Cults and Christianity among the Enga and Ipili

In this article, I examine the continuities between early-contact cult activities and present day Christianity among the western Enga and eastern Ipili of highlands Papua New Guinea. Christians today see the cults as early attempts to ‘open the road’ for the coming of whites and missionization. Cult leaders are currently understood as prophets who had received messages from God and were sent out to herald the coming new era of social change. The ritual killing of a young man in the 1940s by cult leaders is conceptualized as the local version of the crucifixion of Jesus. The data herein illustrate the creative means by which Ipili and Enga in this region have indigenized Christianity and located their own regional histories and practices in the broader scope of world history.     

The temptations of cult: Roman martyr piety in the age of Gregory the Great

Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was arguably the most important Roman writer and civic leader of the early middle ages; the Roman martyrs were certainly the most important cult figures of the city. However modern scholarship on the relationship between Gregory and the Roman martyrs remains curiously underdeveloped, and has been principally devoted to comparison of the gesta martyrum with the stories of Italian holy men and women (in particular St Benedict) told by Gregory in his Dialogues; in the past generation the Dialogues have come to be understood as a polemic against the model of sanctity proposed by the Roman martyr narratives. This paper explores Gregory's role in the development of Roman martyr cult in the context of the immediate social world of Roman clerical politics of the sixth and seventh centuries. Gregory's authority as bishop of Rome was extremely precarious: the Roman clerical hierarchy with its well-developed protocols did not take kindly to the appearance of Gregory and his ascetic companions. In the conflict between Gregory and his followers, and their opponents, both sides used patronage of martyr cult to advance their cause. In spite of the political necessity of engaging in such 'competitive generosity', Gregory was also concerned to channel martyr devotion, urging contemplation on the moral achievements of the martyrs – which could be imitated in the present – as opposed to an aggressive and unrestrained piety focused on their death. Gregory's complex attitude to martyr cult needs to be differentiated from that which was developed over a century later, north of the Alps, by Carolingian readers and copyists of gesta martyrum and pilgrim guides, whose approach to the Roman martyrs was informed by Gregory's own posthumous reputation.     

The Yali movement in retrospect: rewriting history,redefining ‘cargo cult’

This paper is concerned with a definition of the term ‘cargo cult’ as formulated by Papua New Guineans from their personal experience of the colonial encounter. An examination of the negative connotations inherent in their interpretative reconstruction of the concept ‘cargo cult’ reveals that these resulted from a dialogue with western cultural constructions of ‘cargo cults’ which effectively discredited these movements. Interpreted in this way, the indigenous definition can also become the starting point for a reconsideration of the anthropological concept of ‘cargo cult’.     

Logging,Violence and Pleasure: Neoliberalism,Civil Society and Corporate Governance in West New Britain

ABSTRACT The postcolonial world of Melanesia is made up of diverse experiments, which combine modern and customary technologies of power into new hybrid assemblages. In the 1990s, there occurred a proliferation of landowner companies in rural New Britain. This happened in a context of neoliberalism where the state divested itself of many functions and services by allocating these to a supposedly more efficient private sector. In the Kaliai area, this new economic partnership between state and capital gave rise to more militarised forms of policing, which sought to protect logging by a large Malaysian company from growing local unrest. Supplementing these coercive state actions were private strategies, which used sorcery to intimidate opponents to logging as well as rivals within the landowner company. Opponents were bought off and alliances created through using customary exchange relations as well as through modern gifts of money, western goods and commoditised pleasures.     

Memory,Forgetting and the New Tribes Mission in West New Britain

In this paper, I use ethnography from the Kaliai area to explore the social and political relationships which underpin memory and forgetting. I analyse the relationships of hegemony and resistance which are inscribed and articulated in a context of missionising where villagers and missionaries enter into an uneasy alliance to control what should be remembered so that people emerge as particular kinds of subjects. In exploring the social and political organisation of memory, this paper does not treat memory and forgetting as opposites, for people are also taught how to forget. Indeed they are caught in the paradox of always needing to remember that they have to always try to forget. Here the need to forget has the paradoxical effect of keeping alive the content of what must be forgotten. In a strange sort of way the need to forget sustains the need to remember what must be forgotten. I explore the political implications of these paradoxes and ambiguities for sustaining a place outside European hegemony whilst still inscribed in it.     

Buried together,buried alone: Christian commemoration and kinship in the early Middle Ages

This essay explores the ways in which strategies of commemoration elaborated by kin groups changed after the end of the western Roman empire and what role Christianity played in these transformations. In order to shed some light on the situation, a broad sample of cemeteries dating from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was analysed, focusing on the spatial organization of the individuals within the cemeteries and around cult places. For this purpose archaeological, physical anthropological and epigraphic data were studied and juxtaposed with the theoretical debates expressed by Christian writers. The data at hand seem to suggest that rather than radically transforming kinship commemoration strategies, Christianity added new ideological layers, making its use and display multidimensional.     

His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture

Abstract

Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.     

