Feeding Relationship: Uncovering Cosmology in Christian Women's Fellowship in Papua New Guinea‪.‬

INTRODUCTION This paper began as an attempt to understand a ceremony enacted by a group of women during my PhD fieldwork (undertaken in 2001) in a village near Hula on the south east coast of Papua New Guinea. (1) The group was the United Church Women's Fellowship (UCWF) and the ceremony was my own incorporation into the village through the formal presentation of garden food. This was only one of a number of Christian celebrations that I attended which centred on feasting and food distribution. The Hula have also creatively appropriated the secular events of the Western calendar. Mother's Day, Father's Day and New Year, for instance, are all celebrated under the umbrella of the United Church in villages in the Hula area. Such celebrations point to the pervasiveness of Christianity which today regulates village life and also to the extent to which the Hula have assimilated a variety of foreign practices into their contemporary lifeworld. Although the United Church has a presence in other areas of Papua New Guinea (making up 13.1% of all Papua New Guinean Christians in the 1990 census), village ceremonies are highly localized in content, procedure and significance.