Inside The Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology) - Softcover

Whitehouse, Harvey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198280513 ISBN 13: 9780198280514

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 1995

Synopsis

For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing "cargo." The author of this book, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining villages. The two aspects of the cult studied here-on the one hand a large, uniform, and stable mainstream organization with a well-defined hierarchy demanding orthodoxy of views, and on the other hand a small-scale and temporary movement, emotional and innovatieve in its views-stand in sharp contrast one to the other, but are here seen as divergent manifestations of the same relifious ideology, implemented in differing ways. This original theory of "modes of religiosity" which Whitehouse develops draws on recent findings in cognitive psychology to link styles of codification and cultural transmission to the political scale, structure, and ethos of religious communities.

About this title

About the Author:

Harvey Whitehouse is at Queen's University of Belfast.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0198280513
• ISBN 13: 9780198280514
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248