Micronesia covers the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and other island nations in the Pacific; Melanesia includes Fiji, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Papua and Vanuatu. Polynesia consists of New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Easter Island, French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, and other islands. Located in the northern tip of this Oceanic region, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan such as Puyuma and other ethnic minorities are also included in this section, as they speak Austronesian tongues related to other Oceanic languages.

 

Except for the languages of various peoples in New Guinea, Australia, and other nearby regions, the peoples of this vast Pacific region have a common Austronesian linguistic origin, although the variants number over a thousand. Australasia and Oceanic lands are covered by variety of terrain, such as tropical rain forests, deserts, delta plains, flat grasslands, and mangrove swamps. High humidity, hot temperatures, and severe weather are characteristics of this region. Moreover, malaria and land erosion are two major concerns of the people of some of these islands.

Some members of these Pacific peoples are wage laborers in an urban environment, but the principal economic activities are subsistence farming and fishing. Many of them are good gardeners and grow breadfruit, taro, coconuts, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, and other crops as the main staples, in addition to raising pigs for ceremonial reasons. Some ethnic groups are hunters and gatherers in remote regions. Their societies vary from small-scale bands and tribal groups of egalitarian social structure to chiefdoms, all existing today within various nation states.

Based on the study of their languages and cultures, and material traces of their past, it is generally accepted that Australasian and Oceanic peoples originated from Southeast Asia, although there are still disputes about the origins of these people.

During these centuries of European and American colonial encounter, most of the people adopted English or French as their national tongue and Christianity as their religion. Islam is present in Papua (western New Guinea) due to the immigration of Muslims from Java. As the British brought many South Asians to Fiji to work in the sugar industry, Hinduism also exists in the region. Moreover, the Japanese also brought Buddhism and Shinto to Micronesia during the Japanese occupation from 1920 to the 1940s. Nevertheless, none of these major religions, with the exception of Christianity, has managed to convert large numbers of indigenous people.

Christianity has introduced new symbols, which have had a profound effect on indigenous religious beliefs and practices, yet elements of traditional religion have blended with the new beliefs and still coexist with Christianity in religious practice.

Like the conversion to Christianity among the Australasians and Oceanic peoples in other regions, many Atayal and the Puyama in Taiwan had to adopt Buddhism, the religion of the colonizing Chinese, due to socioeconomic reasons as well as a part of the colonial assimilation policies. Yet Buddhism is an eclectic religion and these indigenous people managed to keep their spirit worship and other practices even after they became Buddhist.

New religious movements in these regions have involved syncretism between indigenous religions and Christianity, which also have brought both spiritual and material culture from the West. For example, cargo cults, which embody a kind of millennialism, spread in Melanesia after contact with the colonial powers. These movements, less influential today, seek to reconcile local egalitarian values of sharing and European inequality and capitalism through spiritual means.

Many Pacific societies have shamanistic figures, whether they are called healers, priests, witches, sorcerers, diviners, or mediums. They commune with the dead, see spirits, fly through the air, and heal or harm, thus resembling in many ways shamans in other parts of the world. The tohunga (priest) among the Maori of New Zealand could be a specialist in magic, knowledge, or healing; in their functions as shamans they spoke as mediums, having received communications from the gods.

Spirit mediums in Tikopia in Polynesia enter into trance and serve as mouthpieces of gods or spirits of the dead. Puyuma shamans in Taiwan, also function as therapists, exorcists, and sometimes soothsayers through their communication with the spirits.

For the people of Papua New Guinea, success in hunting, war, and gardening depends on good relationships with supernatural beings, and therefore, those specialists who use dream work as a type of soul journey, are important for their ability to facilitate these relationships. Here ancestors, ghosts, and other spirits who resemble human beings generally play a role, as do spirits associated with specific places; the belief in witches and sorcerers is a common theme, and in some areas totems and deities are accepted.

The shaman is just one of a number of religious specialists who may be called upon for good or for evil. Dreams are understood to be omens of the future, but they serve diagnostic as well as prophetic purposes; people believe in some areas that spirits of nature-trees, stones, and water-can cause illness and that the dream of a shaman can reveal which spirit has caused an illness and what the appropriate ceremony would be. As Christianity has spread throughout Papua New Guinea, it has been combined in various ways with local shamanic practices and beliefs.

Among the Asabano, for example, there are now "Spirit women" who are in essence Christian shamans and whose practice includes various Christian artifacts and prayers; moreover, it is now the Holy Spirit who is the bestower of game and who appears in hunters' dreams.

Also in Micronesia he relationships to spiritual beings, including ancestors, is important for fertility in gardening and other economic subsistence enterprises. Ritual specialists are necessary to ensure or to restore the health and well being of the land and the people.

Throughout Oceania people have traditionally identified with a particular locale, and this relationship has been reflected in myths and rituals and ideas concerning gods and spirits. The importance of the relationship to the land has led to the maintenance of life-giving relationships and motivated participation in the rituals of traditional religion and Christianity, and more recently has led to the emergence of new religious movements. In Oceania there are a variety of rituals for crops, gardens, hunting, fishing, and healing, for which different types of practitioners are employed, such as healers and mediums. The healer is always a diviner who uses ritual, often including dreams and trance, to diagnose and treat illness.

