[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar Wednesday 30 July

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology seminar, 9.30 am Wednesday July 30, Seminar Room A, Coombs
Building

Courtney Handman, PhD candidate, Linguistics and Anthropology, University of
Chicago 

'From the mission station to the village: Schism, denominationalism, and the
transformation of village sociality in a Papua New Guinea Holy Spirit
revival'

This paper examines a 1977 Holy Spirit revival movement among the
Guhu-Samane people of the Waria Valley, Papua New Guinea, paying particular
attention to the spaces in which Christian revivalist social forms
developed. The paper focuses on the social and ideological importance of
moving the centre of Christian ritual life in the Waria Valley from the
mission stations of colonial Lutheranism to the local villages that house
the New Life church (the church which appeared after a schism between
revival leaders and the Lutherans). I argue that the engagement with
Pentecostal Christianity established an important shift in the ways in which
villages as spaces of sociality were conceived. Originally understood as
spaces of social conflict and division, post-revival villages formed around
churches were re-imagined as (potential) spaces of Christian unity. Out of
this reevaluation of the moral value of villages as localized spaces of
unity the revival church sought to Christianize other markers of locality,
including the local language and ethnicity. While Protestant Christianity is
often defined by its denial of materiality and the social - and while local
Christians from denominations that have formed since the revival criticize
the revival church as 'cultish' in its incorporation of local cultural
identity - I argue here that the link between localist forms and Christian
practice is a reflection of the social space in which the revival developed
its Christian individualist ideology. In that sense, attention to the
different spaces of Christian practice can shed light on the varying kinds
of social relations found in different Christian denominational traditions.

All welcome.



____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/

Information about the Master of Visual Culture Research
is available at: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/vcr.php