Carrying the Cross, Caring for Kin: The Everyday Life of Charismatic Christianity in Remote Aboriginal Australia

Carolyn Schwarz
State University of New York at Potsdam

ABSTRACT
In this paper, I address the important yet under-examined role of charismatic Protestant Christianity in the reconfiguring of personhood and social relations in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwinku. I focus in particular on the ways in which this form of Christianity, locally articulated, brings together indigenous concepts of personhood with those introduced by the market, the state, and evangelism to produce what I refer to as Christian individuality and Christian relatedness. These dialectical tendencies in postcolonial settlement life call attention to the ways Yolngu converts use their Christian practices both to continue kin-based moralities in the present and to engage (if selectively) modern individualism. This paper addresses post-colonial conditions where demands of state institutions and modern governance interact with changing ideas of personhood and sociality. It contributes to the growing anthropological literature on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Key words: charismatic Christianity, personhood, relatedness, contemporary Aboriginal Australia

INTRODUCTION A main focus in the recent anthropological literature on Christianity is the influence of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity on indigenous personhood and models of social relations. Many have argued that colonised people readily engage Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity to come to terms with their integration into global and capitalist relations (to varying degrees), which in turn orients converts toward modern individualism and away from an indigenous past full of kinship obligations (see e.g., Barker 2003; Engelke 2004; Meyer 1999, 2004; Robbins 2004a, 2004b). This paper, which is based on fieldwork conducted mainly between 2003-2005 in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwinku in the Northern 1 Territory of Australia, addresses the important yet under-examined role of Protestantism in general, and charismatic Christianity in particular, in reconfiguring Aboriginal notions of personhood and sociality. Compared with the Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity practiced by many other indigenous people around the world, the charismatic Christianity that has arisen in the contemporary Galiwinku settlement does not require converts to reject material and social connections to kin as a prerequisite for becoming Christian moderns 2 (Keane 2007). Rather, I suggest that in engaging a local form of charismatic Christianity, Galiwinku residents seek to both reproduce indigenous ways of being and adopt aspects of modern individualisma term I use to refer to capitalistic enterprise, institutionalised education and employment, wealth accumulation, and so forth. The nuances of the Galiwinku material that are explored in this article can best be understood if placed, at the outset, next to Joel Robbinss (2004a) study of the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea and Birgit Meyers (1999)
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study of the Ewe in Ghana, as both deal explicitly with the issues of Christianity and personhood with which I am concerned. For Robbins, Christianity is unrelentingly individualist (2004a:293) and has seriously challenged the Urapmin paramount value of relationalism. By relationalism, Robbins means that value is placed on the creation of relationships (2004a:292) rather than on the individuals who constitute those relationships or the larger structures that those relationships form. After about fifteen years of encounters with Baptist missionaries, in the late 1970s the Urapmin converted to charismatic Christianity in full force and adopted this revival Christianity on its own terms (Robbins 2004a:15). The individualism introduced by this movement, Robbins contends, started to come into conflict with the traditional relationalism, each vying to claim paramountcy (2004a:332). Today, the Urapmin continue to be caught in an ongoing struggle to live between two cultural logics that remain largely distinct (Robbins 2004a:332). While the Urapmin have been integrated into the cash economy, they have not had as significant an engagement with Western social life relative to other groups in Papua New Guinea. Robbins argues that it is this engagement, combined with Christianity, that ultimately pushes people toward the final transformation to an uncontested individualism (2004a:310). In comparison with the Urapmin, Meyer (1999) argues that Pentecostal Christianity for the Ewe today provides a means for converts to straddle individualistic and kin-based moralities. Through long-term processes of vernacularisation, the Ewe transformed 19th century missionary Pietism, which presented a new definition of personhood in terms of moral individualism (Meyer 1999:xxi) that encouraged a shift away from identities centred on the lineage or clan, to speak to the dilemmas of their incorporation into a modern capitalist world economy. On the one hand, the emphases put by Ewe Pentecostalism on individual salvation and spiritual and material progress in life pressure converts to separate from family ties. On the other hand, Ewe Pentecostalism enables converts to reflect on social, economic, and spiritual links with family. Christian rituals epitomise these two tendencies in the image of the Holy Spirit, indicative of personal deliverance and freedom, and in the image of the Devil, a metaphor for family obligations that persons eventually want to dissolve. As conversion for the Ewe is not conceptualised as linear, but in circular terms (Meyer 1999:212), Christianity enables converts to repeatedly move through a sequence that entails possession by the Devil, exorcism, and possession by the Holy Spirit. In this way, Meyer argues, Pentecostal ritual offers converts a bridge between individualistic and family-centered concerns and allows people to express and reflect upon 3 the tensions between both (1999:212). Sitting at the intersection of an Aboriginal kin-based sharing economyvestige of the hunter-gatherer way of lifeand an individualistically based market economy, Yolngu Christians living at Galiwinku face difficulties similar to some of those that Urapmin and Ewe Christians face: new kinship demands, cultural dislocation, and economic marginalisation. At the same time, Yolngu Christians are able to use their Christian practices to engage the individualism of modernity and to continue kin-based moralities within and beyond Christian rituals, something Urapmin and Ewe Christians cannot do, according to Robbins (2004a) and Meyer (1999). Thus contributing to anthropological discussions about the intersection of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity with indigenous modalities, I show how this dualistic, and ever-unfolding, process of continuity and rupture with the past is made possible in the Galiwinku case. I focus mainly on the ways local charismatic Christianity shapes and weights concepts of the individual introduced by the market, the state, and Christian evangelism, along with indigenous ideas of autonomy and kin-relatedness. As with other Aboriginal groups in Australia, the Yolngu have traditionally placed a high value on individual autonomy, which comes into tension with the traditionally held value of kin-relatedness (Keen 1994). Fred Myers has defined individual autonomy as the capacity to exercise ones will away from the will of others and a reluctance to permit others to impose their authority over oneself (1986:22). Relatedness, in comparison, is the outward extension
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of ones ties to others, being open to claims by others and showing sympathy and a willingness to negotiate (Myers 1986:22). Several researchers have focussed on how sedentarisation, the cash economy, and recent governmental assimilation projects force Aboriginal people to revalue the traditional relationships of autonomy and relatedness (see Austin-Broos 2003, 2005; Dussart 2000; Macdonald 2000; Martin 1995; Peterson 2005; Sutton 4 2001; Trigger 2005). Adding another dimension to this Aboriginalist literature, I discuss how autonomy and relatednessand the tension between themare revalued through an engagement with Protestant and charismatic Christianity (see also Schwarz 2006:72). In so 5 doing, I employ the terms Christian relatedness and Christian individuality to mean the realisation of social relationships and of the individual through local Christian practice, respectively. These two tendencies function in a dialectical relationship with one another. Together, they reproduce kin-relatedness and traditionally valued autonomy and also transform them in accordance with other cultural discourses of person and society. Christian relatedness and Christian individuality are certainly not the only ways that persons can relate to others and express their individuality in the contemporary Galiwinku settlement. Rather, these particular forms of relatedness and individuality coexist with other practices of kin-relatedness and individuality that residents do not associate with Christianity. I argue that an examination of just how Christian relatedness and Christian individuality are produced in the Galiwinku settlement today can extend our understanding of how Aboriginal people in remote Australia cope on an everyday basis with their postcolonial lives. CHRISTIAN GENEALOGY: COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL WORLDS As in the rest of the colonised world, Aboriginal engagements with Christianity across Australia have varied greatly (Swain and Rose 1988). I must thus begin by calling attention to the particular history of Yolngu encounters with outsiders and with colonial and charismatic Christian evangelisms. For at least two centuries prior to their contact with 20th century European missionaries, Yolngu people had been engaging with Islamic traders and fishermen from Macassar (Ujung Pandang) in eastern Indonesia (see McIntosh (2005[1997]). The Mangatharra (the Macassan people), as Yolngu people refer to them, sailed annually to Arnhem Land to harvest trepang or sea cucumber. Several authors (see e.g., Berndt and Berndt 1954; MacKnight 1972) have