Tag Archives: Animism

Book Throwing and the Mission of God: Part 3

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Tom Richards, John Frum, Storytelling, Noah and ark

Tannese Noah and the ark story retold through song and dance at Jon celebrations (John Frum), Feb 2016

Interaction with Don’t Throw the Book at Them by Harry Box

Chapter 2

To live on Tanna is to live in the land of stories. Perhaps this is a familiar experience for other westerners living within oral societies. All people love stories; it seems we’re wired for them. But here, they carry out functions that are foreign to us. For example, stories can function somewhat like a title-deed for land ownership. Stories are also fundamental to all Tanna’s religious movements, conveying and reinforcing their ideals and values. When someone came to our closest village promoting a new movement, he came telling a story.

Box’s fundamental question in this chapter is: ‘Do oral societies have a system of communication that is adequate for receiving and passing on the Christian message?’ Box’s answer is, unsurprisingly an emphatic yes. I will summarize Box’s chapter and then add my own thoughts as to how we might answer Box’s question in relation to any particular oral culture with particular reference to oral communication on Tanna. Continue reading →

Book Throwing and the Mission of God Part 2

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Vanuatu, Tanna, Oral communication, Unity Movement, Tom Richards

Oral Communication: the Unity Movement, Tanna, Vanuatu

Interaction with Don’t Throw the Book at Them by Harry Box

Chapter 1

I was surprised the first time that I supervised ‘homework’ at college by a low and constant whispered murmur. What was it? Was everyone just chatting rather than getting on with their work? Where they collaborating? No, what they were doing was reading aloud to themselves.

Now, I could put that down to the students only just developing literacy skills, like children who have not yet learnt to read silently, and to an extent that may be true in the sense that they are not ‘literacy people.’ But on the other hand, it indicates a difference in the way that they think about ‘text’ and words, and it is this difference that Box discusses in this chapter.

Surely Box is right when he says that ‘…there are many possibilities for misunderstanding and miscommunication between oral and literacy-oriented people’ (p19), and this chapter is foundational to the book in that it seeks to help us to better understand oral (non-book) people. What I will do is summarise the chapter first, and then offer some of my own comments by way of opening a discussion. What I really want to question is the degree to which the difference between oral people and literacy-based people separates us and how we can best think about those differences and (perhaps) similarities. Continue reading →

The Syncretistic Rabbit

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Credit: Revivals Cakes, via Wiki commons

There are no rabbits on Tanna.  There are also no chocolate eggs in the stores.  That’s cool with me, I don’t like chocolate much anyway.  For those who do, I have been able to get my hands on two packs of Tymos – much like the Australian Tim Tam but better because they come in coconut flavour.  Personally, I would prefer the rabbit itself, but as I said, none of them either.

Eggs aren’t a part of Easter here.  Why would they be?  Even if people did know what a rabbit was, I’m pretty sure they could take a fair guess and say that they don’t lay eggs.  An egg-delivering fur-ball just isn’t part of their past.  But it is part of ours of course. Continue reading →

Cyclone Ula and Tanna’s Spiritual Beliefs

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Vanuatu, Tanna, Naka, Cyclone Pam 30At the moment winds are blowing at about 165km/h close to the centre of the category 4 cyclone, Ula, about 210km southwest of Tanna. The courses of cyclones are difficult to predict, but at present the best guess is that it will miss Tanna and continue to head in a southwest direction, however there is more to think about here than the direction of the storm.

We are in Port Vila (on another island further away) at the moment waiting to go home to Tanna tomorrow, but from our experience with Cyclone Pam last year, it is likely that many people on Tanna at the moment will be in a state of great anxiety. Most people on Tanna do not view a cyclone and an event controlled by an all-powerful God, nor as a result of explainable physical phenomena; but as a physical occurrence controlled by certain people who manipulate spirits/gods through their magical ability and mental state. That is, they believe that some people can ‘pull’ a cyclone to Tanna or send it away. Continue reading →

Rain on the Righteous and on the Unrighteous

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DSCF2836It has been an unusually wet couple of months.  They tell us that this is the dry season and that there are sometimes even droughts in this part of Tanna, but this year it has been wet and windy.  In fact it has been so wet that at times it has slowed my work in visiting mission fields.

I am not the only one whose work has been slowed.  There are three trucks in this part of Tanna other than mine.  Last week the drivers went together to see the ‘kastom man’ who ‘works’ the rain to accuse him of using the rain to spoil their businesses.  You see, on Tanna, rain is thought to be controlled by people. Continue reading →