American Society of Missiology Dissertation Series – serie

This book is about religious change. More particularly it is about the changes brought about when Christianity was introduced to a remote tribal group in the highlands of what is now Irian Jaya, Indonesia. These people who are members of a tribal group that has become known as the Western Dani, entered into a process, through their contact with missionaries, that has been the shared experience of hundreds of tribal groups for the past two thousand years. This process has been variously labelled as the 'indigenizing of Christianity,' the 'inculturation of Christianity,^D> ' or as the 'contextualizing of Christianity.' This book uses the term vernacular Christianity in order to emphasize the anthropological perspective that characterizes the study, and the socio-cultural processes that transpire when two belief systems come in contact. Through the use of ethnographical methodology, this study seeks to ascertain as accurately as possible the Dani perspective on what they do and what they believe in their religious perspectives, commonly spoken of as an emic perspective. It records both their pre-Christian beliefs, as well as their own vernacular form of Christianity. It is a study that also seeks to represent the position of the missionaries, often citing their own records at length. Chapter topics include detailed studies of Dani cosmology, myths, religious rituals, sacred paraphernalia, religious specialists, and the problem of cargoism in socio-religious change. Co-published with the American Society of Missiology.