Religion and the regrounding of sovereignty in Papua New Guinea
Research program: Australia in the Asia-Pacific
This project analyses the contemporary search for moral order by Melanesians in response to perceived failures in established church and government organisations. It will focus on the decline of millenarian movements or cargo cults and the rising influence of Pentecostal movements. Whereas, previously, rural villagers used cargo cults to resist and reinvent their participation in modernity, today charismatic churches provide the pedagogic structures in local communities where government services have stalled. In rural areas, the judicial structures of police and courts no longer function and villagers use millenarian forms of Christianity that often contest the legitimacy of today’s "government of the ground".
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