A Thousand Eruptions - (New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity) by Fraser MacDonald (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explains an overlooked but vital chapter in the history of global Pentecostalism - the widespread eruption of intense charismatic revival movements across Melanesia in the 1970s.

Book Synopsis

The charismatic revival movements of the 1970s in Melanesia were the most significant religious development in the region's history, but until now there has been no full-scale look at the regional upheaval or of why it occurred.

As this book shows, many of the most influential anthropological studies of Christianity in Melanesia are built upon the revival movements of this period. In this untold story in the history of global charismatic Christianity, Fraser Macdonald utilises the conceptual framework of Deleuze and Guattari, which guides this study of an emergent Indigenous Christianity. Macdonald shows how the religious context of colonialism, missionisation, and political independence jointly lead to intense eruptions of a new localised Christianity, which was articulated as an ecstatic pursuit of the Second Coming.

Macdonald offers a case study of the global spread of charismatic Christianity and demonstrates how a new ontological directive was set in motion by the rise and fall of colonialism in Melanesia. The work looks at how each movement was formed through the mobilisation of existing local, regional, and transnational cultural elements in pursuit of a common goal, and discusses how the revivals radically and permanently transformed the religious landscape of the region.

Review Quotes

"This is a fine exploration of what the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari can teach us about the nature of religious movements, and in particular those known as Pentecostal or charismatic Christian revivals. Based on extensive ethnographic and historical research on such revivals in Melanesia, this book is an important theoretical contribution to the anthropological study of religion that will have a lasting effect on the field." --Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge, UK

"Fraser Macdonald's work on revivals in the South Pacific is important for understanding the development of Christianity in the region. This book is no exception." --Tom Bratrud, University of Bergen, Norway

"In this remarkable book, Fraser Macdonald examines charismatic revival as a path that offered Melanesian revivalists in the 1970s a distinct alternative to mission Christianity. When these societies convulsed in religious enthusiasm, he argues, they were not just responding to the political forces of waning colonialism and nascent nationalism. Nor were they simply rejecting mission teachings. Instead, they were ecstatically asserting a new and different way to hope, security, metaphysical order, and even utopia." --Matt Tomlinson, Australian National University, Australia

About the Author

Fraser Macdonald is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His main research focus is upon the intersection of global evangelical-Pentecostal Christianity with indigenous lifeworlds in the cultural region of Melanesia.