The entry "Australian Aboriginal Shamanism" continues some of the same themes noted in the previous entry. The term shaman is rarely used by those who study this area; rather the author describes a "clever" person who has shaman-like knowledge and special powers but does not go into trance nor have political power. "Clever" men (and sometimes women, though most of the literature up to this point has focused on men) have advanced psychic abilities, and only they can intervene between ordinary people and dangers of a supernatural kind. The clever person is described as "one who sees" and has a special relationship to the Rainbow Serpent, a prominent mythological figure in Aboriginal cosmology. Such a person therefore has special powers that the ordinary person does not have: They may hold off floodwaters, change shape, revive a corpse, send storms and floods, and the like. They have a training that is similar to shamans in Eurasia: Their special powers are noticed in childhood, and in their initiations they encounter a spirit or have special dreams and visions. They undergo a ritual "disembowelment" and have their insides replaced by magic substances, such as quartz crystals. After this death and disembowelment, the initiate will spend time alone in a deserted place, meditating.

Elements in Australia include going into a cave and meeting supernatural beings, the growth of feathers, a sky flight, quartz crystals rubbed or inserted into the body, and a magic rope used to climb into the sky.

Among some Aboriginal peoples a clear distinction is made, and one way of making a clear distinction is that, though clever people may sometimes do harm, their main function is to heal. Substance insertion and substance extraction are major practices of these healers; they can retrieve lost souls with the aid of spirit helpers, they see with the inner eye, they go on journeys while asleep, and they can even travel on a spider's web. Clever people thus exhibit many of the properties of "shamans," including the practices of initiation, soul journeying, divination, clairvoyance, seeing diseases in the body, and healing. However, they do not go into altered states of consciousness, though some do use dreams (as in Papua New Guinea) to follow a sick person's spirit, catch it, and return it to the body.

The New Zealand Maori,were a Polynesian people who began to arrive in New Zealand, about a thousand years ago according to myth and legends. Yet it wasn't until around the middle of the fourteenth century that fleets of Maori arrived and settled. They based their social organization on the belief that they descended from those who came in a "great fleet," which arrived at that time. The deities worshipped by the Maori are found among other Polynesian tribal groups, and in contrast to Australian Aboriginals, their traditional religion was polytheistic, not totemic. Membership in the Maori tribe is by tradition based on common ancestry, and this basis is reflected in the Maori worldview, which connects everything through ancestors.

Traditionally, the concept of tapu (holy) has permeated their religious life; objects (and people) could become tapu once in contact with supernatural beings or aspects of the supernatural. For this reason priests have had very strong tapu, which also gave them mana, the power over fate as mana is a concept where power is combined with sacredness. Mythology and stories about cultural heroes kept these concepts alive. The 'tohunga, "priest," was a specialist in art, knowledge, magic, and healing. The tohunga were able to diagnose the sources of adverse events often due to witch¬craft or the breaking of a tapu. In their capacity as healers, they were mediums of their own local gods (atua), and in a shamanistic manner they relayed messages from these deities, who communicated by whistling. As elsewhere, Christianity made inroads into Maori religious life, and several syncretic religious developments have resulted. Nevertheless, kinship and the concept of tapu are still important parts of Maori religious life.

Finally the Puyuma are an aboriginal group living in the southeast area of the island of Taiwan. They speak an Austronesian language and are divided into two groups; the village of Puyuma, where the group lives called "born of a bamboo," and "religious practitioners," who are bound up with mythical founding ancestors and attached to their territory and who perform those rituals that recur every year, and "shamans."

Shamans, who currently are always women, play the role of therapists, exorcists, and sometimes soothsayers. There are three categories of birua (spirits): the kaqisatan (On High), the kaqaulasan (the Aulas), and the "homeless." Only the shamans have access to the kaqaulasan, allowing them to invoke the spirits of their ancestors and of dead shamans, as well as their elector spirits. The shaman candidate undergoes the usual initiatory process: visions, dreams, illness. Her investiture is a kind of death and rebirth. A shrine is built by the men of the shaman's household; it holds among other cult objects a special bag with a rattle that is used to communicate with the birua and to recall a soul. There is no formal training, since it is said that invocations come to the initiate while she sleeps, but there is a period of apprenticeship.

At the end of the nineteenth century, hunting was the major occupation of men, and shamanism was built around this activity, with men as shamans, providing spiritual support for this activity. With the change from hunting to agriculture and the influences of Japanese colonization, men now do the community rites, whereas women are the shaman healers.

Recently, the shamanistic practices of the Puyuma can be seen as falling somewhere in the middle between classic shamanism and a possession cult. When Puyuma shamanism was shaped by hunting, it shared features with Siberian shamanism as observed in the nineteenth century; the current form is closer to the possession cult that characterizes Korean shamanism.

The Atayal Shamans of Taiwan aboriginal tribes focus their religious practice on ancestor worship, with the ancestors as a source of moral authority, propitiated with prayers and sacrifices. Again there are two types of religious specialists involved: the gaga chief, male, who acts as a priest, responsible for rituals, and the "shaman," female, who performs exorcisms, makes rituals for weather-related problems, and most importantly diagnoses and treats illnesses. The healing functions of the shaman, including the recovery of lost souls and exorcism of evil spirits who are creating illness, are made possible by the shaman's ability to communicate with ancestor spirits. Head-hunting is also an important part of Atayal ancestor worship because it is believed that head-hunting adds to the soul substance of the village, increasing its fertility and viability for the future. If a member of the head-hunting expedition party is killed, it is believed that the enemy now controls his spirit, and hence it is a source of danger; the local shaman is called upon to perform an exorcism to prevent his spirit from entering the village.

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