History of contact and change in the Goroka Valley, Central Highlands of New Guinea, 1934-1949

The thesis traces the interaction of the Goroka Valley people with European and coastal New Guinean intruders during the pacification stage of contact and change. In this 15 year period the people moved from a traditional subsistence culture to the threshold of a modern, European-influenced technological society. The contact experiences of the inhabitants of the Valley and the outsiders who influenced them are examined, using both oral and documentary sources. A central theme of this study is the attempts by Europeans and their coastal New Guinean collaborators to achieve the pacification of a people for whom warfare has been described as 'the dominant orientation'. The newcomers saw pacification as being inextricably linked with social, economic and religious transformation, and consequently it was pursued by patrol officers, missionaries and soldiers alike. Following an introductory chapter outlining the pre-contact and early-contact history of the Goroka Valley people, there is a discussion of the causes of tribal fighting in Highlands communities and two case studies of violent events which, although occurring beyond the Goroka Valley, had important consequences for those who lived within its bounds. The focus then shifts to the first permanent settlement of the agents of change -initially these were coastal New Guinean evangelists and policemen - and their impact on the local people. A period of consolidation is then described, as both government and missions established a permanent 'European presence in the Valley'. This period was characterised by vigorous pacification coupled with the introduction of innovations in health and education, agriculture, technology, law and religion. The gradual transformation of Goroka Valley society as a result of the people's interaction with the newcomers was abruptly accelerated in 1943, when many hundreds of Allied soldiers occupied the Valley in anticipation of a threatened Japanese invasion. Village life was disrupted as men were conscripted as carriers and labourers and whole communities were obliged to grow food to assist the Allied war effort. Those living close to military airfields-and camps were subject to Japanese aerial attacks and the entire population was exposed to an epidemic of bacillary dysentery introduced by the combatants. However the War also brought some positive effects, including paradoxically, the almost total cessation of tribal fighting, the construction of an ail-weather airstrip at Goroka which ensured its future as a town and administrative and commercial centre, and the compulsory growing of vegetables, coffee, etc, which laid the foundations for a cash economy and material prosperity. The final chapter examines the aftermath of military occupation, the return of civil administration and the implementation of social and economic policies which brought the Goroka Valley people into the rapid-development phase of contact. By 1949 Gorokans were ready to channel their aggressive energies into commercial competitiveness and adopt a cash-crop economy, to accept the European rule of law, to take advantage of Western innovations in medicine, education, transport and communications, to seek employment opportunities at home and in other parts of the country and to modify their primal world view with European religious and secular values. A Stone Age people was in process of being transformed into a modern society.

'By the facts we add to our store' : Lorimer Fison, Lewis Henry Morgan and the spread of kinship studies in Australia

The formal study of kinship was introduced to the South Pacific Islands and the Australian colonies by Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison who distributed schedules and collected kinship data from around the region in collaboration with the founder of Anthropology in America, Lewis Henry Morgan. This article is a sequel to H. Gardner, 2008 'The origins of kinship in Oceania', Oceania, 78:2, 137-150. It traces Lorimer Fison's return to the Australian colonies from his mission post in Fiji and the subsequent spread of kinship schedules to settlers, missionaries and administrators around Australia. Based on unpublished correspondence, the article investigates Fison's gradual disillusionment with Morgan's evolutionist hypothesis of the development of the human family and his disdain for the speculation of much metropolitan anthropology in the 1870s.

From site to text : Australian Aborigines and the origin of the family

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

Missionary Albert Kruyt and colonial modernity in the Dutch East Indies

Intense debates emerged in the Dutch East Indies during the course of the third decade of the twentieth century concerning the role of missionaries in the development of the Outer Islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Ostensibly concerning “native welfare”, disagreement fundamentally reflected underlying fractures within the Dutch nation, projected through its “colonial mission” concerning the nature of modernity. While the main focus appeared to be a disagreement concerning the goals of mission and government agencies, it would be too simplistic to characterise the debate as one between adherents of a secular versus a religious world view. This paper considers the question of “missions and modernity” in the context of this debate about “native development” in the Dutch East Indies through the prism of the Poso mission in Central Sulawesi, headed by missionary Albert Kruyt, one of the foremost missionaries of his day.

Creating an Indigenous Christian leadership in Papua

In eastern Papua, Christian missionaries found a social structure unparalleled in most areas of religious expansion in the world: it apparently lacked chiefs and any identifiable leadership. Nearly all the Massim societies of eastern Papua were matrilineal, and land was passed through females. Here, women enjoyed a higher status than elsewhere in what is now Papua New Guinea. By drawing on the records of missionary agents, both European and Polynesian, this paper shows how the Methodist, Anglican and Kwato (London Missionary Society) missions in eastern Papua all encountered difficulty in fostering a cadre of male leaders, but — as became evident after World War II — they experienced greater success in fostering women's leadership.

