Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how a North Malaitan prophet produces a wonderful historicity and evokes a process of state-building at the level of local communities, conflicting with the world of existing institutions and values.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore the production and proclamation of wonderful historicities for the To'abaita of North Malaita. The leading futurist in the region is the prophet of the Pentecostal All People's Prayer Assembly (APPA) from North Malaita, Solomon Islands who has recently employed 16th century Spanish satanic epics of exploration of the Pacific in his evolving theology. While national and European versions of the modern history of Solomon Islands tend to commence with the wondrous attempt by Alvaro Mendaña to locate King Solomon's Ophir (1 Kings 9:26-28) in 1568, Maeliau holds Pedro Fernández de Quirós's 1605 voyage to "La Australia del Espíritu Santo" as evidence that Solomon Islanders have always been in a covenant with God. Maeliau occupies this historical space by suggesting that Solomon Islanders are Israelites, that their fate is prophesized in the Old Testament, and that De Quirós's crusading expedition was part of God's plan to redeem the Pacific. In this paper I will show how this futurist's wonderful new Christian geography evokes and underpins a process of state-building at the level of local communities, conflicting with the world of existing institutions and values.

Paper short abstract:

In an imagined conversation between the refigured dualisms of Fijian Pentecostal Christianity and a multivalent Western astronomy, I show how these flip current anthropological expectations of ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ ontologies, and some implications this holds for an anthropology of wonder.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when our cosmologies are other than we say they are? In 'To be a wonder', Michael Scott observes the tendency in which what he calls 'non-dualist' ontologies are frequently cited as foils against seemingly Western Cartesian dualism, often privileged as essentially more ethical, open and wondering. In this paper, I imagine a conversation between proponents of two ontologies that flip our expectations of 'Western' and 'indigenous' ontologies: the dualism of Fijian Pentecostal Christianity, and the multivalent cosmological fields of contemporary (Western) astronomy. Proponents of 'the ontological turn' have foregrounded the non-dualist configurations of emergent scientific practice in the West, but continue to see these as marginal to a 'mainstream' Western science steeped in Cartesian dualisms - as demanding wider explication, even advocacy, from scientists and their anthropologist allies. In this paper, I ask whether these cosmologies are really so marginal to Western knowledge practices, and concomitantly, what is at stake in reading the dualism of Pentecostalism as a wonder-filled engagement among Fiji Islanders. To what extent does our devotion to those cosmologies Scott glosses as 'non-dualist' risk privileging Western science once again, while effacing the deep (re)figurings of dualist cosmologies among 'non-Western' peoples?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores religious aspects of territoriality in the Western Solomon Islands in light of Michael Scott’s call for us to remain alert to our interlocutors’ expressions of wonder at encounters with radically “other” forms of being that are beyond human sociality.

Paper long abstract:

Only once have I felt the presence of a ghost. It occurred during a visit to Ranongga Island in the Western Solomons, and I was astonished. My companions were pleased, but not particularly surprised, that their recently deceased elder brother had made his presence known as we entered a place that had belonged to him. They did not experience an ontological gap between living and dead, or between the social and physical landscape, in the same way I did. Everything, it seems, was within the scope of sociality: a version, perhaps, of a non-dualist worldview.

In critiquing non-dualism, Scott urges us to pay attention when our interlocutors approach things as being radically outside of, or prior to, human social relationships. In this paper, I draw on Ranonggan distinctions between vernacular notions of property and land to suggest that territory sometimes is, and sometimes is not, the source of such wonder. My ghost story shows that the presence of ancestors in territory alone does not evoke wonder. However, beneath these familiar landscapes and their recent histories of occupation are accounts of the land itself and the categories of being that arose upon it. Questions about land involve not the familiar dead but ancient, mysterious, sometimes only quasi-human clan ancestors, some of whom remain powerful. Perhaps Ranonggan territoriality might be properly called "religious" if we see religion as phenomena that are simultaneously within, and beyond, the scope of human sociality.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I draw on my fieldwork in Isabel, Solomon Islands and examine the way the Melanesian Brotherhood generates ‘wonder discourses’ through their power to detect and clear harmful sorcery.

