Divine justice: Cosmology, ritual, and Protestant missionization in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

This dissertation contains an examination of the process and consequences of Protestant missionization in highland Central Sulawesi. Most particularly, it concerns the Tobaku people, a regionally united group of Uma speakers who reside in the southwestern part of the Kulawi subdistrict. The shifting agriculturalist communities of this area were first contacted by the Dutch in the early twentieth-century and proselytized by the Salvation Army beginning in 1918. Although the Tobaku people, like most indigenous Central Sulawesi highlanders, are now almost 100% Protestant--some even refer to themselves as fanatic Christians, their religious concepts and practices are not completely orthodox from the point of view of Western missionaries. This study looks at changing Tobaku religious concepts and practices as a process of negotiation and argumentation based on indigenous moral principles and empirical precedents.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.