argued that the relationship between the Macassans and the Yolngu, which lasted until the 6 early 20th century, was principally one of exchange: neither the social order nor the landbased economic foundations of Yolngu life were seriously disturbed. Nevertheless, the Macassan influence was extensive enough for Yolngu people to have incorporated some of the Macassan material world into their own, such as tobacco, the dugout canoe, alcohol, and 7 knives, as well as some vocabulary and aspects of Islam. The arrival of Christianity was fundamentally different from this earlier intercultural experience in large part because of the overt colonial implications that accompanied this event. In accordance with the Federal governments efforts to assimilate and make sedentary the Aboriginal population, the Methodist Overseas Mission established the Galiwinku settlement in the Northeast Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory in 1942. Despite their reliance on the coercive power of the state, the Methodists were relatively benign in comparison with other mission organisations elsewhere in Australia (Berndt and Berndt 1964; Wells 1993), which allowed Yolngu people to maintain an independent Aboriginal domain (Peterson 1998:108). Even so, the Methodists attempted to instill the Protestant ethic (Weber 1958[1904-1905]) and the values of capitalist individualism in the mission population through a labour routine (Foucault 1990; Keen 1994). The short-term goal of the mission was to develop economic self-sufficiency through agriculture and the production of crafts. The longterm goal was to provide Yolngu people with the educational background to become assimilated into the white Australian society (Moy 1950; Webb 1940). To carry out their
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dualistic aims of Christianising and civilising, the missionaries tried to shape the younger people through education, hygiene, an agriculture and craft industry, and evangelism. In response to their efforts, Yolngu people came to understand missionary Christianity as an institution linked ideologically and habitually to Euro-Australian modalities, an interpretation that is evident in Ronald Berndts (1962) discussion of the 1957 Adjustment 8 Movement. During this movement, some of the Yolngu clan leaders erected several sacred objects (rangga) in a public monument to declare their worth to the settler society and elicit reciprocation. Not insignificantly, they placed the monument next to the church and mounted a Christian cross on the top. According to Berndt (1962), the leaders of the movement aimed to achieve a rapprochement between Christianity and traditional religious practice, as well as unity between men and women and among Yolngu clans. They also aimed to set up negotiations with colonists over a number of demands, which included economic independence and better access to education and employment opportunities (see Morphy 1983:111). As one of the leaders explained, Only when we get all the people together, and when they become Christians, can we send all the children to school (Berndt 1962:78). Such early interpretations of missionary Christianity in relation to the modernity of the settler society certainly helped set the stage for how Galiwinku residents would approach Christianity in the postcolonial worlds. The implementation of the Whitlam governments self-determination policies in the early 1970s marked the end of the mission era. Self-determination was designed to promote indigenous autonomy, yet it failed to take into account the historical and structural factors that created and perpetuated a situation of marginalisation and dependency for Aboriginal populations. Administration of the Galiwinku settlement passed from the missionaries to the Galiwinku Community Council Incorporated established under the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (1976). As Nicolas Peterson has argued, this was a time of radical change (1998:109). [T]he Aboriginal communities of remote Australia went from closed institutionalized and largely mission run communities to self-governing secular towns. At the same time a process of rapid integration into a cash economy took place, with marked increases in discretionary incomes. The result was a dramatic shift in the nature, structure and moral economy of these Aboriginal communities. [Peterson 1998:109] Peterson contends that these dramatic changes in remote Northern Territory settlement life were accompanied by an almost complete detachment from productive activity (2005:11) such that circulation and consumption became the central features of social relations and economic activity. Moreover, the provision of unemployment benefits in the late 1970s eventually led to a situation where Aboriginal people living in some remote communities became welfare dependents (Peterson 1998:108, 106). 9 Control of the local Uniting Church (the successor of the Methodist Church) was soon left in the hands of Aboriginal ministers and evangelists. After visits from an AfricanAmerican member of the Billy Graham crusade and from Dan Armstrong, a leader of the charismatic effort in the Uniting Church, an evangelical Christian movement occurred at Galiwinku between 1979 and 1981. Promising spiritual renewal and physical healing in the Holy Spirit, the movement eventually spread to other Aboriginal settlements across Australia. Despite the fact that the missionaries introduced Christianity to Yolngu people much earlier, present-day narrations of the past by Galiwinku residents earmark this Revival as the time when a sizeable portion of the population started to claim Christianity more vigorously for their own identity. Christian conversion is thus a relatively recent phenomenon at Galiwinku. Robert Bos (1988a, 1988b) explains that the religious meetings during the Revival had pronounced similarities to evangelical Christian services, but that they also bore a strong
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resemblance to traditional ritual forms, reflecting an Aboriginalisation of Christianity. Bos (1988a, 1988b) contends that the Revival was a response to changing social conditions, such as threats to land and culture, an emergence of wealth differences, problems with local authority structures, and increased alcohol abuse and petrol sniffing. In attempting to counter these problems, the leaders of the movement stressed unity among Yolngu and between Yolngu and Euro-Australians (so reiterating a theme of the Adjustment Movement) and strove to legitimise the authority of the Council, as there was a high degree of overlap between the leadership of the movement and of the Council. They also required participants to adopt ascetic behaviours. Thus, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the missionary Christianity that dominated the assimilation era gave way to a local form of Christianityshaped in relation to global evangelical practices. This local charismatic Christianity was a platform for Galiwinku residents to respond to changes in settlement life brought about by the governments implementation of self-determination and by their integration into the cash economy. Today, Galiwinku residentswho face a high unemployment rate and live in what is 10 now the largest Aboriginal settlement in Northeast Arnhem Land must deal with governmental policies designed to push them toward comprehensive market integration and capitalist individualism. This is an agenda that recreates the mid-century assimilation schemes devised by the state and church with a new emphasis on ending welfare dependency. The payment of welfare benefits to Aboriginal people has, on the one hand, been the primary means through which they have been integrated in the market economy (see Austin-Broos 2009:17-18), but on the other, it is what has allowed them (at least in remote Aboriginal Australia) some degree of freedom from full-blown market participation. Carried out under the auspices of practical reconciliation, the Howard government (1994-2007) encouraged individual property and home ownership, employment, and out-migration from remote Aboriginal communities to urban and semi-urban centres (Liberal Party 2004). These individualising schemes have been continued by the current Rudd government, whose policy of Closing the Gap also stresses market participation, child education, home ownership, and employment. It is not surprising, then, that the Howard and Rudd governments have described Aboriginal sharing practices as detrimental to achieving modern citizenship standards and to 11 individual wealth accumulation. As Peterson and John Taylor have argued, sharing is often cited as a liability when it comes to individuals and families seeking to improve their personal social and economic situation (2003:106). In line with the historical patterns at Galiwinku, contemporary charismatic Christianity is a process through which residents try to adjust to the circumstances of postcolonial life, which are implicitly and explicitly shaped by current bureaucratic structures. Today, converts continue their commitment to Christianity by participating regularly in church 12 business, which was the case for approximately 9 percent of Galiwinku residents during the fieldwork period, or by other kinds of locally defined Christian behaviours, such as abstaining from gambling and substance abuse, working at the Bible Translation Centre, or attending Christian conferences away from the settlement. Christianity continues to exist, 13 as it did during the mission era, alongside traditional religious practices. Yet the changes in the social, political, and economic circumstances of people living at Galiwinku, as in other Northern Territory settlements, have accelerated a propinquity of sorts between the two laws. As 73 percent of the Galiwinku population identified themselves as Christians 14 in the latest census (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007a), Christian practice figures prominently in everyday social relations and is a process through which many residents try 15 to delicately balance individual interests with caring for others. While I discuss Christian relatedness as separate from Christian individualitya parsing that is analytically useful it is important to keep in mind that these tendencies are in a dialectical relationship with one another in the lived social world.

