Kraji in časi v novogvinejski pokrajini

Over the last decades, several different renewal movements within Christianity have had a strong impact on Melanesian societies and cultures. Even though these societies have shown a great desire for total transformation, they have in their transformative acts come across an insurmountable obstacle: a firm bond between their way of being and places, where their being has been realised. The Ambonwari people of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea have faced the same problem since the Catholic charismatic movement reached the village in December 1994. Their cosmology and social organization have always been inseparable from their paths (journeys of ancestors, marriages, exchanges, adoptions) and places (old and new villages, fishing and hunting places, taboo places), and their historicity was primarily perceived and defined in terms of individual and group relations to particular named locations in tropical rainforest. As times are tightly intertwined with places, temporalities in the landscape are also possessed, seen and held by individuals and groups. The book ('Places and Times in a New Guinean Landscape') argues that it is this multiplicity of emplaced and embodied temporalities that troubles them most in their ongoing attempts to modify their life-world.

Različna prenovitvena gibanja v krščanstvu so v zadnjih desetletjih močno vplivala na melanezijske družbe in kulture. Čeprav imajo te družbe veliko željo po popolni transformaciji, naletijo v svojih prenovitvenih dejanjih na nepremostljivo oviro: trdno vez med načinom bivanja in kraji, kjer se to bivanje udejanja. Ljudje iz vasi Ambonwari v provinci Vzhodni Sepik na Papui Novi Gvineji se soočajo z enakim problemom, odkar je katoliško karizmatično gibanje decembra 1994 prišlo v vas. Njihova kozmologija in družbena organiziranost sta bili od nekdaj neločljivi od poti (migracij prednikov, porok, izmenjav, posvojitev) in krajev (starih in novih vasi, krajev, kjer ribarijo in lovijo, prepovedanih krajev), njihovo zgodovinskost pa je od nekdaj določal predvsem odnos posameznikov in skupin do posameznih poimenovanih lokacij sredi deževnega gozda. Ker so časi tesno prepleteni s kraji, si v pokrajino umeščene časovnosti posamezniki in skupine tudi lastijo, jih vidijo in se jih lahko dotaknejo. Knjiga zagovarja tezo, da je ravno mnogoterost utelešenih krajevnih časovnosti tista, ki jim pri nenehnih poskusih preoblikovanja življenjskega sveta povzroča največje težave.