Sit, Cool Eat, Full Stop: Religion and the Rejection of Ritual in Auhelawa (Papua New Guinea) (Author Abstract) (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION The title of this paper is a quotation from a retired pastor from Kurada, an Auhelawa-speaking community on Normanby Island where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2004 and 2006. It is his statement about how to hold a mortuary feast that followed what he called masele, or 'Christian custom.' I wanted to interview this person specifically because he took credit for this increasingly popular idea about mourning in Kurada. His 'main idea' (nuwatuwu mwala'ina), as he called it, required that an individual's death should be celebrated as a common meal among the deceased's relatives and friends. Unlike the traditional pattern, one should decidedly not force certain classes of kin to assume mourning taboos. Nor should observers of taboos show ritually marked deference to the deceased's lineage or give a large combined gift of yams and pigs that they do not share in eating. The death and its traditional obligations are 'finished' quickly, ideally on the day of the burial, rather than moving through a series of stages that can last years. Because the pastor advocates merely sitting, cooking and eating, it may seem that he is simplifying traditional practices. Auhelawa people do tend to represent cultural change as a gradual process of cultural loss, and many would say that masele is one example of this trend. I will argue that masele is more complex. The pastor's concept of masele is a marked negation of traditional mortuary practice. Christian individualism takes form against the backdrop of traditional practices, thus allowing the pastor to associate being Christian with adhering to a strict code of behavior.