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CHRISTIAN RELATEDNESS For Yolngu people, religious affiliations, social and emotional supports, economic welfare, and political allegiances have long been governed by the rules associated with a kin-relatedness 16 17 that is rooted in the clan or bpurru. Beginning with close kin and fellow clan members, persons moved outward along the kinship network to gain status and prestige through sharing activities (Keen 1994). Today, residents are obliged, as they were in the pre-colonial and colonial worlds, to look after (djga) their close kin, their clan, and other residents in emotional, material, religious, and social terms. Nevertheless, the demands of kin-relatedness and pressures to share have intensified in recent decades as population density has increased and reliance on the cash economy and commodities has grown (Austin-Broos 2003; Dussart 2000; Peterson 2005). Thus, the ability to effectively care for kin is increasingly becoming harder to achieve. Under these trying circumstances, Christian relatedness, or the realisation of social relationships through local Christian practice, provides rhetoric and behaviours for individuals to offer care to kin and other residents. Christian relatedness is the outgrowth of indigenous ideas of kin-relatednessof the dutiful kinspersonas they flow together with evangelical ideas of the faithful and proactive disciple. As Webb Keane (2007) has convincingly argued, compared with ancestral ritualist traditions, which primarily locate agency in objects and nonhuman subjects (i.e., the spirit world), Protestantism places special value on human agency. In Protestant thought, humans act not only as vehicles for divine agency, but also as purposeful agents in their own right (Keane 2007:145). Such notions of agency, Keane contends, have played a central role in the moral narrative of modernity (2007: 179). Reflecting a localisation of these Protestant ideologies, Christian converts at Galiwinku profess the belief that their faith in God enables them to better look after others and to effect transformations in their personal struggles with and on behalf of kin. Working to Fix the Family Problem Members of Galiwinkus convert population believe that God has the power to heal family strife. Indeed, a popular Christian proclamation is He [God] can fix the family problem. As Gods power must be activated by human action, converts often give testimony during Sunday services about their experiences of economic and emotional crises with kin. Such behaviour is understood as an initial step in the healing sequence. A minister spoke in a Sunday service, 18 for example, about a fight that had broken out among his family and others the day before. He explained that his teenage son had asked him for money to purchase marijuana. The minister told his son that he did not have any money so the two of them began to argue, and the argument soon escalated into a fight. A friend of the son, who was not one of the ministers close kin, then got involved; presumably to keep the fight from escalating further but also to help the son against his father. In the midst of the struggle, the minister had tried to hit his son with a stick, but accidentally hit the other teenager, provoking a large-scale fight involving many residents. After telling this story to the congregation, the minister and his wife knelt on the ground in the front of the church to be prayed over not only for atonement for fighting, which goes against prescribed Christian behaviour, but also for the emotional strength to go back and deal with the problem with their son. As this example shows, Christian practice seems to recreate the traditional moral duties of relational personhood, which in this case is articulated primarily in terms of the parentchild relationship but also of the spousal relationship. Indeed, a commonly asserted Christian mandate in English is Clean up your own backyard! or in Yolngu Darrtjalkkum nhunguwuy wnga! Backyard is a metaphor for close kin, and cleaning up your backyard means working to resolve arguments and helping kin with alcohol and drug abuse, and to a lesser extent with gambling and kava addiction (see also Bos 1988b:432; Brady 1992:113-121;

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McDonald 2001:110-113; Myers 1986:269; Tonkinson 2004:194). If cleaning up your own backyard is the challenge for all Christians, the example of the minister and his wife shows that Christian behaviourasking others to help by performing prayeris a means through which converts try to resolve family strife and reestablish their identity as nurturers in the face of the increased sharing pressures. Christian practice thus complements the conflict-resolution meetings used at Galiwinku today that have their roots in pre-colonial times. Nancy Williams (1987:51, 68) has discussed the nature of Yolngu meetings as they pertain to disputes that arose in the neighboring settlement of Yirrkala during the early 1970s. The meetings typically involved those who were most directly concerned with the dispute, which could involve one or more clans, and arose from such grievances as breaches of contractual obligations (e.g., marriage), religious restrictions, or exile, as well as sorcery allegations. Although I was aware of meetings that were also held to address breaches of ritual procedures, this general description given by Williams (1987) is applicable to the Galiwinku context in the 2000s. One of the main differences between Christian practice and the meeting model seems to be that the former involves residents who may not have had any involvement in or concern with the dispute itself, and thus, to whom one goes for support with a family problem in the Christian venue may be different from those who are present in the meeting venue. Another difference seems to be that the Christian procedure is used for more minor offenses than those at issue during the meetings. As these two strategies are by no means mutually exclusive, they provide converts with a repertoire of behaviours to try to resolve problems arising from changes taking place in the family group. Converts may also opt to bring the aggrieved kinsperson with them to the church to be prayed over. A congregation member, for instance, had testified about difficulties he had with his family not coming to church. They were always giving him a hard time, he claimed, for money. Like the minister above, one of his teenage sons had problems with marijuana and habitually asked him for money to buy the substance. Other solaces that the congregation member had turned to in the past included alcohol and kava, but drinking made him feel as though he was lost. After his testimony, he asked the congregation to form a circle around him to pray over him. When the problems still persisted some three months later, this man brought his teenage son to the church with him, and they knelt down together for family healing. Such repeated attempts to initiate emotional and social healing, even when earlier efforts have failed, parallel the measures that converts take to help kin recover from physical illness. Christian Caring for Sick Kin What Yolngu people think of as Western disease is increasing among the local Galiwinku population (Brimblecombe et al. 2006) and Aboriginal Australians in general (Paradies and Cunningham 2002). Despite the fact that their effects on transforming sick persons are quite limited, Yolngu people, like many others around the world (cf. Barker 2003; Coleman 2006; Dilger 2007; Meyer 1999), use Christian representations to deal with unforeseen physical misfortune. Hansjrg Dilger (2007), for example, has shown that in present-day urban Tanzania, the emergence of Neo-Pentecostal healing practices is a response to an increase in afflictions and diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS. At Galiwinku, Christian healing practices are typically called upon as a last case resort and are in large part understood as a failsafe mechanism, especially if symptoms persist or change state by spreading or worsening after persons have already sought out clinical or traditional treatments, which are primarily those of the marrnggitj (healer) and bush remedies (see Reid 1983; Schwarz in press.). Praying over sick kin for healing is commonly performed during church services and with other kin or other Christians beyond the church space. A Christian senior woman, for instance, organised a prayer session at her home for her Christian sisters son (her waku) who
