Ryan Schram
University of Sydney October 20, 2019
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/talks/sanguma

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.

• Presentation slides and paper for the session “Making the occult public” at the 2019 American Anthropological Association meeting, Vancouver.