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Framed by an ambitious introduction, this book contributes importantly to the literature on modernity and the occult by highlighting the workings of Pentecostalism in that relationship.
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Framed by an ambitious introduction, this book contributes importantly to the literature on modernity and the occult by highlighting the workings of Pentecostalism in that relationship. It is argued that Pentecostalism wages “spiritual warfare” against evildoers (Stritecky 2001), promoting efforts to identify and punish witches so as to purge persons and communities of Satanic forces and “deliver” them to the Holy Spirit . Pentecostalism is also intolerant of “tradition” and works to abolish it, as in the astonishing episode described in the introduction in which the speaker of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) national parliament removed emblems of indigenous spirits (carvings, totem poles, etc.) from Parliament House because he deemed them demonic and wanted to dedicate the building and the nation to the Christian Trinity (Rio, MacCarthy, and Blanes, this volume, pp. 1–2; see Eves et al. 2014). The editors see in Pentecostalism a way to explain recent increases in witchcraft accusations and a startling new ferocity in the treatment of alleged witches (see Forsyth and Eves ed. 2015). Taken together the essays provide insight into the functioning of the Pentecostal-witchcraft nexus in various African and Melanesian postcolonial settings at a time of increased market penetration and socioeconomic stratification.
My comments on this collection are offered in two sections: the first, “Witchcraft,” and the second, “The Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus,” a term that is meant to capture the necessary connection between Pentecostalism, which wages “spiritual warfare” against evil forces, and witchcraft wherever witchcraft beliefs are entertained. The first part is largely inspired by Peter Geschiere’s Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust (2013). The second, “The Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus,” is informed by the Comaroffs’ introduction to the edited collection Modernity and Its Malcontents (1993) and by their essay on “millennial capitalism” (2000), as well as by Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997), Meyer’s Translating the Devil (1999a), and Robbins’s Becoming Sinners (2004a).
But first a word about the term witchcraft. The title, if not the book itself, blurs the distinction frequently drawn between sorcery, which involves conscious acts of malevolence, and witchcraft, which bears on unconscious attempts to harm. The editors adopt the term witchcraft to mean acts of occult malevolence, conscious or not. In these comments, I use the term witchcraft in this generic sense as well, but will use the term sorcery instead when discussing particular contributors who use that term.
Witchcraft
In an early comparison of Africa and Melanesia, Max Marwick wrote that in Africa, alleged “attacks and accusations of witchcraft and sorcery occur only between persons already linked by close social bonds” (1970: 280), 1 the relationship between the alleged witch or sorcerer having been strained (ibid.), but in Oceania, 2 “the sorcerer ... is believed to direct his destructive magic outside his own group” (ibid.), sorcery operating between rather than within communities (ibid.). The Melanesianists Mary Patterson and Michele Stephen challenged Marwick’s dichotomy (Patterson 1974; Stephen 1987) and called for a more nuanced comparison , one that acknowledges similarities (as I hope to do here) and not just differences between the two regions.
As this collection shows, witchcraft and sorcery in some Melanesian societies do indeed involve attacks between close relatives. According to Strong, Asaro (PNG) witches kill only their own kin (this volume, p. 74 and passim), and they receive their powers “as a kind of inheritance ..., so that the children and relatives of witches are themselves suspected” of being witches (this volume, p. 73). Reporting on the Trobriand Islands (PNG), the group Malinowski made famous, MacCarthy notes that witches attack members of their own matriline and acquire their powers from their mother in a putative grotesque initiation-like process (this volume, p. 146; see Urame 2015: 26).
Strong’s and MacCarthy’s accounts echo that of Peter Geschiere for the Maka of southeast Cameroon. In its most dangerous form, djambe, an occult force that may be translated as either witchcraft or sorcery, involves “witchcraft from inside the house” (2013: xvi; see also Geschiere 1982: 107, 1997: 38 ff.) . Even in contemporary urban contexts, witchcraft is thought “to arise, first of all, from the intimacy of the family and home” (1997: 11). Witchcraft is in fact “the dark side of kinship” (2013: xvi), “the flip side of kinship” (ibid.: 14), “the betrayal of kinship” (ibid.), and leads to “profound ambivalences about intimacy [here Geschiere generalizes broadly] ... all over the world” (ibid.: xxii).
