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

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 Galiwin'ku in the Northern Territory of Australia, (1) 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 Galiwin'ku settlement does not require converts to reject material and social connections to kin as a prerequisite for becoming 'Christian moderns' (Keane 2007). Rather, I suggest that in engaging a local form of charismatic Christianity, (2) Galiwin'ku residents seek to both reproduce indigenous ways of being and adopt aspects of modern individualism--a term I use to refer to capitalistic enterprise, institutionalised education and employment, wealth accumulation, and so forth. The nuances of the Galiwin'ku material that are explored in this article can best be understood if placed, at the outset, next to Joel Robbins's (2004a) study of the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea and Birgit Meyer's (1999) study of the Ewe in Ghana, as both deal explicitly with the issues of Christianity and personhood with which I am concerned.