Posts Tagged ‘Matt Tomlinson’
Tomlinson and McDougall, “Christian Politics in Oceania”
December 3, 2012Tomlinson and McDougall – New Edited Volume
December 3, 2012Publisher’s Description: The phrase “Christian politics” evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale, from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.
Contributors: Matt Tomlinson, Debra McDougall, Courtney Handman, Michael W. Scott, Annelin Erikson, John Barker, Geoffrey White, Joel Robbins, Webb Keane
Tomlinson, “Passports to Eternity: Whales’ Teeth and Transcendence in Fijian Methodism”
February 21, 2012Abstract: Christianity is often considered a religion of transcendence, in which divinity “goes beyond” human space and time. Recent anthropological scholarship has noted, however, that claims to transcendence must be expressed materially. This chapter examines the ways in which Fijian Methodists attempt to achieve a kind of Christian transcendence in which they escape negative influences of the vanua (land, chiefdoms, and the “traditional” order generally). They do so by offering sperm whales’ teeth to church authorities in order to apologise and atone for the sins of ancestors. Such rituals do not achieve the transcendence they aim for, however, as the whales’ teeth–the material tokens offered to gain divine favour–gain their ritual value precisely because of their attachment to the vanua.