Jaap Timmer

Straightening the Path from the Ends of the Earth: The Deep Sea Canoe Movement in Solomon Islands

This chapter explores the transnational ties of a Christian evangelical religious movement called Deep Sea Canoe that is popular among Melanesian To’aibata speakers on the Island of Malaita, Solomon Islands. Solomon Islands is a Melanesian and pervasively Christian country in the Southwest Pacific that has a dynamic history of missionisation since the mid-nineteenth century and has seen the subsequent evolvement of a variety of ethno-religious movements. The example in this article illustrates a tendency of embracing modernity and the wider world through terms that are specific to To’abaita culture: pathmaking and straightening. By examining the present-day role of these terms in the ethno-theology of the Deep Sea Canoe Movement I will show that the urgency of millennial Christianity inclines To’abaitans to actively seek a straight path to Jerusalem instead of becoming recessive agents as documented for other Melanesian groups.

Cloths of Civilisation: Kain Timur in the Bird's Head of West Papua

This article presents a diachronic perspective on the exchange of cloths (kain timur) and the transformations in their importance over time with social and political changes in the Birds Head region of the province of West Papua. Providing insight into the transformations in kain timur exchange sheds light on the history of the region, long characterised by influences from other islands in Eastern Indonesia while simultaneously displaying distinctly Papuan cultural and linguistic features. The exchange of kain timur has evolved amid colonial and post-colonial influences such as missionisation, government administration, education, migration, and the exploitation of resources. The most prominent current meaning of the exchange of kain timur is the safeguarding of the moral community in regard to marriage practices and married life. As material objects kain timur are considered authentic cultural products that mark local identity. In contrast to other Melanesian art forms kain timur has to date attracted little attention from art collectors, anthropologists, and tourists.

Wondrous geographies and historicity for state-building on Malaita, Solomon Islands

Abstract Contemporary anthropological debates over the political implications of the global explosion of Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity frequently center on a ‘break with the past’ and reliance on the working of divine power. In this article, we intervene in this debate by exploring people’s wonder about new global geography and historicity and the ways in which this wonder is opening up a space for local state building by an Evangelical/Pentecostal movement on the island of Malaita, Solomon Islands. We present and discuss the origins of a particular theocratic impulse of this movement to show how the movement’s theology evokes and supports the institution of a form of governance. This challenges the widespread observation that Evangelical/Pentecostal believers are politically quiet.

Papua Coming of Age: The Cycle of Man’s Civilisation and Two Other Papuan Histories

In Maurice Halbwachs’s Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1952) and La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Etude de mémoire collective (1941) (published together in English as On Collective Memory in 1992) we learn that it is through membership of a social group that people are able to acquire, to localise and to recall memories. Halbwachs’s theory of the social construction of memory demonstrates that ‘society tends to erase from its memory everything which could separate individuals’ (1992: 182–183). It is in the interaction between the individual and society that individual memories are reshaped and reconstructed. Along these lines, Michael Jackson points out that it is in the process of personal memories becoming collectivised and historicised that ‘they cease to be properties of individual minds and enter into intersubjectivity. As such the line between immediate and interpreted experience effectively disappears’ (1998: 140). Or, as Paul Connerton, in his reflection on Halbwachs’ theory, explains:

Patterns and Iconoclasm in Motion

Anthropological scholarship of Christianity has been thriving over the last one and a half decades. While studies of Pentecostalism have played an important role in the growth of this field, research on elements of religion that are typically associated with studies of Catholicism (experience, motivation, personhood and movement or pilgrimage) has been less influential. While Protestant and in particular Pentecostal believers tend to explicitly position themselves against local culture, Catholic identity formation is often less coherent. It is therefore no surprise that in many studies of conversion to Pentecostalism, much analytical emphasis is put on the deployment of rituals that have an uncompromising character. As a result, the anthropological focus of the Anthropology of Christianity tends to elaborate on the causes of social and cultural change at the expense of how people experience and deal with such changes, as Simon Coleman (2014) suggests. Coleman laments the particular “semiotics of theory” in the Anthropology of Christianity and, in response he pushes for a reconciliation between studies of Pentecostalism and pilgrimage studies (in which “Catholic elements” have been prominent). The two studies reviewed here engage with the Anthropology of Christianity, albeit mostly implicitly, and Coleman’s attractive agenda nicely help us to highlight their merits and limitations. Jeffrey Sissons’s historical analysis of Polynesian iconoclasm takes ritual as uncompromisingly structuring social and cultural life, as “largely ‘systemic’” (7), a revolutionary mode of historical agency that was arranged by both chiefs and priests in the Society Islands, Southern Cook Islands and Hawai’ian Islands. The main argument of the book is that because all the people in this region shared ritual and seasonal precedent, the Polynesian iconoclasm was destined to become a regional event, and, “as a ground for historical being, the ritually-produced seasonality of life was fundamental to the indigenous agency through which Christian conversion was affected” (11). The iconoclasm is the destruction or desecration of temples and god-images that began on the island of Mo’orea, near Tahiti, in the winter of 1815 and spread rapidly to the neighboring islands. Chapter 2 details the iconoclasm on Mo’orea as led by the high chief Pomare and his new god, Jehovah, and suggests that hierarchical divisions in society were dissolved in collective feasts. The following two chapters consider the extension of the Mo’orean iconoclasm on the other islands. Analytically these chapters build on Arthur Maurice

The Sovereign and the Banyan

If we survey the anthropology of Papua since the territory’s 1962 incorporation into the nation-state of Indonesia, it becomes striking how little anthropologists have been concerned with the effects on local cultures of an authoritarian state and violence. A relatively rich tradition of ethnographic studies produced during the colonial period following World War II ended with the advent of an until-now inexact and all too Jakarta-centred approach to development, nation-building and counter-insurgency that is keen to avoid anthropological reports on the evolving situation. For foreign researchers, access to the region became severely restricted, while anthropology became a marginal discipline in the high schools and at Universitas Cenderawasih and Universitas Negri Papua. Most ethnographic fieldwork is done by students in theological colleges in attempts to find parallels and continuities between traditional cosmologies and Christian scripture, themes that have become increasingly critical among Papuans with growing importance attached to being Christian in a Muslim-majority nation-state. The few ethnographic studies produced feature snapshots of societies or cursory diagnoses of the contemporary world of Papuans as revolving around issues of development, adaptation and ecology. With the emergence of authoritarian Indonesian nation-building agendas in which themajority of Papuans were degraded to the foreboding status of homo sacer, Papua watchers began to engage with the impact of Indonesian rule from a human rights and military violence perspective. How a climate of uncertainty, fear and terror affects communities has received limited attention in, and amid, studies and reports of state violence, human rights violations, displacement, nationalism

Peacebuilding without culture

Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville John Braithwaite, Hilary Charlesworth, Peter Reddy and Leah Dunn Canberra, ANU E Press, 2010a Pillars and Shadows: S...