Sorcery and Warfare in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Tobias Schwoerer University of Lucerne, Switzerland / Australian National University

This is a Post-print version of the following article: Schwoerer, Tobias. 2017. Sorcery and Warfare in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Oceania 87(3):317-336. Which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ocea.5173/full

ABSTRACT

Sorcery and warfare are closely interrelated in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrast to other areas of the Highlands, sorcery in large parts of the Eastern Highlands is held to be an exclusively male domain, and violent retribution for deaths attributed to sorcery is primarily directed against other communities. Sorcery accusations thus have the tendency to escalate to large-scale inter-group warfare often causing additional casualties. Sorcery beliefs have undergone changes during the colonial and postcolonial era, with new forms of sorcery proliferating, and the zones of safety from sorcery shrinking due to demographic and economic changes. Sorcery accusations were triggers for the resumption of warfare during the late 1970s and 1980s, and they remain pertinent to outbreaks of hostilities today. In fact, the majority of armed conflicts between 1975 and 2006 among a sample of Fore, Auyana and Tairora communities in the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara districts of the Eastern Highlands Province are connected to sorcery beliefs and sorcery accusations. These sorcery accusations are the result of uneven economic development and failure to deliver basic social services. When violence is threatened, local leaders try to mediate the hostility, but the state seems unable to offer alternatives for the peaceful settlement of conflicts.

Keywords: Sorcery, Warfare, War, Conflict settlement, Fore, Auyana, Tairora, Eastern Highlands Province

INTRODUCTION

In large parts of the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, sorcery is held to be an exclusively male domain, and violent retribution for deaths attributed to sorcery is primarily directed against other communities, and not necessarily against specific individuals. Sorcery- related violence thus has the propensity to spiral out of control, escalating to large-scale inter- group warfare often causing further casualties. This state of affairs contrasts starkly with the recent international attention on witchcraft-related killings in Papua New Guinea (Aljazeera 2014; Chandler 2013), in which angry mobs single out usually defenceless (and often but not exclusively female) victims from within the community and torture them to death (Jorgensen 2014). In the flurry of recent publications on sorcery, witchcraft and violence in Papua New Guinea, there had been attempts to distinguish between different forms of beliefs in sorcery and 1

witchcraft, and it has been shown that a belief in sorcery or witchcraft does not automatically lead to violence (Forsyth and Eves 2015:9; Hermkens 2015; Oppermann 2016). What has so far been not adequately addressed, however, is that different forms of belief in sorcery and witchcraft can and do lead to different forms of violence.

In this article, I focus on the under-studied nexus between sorcery and inter-group armed conflict. While the interrelation between sorcery and warfare has long been demonstrated in accounts of precolonial Eastern Highlands society (Berndt 1962; Hayano 1973; Robbins 1982), relatively little is known about today’s situation. I first present an overview of precolonial sorcery beliefs and their connections with precolonial warfare in the Eastern Highlands based on the rich ethnographic literature on the topic, and then describe changes in these configurations throughout the colonial period and up to the postcolonial present. Based on ethno-historical fieldwork in four communities in the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara districts, I examine how sorcery and sorcery accusations are important triggers for the resurgence of contemporary warfare in the Eastern Highlands in the late 1970s until now, and indicate the underlying causes for these conflicts. Lastly, I elucidate the difficulties and challenges local leaders face in trying to mediate and mitigate such conflicts. My intention is to stress how absolutely crucial it is to understand the broader historical-cultural background behind any sorcery- or witchcraft-related violence and to be aware of regional and local differences in order to meet the challenge of responding to and preventing sorcery-related acts of violence.

SORCERY IN THE PRECOLONIAL SETTING

The Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea are characterized by an abundance of beliefs in different types of sorcery. These types of sorcery can be categorized according to the different techniques used to cause physical harm or death (see Table 1). A first category encompasses different forms of leavings sorcery, in which bodily substances (like semen, faeces, hair, fingernails or spittle), food scraps or other objects in close bodily contact with the target person are wrapped in bundles together with other sorcery substances. These bundles are then variously beaten, roasted over a fire or buried in mud. The well-known sorcery technique called Kuru among the Fore is such a case. A second category consists of forms of direct ‘poisoning’ through contact or ingestion, in which certain magical substances (which might not be poisonous in a scientific sense) are brought into contact with the skin of the victim, applied to arrows used in war, or mixed with water, food or tobacco. A third category consists of different forms of what I decided to call ‘projectile sorcery,’ in which sorcery utensils are aimed at a target person, and a harmful substance or object is magically shot into the body of the victim. This and the preceding technique can also take the form of ‘sorcery traps,’ in which a harmful object or substance is hidden on a footpath or in a house, releasing its harmful contents when a person approaches it. A fourth category includes different kinds of soul assassination, in which the soul of the victim is typically ensnared or trapped in small animals like rats or lizards, which are then killed. And lastly there is the category of assault sorcery, in which sorcerers physically attack a person and knock the victim unconscious. The sorcerers then insert needles into various parts of the body, or cut open the belly and remove internal organs before closing it up again, and send the victim home to die within a specified timeframe determined by the sorcerers. All cultures in the Eastern Highlands know several or all of these different categories, and the

