For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intriguing intersection of theology and cultural anthropology.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the Urapmin people, a traditional hunter-gatherer society who live in an isolated valley in the western mountains of Papua New Guinea, converted en masse to Christianity. As they proceeded to internalize and practice their newly acquired faith, they began to systematically abandon cultural practices now seen as incompatible with their new convictions. When anthropologist Joel Robbins arrived in the 1990s to do fieldwork among the Urapmin, he found them in a cultural situation his own training had not prepared him to interpret.
“Anthropology is really built on reaching out to the cultural other, groups that were non-European, non-Western,” says J. Derrick Lemons, an anthropology professor at the University of Georgia and director of the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology. “That was the bread and butter of anthropology through the ages. The idea was: we want to know what the ‘real’ religion of these people consists in.” But with the Urapmin, Robbins found a group of people whose conversion had not been directly influenced by Western missionaries. Their strand of adopted Christianity seemed unique, and Robbins initially struggled to sort out the theological underpinnings of their approach to their faith.