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was having a major operation that afternoon in an urban centre hospital. Several close kin had gathered at her house. At the precise time that the operation was to take place, one of the ministers and his wife, who were the classificatory ngathi (MF) and mri (MM[B]) of the sick person, arrived to lead a sequence in the prayer session during which the minister read from the Bible and directed songs. For the participants, the ministers presence contributed to the efficacy of the ritual performance, as his ministerial status assigned legitimacy to the prayer sessiona belief that parallels ideology about leadership in the traditional ritual domain. A few months after the operation, the mother of the child attributed her sons recovery to her own faith and to the prayer session that activated Gods healing power. She explained, Thats why I will not run away from God anymore because of those miracles that Ive seen and experiences in the family. Thats why Im not turning away and giving my back to God. Prayer for the healing of sick kin may also be performed individually. Take the following example of a grandmother praying over her granddaughter, which is paradigmatic of countless situations that I witnessed during the fieldwork period. A small child became ill with a common intestinal virus. The childs mri (MM[B]) brought her to the clinic for medicine and gave it to her in the early evening. But the child continued vomiting into the night. The grandmother was very concerned about the little girls condition so she held her stomach and prayed for her. When the child woke up in the morning, she was no longer sick. The grandmother told this story to her close kin the following day and accentuated the point that after the child went to the clinic and had medicine, she continued to vomit. It was not until the morning, after the woman prayed, that her granddaughter felt better. As this and the previous example demonstrate, converts interpret Christian prayer as a means to help kin recover from illness in a time of crisis, a conviction that many of them cling to in explaining their Christian resolve. The realities of chronic illness in contemporary settlement life are such that people find themselves squaring off against sickness over and over again (Schwarz in press). Converts interpret those instances of success, which may range from full-blown miracles to less spectacular recoveries, as evidence of Gods healing power. This perceived affirmation in turn seems to strengthen their confidence as caregivers as they are the ones who act, either alone or with other Christians, to deliver that power to kin. Caring for Christians and the Community As Christianity is a means through which converts offer care towards their close kin, it also generates possibilities for giving care to persons for whom converts may not have responsibility as close kin. Put differently, Christian membership implies quasi-kin-relatedness on top of existing classificatory relations. This is a process that is rooted in the universalised Christian message We are all children of God (see Robbins 1998) and is captured locally in the concept of the Christian bpurru or Christian clan. To be sure, converts are faced with additional caring responsibilities, but they also gain access to a support network that can offer them care in times of need, which for many converts has proven to be an invaluable emotional and spiritual resource. Quasi-kin-relatedness in Christianity is regularly demonstrated through some of the activities discussed above, such as praying over others and holding prayer sessions at the homes of Christians whose kin are sick. Other behaviours include visiting residents informally in times of emotional or physical crises or having Fellowships for sick residents at their homes. Converts may also organise church meetings to address concerns about the general well-being of the community, thus extending care to the community at large. For example, on one occasion, the Church held a meeting to address worries (warwuyunmirr) about Christian and traditional knowledge not being transmitted to future generations, a failure that they saw as contributing to social stress. Many Christians are members of the senior generation, and they commonly depict youth suicides, break-ins, and problems with substance abuse as symptomatic of young people not wanting to learn about the old ways or the Christian way. While anxieties about future generations are discursively
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performed in many contexts, the church space provides a regular and public space to do so. One of the churchs ministers announced a meeting on the community loudspeaker. He said that people needed to clean up the community because there was much [social] sickness (dharrwa rerri), arising from a lack of knowledge and engagement with the Christian way. The minister explained that those of his generation needed to make the community a better place for the children. During the meeting, church members talked about what steps could be taken to improve the lives of young people for the future of the community. Caring for the community, particularly those that belong to the junior generation, is thus performed in the present and projected into the future as a responsibility of the Christian person and of Christians as a whole. This pattern also recreates traditional models of hierarchy as nurturance (Myers 1986:22), meaning that members of the senior generation gain respect from their juniors in exchange for looking after them, which is a point I return to and further explore later. My discussion thus far has shown that converts at Galiwinku highly value the production of social relationships. Christian relatedness, which is rooted in evangelical ideas of human agency (i.e., the faithful and proactive disciple) and indigenous ideas of the dutiful kinsperson, enables converts to strengthen their connection to close kin. It is also a means through which converts create quasi-kinship connections to others on top of classificatory relations. Thus, in Christian relatedness, kin-relatedness is both reproduced and reorganised with what Yolngu understand as Christian ways of relating to others and Christian ways of looking after others. CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALITY Operating in dialectical relation with Christian relatedness in contemporary Galiwinku life is Christian individuality, or the realisation of the individual through local Christian practice. As explained earlier, Aboriginal societies have traditionally placed a high value on individual autonomy, which is defined as the capacity to exercise ones will away from the will of others and a reluctance to permit others to impose their authority over oneself (Myers 1986:22). For example, prominent men were known for making it their business to attend ceremonies far and wide, thus accruing vast knowledge (Bern 1979; Keen 1994; Morphy 1991). Individual accumulation of wives and of money or artifacts for valued social purposes was possible (Peterson 1993:867). There is also individual discovery of sacred knowledge and objects through dream and reverie in the traditional religious sphere (Dussart 2000; Poirier 2005). Thus, as the work of other Aboriginalists has clearly shown, there was never a perfect egalitarian world free of tension. The Christian individuality that has emerged in the Galiwinku settlement is therefore not just the product of market, state, and evangelical ideas of the individual. Rather, it is the amalgam of these ideas along with indigenous ideas of individual autonomy. Neither the introduced nor the preexisting notions of person have, of course, remained (and were never) static, but rather, are ever-evolving. Converts living at Galiwinku today articulate their Christian individuality through certain religious doctrines about accountability, redemption, and willfulness in following God, as well as through a host of everyday ideologies that define the individual in accordance with the educational, political, and employment-based structures of postcolonial settlement life. God and the Believer Christian individuality is grounded, at a most fundamental level, in evangelical doctrines about the nature of the persons relationship to an omnipotent God. In some sense, this relationship is comparable to the relationship between the Yolngu person and the Wangarr (Ancestral Beings) in that both God and the Wangarr provide human beings with an identity, code of conduct, and the responsibility to nurture and perpetuate the cosmological order into the future. Moreover, Christians often exclaim in Sunday services that they have authority based on the
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holding of primary rights to Gods power, which is analogous to how Yolngu people understand Ancestral powers and clan membership (see Morphy 1991:102-103; Keen 1994:103). As one church elder put it, authority, ganydjarr (power) God ga ngayatham (holds). And weve got that authority, God-given authority as a church. Such parallels in belief systems are accentuated in the commonly used phrase God Wangarr (see also Bos 1988b:430; Keen 1994:47; Magowan 1995), integrating the Christian God into Ancestral 19 understandings. Nevertheless, local Christian doctrines have been impacted by evangelical discourses that stress the importance of the persons individual relationship with God. Reflecting the Protestant emphasis on human agency discussed above, such discourses define each person as solely responsible for that relationship, as it must be maintained and nurtured through individual faith alone (cf. Austin-Broos 1997; Keane 2007:55; Meyer 1999:175-212). This is a principle that is captured locally in the metaphor of ones own cross. As a church minister explained in his sermon: You have to pick up the cross. I cant pick it up for my wife. She has to pick it up, carry that cross. I dont pick up cross for somebody else. I have to pick up that cross myself. That is the Law for me. The statement That is the Law for me conveys the belief that each person has particular rules and regulations that one must abide by as a personalised form of Law. Each person is also said to have a covenant with God, and God will judge and redeem persons one-by-one (gna-gana), not as a clan (in both the traditional and Christian sense) or as kin. These conceptualisations of individual salvation are indeed distinct from Ancestral theologies in that the person is defined apart from the identity of kin and other clan members. Local manifestations of