The ‘three hearths’: Custom, religion and the state as colliding orders of time and space in Asmat, Indonesian Papua

In Melanesia and Indonesia, socio-political life frequently centres around a tripartite relationship between custom, religion and state government. Building on the classic work of Kenelm Burridge, I analyse how tensions between these three institutional domains order the social fields of Asmat villagers, who live at the intersection of these regions as a Melanesian people incorporated within the Indonesian state. Asmat say that their key political task is to balance ancestral custom, missionary Catholicism and the state, which they describe as ‘three hearths’ around which people gather. The challenge, villagers argue, is avoiding spatio-temporal ‘collisions’, in which structures of action associated with one institutional ‘hearth’ disrupt the social formations required for the other two. Through a case study of one man’s attempt to draw a state infrastructure project and Catholicism within a ritual feast house construction project, I examine how Asmat people are using the ‘hearth’ as an egalitarian social model to domesticate church and state around local orientations to social spacetime. This case study highlights that the social fascination of the triadic custom/religion/state nexus lies in its instability. Using one institution to reshape the other two offers the promise of living relations of hierarchy as forms of autonomy, by transforming, rather than exiting, ever-shifting formations of the custom/religion/state nexus. This research theorises how subaltern cultural models for ordering society can operate as political tools for resisting and reshaping colonial structures. 

Tom Powell Davies is a political anthropologist who studies how Papuan people attempt to domesticate missionary religion and the Indonesian state, and their implications for social spacetime. He has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, has been an Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland, and is the Managing Editor of Oceania. Tom has co-edited a special issue of L'Homme entitled 'Negative Ethics', and has curated museum exhibition projects in the UK and Europe. Tom will take up a Leverhulme and Isaac Newton Trust postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge next year.
 

Date & time

Mon 12 Aug 2024, 3–4pm

Location

Seminar Room B, Coombs Building

Speakers

Tom Powell Davies, Univeristy of Sydney/ University of Queensland

Contacts

Caroline Schuster

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