Paper long abstract:

The Melanesian Brotherhood (Tasui) are an Anglican order of monks in the Church of Melanesia and renowned across Solomon Islands for their Christian power. Established in 1925 by Ini Korporia, the order's goal was to convert the remaining heathens of Solomon Islands. Today, the order continues to be experienced and imagined as a wondrous Christian institution which will rid rural Solomon Islands of harmful sorcery and malevolent ancestral beings. In this paper I draw on my fieldwork in Isabel, Solomon Islands and examine ethnographically the way the Brotherhood generates 'wonder discourses' through their power to detect and clear harmful sorcery. But the awe and esteem in which they are held is double-edged because in coming to clear a village of sorcery they also sanction the autochthonous power of local groups as well as the secret knowledge of ritual specialists to command autochthonous beings. In this paper I argue that it is through these stories and rumours of their amazing spiritual feats that the Brotherhood are being re-imagined as the adjudicators of autochthonous power and in so doing have become entangled in land disputes and church schism in Isabel, Solomon Islands.

Paper short abstract:

Missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries engaged in contests to prove Jehovah’s power and local gods’ weakness. These ‘power encounters’ depended on a dialogical relationship between wonder and anti-wonder. I analyze power encounters in Oceania, focusing on trees as sites of wonder in Fiji.

Paper long abstract:

Missionaries who attempted to convert Pacific Islanders to Protestant Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries often engaged in public contests meant to demonstrate the power of Jehovah and the weakness of indigenous gods. These 'power encounters', as they came to be called, often depended on a dialogical relationship between wonder and anti-wonder: missionaries were fully invested in the concept of wonder as radical alterity, as the success of their efforts depended on local populations' willingness and capacity to imagine the previously unimaginable; but to make new encounters with wonder possible, missionaries had to challenge local expectations of spiritual efficacy, draining local sites of their own original wonder. In this paper, I begin by examining several cases of power encounters in Oceania, including Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and Solomon Islands. I then turn specifically to trees as spiritual sites that were prominent in old Fiji--and therefore the target of ax-wielding missionaries--but remain today as sites of a perceived fundamental, indigenous, land-based spiritual efficacy.

Paper short abstract:

An Aboriginal group called ‘Aunty Joan Mob’ experience fear and wonder out bush. I consider the relationship between local social conditions, Aunty Joan Mob’s marginal political position, and the significance of them being both scared of, and awe-inspired by, their country.

Paper long abstract:

When an Aboriginal family group called 'Aunty Joan Mob' travel out bush, they make contact with awe- and fear- inspiring country. What is the relationship between their fear—of the heat, snakes and wild dogs—and the wonder awakened by contact with sites, eagles and material traces associated with 'the old people' or ancestors? Joel Robbins (2013) argues that postcolonial and Indigenous challenges to anthropology's treatment of cultural otherness saw ethnographers turn their attention to suffering subjects from the mid-1980s. Robbins suggests this interest in suffering is waning in light of a reinvigorated anthropological interest in radical alterity. In the case I describe these foci are not easily decoupled. National political developments and the liberal promise of the recognition of cultural difference, bitter local intra-Aboriginal conflicts, and the subordination of Aboriginal people within an outback town's racial schema, are all crucial to understanding Aunty Joan Mob's wondrous orientation to the primordial Aboriginal past and the otherness of their own antecedents. The bush acts as a repository for latent powers, which are only partially grasped today, and respectful fear of the bush enhances rather than detracts from its pleasures. Thus the bush becomes a politically transformative imaginary space, where Aboriginal people seek to escape the white gaze and where Aboriginal's ability to survive, independent of white foodstuffs, is conjured up and relished.

Paper short abstract:

Buffalo sacrifice marks both regular events and moments of crisis for the Katu of Laos. In this paper, I consider the value of buffalo - in terms of their symbolic position in a network of value and also in terms of their wondrous potency in sacrifice - in order to approach Katu “enemism”.

