· 2019
Becoming Sinners
- 605citations
- 2019year
Short summary
The Urapmin of Papua New Guinea transformed their culture from traditional beliefs to an intense Christianity focused on sinfulness and millennial expectation within four decades, driven by external missionary influence and internal revival.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Urapmin culture underwent rapid transformation from traditional beliefs to Christianity in ~40 years.
- The shift was influenced by Baptist missionaries and a charismatic revival in the late 1970s.
- Urapmin Christianity is characterized by a strong focus on human sinfulness and millennial expectations.
- The study provides a rich anthropological account of Christianity as a lived religion and its role in cultural change.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote people never directly "missionized," the Urapmin began in the 1960s to send young men to study with Baptist missionaries living among neighboring communities. By the late 1970s, the Urapmin had undergone a charismatic revival, abandoning their traditional religion for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness and driven by a constant sense of millennial expectation. Exploring the Christian culture of the Urapmin, Joel Robbins shows how its preoccupations provide keys to understanding the nature of cultural change more generally. In so doing, he offers one of the richest available anthropological accounts of Christianity as a lived religion. Theoretically ambitious and engagingly written, his book opens a unique perspective on a Melanesian society, religious experience, and the very nature of rapid cultural change.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2019 · DOI ↗
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Field: Anthropology
AnthropologySocial Sciences