ideas about the individuated believer at Galiwinku resonate with observations made elsewhere around the former colonial world. John Barker (2003), for example, has argued that Maisin people in Papua New Guinea, who were first introduced to Christianity by Anglican missionaries, are increasingly likely to perceive the causes and appropriate responses to sickness in individual termsas a matter between the believer and Godrather than in terms of the social whole (2003:281). Maia Greens (2003) work on contemporary Catholicism in Southern Tanzania has shown that in comparison with traditional relations to ancestors and spirits, converts prioritise the establishment of highly personal and unmediated relationships with Christian beings, emphasising a spiritualised individualistic understanding of Christianity (2003:143). Following God: A Matter of Individual Choice Related to the importance that Galiwinku converts place on the faith of the individual, which reflect global evangelical concepts of the individuated believer, is the notion that one must willfully decide to follow God (malthun Garraywu), as opposed to following God merely to satisfy the desires of close kin. In testimonies, speakers commonly assert that they have turned back to God (ronganmaram Garraywal) not because they were brought to the church by other kin, but because it was their own choice (cf. Keane 2006:318; 2007:149; Tomlinson 2009:184205). Such rhetoric rearticulates the high value placed on individual autonomy with 20 evangelical notions of the individuated disciple. Lalambarri, for example, a husband of one of the church elders, had worked for God for many years from the time of his youth. He had received theological training at Nungalinya College in Darwin and ministered to people in the settlement, as well as in other Australian states and countries. His travels to preach the gospel, however, were also marked by personal bouts of intense alcohol drinkingcreating a cycle of preaching and temperance followed by not preaching and drinking. Around the age of forty, Lalambarri decided that he did not want to continue ministering to people outside of
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the settlement. He felt that his travels kept him from fulfilling his obligations as a leader 21 (dalkarramirr) of traditional ceremonies. He stopped participating in church services for several years and took up the social activities of drinking kava and alcohol in and outside of the settlement. During the 2004 Christmas celebration, however, Lalambarri started attending church once again. He stood before the congregation and said that it was not his wife who had brought him to church, but that he alone (ngarrapi) had decided to turn back to God. Lalambarri explained that he had given up his previous ways (i.e., drinking) and was prepared to undertake work for God by ministering within the settlement. This rhetoric of moral asceticism that Lalambarri and other converts at Galiwinku invoke diverges from the Weberian (1958[1904-1905]) model, according to which ascetic virtue led to prosperity and thus evidence of Gods favour. It seems that the ascetic life is not its own reward in the Galiwinku context because it does not automatically (and in most cases) produce economic gain. Rather, Christian rhetoric of ascetic virtue and consumption is another idiom for individuals to express willfulnesssomething that is very prominent in indigenous notions of individual autonomy. There is also the related rhetoric of returning to God and turning from God (turning your back) or what may be called lapsarian rhetoric. This is as well a moral discourse that allows for the recognition of willfulness in having the freedom to oscillate between the two ways of living. The emphasis on individual desires to change and follow God, along with the emphasis on the individuals relationship with God discussed above, fit with and influence how converts make sense of their individual life courses and approach the institutionalised structures that have become part of their everyday worlds. Individual Life Trajectories: Christian Ideologies and Practices In connection with the belief in the power of faith to heal sick kin discussed earlier, which is anchored to Protestant ideas about agency, converts also profess belief that in living out their faith they can exert some control over their personal life trajectories, in general, and personal well-being, in particular. This is the local version of the global Health and Wealth Gospelevangelical shorthand for the belief that through faith the convert himself or herself can become healthy and affluent. As one senior woman and church elder explained: If you are looking for power. you have to make your hands dirty. You have to struggle. Thats why people get sickbecause they dont use their hands. They are relying on others. The power is in you, right now. You have to build up that power by your wisdom. It is in yourself, individuallyIf we are in Christ, we have to be his example. In her statement, she not only associates self-reliance and struggle with personal well-being, but she also defines the individual as ultimately responsible for his or her life trajectory (cf. Austin-Broos 1997:55; Tomlinson 2009:95-96). Her assertion contrasts with traditional cultural logics which allow one to give up and free oneself from personal accountability by placing blame on other kin or clan members (see Dussart 2000; Keen 2006:526). Such beliefs in individual agency also resonate with and envelop ideas of individualism derived from the state and market economy, namely those of personal development, hard-work, and selfreliance (see Schwarz 2006:75-79; 2007:73-84). Among Galiwinku residents, this rhetoric of self-improvement exists despite the absence of a rhetoric of economic progression. In the local context, notions of self-dependency and individuated responsibility are connected most explicitly to employment and education, a process that reproduces many of the practical intentions of the Methodist missionary project. Aspects of the Protestant ethic are represented at Galiwinku even while the main premise of Webers (1958[1904-1905]) model (be austere and reinvest in your business and then riches will follow) is absent. Christian
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discourses stress the importance of learning how to save money and having a job, as opposed to gambling and substance abuse, as well as English literacy. From the perspective of many Galiwinku residents, English literacy is both iconic and practical in its ability to provide the means to engage and interact with Euro-Australians and with governmental institutions. Both Christians and non-Christians infer that someone who is a Christian is someone who is literate in English (see also Kral and Falk 2004:49; Schwab and Kral 2003:17). Hence the quite common assertion in life history narratives that it was not until the person changed his or her life to follow Gods way that he or she was able to become literate through enlisting Gods aid. As one minister preached, He [God] was the only one who taught me English through the Bible so that I could speak. The Bible is always helping meJesus only help me for English in the nation. For many, English literacy can be an entry point to employment; but even if attempts to secure employment fail, most Christians continue to maintain faith that God will somehow help them. The living out of these ideologies about work, literacy, and the power of faith indeed helps Christians secure the jobs in the settlement that require educational certificates and some English literacy. Although church participants (who belonged to eleven different clans) were only around one-and-a-half times as likely to be employed by the Council than non-participants, they were three-and-a-half times as likely to be employed in council jobs 22 that require formal educational training. These local aspects of the Protestant ethic also seem to foster participation in the settlements governmental structures and open up other routes to authority, besides those of minister and church elder (cf. Trigger 1992:111-118). In the traditional domain, the ideology of power is such that achieved power tends to be downplayed and explained in terms of rightsaccording to birth order and gender especially. A successful leader justifies authority by virtue of being first born as well as knowledgeable and of an appropriate age (Bern 1979; Berndt 1965; Keen 1994). By comparison, achieved status and power is more readily available in the Christian domain. Church participants were five-and-a-half times as likely as nonparticipants to serve in the political positions of councilors and proxies, elected offices that 23 represent each of Galiwinkus clans. During the fieldwork period, councilor positions came with political authority in the settlement, but it was a conditional power. The authority of councilors was always subject to various levelling mechanisms, such as gossip or sorcery allegations, that curtailed its excessive expression (see also Schwarz 2006:80-81). Another, and not unrelated, position of authority in the settlement that is connected to local Christian practice is that of cultural mediator, or, individuals who transverse the intercultural space (Myers 2002:6). Cultural mediators are situated in such a way that they are considered to be bosses (Anderson 1998[1988]) by both Yolngu and non-Yolngu social actors. The notion of a cultural mediator in Aboriginal Australia is not a recent phenomenon (see e.g. Meggitt 1962:251). In the pre-colonial and pre-Christian world, for instance, there were individuals who mediated visits to distant communities. And in reference to the colonial period, Berndt (1962:33-37) has discussed the dynamics of what he termed the liaison officer role. Berndt (1962) explained that liaison officers were closely associated with the activities of the mission and were considered ritual leaders with regards to the Yolngu (pre-Christian) religious domain. They spoke fluent English and acted as interpreters and spokesmen between 24 the missionaries and Yolngu people. Today at Galiwinku, the ability to develop a reputation as cultural mediator depends largely on professional status, educational attainment, travel experience outside the settlement, as well as clan group authority in the community. Recreating the pattern described by Berndt (1962), contemporary Christianity is a domain that fosters many of these personal attributes. Supra-local Christian networks provide regular and extensive opportunities for Galiwinkus Christian residents to enroll in church educational institutions, to attend Christian conferences, and to participate in evangelistic endeavors all over the world. Links with global Christian circuits (Coleman 2006:166; Meyer 2004:448), coupled with the local Christian ideologies discussed above, seem to afford converts a leg up, so to speak, to establish and project the
