a thousand eruptions: charismatic revival and the quest for metaphysical security in melanesia 1970-1980

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.

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.