The African chapters in this volume mostly uphold Geschiere’s insight that intimacy breeds witchcraft. Pype claims that in Kinshasa , the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, occult powers are transferred “within intimate spheres of belonging (principally the extended family)” (this volume, p. 114). Of urban Angola, Blanes writes that the powers of ndoki or sorcery are transferred from maternal uncle to nephew within the matriline (this volume, p. 238). Bertelsen provides the one African anomaly in the collection in recounting how residents of a Mozambican peri-urban area suspected German strangers (missionaries, communists) of witchcraft.
To the extent that witchcraft concerns malice between those related through ties of social and/or geographical propinquity, “the main danger lurks in the very core of sociality” (Geschiere 2013: xxi) . In many parts of the world, such ties are developed transactionally, and not surprisingly, suspicions of witchcraft may be aroused by perceived transactional slights, according to some contributors. Asaro, for example, search for some “hidden” resentment (Strong, this volume, p. 75) whenever witchcraft is alleged. “Did the deceased give money to some kin but not others? Was a pig consumed that was not shared?” (ibid.). “Every accusation [of witchcraft] I have encountered revolves around the breaking of the ethos of reciprocity among kin,” Strong reports (ibid.). MacCarthy suggests as much in her essay on Trobriand witchcraft. “Gifts and their reciprocation are the basis of all functional relationships in the Trobriands ; between kin, affines, friends, lovers, marriage partners, and so on” (MacCarthy, this volume, p. 140). Withholding when indigenous ethics mandate giving constitutes a violation of norms, one that may provoke a witchcraft attack. MacCarthy was warned that if a woman complimented her on her clothing, netbag, jewelry, or other valuable, she should give the item away immediately to forestall such an attack. Refusing even a betel nut to someone who wanted it could result in “retribution,” witch-style (ibid.: 139), she was told. 3
Wherever witches are thought to assault consanguines—or affines, for that matter (see note 3)—witchcraft becomes central in the study of kinship, alliance, and exchange, as their “dark” side. This point was made over two decades ago by Eytan Bercovitch, in his article on Nalumin (PNG) “hidden exchange” (1994). The Nalumin live in small settlements the residents of which are connected through affinal and consanguineal ties. Local norms dictate that peace and harmony be achieved through benign reciprocal transactions. Yet allegations of witchcraft arise within these small, socially close networks. The explanation Bercovitch offers is of general interest. Anyone has too many exchange obligations to meet, putting the person in the position of having to renege on some of these obligations. It follows that to give is also to withhold, the “inescapable” problem of exchange (1994: 520). There is a benefit to giving to others, but this is offset by the risk taken in giving: “the harm that comes from not giving to others” (ibid.: 523). To avoid the conflicts such exclusions could engender, Nalumin conduct their transactions in secret so as not to antagonize non-recipients. Auslander echoes Bercovitch’s point, albeit for the Ngoni, an eastern Zambian group. “Ngoni frequently stress that any act of giving or sharing may potentially trigger later dangerous acts of witchcraft or poisoning by those left out ... the witch—as the ‘excluded other’ (Munn 1990: 3)” reciprocates by retaliating and “endangering the community” (Auslander 1993: 178).
