131 Healing Despite Christianity; Struggles Between Missionary and Traditional Conceptions of Medicine Astrid de Hontheim Historical Basis of Missionary Presence among the Asmat Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries mentioned in this article are American: the Crosier fathers and brothers and TEAM evangelicals. Crosiers, a common name to designate the Regular Canons of the Holy Cross, belong to an order founded by heodorus de Celles and his four companions in 1210, at the time of the hird Crusade. After almost disappearing in the nineteenth century, a revitalization in the early twentieth century led to the settlement of several new communities, notably the irst American community in Onamia, Minnesota in 1910. his Crosier branch had experience with missions when they were entrusted with the evangelization of the Asmat area (West Papua 1 ) in 1947. he irst missionary, Father G. Zegwaard MSC, arrived in 1953 and the irst four Crosiers reached their mission ield in 1958. Currently, 500 Crosiers are working in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Europe, the United States and Brazil. On the Protestant side, in 1890 the Swede Fredrik Franson created TEAM (he Evangelical Alliance Mission) and 13 other missionary societies in order to recruit missionaries for China. At that time, hundreds of missionary societies were concen- trating on converting the Chinese, whose numbers and relatively closed society fascinated numerous missionaries and made their conversion seem to be the ultimate 1. Politically speaking, after having been a Dutch colony until 1961, West New Guinea (previously called “Irian Jaya”) was officially annexed by Indonesia in 1969 by the “Act of Free Choice” – commonly nicknamed “Act Free of Choice” by the Papuans – parallel to the settlement of the OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka), the Organisation for the Independence of Papua, still active nowadays. West Papua is the largest Indonesian province (421,981 km 2 , or 22% of the total surface of Indonesia [Cribb, 2000; 3]) for a population of around 2,500,000 inhabitants. The Asmat are themselves around 75,000 people living in a swamp of 26,700 km 2 in a jungle of high trees, sago palms and mangroves on the South Coast. Religious Dynamics in the Pacific – Cahiers du Credo – 2010