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personal skills and prestige necessary to attain the status of cultural mediator. Indeed, while there are certainly educated men and women who are cultural mediators and who are not Christians, the most well known of the Galiwinku cultural mediators come from its Christian population. In the past few years, some of these Christian cultural mediators have partnered with Euro-Australians and begun a cultural tourism enterprise. Visitors were invited to Galiwinku to participate with Yolngu people in some traditional rituals, as well as in crosscultural education programs. These weeklong intercultural events have taken place nearly every other year since 2004 at an outstation near the township. While the events have generated income for the individual organisers, sizeable portions of the revenues were also distributed among local residents mainly in the form of purchase orders at the shop and cash payments. In pursuing enterprises and political status in the settlement, converts are thus embracing certain ideas and practices of modern individualism spearheaded by evangelical, market, and state discourses. But this is not the same as saying that the person becomes selfish and cuts 25 off relations with kin and community. The following statement from Matjawuy, a senior man, minister, councilor, and cultural mediator, is paradigmatic of the way converts interpret their individual achievements. Matjawuy had been enrolled in theological college in Darwin and taken part in several Uniting Church educational programs around Australia, as well as evangelical endeavors with indigenous peoples in Canada, New Zealand, and Vanuatu. As his experiences show, one has to go away from the remote Aboriginal settlement in order to study, which is a reflection of government policies that prioritise educational achievements of the individual over improving the educational system within the local community (see also Mooney 2005). Of his accomplishments, he said: Im now ready to do my masters study [in theology]. But you have to put your effort if you want to go for this one You have to keep going through the hardship until you reach the goal where you are heading because you are not equipping yourself for yourself. You are equipping skill and everything, knowledge and the wisdom to help others. When you learn something, you feed somebody with your knowledge and wisdomto help others to become like you If I understand Gods religious studies then I have to use [it] as a pilot for different indigenous peoples resources[and for] rebuilding my resources. As this example illustrates, the individual has to work to enhance personal skills by going away from the settlement to receive religious training. Yet Matjawuy characterises the Christian knowledge gained from his experiences as a resource not only for the self, but also for others within the community, thus reemphasising practices of Christian relatedness discussed above. Upon returning to the settlement, personal advancement through mainly Christian educational endeavors is interpreted as a service that helps others to attain social and spiritual development. This sentiment is conveyed perhaps most cogently in Matjawuys reference to feed[ing] others. Moreover, Matjawuys definition of his Christian leadership as having the ability to feed others and help them to become like [him] recreates traditional models of hierarchy as nurturance (Myers 1986:22) introduced above. Myers (1986) argues that prestige is generated through concern in an egalitarian context. In the realm of traditional religious practice, members of the senior generation, collectively and individually, are obligated to care for others, especially the subordinate generation. In return, the subordinate generation gives respect and deference to the senior generation if they are to eventually become seniors themselves and gain the ability to look after others, as well as the prestige and autonomy that come with that ability (see also Peterson 1993:869-870). Indeed, Matjawuy often worked hard to demonstrate his role as a caregiver. When he was not travelling away from the settlement to minister to other Uniting Church congregations, preaching to the local congregation, or participating in
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traditional rituals, he spent several hours a week with his wife cleaning up and burning the rubbish on the church lawn. They would take breaks periodically when joined by their adult children and grandchildren, or when other residents stopped and visited as they went back and forth from their homes to the shop, the credit union, and the council, passing the church along the way. Matjawuy saw his maintenance work as part of his responsibility to care for the church, in both the physical sense (i.e., the building) and in the congregational sense. He also believed that it was a way to show others that even with his numerous degrees, he lived in a normal way. This was how you win them for your leadership, he explained, as opposed to walking around carrying books under your arm. The demonstration of care (not the expression of grandeur) and the procurement of Christian authority on the part of the individual are surely understood as interrelated processes. In Christian individuality, then, indigenous ideas about autonomyand attendant notions of power and authorityare continued and also remapped with what Yolngu interpret as Christian ways of expressing personhood and Christian ways of accumulating prestige. This process is, of course, mirroring what is happening with indigenous ideas about kin-relatedness discussed in the previous section as they are both reproduced and reconfigured in Christian relatedness. The original tension between autonomy and kin-relatedness in Aboriginal society is thus not rectified in local Christianity, but rather is recreated in another form. AGENCY, CONTINUITY, AND RUPTURE In order to extend our understanding of how Aboriginal people living in remote Australia cope with the predicaments of postcolonial life, I have called attention to the ways social relationships and the individual are realised through local Christian practice, or what I have referred to as Christian relatedness and Christian individuality, respectively. As I have shown, Christian practice in the contemporary settlement provides possibilities for individuals to relate to others and to assert their individuality, sometimes but not exclusively away from others. It seems that Christian relatedness and Christian individuality can best be understood as situational processes. On certain occasions, Christian relatedness is pushed to the foreground and Christian individuality is pushed to the background. On other occasions, the opposite is true. And on still other occasions, neither may be at issue and practices of kin-relatedness or individuality not associated with Christianity are expressed instead. In this way, individuals are provided with a number of different options for acting upon their personal and social worlds. The notion that Christian relatedness and Christian individuality are situational processes brings to mind the Manchester Schools concept of situational selection. Situational selection refers to the ways that individuals select from a repertoire of beliefs, values, and behaviours given the demands of the situation that they are faced with at the time (Doorne 1981:482-484; Werbner 1984:174-175). Max Gluckman argued that situational selection was the means through which individuals could live coherent lives. from a medley of contradictory values, ill-assorted beliefs and varied interests and techniques (1958:26). While in retrospect situational selection seems to have made the actor the victim of the situation, the concept is quite compatible with postmodern concerns with multiple identities (see e.g., Friedman 1994:142). In other words, the Manchester situational selection can be placed into an agentive frame when considered together with the more recent emphasis in the anthropological literature on agency: once in a particular situation, people try to have influence over the situation through their responses. In relation to the Galiwinku data that I have discussed, it seems that individuals choose to enact Christian relatedness in circumstances when they need the help of other Christians, or when expressing affinity toward others in collective Christian performances (e.g., prayer, song, Bible reading, church meetings), or when concerned about the well-being of kin and other residents. In these circumstances, individuals are attempting to have an effect on what
