense of other religious traditions. The article ends by sketching a possible direction for such reflection.     

Italian religious historiography in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines Italian religious historiography of the past decade, taking into account the difficulty of this national limitation, given the increasingly frequent arid profitable exchanges among the diverse European traditions. The review first examines some general works and then focuses on certain themes that mark the historiographical trends: ecclesiastical institutions, with particular reference to the period of the Reformation and the Counter‐Reformation; religious complexity, with special reference to heterodox movements, to Jewish culture and to the Islamic presence; and people's religious experiences, with particular emphasis on those of women, in their interaction with both cultural production and social history.     

Dominion of the Spirit over the Flesh: Religion,Gender and Sexual Morality in the German Women's Movement before World War I

This article examines the place of religious values in the thinking of leading figures in the mainstream German women's movement in the period before World War I. Focusing on the debate of sexual morality and abortion within the German League of Women's Associations, it argues that the position taken by these women is best understood as a product of their religious commitments, rather than their political ideas. The article seeks to place these women in the historical context of a particular liberal, Protestant, social and intellectual milieu that flourished in the period before 1914.     

“The Country Christ Knew”: New Zealanders' Interactions with Christianity in the Middle East,Greece, and Italy during the Second World War

During the Second World War, New Zealanders of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF) interacted with Christianity throughout the Mediterranean from 1940 to 1945. Stationed in the Middle East, New Zealanders saw the birthplace of Christianity in Egypt and Palestine. In Greece, Crete, and Italy, New Zealanders saw countries where Christianity was deeply ingrained in the landscape and social fabric. This article explores New Zealanders' interaction with Christianity in the Mediterranean during the Second World War on two levels: Firstly, by discussing New Zealanders' visits to Christian religious sites; secondly, by examining New Zealanders' observations on religious practice and the place of religion in society in the Middle East, Greece, and Italy. The article will argue that New Zealanders demonstrated a keen interest in religious tourism during the war, and more broadly, that Christianity was an important lens through which New Zealanders viewed the places in which they served in the Mediterranean.     

Rethinking detention and deportability: Removal centres as spaces of religious revival

This article investigates the effects of confinement on the religious subjectivities of migrants who have been held in British removal centres, elaborating connections to broader debates and mobilizations over the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. It draws on geographic scholarship on affect and the emotions to shed new light on the embodied experiences of detention, its wider socio-political effects and the complex links between intensified religious identities and politics. I argue that removal centres are acting as spaces of religious revival. African ex-detainees' narratives of their confinement dwelt repeatedly on their experiences of religious renewal, and the article explores how Christianity and the Bible provided bodily, narrative and performative ways of coping with, and countering the fraught ‘affective atmosphere’ within detention centres. Faith was a source of energy, hope and strength, created ‘communities of practice’ within and beyond the removal centres, while religious narratives affirmed detainees' humanity. Some expressions of faith underpinned directly political messages, intersecting with ideas about the self as a rights-bearing subject. By including religious responses in debates over the effects of the restrictive border controls, the discussion not only highlights dimensions of non-citizens’ socio-political agency but also demands a rethinking of the broader socio-political consequences of detention and deportability. The article is based on interviews with ex-detainees, chaplains and members of detainee visitors' groups as well as official inspection reports.     

Areopagitica,freedom of the press,and heterodox religion in the Holy Roman Empire

Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) is widely recognised as a foundational work in the philosophical history of the freedom of the press, although it had little impact upon first publication. However, in 1989 Leo Miller discovered an early German-language critique of Areopagitica from 1647, preserved among the papers of the Anglo-Prussian intelligencer Samuel Hartlib. The present article identifies the critic as the Brandenburg scholar Joachim Hübner, a key member of Hartlib’s networks. Available evidence suggests strongly that Hübner considered translating Milton’s tract in order to promote the printing and distribution of heterodox doctrines of spiritualist Christianity in the Holy Roman Empire. Using the short critique of Areopagitica as a springboard, this article demonstrates through biographical and contextual research the interrelations of political and religious cultures of the period, and that questions of freedom of the press were central to promoters of heterodox religious doctrine not only in England but also on the continent.     

Shia groups and Iranian religious influence in Azerbaijan: the impact of trans-boundary religious ties on national religious policy

Abstract

The Azerbaijani Government’s struggle against external influence from Iran has played a significant role in consolidating its secular self-identification since independence in 1991. Though strong, direct Iranian influence on Azerbaijani Shia groups belongs to the past, its effects are sustained. This article examines the religious transborder flows from Iran to Azerbaijan and their impact on Azerbaijani domestic religious policy. The analysis includes religion as a factor in the debate about transnationalism and about how transnational actors challenge nation states’ exclusive authority over their territory. The analysis uses data from government documents, newspaper articles, social media, and interviews with politicians and religious actors. As a result, the article shows that the Iranian intervention in Azerbaijan has effectively initiated the building of a more specific Shia identity among a small but growing number of Shia groups. This has led to the reconfiguration both of the religious field and of Azerbaijani political secularism.     

Culture, religion and curriculum: lessons from the 'three books' controversy in Surrey, BC

This article considers the spatial, cultural, and legal dimensions of the controversy surrounding the Surrey School Board's religiously motivated refusal to approve three books portraying families with same-sex parents. It examines the issue in terms of debates over the public/private distinction, and the notion of a 'culture war' between progressive and orthodox stakeholders. The polarized opinions advanced in such debates not only invoke and rely upon particular understandings of space, they also have ramifications for the organization of the public sphere, and services such as public education in particular. This article focuses on the three decisions handed down in the Surrey case, culminating in the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling that religious concerns have a place in public decision making, but not to the exclusion of other considerations. This decision signals that the religious opinions of some parents may shape the public school curriculum, and thus the instruction of all pupils. In this respect, it poses a serious challenge to liberal visions of secular public education, and to a secular public sphere more generally.     

Christianity and Indigenous Peoples: A Personal Overview

This article summarizes its author's response over more than 30 years to the various arguments advanced against the possibility of the appropriation of Christianity by indigenous peoples. It sets out the intellectual and evidential reasons for rejecting these arguments. However, it admits that while indigenous appropriation of Christianity is always possible, under some circumstances it has been improbable. Many indigenous peoples have made use of Christianity but in the past there has been comparatively little appropriation by Native Americans or Australian Aborigines. This article explores the reasons for this. When the factors that have accounted for resistance and rejection rather than adaption no longer exist, it may be expected that Aborigines will indeed appropriate Christianity. The article concludes with a brief examination of academic work on African appropriations and suggests that new developments in Aboriginal Christianity will reveal how far comparisons can be made.     

POCKETS FULL OF MISTAKES: THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN A TORAJA VILLAGE

This paper analyses the personal consequences of religious change in a Toraja village, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. It describes how Toraja villagers traditionally define and respond to wrongdoing and then examines their ambivalent reactions to alternatives suggested by Christianity. The paper argues that studies which attempt to evaluate the relative costs and benefits of religious change should specify the subjectively perceived ‘fit’ between old and new religious conceptions and should examine the manner in which individuals use cultural symbols and institutions to order and make sense of their everyday experience.