This book explores a range of societies in and around the Pacific and southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that encountered religions introduced from elsewhere, or fashioned their own responses to already established religious traditions. These changes observed through the responses of the receiving societies indicate that religious change is a creative dynamic, rather than a passive acceptance of new ideas, beliefs and practices. While change is often triggered by the introduction of new understandings, it can only become entrenched within a community when it takes on...

Up until the 1970s, a large proportion of Aboriginal people in Australia had some experience in institutions as part of government assimilation and protection policies. By focusing on three communities in South Australia, this book attempts to understand the consequences of this institutionalization for Aborigines and Australian society in general. Peggy Brock uses the word "ghetto" to evoke the nature of the missions in which many Aboriginal people settled for generations, as ghettos both oppress and nurture. The book shows that Aboriginal people often chose to live in the missions as part...