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they define as a crisis situation. The transformation that they seek may involve the resolution of a family conflict, restoration of the health of a family member, management of social stress in the community, and so on. By comparison, it seems that people choose to enact Christian individuality in circumstances when they want to assert their ability and authority to serve in a particular capacity, which may be as a minister, a church elder, a councilor, a returning Christian, a cultural-mediator, or an entrepreneur. In these circumstances, the individual calls attention to personal credentials, as well as to the resoluteness of personal faith, to create a pathway for autonomous action, either in the immediate moment or at some point in the future. This is especially the case within the institutionalised domain of the settlement. Thus, converts cannot take Christian relatedness and Christian individuality as given, but rather have to constantly work to achieve them through recurrent social action. It is also important to keep in mind that as Christian relatedness and Christian individuality are moving situationally in relation to one another, there is also a tendency for them to feed back into and foster one another. For instance, collective efforts are undertaken by converts to heal sick kin, the consequences of which in turn relate to the faith of the individual caregiver. And, Christian educational achievements on the part of the individual in turn feed back into the practice of looking after others. It is worth noting that Simon Coleman (2004, 2006) has also shown that there is a relationship between benefit to others and selfinterest in charismatic Christianity, among Word of Life members in Sweden. Focusing solely on the exchange of money and words, which is a more narrow focus than the one I have taken, Coleman argues that the spiritual self is realised through giving to others. Giving becomes a means for the individual person to cultivate a spiritual contract with God (2006:181) and to achieve continual self-affirmation of salvation. Thus, in the Word of Life example the relationship between helping others and individual interest is unidirectionalgiving is for the sake of individual spiritual accumulation and not the reversewhile in the Galiwinku case there seems to be more traffic (Marcus and Myers 1995) between the two tendencies. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels between the cases , which certainly raises the question of whether the dependency of sharing with others and individual accumulation (in whatever forms) might be a common quality of charismatic Christianity. My examination of the Galiwinku material thus presents a different vantage point for viewing some of the common issues of personhood and sociality (of various kinds) explored in the recent anthropological literature on Christianity (see also Schwarz and Dussart n.d.), especially when we consider the fact that the most often cited collections have overlooked the Aboriginal Australian example (see Cannell 2006; Engelke and Tomlinson 2006; Robbins 2003). Of particular importance, Galiwinkus charismatic Christianity does not insist that Christians sever material and social connections to kin as they step in the direction of their modernity. This is quite a different picture from those painted for the charismatic Christianity practiced by the Urapmin, which has opposed relationalism (Robbins 2004a:292), and the Pentecostal Christianity practiced by the Ewe, which has bridged in ritual individualistic and family-centered concerns (Meyer 1999:215). The charismatic Christianity that has arisen in the Galiwinku settlement stands apart from the Urapmin and Ewe examples as it has entailed a dual and ever-unfolding process of continuity with and rupture from what came before. This phenomenon of integrating new forms with old ones (which in turn produces new interpretations of both the old and the new) echoes other discussions in the Aboriginalist literature on remote Australia. Myers (1989), for example, has analysed the Pintupi motorcar that becomes an object to be destroyed during funeral ceremonies, and Elizabeth Povinelli (1993) has addressed Belyuen explanations of ecological catastrophe as punishment for transgressions against the Dreaming. Several authors have argued that this ability to accommodate change without doing away with or totally restructuring the existing order is due to an inherent flexibility and dynamism in Aboriginal social and ritual practice (see e.g., Dussart 2000; Keen 1994). This argument certainly helps shed some perspective on the
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Galiwinku example in comparison with the Urapmin and Ewe examples when it comes to the kinds of responses that Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has generated. The histories of evangelism, colonialism, and market engagement in the three cases are also relevant to explaining the contrasting responses. In other words, the differences between the Galiwinku scene and the others may also have to do with their specific Christian genealogies, as well as withand perhaps even more sothe presence of the welfare state in Australia and the extent of remote Aboriginal peoples marginalisation from the market. As Peterson has argued, only when consumer dependency is a great deal higher in remote Aboriginal communities such that it cannot be maintained by transfer payments, subsidies, grants, loans, royalty payments, casual employment or target working can people be expected to become motivated and involved in the treadmill of wage labour, and the emphasis on circulation reduced (2005:14). As yet, remote Aboriginal people have not suffered profound material consequences (Peterson 2005:15) for not fully engaging the market. It appears, then, that the Yolngu today do not have to have as radical experience of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity as the Urapmin, the Ewe, and other colonised peoples. In situations where people live without the welfare state and where they are more thoroughly integrated into the capitalist economycompared with remote Aboriginal Australians, that isand thus face (or potentially face) its harsher realities, these Christian traditions challenge the old and generate harder-nosed responses. The particular dynamic achieved in Galiwinkus charismatic Christianity may certainly shift, which in no small part will depend on future government decisions. But it seems that at least in the near future Galiwinku residents will continue to use their Christian practices to recreate the indigenous past in the present and to attune that past to the relevant concerns of their postcolonial lives. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Franoise Dussart and Karen Johnson-Weiner for their critical readings of manuscript drafts and to three anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions for revisions. I am also indebted to my friends and adopted family in the Galiwinku settlement and to the Galiwinku Council for approving my research. An earlier version of this paper was presented as part of an invited session titled Ethnography and the production of anthropological knowledge: essays in honour of Nicolas Peterson at the 2008 Joint International Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Australian Anthropological Society. NOTES
1. Return visits were also made to the Galiwinku community in June 2007 and in June-July 2009, when this paper was in its revision stage. The 2003-2005 research was supported by a grant from the International Institute of Education Fulbright Program, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Grant #G2004/6934), the University of Connecticut Research Foundation, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. The 2009 fieldwork was supported by an Individual Development Award from the State of New York/United University Professions Joint Labor Management Committee and by a Research and Creative Endeavors Award from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Elsewhere (Schwarz 2007, in press), I have referred to this as Yolngu-conceived Christianity. A predecessor to the work of Meyer (1999) and Robbins (2004a) is Norman Longs (1968) study of converts to Jehovahs Witness in Zambia in the mid-1960s. Long argued that compared with the rest of the population, Jehovahs Witnesses emphasised individualism, industriousness, and self-discipline. They also took greater advantage of economic opportunities that came with the introduction of cash-crop production, were less reliant on kin labour at their farms, and experienced greater economic mobility. Diane Austin-Brooss book Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia (2009) traces the Western Arrerntes history of colonialism and mission life through to their modern experience with the market society and bureaucratic state. The book, which came out after this essay was submitted for publication, elaborates on the cited articles and includes some excellent discussion of vernacular Christianity in the contemporary period of the 1990s.

