Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

30 April 2015

Jorgensen, Dan. 2014. “Preying on Those Close to Home: Witchcraft Violence in a Papua New Guinea Village.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology [Early View]. doi:10.1111/taja.12105.

Wesch, Michael. 2007. “A Witch Hunt in New Guinea: Anthropology on Trial.” Anthropology and Humanism 32 (1): 4–17. doi:10.1525/ahu.2007.32.1.4.

Schram, Ryan. 2010. “Witches’ Wealth: Witchcraft, Confession, and Christianity in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (4): 726–42. doi:10.1111/j.1467–9655.2010.01650.x.

Allison, April. 2015. “The ‘Women Not Witches’ Project.” Seeds Theatre Group, Inc. Accessed February 15. http://seedstheatre.org/the-women-not-witches-project-2/.

Chandler, Jo. 2013. “It’s 2013, And They’re Burning ‘Witches.’” The Global Mail, February 15. http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/its-2013-and-theyre-burning-witches/558/.

The Leniata Legacy. 2015. “The Leniata Legacy: Advocates Against Gender-Based Violence in Papua New Guinea.” Accessed February 15. http://www.leniatalegacy.com/.

The Papua New Guinea Post-Courier. 2013. “Time for leaders to condemn sorcery killings.” The Papua New Guinea Post-Courier, Editorial, p. 2. February 7. PDF copy.

Many cultures throughout the world find invisible causes for otherwise material, physical events, like illness, death and misfortune. Let's call any kind of belief of this nature magic.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, an anthropologist who studied the people who live in what is today South Sudan, has been very influential in helping anthropologists think about magic in social terms.

Some key points:

• Witchcraft is mentioned every day, and invoked to explain any number of bad things, from minor incidents to death. “Witchcraft is not less anticipated than adultery” (which is also common) (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 19).
• Witchcraft belief coexists with reason and logic. When the granary collapsed on top of a person, and people saw that termites had eaten away the posts, they reasoned that termites made the granary fall, but a witch made sure it fell on that person at that time (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 22).
• Witchcraft doesn't explain everything: when people commit certain acts, like lying and adultery, they cannot claim that they have been bewitched (ibid.: 26). Similarly, sickness that results from breaking a taboo is not caused by a witch (ibid.: 28).
• Witchcraft comes from an organ; one is born a witch, and one inherits from the mother and mother's brother. Sorcery by contrast is learned. “A witch performs no rite” (ibid.: 1).
• If someone's witchcraft causes death, then the witch is killed in vengence (ibid.: 5).

Many societies have very similar beliefs. We can speak of these beliefs as forming a package, because they often go together too.

Some key variations:

• Is the witch an “insider” or an “outsider”?
• Is the witch typically male or female?
• Is witchcraft always unintented or just covert?

Social anthropologists loved talking about witchcraft and sorcery. It seemed a perfect test case for their ideas about social function:

• Witchcraft and sorcery functions in relation to ideas about egalitarianism. Only equals bewitch each other (Fortune 1932).
• Witchcraft is a way of mediating social conflicts (Nadel 1952).
• Witchcraft is a collective representation of deviance itself, the “standardized nightmare” of the society (Wilson 1951: 313).

Witchcraft exist in an equilibrium, and is part of a process of maintaining social equilibrium.

At some point, anthropologists in Africa seemed to arrive at the conclusion that witchcraft accusation was on the rise, along with organized grassroots campaigns for cleansing of witches. A new question was now asked:

• Why is there more witchcraft accusation and divination?

One important answer:

• New and more frequent accusations to witchcraft are functional responses to increaing inequality and economic insecurity due to recent, sudden economic changes.

In other words, if old witchcraft should be understood in relation to equilibrium, then new witchcraft should be understood as the result of disequilibrium.

I'm sure all this will settle down once everyone is part of a modern, capitalist society…

In the 90s, anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff start to notice something new in the news from South Africa, where they had conducted research for many years (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999):

• In March 1996, in a far northeastern village, a baboon, taken to be a witch in disguise, was killed by “necklacing,” the infamous way in which collaborators were dealt with during the late apartheid years. (ibid.: 280).
• Curious crowds are visiting the Howick Falls, in KwaZulu-Natal, to glimpse a mysterious 25-foot creature. Absolom Dlamini has not actually caught sight of it yet. But, he says, there is “a fearsome spirit here which makes you feel like you are being dragged [in].” It proves there is a monster down there“ (ibid.: 280). [A bustling trade in the sale of monster dolls emerged.]

In the midst of stories of a new, post-apartheid South Africa, wire reports mentioned weird and wild stories of witchcraft, sorcery, strange new creatures, illicit trade in children and body parts for magical purposes.

Interest in the occult seemed coupled with pyramid schemes and other promises of instant wealth, brought by God. It was an occult economy: The deployment of magical ideas and practices in relation to practical, economic ends. People believed that witches and many other occult beings were profiting from the global economy in invisible ways. Why would a belief in an “occult economy” emerge now?

Structural-functionalist saw new kinds of magical beliefs as symptoms of social dysfunction.

Comaroff and Comaroff take a different approach in which the idea of an occult economy is a product of their own alienation.

The new occult beliefs are not extensions of traditional beliefs, but a new set of ideas about causality and responsibility altogether.

Witchcraft and sorcery beliefs are also found widely in the cultures of Melanesia and Polynesian, including Papua New Guinea.

There are many terms for many different magical ideas:

• puripuri
• sangguma
• werabana (female 'witchcraft'), barau (male 'sorcery')
• vada
• blakpawa
• wiskrap

Sorcery was banned in 1971 until 2013.

http://rschram.org/2015/02/12/haus-man-haus-krai/

http://rschram.org/2014/02/10/haus/

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1999. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–303. doi:10.1525/ae.1999.26.2.279.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E., and Eva Gillies. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Abridged edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fortune, R. F. 2013. Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. Routledge.

Nadel, S. F. 1952. “Witchcraft in Four African Societies: An Essay in Comparison.” American Anthropologist 54 (1): 18–29. doi:10.1525/aa.1952.54.1.02a00040.

Wilson, Monica Hunter. 1951. “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 56 (4): 307–13.