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Although over eighty percent of the country is Muslim, Indonesia is marked by an extraordinary diversity in language, ancestry, culture, religion and ways of life. This book focuses on the Christian Dani of West Papua, providing a social and ethnographic history of the most important indigenous population in the troubled province. It presents a fascinating overview of the Dani’s conversion to Christianity, examining the social, religious and political uses to which they have put their new religion. Based on independent research carried out over many years among the Dani people, the book provides an abundance of new material on religious and political events in West Papua. Underlining the heart of Christian-Muslim rivalries, the book questions the fate of religion in late-modern times.

This paper outlines events in the developing independence movement in West Papua (Indonesian Irian Jaya) during a brief and remarkable period of Jakarta-led reform. The raising of the people's Morning Star flag - previously an act of treason - was conditionally permitted by the Indonesian security forces on 1 December 1999. For Papuans, it marked the 38th anniversary of the initial steps towards self-determination while under Dutch rule, and expressed their right to social justice and the ideal of freedom from Indonesian control. Punitive action followed the flag-raisings in Timika and Nabire. While a nascent 'people's task force' (Satgas Papua) began to play a security role, the independence movement took shape with a large formal gathering (MUBES) in February 2000, which for the first time brought together Papuan leaders from all over the province, and in exile, to formulate a political strategy. The momentum of the MUBES continued in May-June 2000 with the Papuan People's Congress, which resolved to pursue the right to self-determination 'peacefully and democratically', while acknowledging the absence of viable international support.

The First International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles in Melanesia was planned mainly for Tok Pisin, but no predetermined theme(s) had been proposed to the participants. Nevertheless, in this collection of papers several principal themes stand out.One is that of a revived interest in substratology, both for Tok Pisin and for Bislama. Another is what in fact amounts to a change in perspective from universalism, as supposedly competitive with the substratological orientation, towards a generalist approach to typology, which reduces the apparent polarity, from a theoretical point of view. A third is the pervasive interest of contributors in wider language issues in the social and political life of Papua New Guinea.These interests go back to the linguistic and social experience of the participants, most of whom have a long record of living among the people whose languages they have studied on a day-to-day basis, and to the relative remoteness of their inspiration from the more theoretical and perhaps ultimately untestable issues which surround the universalist approach and its claims for a bioprogram foundation for language.