Paper long abstract:

One of the primary explanations for illness and other misfortunes offered by the Katu (Laos) is the displeasure of the ancestors. To relieve such situations, the most prestigious animal to sacrifice is a black, male buffalo. Buffalo are also sacrificed routinely for events such as building a new house, the annual village festival, weddings, and to ensure general well-being. Alive, buffalo are heavily symbolised as a form of wealth associated with long-distance trade, external relationships and masculinity (as opposed to cloth, which is associated with domestic production, internal power, and femininity). Dead, their blood offers supplicants a wondrous brush with the unseen and often unknown supernatural dimension. Their sacrifice states in symbolic terms a truth that many are too fearful to say directly in the "enemistic" world in which Katu find themselves: that is, that your deadliest relationships are often also your closest.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores when a sense of wonder can arise within human-elephant entanglements in Assam, North East India. When elephants engage humans unexpectedly, perceiving their hidden intentions, this encounter can reveal the hidden moral character of individuals, both human and elephant.

Paper long abstract:

Wonder can arise from the dissolution of difference as well as in response to alterity that is encountered at the limits of our explanatory frameworks. Nonhuman animals are "good to think with" about wonder: as unstable ontological categories they have capacities that are constantly being redefined and overlapping with human abilities. Further, they have access to a world through a subjectivity that partially escapes our grasp and with senses radically different to our own. As agents, animals also open up wonder in the world: they can seemingly participate in and have knowledge of human affairs that defy our expectations. In rural Assam, North East India, I was told that "elephants know all", and are able to perceive the hidden thoughts and feelings of humans, even from great distances. Considered by many to be incarnations of the deity Ganesh, elephants will occasionally cross paths with people, specifically targeting them to damage their property or even kill them. Their unusual behaviour is attributed to the animal having knowledge that the person had bad intentions towards elephants, or occasionally acting in retribution for a moral transgression. This presentation illustrates how the sense of the uncanny and wonder can arise in these encounters, and reveal the hidden moral character of individuals, both human and elephant. I argue that in order to understand wonder of animals in other cultures, we need to attend to the limits of western thought about animals, where categories can be unstable.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I focus on myths of origin that express—to follow Scott—the wonder of creation. I begin with Alan Dundes’ classic work on Native American earth-diver myths, and end with Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional (2010) in MONA to consider the wonder of being.

Paper long abstract:

Michael Scott (2014) begins his discussion of wonder with Socrates' statement that 'wonder is the beginning of philosophy'. For some more recent philosophers '...what begins in wonder, even before philosophy developed, is myth-telling'. In this paper I focus on myths of origin that express—to follow Scott—the wonder of creation. I begin with Alan Dundes' (1962) classic work on Native American earth-diver myths, which are their creation myths. Dundes connects these to the Biblical stories of Genesis and Noah's Ark to argue the case for two Freudian insights; a cloacal theory of birth linked to childhood sexuality, and the idea that men would like to be able to produce or create valuable material from within their bodies as women do. Dundes also draws connections between creation myths and male initiation rites, and I will consider examples of both from Papua New Guinea. Finally I explore my own wonder at discovering artist Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Professional (2010) in the cavernous interior of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. It is hoped that in thinking about creation myths as wonder—the wonder of being—that we might find an alternative explanation for the origin of origin myths.

Paper short abstract:

Based on research in Solomon Islands, this paper offers an ethnographic response to a key question in the anthropology of wonder, viz. what ontological implications might flow from locating being not in what is known but in that towards which wonder draws one?

Paper long abstract:

What ontological implications might flow from locating being not in what is known but in that towards which wonder draws one? In this paper I address this question ethnographically by exploring the varied discourses and phenomena that Arosi know as the Seven Wonders, Biu Ha'abo'uahu, of Makira (Solomon Islands). Arosi say that these wonders comprise such elements as a 'door' in a steep limestone cliff, an under-sea freshwater spring, and even the Roman Empire. All are associated with geophysical features along the western coast of the island of Makira. Taken together, the Seven Wonders are experienced locally as only one of several currents in an 'open sea of endless questioning, strangeness, and impossibility' - to borrow an apt phrase from the philosopher of religion, Mary-Jane Rubenstein (2008: 5). I argue that these Arosi 'wonder discourses', as I call them, not only evince but also actively produce wonder in ways that inform and advance processes of ontological transformation.