That witchcraft is the dark side not only of kinship but exchange is implicit in the recurring figure of the devouring cannibalistic witch. In Bertelsen’s chapter, for example, the Germans are imagined as nocturnal bloodsuckers (this volume, p. 43) and as undertaking “savage hunts for children” (ibid.: 39), who are “kidnapped or devoured” (ibid.). Similarly, Asaro witches are depraved, necrophagous consumers that loiter near graves, where their next meal lies (Strong, this volume, p. 73). They are “figures of unmitigated, cannibalistic hunger or greed” (ibid.) who feed at night “on the internal organs of persons or pigs, slaking their persistent hunger by eating livers, hearts, lungs, and brains” (ibid.). Moreover, the invisible spirit or familiar that is thought to be responsible for a witch’s behavior is believed to be lodged in the abdomen, belly, or (in Melanesian creoles) bel. 4 Such tropes discursively associate witches with consumption, which is selfish and immoral, not with sharing and prestation, the valorized alternatives. The witch is imagined as “the epitome of maliciousness and antisocial selfishness” (Kelly 1993: 177)—in short, as a transactional pervert (see Munn 1986: 215–233). Something like this interpretation has frequently been proffered. Writing generally of African witchcraft, Marwick states: “It is widely held that beliefs in witchcraft—and the same would hold for sorcery—are an effective means of dramatizing social norms in that they provide, in the person of the mystical evil-doer, a symbol of all that is held to be anti-social and illegitimate” (1967: 124). The witch figure partakes of the logic of exchange and must be understood semantically (rather than functionally), through the morality of exchange, as its inversion.
In Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Geschiere critiques the tendency in kinship studies to assume that the closer the bond, the greater the “self-evident solidarity and trust” (2013: xxi) and the greater the transactional benevolence. But if witchcraft is the dark side of kinship, as Geschiere has maintained, and if it is also the dark side of exchange, as I have argued, witchcraft is integral to these institutions, which must now be rethought in less romanticized terms and with an attention to dynamics (benevolent but also malevolent) rather than structure (cf. Macintyre 1995). Such rethinking would shift witchcraft from the margins to the center of our attempts to grasp human sociality in all its variety, warts and all. The next section pivots to a discussion of what I am calling the Pentecostal-witchcraft nexus, but it never strays far from the considerations of the first section.
The Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus
This book is the latest contribution to the study of “witchcraft and modernity” (Geschiere 2013: 7) initiated by the Comaroffs (1993) and which Geschiere (1997) and Meyer (1999a) developed in their respective monograph-length treatments. The witchcraft and modernity paradigm treats witchcraft as a changing and “integral part of people’s vision of modernity” (Geschiere 2006: 220) rather than as an ossified holdover from the past. Witchcraft discourses provide “critical commentaries on new forms of wealth and commodification” (Myhre, this volume, p. 156)–in particular “on the new inequalities that have arisen with incorporation into cash and market economies” (Eves 2000: 454). As market-related inequalities have deepened, the witch figure continues to be “good to think with” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxvii), providing explanations, in some cases, for these inequalities and, in others, for the misfortunes endured by the economically successful, who are presumed to be afflicted by witchcraft. Indeed, Pentecostalism, “one of the great success stories of the current era of cultural globalization” (Robbins 2004b: 117; see also Meyer 2004), with its crusade against the demonic, clearly constitutes an incitement to witchcraft discourse (Foucault 1980), albeit under altered material and symbolic circumstances.
There is evidence aplenty in these chapters of the many connections between the Pentecostal-witchcraft nexus and these altered material circumstances. In Eriksen and Rio’s chapter, for example, well-off ni-Vanuatu urbanites worry that jealousy (“for other people’s possessions, for other people’s wealth ” [this volume, p. 187]) will motivate sorcery attacks on them, and they look to Pentecostal churches to provide protection against jealous enemies (ibid.). Elsewhere in Vanuatu , a person who “sees another ... having success relative to and often at the expense of him- or herself” (Bratrud, this volume, p. 208) is expected to engage in sorcery. Meanwhile, on the African continent, urban Angolans view Pentecostalism as the “insurance” (Blanes, this volume, p. 94) needed to shield themselves from the covetousness of others (ibid.; see Meyer 1999a: 188 ff.).
