More recently, however, we have found that this was not necessarily the most useful way to operate.
4 In the first phase of this research, we were eager to define what kind of churches were Pentecostal and which were not.
Since 2006 we have done research on Pentecostal churches in Port Vila. The city of Port VilaĬan, therefore, be understood as “another world,” and we argue that we might see this as a Pentecostal world. It has other spiritual, moral and ritual bearings. , or that people abandon their kinship awareness or relational obligations-but that city life represents a unique situation with other social parameters and values (see also Mitchell 2011). What matters is not that the city brings people much closer in terms of access to the market, to the state or to modernity Services and schools, the different settlements and their numerous kava-bars 2 and stores, the many different church communities, 3 all form a new order of life. Whereas in a village context kinship systems, avoidance rules, ceremonial obligations, marriage patterns, and agricultural routines order everyday life, in the urban neighborhoods people from different islands live side by side with different languages, different kinship systems, and marriage principles, and social life is regulated by completely different regimes. As a small city, it is not just a big composite village or a more compact version of a Melanesian place. This is also often pointed out in urban discourses: Vila i difren or Vila i tanem kastom (“Port Vila is a different place” or “Port Vila changes traditional life”). From the perspective of a village-dweller in the rural areas, these urban settlements are somewhat strange and alien places. The migrants from the different islands of the country live in semi-formalized neighborhoods at the outskirts of the city center. Some of the most centrally based residential neighborhoods and gated communities are almost exclusively settled by white ex-pats, who operate on the managerial levels of the tourist industry, as advisors or NGO-workers. The city center itself is dominated by tax-free stores, restaurants, coffee bars, and local handicraft markets, a generally modern sphere of consumerism and wealth that is not really available to most ni-Vanuatu. Many migrants also arrive without work, and spend periods of time just “hanging around” or as “SPR - sperem pablik rod” 1 as they are locally phrased, before most of them go back to their island or find some low-income work. In the last decade, an increasing number of migrants from around the archipelago have arrived to take part in the country’s growing tourist industry-as taxi-drivers, in hotels or as domestic workers, cleaners, or shop assistants. , is a small but growing Melanesian city. Whereas the locus of the divination practices in Pre-Christian Melanesia was a realm of forces beyond human control, the modern equivalent ritual is directly attacking the moral person and making that into both an instrument of divination and a sacrificial body. They move into suburbs with what they call “spiritual warfare” and cleanse whole neighborhoods for signs of hidden evil. In Vanuatu today, especially in urban areas, there is hectic activity aimed at sorting out the problem of sorcery and witchcraft in the new Pentecostal churches, and these churches are designed for exactly the purpose of healing and exorcism. In many ways, traditional sorcery practices were considered legitimate and morally “good” However, there are reasons for thinking that recent upscaling of beating, burning, or killing of witches in Melanesia can be related to the Pentecostal beliefs that align witchcraft with evil and individual morality. In accounts of “traditional Melanesia,” we learned that witchcraft was an underlying structural condition of relations between men and women and an ever-present potential of social relations themselves.
0 kommentar(er)
