'Nautral'

            As a GECS (Global Environmental Change and Sustainability) major, and a person who connects with the living landscape profoundly, I have big dreams to save the earth. In particular I am called to agriculture, getting my hands dirty, and feeding people. At the center of my work as a self-nominated food activist is local food and decreasing our food mileage. In my dream sustainable world, we would only eat food that is produced at a walkable distance that is in season. (Of course that’d mean I’d have to give up coffee and chocolate, but if our food system did not allow such extreme trades, there also wouldn’t be slave labor and communities dying due to the effects of industrial agriculture)

            This rant may seem irrelevant to the Pentecostal Christians in Papa New Guinea, but the connection is loud, although not yet clear, to me.  

            What is native, uncontaminated and natural?

            Through both lenses of environmental science and anthropology the question puzzles me.  Where does the shame of anthropologist come from when studying a Christian culture? Is Christianity undeserving of scholarly interest because it is so colonial/common/white? “Foreign intrusion continue to pursue the fading vestiges of uncontaminated traditional religions…. It can never become “cultural”’ (28)

            If I were to sit on top of a hill looking over a lake, and to have a spiritual connection with the magic of how things shift and be in the living landscape, should that not “count” because in fact that hill I was sitting on was taken over with invasive species, and the lake was filled with run-off fertilizer from a nearing golf-course? I think No.

            I think the following quote relieves the tension of a “world religion” invading an “uncontaminated” culture: “The process of incorporation differs from that of adoption by virtue of its focus on the localization of institutions and the way such localization allows local people to play the roles that are central to them.” (48)

            In terms of Harvey Cox’ definition of religious success as I mentioned in my first blog post, the Urapmin seemed to truly succeed.