A line to heaven : the Gamagai religious imagination

Abstract

The thesis is an ethnography and interpretation of the Gamagai people's response to the Catholic mission in Rulna, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. The Gamagai saw the mission the way they viewed their own social universe, i.e. in a holistic manner in which individual conduct and the resultant health or sickness, personal success or defeat were interwoven in mutually reactive relationships with the ghosts and spirits. The Gamagai assumed a degree of responsibility and autonomy for their situation in the world by practicing techniques aimed at enhancing personal assertiveness and slarity of judgement. Their cosmology constituted a totality of meanings able to explain every aspect of experience. The Gamagai thus attempted to assimilate the mission by giving it a place in their world and so in their own terms. The Gamagai perceived the differences between their and the nission's views and attitudes as being the same ones which separated :hem from the modern world they found so appealing. They strove to -hange their own culture, modifying their sociality, their practice of justice and group loyalties. A special problem the Gamagai had to race was the modern was the modern Western rationality in which particularly the issues of health and sickness are divorced from moral ronsiderations and group loyalties. The mission's activities in jenerai were grounded in this rationality. The mission conducted not pnly religious activities by introducing Christian teachings but also issisted in the development of local infrastructure, school, clinic md various successful economic activities, but it benyed the .ntrinsic interrelationship between all these elements, especially the relationship of piousness to sickness or misfortune. In response to this ideological challenge the Gamagai started their own grassroots moral movement in which they combined Christian notions and characters (saints, God, Satan) with their own cosmological imperative of the interdependency of spirit-being with everyday experience and all human activities. They blended the originally opposing values and ethos of the clan and tribe with the elements of Christian teachings. The movement, centred around a big man Kints, achieved a cultural convergence by extending the strict moral code of the clan to the social formation of the tribe as a whole, making it into a basic Christian community. This was in response to the mission's demands. At the same time the movement preserved the consideration central to the traditional system, the inescapable responsibility of the individual conduct even though it, like the behaviour predetermined by the clan's moral code, or influenced by the "bad spirits"(tipokic) f was beyond the scope of individual choice. The Kints movement adopted the notions of God, saints and Satan and imbued them with a power to exercise control over tribes(wo)men's behaviour and fate much in the same manner as the clan ghosts, kur manga rapa, and the bad tipokit spirits had been doing prior to the arrival of the mission . The newly developed powers, encompassing both the original clan and Christian notions, had larger social reference than the traditional spirit beings, concomitant with the transformation and restructuring of the tribal universe of human relationships. A dualistic emphasis on good and bad spirits, tipokai and tipokit, was further articulated in reference to the Gamagai territory which also acquired good (kai) and bad (kit) determinations. The Gamagai, engaged now with powers (God, Saints, Satan) stronger than before, had created more demanding requirements for intratribal moral relationships and as such risked more personal damage. This was so because the transfigured spirit beings had the ability to send on them sickness Required and misfortunes. Simultaneously, the Gamagai had also a sense of their own strength as the whole tribe and so the prospects of bigger than ever assertiveness on the local political scene. Show more