Pentecostalism not only offers to the prosperous safeguards against witchcraft (in the form of “discernment,” “deliverance,” exorcism, and prayers) but promotes individualism in the face of familial demands for sharing. In Pentecostalism, the individual is the “unit of salvation” (Robbins 2004a: 295): a he or she who is “filled up by Jesus and the power of the holy spirit” (MacCarthy, this volume, p. 147) and who enters into direct relation with the divine as a result (Meyer 1999a: 172). On the theory that “[a]ll family ties are ... potentially dangerous” (ibid.: 170), Pentecostal policy encourages detachment from “the ‘corrupting’ influence and obligations of kin” (Bratrud, this volume, p. 209). As Trobrianders immerse themselves in Pentecostalism, their attention is directed away from “wide-ranging kin obligations to, instead, the household level” (MacCarthy, this volume, p. 147). To draw on Meyer’s Translating the Devil, “When witchcraft has been diagnosed as the cause of someone’s trouble [among the Ewe of Ghana] ..., all the energy is devoted to cutting the victim’s ties with his or her family. Individualization is the main option in the fight against Satan” (1999a: 195) .
Pentecostalism undermines the social fabric in another way: by insisting upon a “complete break” with tradition (Meyer 1999b ) . This can give rise to a generational rift, one that may coincide with an urban/rural fault line. Among the Asaro, for example, the Pentecostal demonization of the past at a time of urbanization produces a fissure between village dwellers, whom the urbanized young identify with “‘the way of the ancestors’” (Strong, this volume, p. 72), mainstream, pre-Pentecostal religions such as Lutheranism (ibid.: 70), and witchcraft, on the one hand, and, on the other, city-based Asaro youth, who pride themselves on having been “born in the time of modern technology, the time of ‘computerized systems’” (ibid.: 72) and who look down upon villagers for their lack of sophistication. The point is often made that contemporary PNG witchcraft targets vulnerable populations, older people and sometimes women (Urame 2015: 27), and insurgent male youth have been known to take the lead in torturing and killing identified witches and sorcerers in PNG (Gibbs 2012: 129–130; Jorgensen 2014; Urame 2015: 27) and Vanuatu (Taylor and Araújo 2016). The upper Asaro seem to be ripe for this development. Certainly, city-based youth believe that all villagers are witches, and it is easy to imagine that the city-based young men will come to suspect their village-based kinspeople of envying them and engaging in witchcraft to retaliate for felt inequalities. 5
As the “dark side” of kinship and exchange, witchcraft is symptomatic of the weakness of the grip of these institutions. Pentecostalism exacerbates this weakness by promoting the contraction of social networks, by setting the old against the young, and by offering spiritual protection to those fearful of envious relatives. At the heart of the Pentecostal-witchcraft nexus, then, is a tension between “relationalism and individualism” (Robbins 2004a: 323) in the orientation of converts. The exigencies of new economic circumstances–monetization, market participation—would exacerbate this tension as households become reoriented toward consumption and away from production for exchange purposes (see Meyer 1999a: 207–208).
Much of this book’s introduction is devoted to a consideration of the power dimension of Pentecostalism. There Rio, MacCarthy, and Blanes make the strong claim that the “Pentecostal movement, in its many forms and expressions, produces and invigorates a space for invisible powers and it is within this space that Pentecostalism directs all its attention and energy” (this volume, pp. 14–15). Given its involvement with individuals, the kinship and community networks in which individuals are embedded, and their fear of occult events, Pentecostalism presents “a particular form of governance or social ordering” (ibid., p. 26; see also Eves 2011), one that is capable of regulating “the social life of households or the inner person” (Rio, MacCarthy, and Blanes, this volume, p. 26) as “state forms of governance, such as policing or schooling” (ibid.) are not.
In providing “spiritual protection” and “deliverance” from evildoers to those who believe themselves to be vulnerable, Pentecostalism supplies a bulwark against Satan/the witch, something no secular institution can supply. 6 As wielders of secular power, postcolonial states lack the technologies and knowledge thought necessary to defeat malevolent supernatural forces, and must seem utterly irrelevant to those who feel threatened by them. I agree with the editors in their argument that Pentecostalism “invigorates a space for invisible powers” (ibid.: 14), a space of “a particular form of governance or social ordering” (ibid.: 26), and that Pentecostal forms of governance can and do compete with state forms of governance. However, I would resist the idea that Pentecostalism “produces” this space. The space is the space of witchcraft, a space with antecedents that predate Pentecostalism’s several decades of activity in Africa and Melanesia. I would attribute Pentecostalism’s “success story” (Robbins 2004b: 171) to the way Pentecostalism re-invigorated and colonized the space of witchcraft, bringing into its fold indigenes who were desperate for a “deliverance” they had long sought.
