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Paper short abstract

In an imagined conversation between the refigured dualisms of Fijian Pentecostal Christianity and a multivalent Western astronomy, I show how these flip current anthropological expectations of ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ ontologies, and some implications this holds for an anthropology of wonder.

Paper long abstract

What happens when our cosmologies are other than we say they are? In 'To be a wonder', Michael Scott observes the tendency in which what he calls 'non-dualist' ontologies are frequently cited as foils against seemingly Western Cartesian dualism, often privileged as essentially more ethical, open and wondering. In this paper, I imagine a conversation between proponents of two ontologies that flip our expectations of 'Western' and 'indigenous' ontologies: the dualism of Fijian Pentecostal Christianity, and the multivalent cosmological fields of contemporary (Western) astronomy. Proponents of 'the ontological turn' have foregrounded the non-dualist configurations of emergent scientific practice in the West, but continue to see these as marginal to a 'mainstream' Western science steeped in Cartesian dualisms - as demanding wider explication, even advocacy, from scientists and their anthropologist allies. In this paper, I ask whether these cosmologies are really so marginal to Western knowledge practices, and concomitantly, what is at stake in reading the dualism of Pentecostalism as a wonder-filled engagement among Fiji Islanders. To what extent does our devotion to those cosmologies Scott glosses as 'non-dualist' risk privileging Western science once again, while effacing the deep (re)figurings of dualist cosmologies among 'non-Western' peoples?