Calvin's Legacy for Public Theology

Abstract

Many thinkers, of whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a prominent example, have expressed ambivalence regarding John Calvin's contribution to our understanding of a healthy civic order: while Calvin's political genius is undeniable, he and his followers are also known for intolerant attitudes and practices. Thus the image of "two Calvins" by a recent biographer of the Reformer. In this essay I lay out some relevant tensions in Calvin's political thought, while also identifying underlying themes that were later developed by his followers. Special attention is given to the ways in which the "neo-Calvinist" movement, initiated in the nineteenth century by Abraham Kuyper, both corrected and expanded upon Calvin's theology of public life. It is noted that while Kuyper's thought also influenced the Afrikaners' apartheid ideology, Reformed opponents of apartheid also appealed to elements in Kuyper's theology of public life. Although the results have been mixed, Kuyper and others did demonstrate the ways in which some basic elements of Calvin's thought can be used to address issues that are being given sustained attention today in broad-ranging explorations of what makes for a flourishing civil society characterized by a variety of "mediating structures."     

Translating relics: Victricius of Rouen and fourth‐century debate

This article uses a little‐known sermon by Victricius, bishop of Rouen, as an approach to the fourth‐century debate on the translation of relics. In the last third of the fourth century, the cult of martyrs and their relics was promoted by Damasus of Rome, Paulinus of Nola and Ambrose of Milan, but remained controversial in the western churches. Roman law forbade the disturbance of dead bodies, especially where magic was suspected. Christians as well as non‐Christians were repelled by the veneration of bone, bloodstains and dust, and by the extreme asceticism that was often associated with relic‐cult. The sermon Victricius preached, welcoming to Rouen a gift of relics from Ambrose, is here interpreted as an attempt at cultural translation. Victricius deploys a late‐antique education in rhetoric and philosophy to make relic‐cult and asceticism acceptable. Like many others, he uses the adventus, the ceremonial reception of a visiting emperor or his deputy by local aristocracy and officials, as an analogy for the reception of relics by ascetics and clergy. Exceptionally, he equates corporeal relics with the presence of God; but his unique theology of relics was lost to view.     

Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability

Feminists have long known that gender and mobility are inseparable, influencing each other in profound and often subtle ways. Tackling complex societal problems, such as sustainability, will require improved understandings of the relationships between gender and mobility. In this essay I propose new approaches to the study of mobility and gender that will provide the knowledge base needed to inform policies on sustainable mobility. Early in the essay I survey the large literature on gender and mobility, teasing out what I see as two disparate strands of thinking that have remained badly disconnected from each other. One of these strands has informed understandings of how mobility shapes gender, while the other has examined how gender shapes mobility. Work on how mobility shapes gender has emphasized gender, to the neglect of mobility, whereas research on how gender shapes mobility has dealt with mobility in great detail and paid much less attention to gender. From this overview of the literature, I identify knowledge gaps that must be bridged if feminist research on gender and mobility is to assist in charting paths to sustainable mobility. I argue for the need to shift the research agenda so that future research will synthesize these two strands of thinking along three lines: (1) across ways of thinking about gender and mobility, (2) across quantitative and qualitative approaches, and (3) across places. In the final part of the essay I suggest how to achieve this synthesis by making geographic, social and cultural context central to our analyses.     

Religion,the state,and the Vietnamese lunar new year (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article examines the ways in which the Communist Party and the state in Vietnam have become involved in the annual lunar new year (Tet) festival in the name of the nation, and with how this is facilitated by the ancestor cult and linked to their more general involvement in religious events such as the commemoration of national heroes and deities.     

Logging,Women and Submarines: Some Changes in Kamula Men's Access to Transformative Power

In this paper I describe how, for the Kamula, the productive elicitation of both familiar and modern things often requires access to the transformative capacities of ‘bush spirits’. The Kamula narratives I deal with outline how elements of modernity (such as money, logging, guns) are relocated into the domain of these spirits. By the mediation of these spirits, sometimes disturbing, even dangerous, aspects of modernity are transformed and then productively transferred to Kamula men such that they can apparently more effectively negotiate the new forces that now structure their lives. Through these narrative and magical definitions of agency, Kamula men become complicit in a modernity that is increasingly both the source and negation of their power.     

De Gasperi and Togliatti: Political leadership and personality cults in post‐war Italy*

After twenty years of Fascism, political leaders were faced with the need to rediscover or invent new ways of relating to the mass public and, in the first place, to distance themselves from the type of relationship consolidated under Fascism. This article is based on an examination of the representations of De Gasperi and Togliatti in illustrated weeklies and in the satirical press, as well as their more or less hagiographical biographies. From the sources it emerges that, in the case of the Christian Democrat leader, the hypothesis that there was a personality cult is hard to sustain. By contrast, in the case of Togliatti, it does seem possible to argue that there were manifestations of a genuine cult, but these were set within the context of an institutional charisma.     

