Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

This paper addresses the course of crucial events that disharmonize the life of the Nungon community in Papua New Guinea. The objective of the paper is the telling and narrating the local history through the lens of “disharmonizing” events in the history of the Nungon. There are unwritten histories of human societies: witnesses of events passed away long ago. Their memories of what they witnessed are lost with them. But knowledge of them is living in collective memory. There are also rare written documents describing the course of the events. Two crucial events took place in the history of the community: 1) The villagers had to move from their customary land to a new site; 2) Villagers invited SDA (Adventists) to the area that was dominated and controlled by the Lutherans. The villagers claim that the relocation was ordered by a patrol officer, and that the SDA missionary was invited because the community was without services for a quarter of a century as a consequence of Lutherans deciding to leave the community. Archive documents read these two events alternatively. The relocation was ordered by a missionary and the Lutheran mission have never left the area. It does not mean that one interpretation is true and the second one false or vice versa.