Strauss’s predecessor Maurice Leenhardt framed early body
theory as a self-awareness process running from cosmomor-
phism to anthropomorphism; the Hungarian Géza Róheim
and the Englishmen John Layard tried substantiating Freud-
ian and Jungian insights, respectively, from coastal Papua
and Malekula; and Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and Grego-
ry Bateson worked together to formulate theories of gender
and social divisiveness from the Sepik area. Important contri-
butions to particular religio-ethnologic issues have also been
drawn from Melanesia, mainly by European and American
researchers. Topics that have been addressed include head-
hunting by Jan van Baal, cannibalism by Marshall Sahlins,
grand ceremonial exchanges by Andrew Strathern, initiatory
disclosures by Fredrik Barth, ritual homosexuality by Gilbert
Herdt, sorcery by Reo Fortune and the Australian Michele
Stephen, and sacral legitimation of leadership by Jean Guiart
and Maurice Godelier. Melanesian cargo cultism produced
various theories, such as cosmic regeneration by Mircea
Eliade (1907–1986), proto-nationalism by the neo-Marxist
Peter Worsley, the dream of a perfected reciprocity by Ke-
nelm Burridge, new explanations of a changing cosmos by
Peter Lawrence, a rite of passage into modernity by Patrick
Gesch, and a search for salvation by John Strelan. The con-
version processes among Melanesians also attracted mission
historians such as the Australians Niel Gunson on Polynesia,
David Hilliard on the Solomons, and David Wetherell on
Papua; missiologists such as the eminent Australian scholar
Alan Tippett, as well as Theo Ahrens, Ennio Mantovani,
Friedgard Tomasetti, Darell Whiteman, and Mary MacDon-
ald; and analysts of indigenizing Christianity such as John
Barker and the Australian Bronwyn Douglas. Part of Trom-
pf’s vision has been to assess Melanesian religion in all its as-
pects to find the means of representing all this scholarship
synoptically and to facilitate indigenous scholarly writing on
religion.
An early graduate of the Sydney department, Tony
Swain confirmed its strength in indigenous studies by writ-
ing the first exhaustive account of theories about Australian
Aboriginal religion and the first history of Aboriginal religion
since outside contact in A Place for Strangers (1993). He
questioned Eliade’s stress on cosmic axis and accounted for
more diffuse notions of space and one’s belongingness to
land. He also disputed that there were any traditional Ab-
original notions of Mother Earth and denied that high gods
were honored before outside pressures from Melanesia and
then white colonization. Again, Swain benefited from im-
portant predecessors that included, aside from those already
mentioned, the Australians Ronald Berndt and Ted Strehlow
(both with German backgrounds), W. E. H. Stanner of Aus-
tralian National University, and the Victorian Max Charles-
worth. Swain and Trompf’s Religions of Oceania (1995) re-
vealed the extraordinary international interest in the Pacific
religious scene. Sometimes disproportionate group interest
is found, such as Germanic scholarship on the Aborigines
and Americans on Micronesia, but some unusual individual
achievements by outsiders stand out. For example, the Italian
Valerio Valeri wrote a detailed account of Hawaian religion;
the German Hans-Jürgen Greschat wrote a thorough eth-
nography of taboo; and the Finn Jikka Siikala wrote an au-
thoritative account of new religious movements in central
Polynesia.
ACADEMIC PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT. Other intellectual
and institutional developments within the whole Australo-
Pacific region make for a complex story. In Victoria, pro-
grams for studying religion were successively established at
LaTrobe University, Deakin University, and Monash Uni-
versity. At LaTrobe the sinologist Paul Rule researched
Western images of Confucianism; Gregory Bailey studied
ancient Indian ideologies; and the Australian dean of patris-
tics, Eric Osborn, researched select pre-Nicene Church Fa-
thers. Deakin possessed the philosophers Max Charlesworth
and Ian Weeks. Charlesworth, who had already taught a reli-
gious studies course at Melbourne University as early as
1970—basically in the philosophy of religion—was to insti-
tutionalize his dream as professor at Deakin (in Geelong) and
he went on to write incisively about methodology issues in
Religious Inventions (1997). In Victoria, interestingly, there
has been sympathy for the idea of a philosophia perennis be-
hind spiritual traditions, revealed not only in Kenneth Old-
meadow’s fine exposition, Traditionalism: Religion in the
Light of Perennial Philosophy (2000), but also among philoso-
phers attracted by Eastern, especially Indian, metaphysics,
including Ian Kesarcodi-Watson and Purussotima Bilimoria,
founder of Australian Society for Asian and Comparative
Philosophy and editor of the journal Sophia.Further afield in Australia, Adelaide is most important.
With the change in institutional status that produced the
University of South Australia came the largest department
of religion studies in the country in 1991. This was spear-
headed by Professor Norman Habel, the brilliant expositor
of the book of Job and founder of the Earth Bible project.
With liberal philosophical theologian Vincent Hayes, he
founded the Australian Association for the Study of Reli-
gions in 1975, which came to oversee the Charles Strong
Lectures and built up its own publications, including the
journal Australian Religion Studies Review, first published in- The Association’s concern with a variety of religions
demarcated it from the Theological Association of Australia
and New Zealand, which is linked to the journals Colloqui-
um, Australian Biblical Review, and Pacifica.
New Zealand benefited from Paul Morris, who returned
to Wellington from Britain in 1993 to take over the chair
from Geering. Already established in Judaic studies, Morris
went on to edit impressive collections on modernity and
postmodernity (and New Zealand religious verse). He
worked with James Veitch, a critical thinker inspired by
Geering with an eye for crises produced by environmental
degradation and ideologies of terror. Also worthy of mention
are the well-known Africanists Elizabeth Isichei, who was for
a time at Wellington, and Harold Turner, who has worked
primarily from Britain. Other New Zealand scholars of note
8770 STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA