Religious Change among the Central Ok Groups: A Regional Study

In contemporary ethnographies, people in Mountain Ok region are often described as leading lives highly permeated by Christian rituals and beliefs (e.g. Robbins 2004, Lohmann 2000). The region is well-known in anthropology for its elaborate pre-contact ritual system greatly varying in details among different places. It was just these cosmological and ritual differences that Barth tried to explain for the southern Mountain Ok groups in his regional study Cosmologies in the Making (Barth 1987).
However, after the advent of colonialism, the regional ritual system began to decline, and in 1977, a charismatic revival movement, known as the Telefolmin rebaibal, came to the region. It was spread by local people only, and had more than 3000 followers. Members of the Australian Baptist Missionary Society (ABMS) had built the first mission station in Telefomin at the beginning of the 1950s. Yet most people have only identified as Christians and left behind their pre-contact male cult since the 1977 revival.
The Mountain Ok Christian rebaibal was  a regional network from the  outset, and at the beginning of the 1980s, most Ok groups had taken part. A network of pastors had developed over the whole Ok territory. Yet up to date there exists no systematic regional study of the 1977 revival and the uptake of Christianity among Mountain Ok groups. I will argue for a study “designed to document, analyse, and interpret human actions and intentions that link hamlets, villages, and localities in broader fields of relationship and undertaking” (Terrell 1993:177). In addition to a focus on practices and social relations in single villages or communities, anthropology should also turn to questions about the regional social processes that link communities.