Geschiere tells the story of how the Makas of southeastern Cameroon resented the fact that the colonial state protected rather than prosecuted witches, no doubt because its Western culture precluded a belief in witches. In the postcolonial period, however, the protections were no longer there, and, “as the state Africanized itself, the old link between power and the occult was restored” (1997: 15), witchcraft becoming once again rampant. Pentecostalism restores that link, propagating in tandem with its arch enemy witchcraft a zone of power that is at once old and new—“Pentecostal witchcraft,” as Newell has called it (2007: 461; see Rio, MacCarthy, and Blanes, this volume, p. 11).
To put the matter this way is to suggest that the success of Pentecostalism, whether in Melanesia or Africa, is best understood not in terms of Pentecostalism per se but in terms of the Pentecostal-witchcraft relationship, through which this zone of power is produced and in which it is lodged. Pentecostalism’s globalization is thus simultaneously its localization, to be understood through the interplay of indigenous and exogenous factors (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xiii-xiv; Eves 2000 7 ; see discussion in Robbins 2001). Such an approach typically accounts for differences. But the real mystery to me is why African and Melanesian witchcraft beliefs, non-Biblical in their provenience, are, even in the era of Pentecostal incursion, so similar to each other.
Notes
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1.
Marwick first published his views in 1964 in the essay “Witchcraft as a social strain-gauge.” Excerpts of this article were subsequently published in 1970 in the collection Witchcraft and Sorcery, which Marwick edited.
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2.
Marwick’s term is “Oceania,” but his examples come from Melanesia, a region within Oceania, one that contains Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, about which several contributors have written.
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3.
Bruce Knauft’s discussion of Gebusi (PNG) sorcery provides an example of the use of occult powers in affinal rather than consanguineal relations. As of his initial research in 1980–1982, the Gebusi achieved “balanced reciprocity” (Sahlins 1972) by exchanging women between groups, returning a woman for a woman instead of bridewealth for a woman, as in many other PNG societies. Gebusi “alliance” exchanges were not always balanced, however, and “[s]orcery accusations are especially likely between kin groups linked by a marriage that has not been reciprocated” (2016: 72), a claim Knauft initially made in his first book, Good Company and Violence (1985).
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4.
Geschiere has adopted Jean-François Bayart’s notion of a “politics of the belly” (1997:7)—an imaginaire that signifies the “dangerous force [of sorcellerie or witchcraft/sorcery] that is supposed to live in someone’s belly” (ibid.) and that is said to dominate African politics. Melanesian witchcraft discourses also deploy the trope of the politics of the belly by way, I suggest, of signifying the dark side of exchange.
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5.
As said, Asaro witches only attack kin.
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6.
In her study of witchcraft and Pentecostalism among the Ewe of Ghana, Birgit Meyer explains Ewe conversion from missionary derived to Pentecostal churches in these terms: the missionary-derived (specifically the Evangelical Presbyterian Church) “failed to deal with demons satisfactorily because its leaders would take neither the Holy Spirit nor the Devil and his demons seriously” (1999: xviii; see also ibid.: 195).
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7.
Eves’s target in “Sorcery’s the Curse” is the Comaroffs’ introduction to Modernity and Its Malcontents which he reads as seeing “local responses as the passive product of exogenous forces” (2000: 454) rather than emphasizing the “dynamic interplay between the local and the exogenous” (ibid.: 455). However, the Comaroffs clearly do emphasize the interplay between the local and the exogenous.
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Biersack, A. (2017). Afterword: From Witchcraft to the Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus. In: Rio, K., MacCarthy, M., Blanes, R. (eds) Pentecostalism and Witchcraft. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7_13
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