[ANU Pacific.Institute] Seminar by Mark Mosko tomorrow on Christian Conversion as Sacrifice in the Trobriand Islands

[Alan Rumsey]

28 March
Mark Mosko, ANU
"Break" or Bwekasa?:
Christian Conversion as Sacrifice in the Trobriand Islands
Coombs Extension, Room 1.13
9:30 - 11:00 am

Abstract. In this paper I examine two issues that have arisen in the burgeoning study of Christianity in the Pacific and beyond:  the extent to which conversion to Christianity amounts to a case of fundamental rupture or continuity in people’s religious commitments, and specifically whether such shifts of religious orientation have involved transformations from dividual to individual modes of personhood, agency, and sociality. I focus on the religious leanings and experiences of Trobriand Islanders, one of the most well-described ethnographic cases in anthropology. Informed by a theoretical synthesis of Marilyn Strathern’s notion of “personal partibility,” Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of “participation,” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s formulation of Amazonia “perspectivism” that has inspired the recent Ontological Turn, and Marshall Sahlins’s vision of “paradigmatic history,” I present new data on Trobriand understandings of the character of personhood, the afterlife, procreation, spiritual efficacy, magical performance, and life-giving sacrificial reciprocities between the living and the dead, then compare them with their counterparts in core Christian belief and ritual.

All are welcome! Please feel free to circulate this announcement.

Future speakers and dates are:

18 April
Ghassan Hage, University
of Melbourne
Revisiting Nostalgia as a Diasporic Cultural
Form

2 May
Heather Horst, University
of Sydney
Free Culture and Mobile Phone Gift Economies
in the Pacific

9 May
Rebecca Williamson, ANU
Mundane Multiculture and the Spatialities
of Mundane Governance

16 May
Holly High, University
of Sydney
“Shit
Calculation”: Open Defecation Free Certification in Laos and Beyond

23 May
Simone Dennis, ANU
Mundane Governance: The Fascinating World
of University Timetabling

<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-monologic-imagination-9780190652814?cc=au&lang=en&>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/pacific.institute/attachments/20180327/ac4961c2/attachment-0001.html>