Paper short abstract:

Witchcraft (Tok Pisin: sanguma) appears stronger than ever throughout PNG at the present time. This belief is held by large numbers of the population in times of stress at sickness, accident or death. Its persistence and ubiquity are to be attributed to its religious character.

Paper long abstract:

Those identified as witches in PNG are ordinary people in many ways, but the community comes to a judgement that they are extraordinary: “He is a sanguma. We all know that.” The result can be taken to the extremes of public torture and execution. Many theoretical viewpoints have been brought forward to explain what is happening with the rise of sanguma practices, with the suffering that makes urban dwellers fear a return to the village, and with the way out of this barbaric vigilantism. The Prime Minister of PNG has called it “nonsense”. This paper searches for suitable ways of identifying the religious nature of sanguma, which accounts for its resistance to arguments based on “just good sense” or on the accumulation of reasonable secular experiences and processes. Individuals can be found to have special powers in the light of the mysterium tremendum et fascinsosum. These powers are enhanced by the initiation traditions in many areas, where kn

owledge is characterized as forever partial and yet leading on. The transformation of personalities in these traditions are drawn on in present conflicts involving sectors of society in Madang, who are largely at war with one another, following different initiations. The causality of killing is beyond the ways of daily reasoning, discontinuous in its account of what persons are capable of. Communities must open up their ways of discernment and keep control of what is done in their name.