"Sanguma em i stap": Ethnographic citizenship and epistemic exclusion in Tok Pisin sorcery stories since 1945

Ryan Schram
University of Sydney
October 25, 2019

To be presented in the session “Making the occult public” at the 2019 meeting of the American Anthropological Association on Saturday, November 23, 4:15–6 p.m. (Convention Center West, Room 306)

Paper and slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/talks/sanguma/aaa. (Please do not cite or quote without permission from the author.)

Abstract: In Papua New Guinea, people's political participation takes place in contact zones among many different cultures, and public discourse circulates only when people create interfaces between disparate languages, systems of knowledge, and value orientations. Citizenship rests on one's capacity to translate oneself; yet translations are not treated equally in mass print media. In the same way that the national creole language Tok Pisin is subject to competing ideological evaluations about the nature of multilingualism, Tok Pisin public discourse is characterized by competing tendencies toward epistemic inclusion and exclusion. In this paper, I present several different frames found in Tok Pisin public discourse which privilege different epistemological positions on sorcery and other occult topics. In each case, talk of the occult involves both an openness to differences in knowledge and a tendency to treat particular knowledge claims as beliefs (bilip) to be overcome. While bilip has become the dominant way to constrain public talk about the occult, I also show that the bilip can be reinterpreted to index a moral stance of mutual recognition of differences as well. Competing tendencies of inclusion and exclusion in Tok Pisin discourse also feed into and reinforce each other. The struggle over ontological recognition will thus always be a part of creole cosmopolitanism in PNG. Keywords: occult, belief, creoles and pidgins, media, citizenship.

"Sanguma em i stap (Sanguma is real). From the government, you would notice that they are focusing on the violence against alleged sorcerers and their human rights, but what about the other side of the issue? As a government we have to come down and see the real issue that is affecting our people. Sorcery related killings are happening everywhere," said Mr Kain. "Mi laik appeal long gavman of the day, disla sorcery act em i stap pinis. Long dai blong disla innocent pikinini, mipla laikim osem gavman i mas wokim sampla action long enforsim disla lo (We want to appeal to the government of the day, the Sorcery Act is already there.)"

—“Community rallies to weed out sorcerers” (Arnold 2017) [The reporter only translates some of Jimmy Kain's quoted statement, and alters its meaning slightly. My own English translation of his full statement is: “I want to appeal to the government of the day, the Sorcery Act is already there. Of the death of this innocent child, we(excl.) demand that the government take action to enforce this law.”]

1. the identification of common grounds for communication in diffusely and unevenly shared languages, and
2. the typification of the persons who occupy these meeting places as a basis for containing, commensurating, and ranking differences among them.

• Jourdan and Angeli (2014) argue that both the ideologies of reciprocal and hierarchical multilingualism determine the public role of pidgins and creoles.
• Using this distinction, we can draw an analogy between the politics of language in PNG and the politics of knowledge.

• When writing about the occult in Tok Pisin, it is common to list several terms which all refer to overlapping ideas, including sanguma, puripuri, malira, posin, blek mejik, and blekpawa, among others (see e.g. Gibbs 2015).
• Another English-derived word soseri (from sorcery), however, is a marker of a prestige register. Its use changes the multilingual context for discourse on occult topics because as a prestige term it also indexes English as a dominant code and metalanguage. There is an asymmetric “semantic ascent” (Quine 1948, [1967] 1992)

The occult poses an acute dilemma for Wantok Niuspepa:

• It embraces Tok Pisin as a grassroots language for a new nation.
• It strives to conform to the model of mass journalism as an anonymous voice from nowhere, and thus tends to favor official sources as “authorized knowers” (Tuchman 1978; Fishman 1978).

<html> <table> <tr> <td style=“padding-right:0.5em;”

>