Hierarchies of Power / Contestations in Contemporary Southeast Asia (PDF)

"This important ethnographic and ethnohistorical study of the interactions of Adat and Pentecostal-Evangelical Christianity among the Kenyah of Central Borneo cuts through the underbrush of now overfamiliar debates about Christian conversion and individualism to ask challenging new questions about how egalitarianism and hierarchy are negotiated by means of complex religious and political struggles. Opening up a fresh analytic perspective and posing a novel set of questions about religion and cultural change, this book is a major contribution to the anthropology of Christianity."

- Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

This book focuses on a Pentecostal-Evangelical Kenyah community in central Borneo, a region that crosses the border between Malaysia and Indonesia. The book argues that the Pentecostal-Evangelical (P/e) mode of religious authority and organization has the capacity to adapt to both the pre-existing hierarchical traditional institution such as Adat and modern egalitarian social forms. It has been necessary within the context of Kenyah's experience of religious change as it enabled many actors from various social classes to obtain and perceive religious authority in a specific local and regional political-religious situation while promoting their identity as egalitarian and autonomous modern subjects. In contrast with other studies on the P/e church that emphasize its egalitarian spirit as a factor that supports its impressive growth, the book contends that its adaptive structural characteristics have enabled the development of this specific Christian denomination to expand rapidly and play a dominant position in contemporary social life in various parts of the world.

The book thus provides novel findings in the study of religious change in Southeast Asia by enriching the discussion of historical transformation in the region, and analyzing thearticulation of global and regional Christian movements, with the socio-political characteristics of Bornean society.

Imam Ardhianto is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Indonesia. His research interests include religious change, Adat transformation, globalization, anthropology of Christianity and Borneo studies.