Timmer, ‘Building Jerusalem in North Malaita, Solomon Islands’

Timmer, Jaap.Ā 2015. Ā Building Jerusalem in North Malaita, Solomon Islands. Oceania. doi:10.1002/ocea.5110

Abstract:Ā Amid a variety of ideas of Israelite genealogies for To’abaita speakers in North Malaita, Solomon Islands, ā€˜Holy Land’ features as a utopian fantasy of a just nation, not in Israel but grounded in the ancestral soil of the island. I analyse this mimetic gesture as part of attempts to reconcileĀ kastomĀ (custom) with Christianity and as evoking a sense of an essentialised group identity. In particular for followers of the All People’s Prayer Assembly (APPA), the idea of an essentialised group of To’abaita as a nation in the canonical ā€˜Table of Nations’ in Genesis 10 is quite prominent. This dialectic between ā€˜religion’ and ā€˜nation’ explains the ways in which people claim to have found authentic To’abaita foundations for a nation unifying distinct lineage groups, with a religious form at the centre, namely: Jerusalem. In this article I will show that APPA’s theology weakens the claim of the ā€˜secular’ state while strengthening the force of religious imagination and ideas about local sovereignty and a related notion of nation.