The Sun and the Shakers,Again: Enga,Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain Part One

ABSTRACT In the middle 1940s, at a time when white people were just beginning to penetrate the western highlands of what would become Papua New Guinea, a cult spread quickly among Engas, Ipili speakers, and Somaips. In the seminal article ‘The Sun and the Shakers' published almost 40 years ago, Mervyn J. Meggitt would call this cult the ‘Cult of Ain.’ The cult's core feature involved a massive sacrifice of pigs to the sun in an attempt to enlist the sun's aid. Participants stared at the sun and shook, entering a trance‐like state. While massive pig sacrifices to the sun occurred in all cult variants, local versions of the cult differed in emphasizing one or two themes: acquiring wealth (pigs and pearlshells but also white manufactured goods) and/or ascending to the sky. Interpretations of the cult reflect this variation, some focusing on apparent cargo cultic dimensions while others train on the cult's millenarian aspects. This reprise of Meggitt's article argues that the themes of wealth acquisition and ascent to the sky were at base the same, intelligible with respect to the cosmological discourse that so clearly informed all the cult's manifestations (hence the emphasis upon the sun), a discourse that this article attempts to interpret. This, the first of a two‐part article, summarizes what is known of Cult of Ain variants, highlighting the features other reporters have emphasized as well as those that may provide insight into underlying cultural and even transcultural logics.     

Prejudice: rethinking geographies of oppression

Despite equal opportunities legislation in many western societies, overt prejudice against minority groups is still evident. Yet, despite the persistence of equality issues, ‘prejudice’ is a term that is not widely employed in geography because of its association with a particular history of meaning within social psychology. In this paper I explore the concept of prejudice and its relationship to geographical research on discrimination and oppression. Then using original empirical research in three communities I examine how prejudice is justified and articulated by majority people. In doing so, I explore the complex intersectionalities of negative attitudes towards specific minority groups and the ways that specific mechanisms of sub-ordination can reinforce and support one another.     

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.     

Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? Forming a History of the Sacred Heart in New Spain

In the eighteenth century, Novohispanic painters produced some of the most innovative and visually complex images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. While they are based in part on European printed frontispieces of books about Christ's heart, the paintings are not mere copies or derivatives of European artworks. This article explores the reasons for the particular pictorial strategies of Novohispanic paintings of the Sacred Heart. I argue that the visual strategies employed by Novohispanic artists were intended to argue in support of the legitimacy and historicity of the cult of the Sacred Heart; the cult was under attack in the eighteenth century for, among other reasons, being too new and thus lacking historical roots, making it potentially heretical and apocryphal. Novohispanic depictions, like religious texts produced to defend the Sacred Heart, champion the cult, thereby attempting to shape perception through the power of the images.     

Liberalism and Revivalism. A Comparative Case Study of Liberal Ideology,Individualism, and Revivalism in Schleswig-Holstein and Värmland,ca. 1860–1920

Only rarely have the non-secular roots of modern political individualism been subject to study. In this article I forward the hypothesis that modern political individualism, as expressed by 19th-century liberalism, was a result of individualistic, low Church and nonconformist revivals to the same extent that it was a product of secular rationalism. The hypothesis is probed in a comparative case study of rural liberalism in two north European regions, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) and Värmland (Sweden). I address three key requirements of the hypothesis: that the nonconformist revival movements in 18th and 19th-century northern Europe promoted an individualistic outlook among their followers; that individuality rooted in religious awakenings was congenial to liberal ideology; and that traits of non-secular individualism were incorporated with everyday liberal political discourse and practice.     

Landscapes of women and men: rethinking the regional historical geography of the United States and Canada

This paper proceeds from the premise that historical geographers are not prejudiced against women, but many are unsure how to incorporate information on women into their research. The result unfortunately is a historical landscape in which only half of the residents normally are visible, despite many models of regional studies published in women's history. Historical geographers of rural Canada and the United States are to some extent limited by their frequent use of one narrative form, the national epic, that cannot readily portray women as important actors unless its essential plot line is reinterpreted in ways less familiar to geographers. Taking the examples of three western frontier women, I discuss how their narratives indicate ways to give a more balanced impression of both women and men in studies of regional economies and landscape modification. Incorporating female experience is likely to change some fundamental assumptions about the historical geography of the United States and Canada.     

The Sun and the Shakers,Again: Enga,Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain

ABSTRACT The ‘Sun and the Shakers, Again’ resumes the conversation begun by Mervyn J. Meggitt in his 1973 article ‘The Sun and the Shakers’ concerning the circumstances and mindset of Enga and Ipili speakers on the eve (or in the early stages) of colonial penetration. The ‘Cult of Ain,’ as Meggitt termed a regional cult that broke out in the mid‐1940s, followed on the heels of devastating epidemics and famine and was in some measure, at least in most areas where it caught on, a response to those traumas. Yet there were other dimensions: apparent cargo cultism and millenarianism. Widening the geographical scope of reporting beyond that of Meggitt's article to include both the Somaip, as reported on by Hans Reithofer in The Python Spirit and the Cross, and the Ipili speakers of the western Porgera valley and the Paiela valley, this second and final installment reviews and critiques existing interpretations of the Cult of Ain in light of the ethnohistorical detail offered in the first installment and goes on to offer an interpretation of the cult that is inspired by the cosmological symbols common to all cult versions: most obviously the sun but also the sky. The Cult of Ain is viewed by participants and their descendants alike as the prelude to colonialism and missionization, and understanding it is crucial to writing the cultural history of the last 65+ years.