Waiting for the day: Globalisation and apocalypticism in Central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

Through an exploration of some of the negotiations occurring in the cultural sphere of religion, I problematise the term globalisation, challenge some of the assumptions that have been made about it, and argue that, in a particular sense, it has become a two-way process. Taking the case of the experience of the 1997-98 drought on the Lelet Plateau in central New Ireland, I examine the manner in which the concepts and beliefs of premillennialist Pentecostal Christianity engage with the local. What is new is that these discourses about the end of the world have brought the global horizon into prominence in a way that the previous more orthodox Christianity did not, so that local events take on signficances they did not have in the past. This is not a simple matter of the new powerful framework irresistibly overwhelming local knowledge, but involves careful scrutiny of both, and negotiation between them. The result is not that the local is swamped, but that the globe becomes an horizon which frames local experiences in particular ways.