Josephine's Journey: Gender-Based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea (Essay‪)‬

INTRODUCTION The association between Mary, the mother of Jesus, and violence seems not very obvious, but in Papua New Guinea, as elsewhere in the world, people turn to Mary in order to seek a solution for the problems they face. Josephine's 'journey of violence' deals with how in the urban setting of Madang, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender-based violence. In following the experiences and perceptions of Josephine, a 49-old educated woman working at the Catholic Diocesan's Health office in Madang, this article acknowledges the current debate on Christianity in Papua New Guinea and, in particular, the urge for a more intensive anthropological investigation of the experience of Christianity by Melanesians (for example Barker 1990:9, 1992).