Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future: The Duna People of Papua New Guinea (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion)

How have the Aluni Valley Duna people of Papua New Guinea responded to the challenges of colonial and post-colonial changes that have entered their lifeworld since the middle of the Twentieth-Century? Living in a corner of the world influenced by mining companies but relatively neglected in terms of government-sponsored development, these people have dealt creatively with forces of change by redeploying their own mythological themes about the cosmos in order to make claims on outside corporations and by subtly combining features of their customary practices with forms of Christianity, attempting to empower their past as a means of confronting the future. Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future provides a new analysis of changes in the lifeworlds of the Aluni Valley Duna people living in a remote part of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Influenced by companies mining for gold, cooper, and oil, they have devised ingenious ways to adapt their own myths about the cosmos in order to make claims for compensation and royalty payments. They have also improvised their own responses to the demands of Christian missionaries. The book expands out from this case study, providing a comparative framework for analyzing changes in neighboring societies and a general evaluation of work on the politics of tradition in Pacific societies Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-7 Place and Problem....Pages 9-24 Flexible Groups....Pages 25-52 Forces of Change....Pages 53-68 Leaders and Speech-Making....Pages 69-89 Myth, Ritual, and Change....Pages 91-105 The Duna in Regional Context....Pages 107-120 Concepts of Tradition and Change....Pages 121-137 Empowering the Past?....Pages 139-152 Change Among the Duna: A Synopsis and Some Wider Implications....Pages 153-162 Back Matter....Pages 163-190 The Aluni Valley Duna people of Papua New Guinea have met the challenges of the postcolonial world by creatively integrating selected elements of global culture with their own spiritual and mythological heritage, and have succeeded in thus empowering their past as a means of confronting the future Annotation This book is a new ethnography on the Papua New Guinea Highlands, which uses a case-study approach to consider the role of "tradition" in the politics of adjustment to transnational forces of change