This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
Abstract
Stories of ghosts and black magic abound on Epoon, an atoll in the southern Marshall Islands. These come in various genres and varieties to meet a range of purposes. People on Epoon continuously remind each other of various taboo places or areas where specific ghosts are thought to reside and measures to take to avoid them. The fact that many of these stories have material expressions in the landscape serve to legitimise them as true (ṃool). The truth that they carry means that they still have effect today. Yet, the existence of ghosts sits uneasy within a Christian view that says that the arrival of the gospel and subsequent large-scale conversion eliminated all forms of black magic and evil spirits from the atoll. As my Protestant research participants portrayed it, taboo places and evil spirits could not harm anyone today because Jesus Christ held his protective shield over the atoll. Therefore, faith alone was enough to protect individuals from evil. In this paper, I explore the ambiguous relation between Christian faith and the belief in ghosts and other forms of evil spirits and magic. Taking my que from Tanya Luhrmann’s work on real-making processes, I turn my attention to the ways in which people, including myself, experience their relationship with gods and ghosts when and if they make themselves known. The question that drives this analysis is not whether or how Epoon people work to square the seeming contradictory existence of the Christian god and demonic ghosts but how gods and ghosts become real to them in specific situations and how that affects their Christian faith.
Biography
Ola G. Berta is an MSCA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen. Since 2014, he has done two ethnographic fieldworks in, and extensive archival work on, the Marshall Islands, resulting in publication on chieftainship, mission history, and cultural production. As part of the SEAS programme, he has begun a new project to study tuna diplomacy among the big ocean states of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), commencing a new fieldwork in the Marshall Islands from February 2024.