Documenting Abandoned Ancestral Religion - How Spirit Signs Convince

The Department of Anthropology of the University of Regina invites you to the public lecture

Documenting Abandoned Religion: How Spirit Signs Convince

by Prof. Roger Ivar Lohmann (Trent University)

Friday, April 25, 2025,  2:00-3:30pm, in Room ED193 of the Main Campus of the University of Regina

What makes people believe in gods, magic, object spirits, fairies, death-dealing witches, and souls, despite evidence and competing religions’ claims?

Asabano people of Papua New Guinea traded old religions for imported ones and say they were convinced by presences, elders’ claims, supernaturally-caused objects and events, and spiritual encounters in dreams and visions. Examples of these spirit signs are explicable and cross-culturally comparable when classified as illusions, trusted testimonies, confirming interpretations, and autonomous imaginings.

Roger Ivar Lohmann, an ethnographer of the Asabano of Papua New Guinea and general anthropologist, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Trent University in Oshawa, Ontario. His published topics include religious enculturation, dream beliefs, colonizing spirit beings, war- and peacemaking, hauntings, mortuary practices, mementoes, and Green fiction and politics. Current projects include human/dog interspecies culture, religious conspiracy theory-caused killings, ethnography of a mythical people, and the book this talk is based on.