A mystery to the medical world : Florence Nightingale, Rosendo Salvado and the risk of civilisation

In 1860 Florence Nightingale conducted a study on the mortality rates of indigenous children attending native colonial schools across the British Empire. Her study was driven by the question: ‘Can we civilise the natives without killing them?’ One colonial school that participated in the survey was New Norcia Benedictine mission in Western Australia. When Rosendo Salvado, the mission’s superintendent, responded, he drew on his daily encounters with the Yuat people, his statistics on the mission residents and his Benedictine philosophy of civilisation and conversion of colonised peoples. The correspondence between Salvado and Nightingale took place in the climate of intense debates about Aboriginal health, colonisation and extinction in Britain and the colonies. While many settlers and colonial observers understood Aboriginal depopulation to be the result of either the vices and diseases of unprincipled Europeans or an unstoppable destiny, whether Divine Providence or natural selection, Nightingale and Salvado shared a belief in practical solutions to what they understood to be a practical problem. Their collaboration is an example of the humanitarian opposition to the racial pessimism of Social Darwinism. They both sought to use the recently influential intellectual discipline of social statistics to support their conviction that Aborigines, if patiently and carefully handled, would survive the admittedly risky process of civilisation.

Understanding pentecostal motivations for undertaking community development in South East Asia : evidence of an expanded understanding of holistic mission

A shift has been observed in the activities of by Western-based, pentecostal mission organisations in mainland South East Asia. Where once these mission organisations avoided formal community development programs as a distraction to their understanding of mission, the funding for and implementation of such programs has increased dramatically in recent times. This shift in focus is best understood by considering motivations and changing pentecostal perceptions of mission. The research is based on new primary data collected through interviews with long-term and senior pentecostal mission practitioners engaging in development projects in mainland South East Asia. It explores their motivations for engaging in community development, and in particular the extent to which community development programs are seen as a strategy for proselytisation as compared the extent to which they are conducted out of other humanitarian motivations. Analysis of this data challenges preconceived notions of proselytisation being the primary motive of pentecostal mission agencies, and demonstrates a more holistic idea of mission.

I had gone to teach but stayed to learn: Geraldine MacKenzie at Aurukun Mission, 1925-1965

This article examines the missionary career of Geraldine MacKenzie who, with her husband Bill MacKenzie, served on the Presbyterian mission at Aurukun on the Cape York Peninsula between 1925 and 1965. It focuses primarily on MacKenzie’s own interpretation of and reflection on her experiences, as described in her memoir, Aurukun Diary. While the memoir elides some of the more controversial features of the MacKenzies’ tenure at Aurukun, it provides insights into the changing nature of missionary theology and practice on Aboriginal missions in the early twentieth century, particularly as they relate to the role of women—both missionaries and mission residents.

A reestruturação sócio-religiosa em Sergipe, no final do século XVIII

The issues surrounding the religious have been given greater importance in scientific discussions and the media. Discussions on religion and religiosity have become widespread as a means for construction of social representations, both as individual levels, in addition, in the collectivity. This work deals with the construction of the order of Jesus, missionaries and settlers of the projects that marked the presence of the Jesuit missionaries, from colonization to the religious restructuring imposed after the expulsion of the Jesuit Order in Sergipe. Expulsion is what happened in the midst of political and administrative changes made by the Portuguese government in the mid-eighteenth century, which had representation at the Marquis of Pombal its creator. Understanding the religious and social restructuring, designed here in the practices and representations of popular and official. This restructuring has had on the religious brotherhoods, religious orders and other representations, an important symbolic presence in the spaces sociorreligiosos linked to Catholic practices in Sergipe. Representation such that officially came into the vicars pasted their legal representatives, in the maintenance of religious practices in the boroughs and cities Sergipe

Entre cristo e o diabo:o ideário do Colégio Americano Batista do Recife (1902-1942)

Due to lack of work on the history of Baptist schools in the Northeast region of Brazil, it is important to understand through a historical reconstruction of the Baptist Protestant education. We embarked on this venture as a chance to understand the presence of Protestant schools, and his ideas on Brazilian soil. Our goal is to promote a reflection which has the axial dimension of the Baptists Protestant education, in time, we will place the debate between 1902-1942. The temporal boundaries of 1902-1942 was because 1902 was when he started the American Baptist College of Recife in 1942 and that ends the cycle of managing directors of Americans. Understand the functionality of time a school is justified when we realize that the history of education is the story of a work of self and formation within a framework that has the school as the main support that can enable a reading of reality. We also intend to examine the school culture brought to Brazil by American missionaries and their applicability in the Brazilian cultural-historical context. And just to demonstrate the hypothesis that the educational contribution of Baptists added to the participation of other Protestants promoted advances in Brazilian society. Possibly taking for granted that the Baptists were in possession of the democratic ideals of religious freedom, taken by many representatives and religious version of the republican regime. In addition to promoting a model in Brazil to make different methodological schools, based on the ideals of new school and ethics of the Bible. Our proposed research aims at understanding how North American missionaries settled in Brazil and what were the purposes of adding to the efforts of evangelization to formal education, binomial that justified the establishment of schools. A vision of saving men for evangelization and education of the Devil attack victims over the ethics of Christ

Frei Agostinho de Jesus e as tradições da imaginária colonial brasileira: séculos XVI-XVII

Pós-graduação em Artes - IA

Uma investigação etnomatemática sobre os trabalhos dos jesuítas nos Sete Povos das Missões/RS nos séculos XVII e XVIII

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)