A diagram for eruption: Charismatic Christian revival in 1970s Melanesia

Abstract

Melanesia in the 1970s was the scene of an enormous religious transformation. Across the region, charismatic religiosity engulfed innumerable communities, unfolding both a wide range of ecstatic worship and eschatological visions, a historical watershed that permanently shifted the parameters of local Christianity. The revivals are also noteworthy from a disciplinary perspective in that many of the most influential studies of contemporary Melanesian Christianity view these intense movements as the historical platform out of which their objects of study arose. Here I feed a range of ethnographic, historical, and missiological material related to this regional upheaval through a Deleuzoguattarian conceptual framework. The paper presents a view of charismatic revival movements as intensively orchestrated combinations of various elements (assemblage) obtained from a wide range of contexts and which articulate a specific cosmological territory. Within this ontological system, what counts is not whether elements are material or immaterial but rather what abstract forces (diagrams) the movements substantiate and, in so doing, what work the movements are designed to achieve.