2. 3.

4.

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

This is not to be confused with what Robbins calls Christian individualism (2004a:298). Robbins uses this term to refer to the individualism that dominates modern Western culture, which is rooted, following Dumont (1986), in concepts of individual salvation. The Australian authorities prohibited Yolngu-Macassan relations in 1907 (MacKnight 1976). For an analysis of the influence of the Macassan presence on Yolngu mythology and ritual forms see Ian McIntosh 1996, 2005[1997]. Based on Yolngu interpretations of the past and the ethnographic record, McIntosh discusses Yolngu belief in Walithawalithawhich are today known as personal familiar spirits, but in the past have been associated with Allahand a particular ritual known as the Warramu. As I do not want to rehearse the anthropological literature on the Adjustment Movement here, for more thorough descriptions see Keen 1994:277-280; Maddock 1972:1-5; McIntosh 1997:279-281; Morphy 1983:110116; and Rudder 1993:74-75. In 1977, the Methodist Church joined the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches to form the Uniting Church in Australia. According to the 2006 Census data for the Galiwinku community (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007a) the unemployment rate is 21% (expressed as the number of people unemployed as a portion of the total labour force). This compares with an unemployment rate of 16% for all indigenous people in Australia and 5% for all non-indigenous people in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008). In the census, those participating in the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme are considered employed (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008). The assertion about settlement size is based on a comparison of figures from Northern Territory Indigenous Areas. It is also worth mentioning that Galiwinku has one of the highest population densities in the Northern Territory, with a population of approximately 1,572 Aboriginal and 128 non-Aboriginal residents in 4.4 square kilometers (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007a, 2007b). See for example, Jenny Macklins (Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services, and Indigenous Affairs) statement in a media release (July 11, 2008) on the governments Income Management scheme. She states, there is less cash circulating [in Aboriginal communities], residents have more control over their money and the incidence of humbugging for goods or cash has dropped. Accessed on July 17, 2008 at http://fahcsia.gov.au/internet/jennymacklin.nsf/content/income_nt_11jul08.htm Business is used in Aboriginal English to capture the extensive organisational and political aspects of ritual (Myers 1986:225). It has also become associated with church activities. My use of the term traditional follows Aboriginal English convention to mean present understandings of the ritual obligations, bodies of knowledge, and the code of conduct adhered to prior to sedentarisation. As they are practiced today, what Yolngu people characterise as traditional practices have been impacted by missionisation and (post)colonial circumstances. The term the Law also refers to this sense of traditional practices. Out of a total population (1,701 people), 1,247 put Christianity as their religious affiliation. 1,163 (585 males, 578 females) affiliated with the Uniting Church. The remaining 84 people were spread across various Christian denominations. The next highest affiliation count was Religious affiliation not stated at 264 people (114 males, 150 females), then Australian Aboriginal Traditional Religions at 118 people (53 males, 65 females). Placing Galiwinku in the broader context, 73% of the indigenous population in all of Australia affiliated with various Christian denominations on the 2006 census (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008). In reference to Southeast Ambrym, Vanuatu, Robert Tonkinson (1981) has used the term subsistence Christianity to mean that people abide by prescribed Christian principles in daily life, while maintaining a limited degree of overt commitment to Christian religious activity. This characterisation is appropriate to the contemporary Galiwinku context. Clans are patrilineal and exogamous. Close kin are typically defined as siblings, parents, parents siblings, parents siblings children, grandparents, and grandchildren. During the 2003-2005 fieldwork period there were 16 elected elders and five ministers, but not all of the ministers were present in the settlement for the entire time. For more extensive discussions of how Yolngu people have understood the relationship between Christian and Ancestral cosmologies see Berndt 1962; Bos 1988a; Gondarra 1988; Keen 1994:284; Magowan 2007:142-184; McIntosh 1997:277-283; Rudder 1993:34, 72-77. This is a pseudonym. The term dalkarramirr refers more specifically to a leader of Yirritja moiety ceremonies, while the term gunburmirr refers to a ritual leader for Dhuwa moiety ceremonies. I compiled a list of those who consistently participated in church business from February 2004 to December 2004. The Councils accountant provided me with data on Council Employment, which includes people enrolled in the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) Scheme. Population figures are based on census data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2001, which is the best estimate for the adult population at Galiwinku during the fieldwork period because the census is only conducted every five years. A crosstabulation of the two variables, participation in church business and employment in all the Council departments, revealed that out of 72 people participating in church business, 25 were Council employees while 47 were not. Out the 675 people not participating in church business, 178 were Council employees, while 497 were not. A cross-tabulation of the two variables, participation in church business and employment at the main Council centres (excluding manual labor positions), shows that of 72 people participating in church business, 23 were Council employees at these centres, 49 were not. Of 675 people not participating in church business, 62 were Council employees at these centres, while 613 were not. Note that the figures here and just below vary slightly from the figures presented in Schwarz 2006, 2007. In late 2007, the Australian Bureau of Statistics rereleased

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23. 24. 25.

the 2001 census figures, which included a figure for Indigenous persons aged 18 and over, whereas the original release did not. The calculations given in Schwarz 2006, 2007 were based on a figure of aged 15 and over. A cross-tabulation of the two variables participation in church business and Councilorship (2003-2006) shows that of the 72 people participating in church business, 17 were Councilors (including proxies), 55 were not. Of the 675 people not participating in church business, 27 were Councilors while 648 were not. See Thomas Beidelman (1982:172-207) for a similar discussion of intermediaries between the Anglican missionaries and local peoples in Ukaguru, Tanzania, from 1957-1958. This is a pseudonym.

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