Christian Bodies: Dialectics of Sickness and Salvation Among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the impact of a Charismatic youth fellowship movement among the Maisin people of Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, in the late 1990s. Drawing upon ethnographic and archival sources, I show that the response conforms to a pattern repeated periodically over a century of regional religious movements focused upon eradicating sorcery and promoting health. Over several generations, Maisin have experienced and interpreted Christianity in ways that at once confirm a basic belief in sorcery while prodding the faithful towards increasingly individualistic notions of morality and, thus, new collectivist responses to misfortunes like life‐threatening illnesses. Thus, while the main intent of religious movements among the Maisin has remained remarkably consistent, the underlying conception of the links between morality, sickness, and healing has shifted markedly over the years. The article thus demonstrates that Christianity in this Melanesian community has had both conservative and transformational effects upon everyday conceptions of morality, sickness, healing, and redemption. More generally, the article advocates moving the study of religious change in longer contacted regions of Melanesia from a dualistic model that opposes Western and indigenous cultures to one that examines the complex historical development of vernacular Christianity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it