Sit, Cook, Eat, Full Stop
Religion and the Rejection of Ritual in Auhelawa (Papua New Guinea)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18929829 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R Schram (0000-0002-3544-3595, University of California San Diego, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 77 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 172-190 |
| Publication date | 2007-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Oceania (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0029-8077 • E-ISSN: 1834-4461 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/j.1834-4461.2007.tb00011.x |
| OpenAlex | W2031105944 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 31 |
The Auhelawa people of Normanby Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) typically observe the death of an individual through a series of feasts in which the lineage of the deceased and its lateral relatives exchange food and perform rituals of mourning. Recently, a number of people have decided to reject all forms of ‘custom’ in favor of a practice of ‘Christian custom’ in which no food is exchanged and no rituals are performed. This paper examines the way people view custom and its Christian alternative. It argues that the basis for Christian forms of mortuary feasting is a shift away from thinking of feasts in terms of reciprocity and towards thinking of them in terms of traditional customary rules. In this context, active church members have begun to represent the absence of markers of custom as itself a marker of an alternative Christian custom. I argue that this reformulation of the relationship of custom and change is meant to give concrete form to the value of Christian individualism as the basis for sociality. The paper then concludes that in order to explain historical changes in ritual systems, the study of ritual needs to examine ritual in relation to the values that underlie it
Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Cult · Ethnology · Hinduism · Individualism · New guinea · Order (exchange) · Political science · Reciprocity (cultural anthropology) · Sociality · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies
Social reproduction and history in Melanesia
The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers
Identity through History
Women of Value, Men of Renown
Homo hierarchicus
The fame of Gawa
Celebrations of Death
Death, women and power
Death and the Regeneration of Life
Articulating Change in the "Last Unknown"
New Heaven, New Earth
Twenty Years among Primitive Papuans
Marked and unmarked
Fruit of the Motherland
Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring
"Articulating Change in the "Last Unknown
The Ilahita Arapesh
The Rites of Passage
Becoming Sinners
Value Without Equivalence
The Developmental Cycle Among Public Groups
Your Own Pigs You May Not Eat
New Heaven New Earth
Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture
We Feed Our Father
Agency, Personhood and the 'I' of Discourse in the Pacific and Beyond
Reflecting on Loss in Papua New Guinea
Secrecy and the Sense of an Ending
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,56 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2019 (12) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |