Culture
Sorcery
'I had gone east with the Governor on the Luuradaba and since it was the rule when I was on board, I took the cases for trial at the stations visited. At Abau there were three men, brothers, charged with the murder of a man. They were three fine looking young men and they stood before me unperturbed by the position they were in and the atmosphere of the court. There was no doubt they were guilty; indeed, they admitted it quite freely and seemed bored with the proceedings. I asked each in turn if had anything to say
before I sentenced him. One of the brothers, probably the eldest, spoke for the three of them, saying, 'We killed the man for he was a sorcerer.'
'I said, 'You can get a long term of imprisonment for your crime'.'
' 'Yes' said the spokesman, ' we know, but you must see that we had to kill the man because he was a sorceror.'
'I then said, 'You know the law is that I can order you to be put in gaol to remain there for the rest of your life and if you had been charged with the wilful murder you would have been sentenced to be hanged by the neck.'
' 'Yes,' said the spokesman, 'that too we know, but this man who was a sorcerer killed our father. A snake bit our father while he was tying up a bunch of nananas and he died. The man we killed told the snake to bite our father; the snake did so and our father died. What else could we do but kill the man? If you wish to hang us up by the neck, do so, or if you want to put us in gaol, that also you can do - it is purely a matter for you,'
' 'How about three years,' I said. 'Oh, yes,' they said, 'whatever you like.'
'After the court I returned to the ship and the Governor asked me how the court had gone and I told him of the three brothers and the sorceror. He asked me what sentence I had pronounced.
'I said, 'Three years, what can one do?'
'He agreed. 'What indeed.'
Justice R.T. Gore C.B.E.
Justice and Sorcery
The Jacaranda Press, 1965
Sorcery and witchcraft may be defined as mobilisation and projection of superhuman powers for malevolent purposes. Although the two are closely linked and in some cultures inseparable, it is useful to maintain a conceptual distinction between sorcery as the employment of harmful substances or objects and witchcraft as projection of harmful power residing in the agent. A sorcerer's capacity to harm, in other words, depends on his ability to control posers extrinsic to himself; whereas a witch, who can inflict sickness or death on others simply by staring at them or willing evil on them, possesses powers - inherited or acquired - as an intrinsic part of his or her person. Beliefs in witchcraft are not uncommon in Melanesian cultures, but amongst most peoples of Papua and New Guinea Sorcer beliefs are decidedly predominant; moreover, where witchcraft is encountered, it is likely to appear as part of a complex of ideas centering on sorcery, This essay will therefore concentrate on sorcery, but identical principles of explanation apply to witchcraft.
An essential point is that sorcery and witchcraft refer by and large to ideas held by all persons in a society about the powers of other people in general to harm, not to actual knowledge and powers possessed exclusively by a few anti-social individuals. This means that they cannot be adequately explained with reference to the personalities or psychological peculiarities of individual sorcerers and witches, if indeed such persons can even be identified; on the contrary, recourse to psychologically slanted explanations centering on the mental status of individuals accused of sorcery or witchcraft id liable to preclude the more profound understanding that becomes possible when the matters are explored as social and cultural phenomena. An anthropological approach to these beliefs and practices therefore takes the form of efforts to understand where they fit into the cultural pattern and how they mesh with other kinds of social behaviour.
Some of the questions one needs to ask about sorcery are mainly cultural in scope, others are mainly sociological; but the two points of view are complementary, and both belong in a thorough study. In the category of culturally oriented questions are the following: What kinds of people are believed to be sorcerers? Are they said to possess special powers or personal characteristics setting them apart from ordinary people? How do they work harm? What substances do they use? What are their techniques?
To illustrate the kinds of answers one is likely to encounter in this domain (and, incidentally, to call attention to the tenacity of these ideas in the face of changing social and cultural conditions), we may briefly consider sorcery beliefs in four societies which have experienced different amount of European influence: the Keraki, of the Trans-Fly region in western Papua, studied in the 1930s by F.E. Williams; the Gimi, of the Eastern Highlands south-west of Lufa, studied by L.B. Glick in 1960-2; Tangu, a people living in the Madang District inland from Bogia Bay, studied in 1952 by K.O.L. Burridge; and the Hanuabada [q.v.], a large urbanised village close to Port Moresby, studied in 1950-1 by C.S. Belshaw.
Keraki sorcerers are said to be able to render themselves invisible, to fly, to metamorphose into birds and trees, and to project their own souls.
Their techniques include projection of poisonous objects into their victims, soul-stealing, cooking packets containing excrement or food scraps mixed with special poisons, inducing snakes to bit their victims, and projecting tainted blood from their own bodies into those of their victims. All such actions depend for their efficacy on the sorcerers's utilization of privately owned wen, translated by Williams as 'medicines' but perhaps more precisely definable as 'powerful substances'.
Similar ideas are held by the Gimi. Perhaps because they are more empirically inclined than the Keraki, whey do not credit sorcerers with superhuman capacities, but instead most often declare that only
a scrubby weakling would stoop to such activity. A contrasting point of view, however, holds that a strong man may properly carry out sorcery to gain retribution for his own village. Sorcerers are said either to propel poisonous darts or to cook packets of refuse mixed with poisons in order to make their victims ill and kill them. A related but distinct kind of sorcery involves outright assault by several men on a lone victim, who is mauled and jabbed with poisonous needles, then sent on his way, dazed, amnesic, and certain to die.
Although any Tangu man may be accused of sorcery, ordinarily sorcerers are thought of as sullen, secretive men, lean and bony, with long fingers and disquieting bloodshot eyes, who may be readily identified by their disinclination to share in the open egalitarian social interaction on which Tangu lay great stress. The sorcerer, says Burrdige ' is the epitome of of the non-reciprocal man'. such men are said to use almost every conceivable method - charms , spells, poisons, weapons, strangulation - to undo or destroy their victims.
In Hanuabada, sorcerers are said to have a kind of power, or 'heat', similar to that of a frenzied dancer or a charismatic orator. To augment this heat, they chew ginger and spicy barks, and avoid foods and activities associated with cooling. The sorcerer sometimes projects his power from a distance; or he may sneak up to a home at night, and either induce sickness through spells and projection fo lethal breath or charm a sleeping victim into wandering later to a place where an accident will befall him.
To understand sorcery in depth requires that one expand this kind of information by detailed inquiry into the role and significance of sorcery beliefs in the social life of a people. for sorcerers, whether or not anyone knows their names, are believed to be human agents who act consciously and wilfully , either on their own behalf or at someone else's behest. Some fundamental questions that arise are: Who or what provokes sorcerers to act? Are they usually motivated by personal malice or do they work for others? What is the relation of a sorcerer's social group to that of his victim? What is the usual response to sorcery, and who responds?
As answer to these questions accumulate there should emerge a picture of sorcery as a critical feature of social life. and since it is in times of conflict and stress that fundamental cleavages and alignments often appear most clearly, careful analysis of situations involving sorcery accusations may lead to fresh insights into the social structure of a community. For example, returning to the first of the four societies under consideration, Williams concluded that among the Keraki sorcery beliefs were a key element in suppression of intra-group aggression.
Although people maintained that there were no sorcerers in the immediate local group, only in other villages or tribes, it was nevertheless understood that under sufficient provocation anyone might have recourse to a sorcerer; and, Williams observes, 'the thought of this possibility, perhaps more than the thought of retaliation by violence, is an effective inducement to refrain from offending others'.
Gimi society consists of politically autonomous villages, whose inhabitants are chauvinistic and proud, loyal to their own kin, hostile to outsiders. Sorcery accusations occasionally pass within a village in the heat of argument, but deliberate accusations always involve other villages, especially those at odds with that of the victim. The death of a mature man in particular is not looked upon as simply an individual or family misfortune; rather it is evidence that one village has wilfully maimed another. Various divination [q.v.] and detection procedures - some involving the co-operation of nervous outsiders who come to pay their respects and, incidentally as it were, to demonstrate their innocence by exposing themselves to the presence of the dead man and the scrutiny of his kin - a re designed to identify not so much the individual sorcerer as the village responsible for his actions. Prior to Australian administrative control, these procedures were followed by assault on the village deemed guilty.
Above all else Tangu value reciprocity, equivalence, and flexibility in social interaction. The man who seems selfish and unduly aggressive who is unwilling to take into account the needs of others, is called ranguma - a word which Burridge would translate not only as 'sorcerer' or 'witch' but also as 'criminal' or 'non-conformist' It is interesting to note, however, that when someone falls ill, his initial response is likely to not an accusation against another individual but a denial of his own guilt; but, if the illness persists he may reverse tactics and bring into the open every personal transgression that comes to mind, in the hope that whoever has been offended will relent, through fear of retaliation, and sorcerise him no longer. Although sorcerers are despised, there is a feeling that their victims ar not altogether undeserving. The emphasis on co-operation and conformism in this society is thus reinforced; Tangu presumably weigh their actions against the possibility of sorcery retaliation.
The people of Hanuabada maintain that sorcery knowledge originates in neighbouring rural and hill communities, but this does not preclude their accusing one another of being sorcerers. A foreboding dream, an unusual bit of circumstantial evidence, or, especially, a man's reputation for animosity toward the victim - any of these may underlie a sorcery accusation within the village. Prolonged feuds between kinship groups, with accusations followed by counter-accusations, are a feature of village life which Belshaw thought unlikely to disappear soon. He saw in Hanuabada sorcery a reflection of social tensions and an expression of chronic fear and distress associated with poverty, malnutrition, and disease.
In summary, sorcery and witchcraft are more critically linked to other parts of a people's way of life than will be apparent on superficial inspection. Whatever may be one's ultimate conclusions about tolerating or attempting to suppress these ideas and practices it is appropriate, indeed essential, on practical, intellectual, and moral grounds, that they first be examined in their own social and cultural contexts, rather than exclusively in the light of Euro-American values and presuppositions.
Source:
Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea
Peter Ryan
Melbourne University Press, 1972