distinctively named types of sorcery could number as high as sixteen among the Fore (Lindenbaum 1979:60-64) or twenty among the Kamano (Levine 1977:196). Ethnic Leavings Poisoning Projectile Sorcery Traps Soul Assault Group Sorcery Sorcery Assassination Sorcery Agarabi Imusa Yana Afa (Westermark (Westermark (Westermark 1981:92) 1981:92) 1981:93) Auyana Taeta (Robbins Uwa’a Sa’a, Tira’a (own 1982:28-29, (Robbins introduced fieldwork) name from own 1982:28-29) from Tairora fieldwork) (own fieldwork) Awa Mu’tah, Ka’pori, Ka’pori No name Tirah (Boyd Tu’keshah, Ahwonah (Newman recorded 1996:46; Nau’pwe, (Boyd 1996:46; 1972:292) (Hayano Newman Agogwe’e Hayano 1973:184- 1972:292) (Boyd 1996:46; 1973:184; 185) Hayano Newman 1973:184; 1972:291-292) Newman 1972:292) Benabena Imusa (Johannes Lipi’na, Nami, Nalisa, Keyakapo Gu’nakafe’i 1976:127-128) Giyo’na, Gupa’nalisa, (Johannes (Johannes Mayayanakofa’i, Kleotahi, 1976:133- 1976:132- Mula’mula Yahafeya, 134) 133) (Johannes Uwatagohi, 1976:124-126, Logo’nalisa, 135-137) Lakegusa’i, Yasasalihi, Nakofa’i (Johannes 1976:138-145) Dano No name Nasu’imbiribe, No name Gini’mutu recorded Rangusunu recorded Hibe (Newman (Newman (Newman (Newman 1962:92-99) 1962:91-92, 1962:100) 1962:91) 99-100) Fore Imusa, Kuru, Karaina (Bamler Nankiri Tokabu (North) Tugezajana, 1963:142-143) (Bamler (Berndt Kukubari 1963:145) 1962:223- (Berndt 228; Bamler 1962:214-223; 1963:131- Bamler 132) 1963:127-128) Fore Imusa, Kuru, Karena, Yanda, Kai, Kesena, Tokabu (South) Ambelaga Kio, Yentagio, Nankili, Agai’inkina, (Lindenbaum Kio’ena Aiya’kio, Kanine Aiya’kio Agai-ikio 1979:60) (Lindenbaum (Lindenbaum (Lindenbaum (Lindenbaum 1979:60-63) 1979:61-64) 1979:60-64) 1979:62-63) Tauwa (Lindenbaum 2013:191) Gadsup Yandabitini, Koi’edan, Uwa Wandim Oyi (Du (Du Toit 1975:139-140)

Toit 1975:138, 141) Gahuku- No name Gama recorded (Read (Alekano) 1954:27, 1986:206) Gimi Rubesekena Anarisa (Glick No name No name Rubakina (Gillison 1963:115) recorded (Glick recorded (Gillison 1993:312-314; 1963:115-116) (Glick 1993:305- Glick 1963:115) 1963:116) 306; Glick 1963:118- 120) Kamano Imusa Karana, Amako Kerifa Afa & Kafe (Zuckerman Muramura (Zuckerman (Zuckerman 1984:181; (modern form of 1984:182), 1984:182- Levine sorcery) Abo’taga, Ufa, 183; Levine 1977:195) (Zuckerman Iyana (Levine 1977:195) 1984:181-182; 1977:194) Levine 1977:196) Keyagana Nami (Bamler Narisa, Sipika, No name Tunakafe & Kanite 1963:142-143) Tuki, Yofeseku recorded (Bamler (Bamler (Bamler 1963:131- 1963:145-147) 1963:138) 132) Siane Kimfi Hiyaiye (Salisbury 1965:58) Tairora Irama (Johnson Tuhi (Johnson Tuhi (Johnson Sa’a (own Tukab, 1980:27-28; 1980:27-28; 1980:28; fieldwork) introduced Mayer 1987:83- Mayer 1987:84), Mayer from the Fore 84; Watson Kyavundarura 1987:84) and Auyana 1983:317-320) (Johnson (Johnson 1980:28), Ha’a 1980:27; (own fieldwork) Watson 1983:195; own fieldwork) Yagaria No name Kembige (Meigs recorded (Smith 1976:396; Smith 1981:58) 1981:58) Yate Naglisa Tunakafe (Berndt (Bamler 1962:216-217) 1963:131- 132)

Table 1: Sorcery techniques and their local names in the Eastern Highlands

Madang Province Dano

Gahuku- Simbu Morobe Siane Gama Province Province Goroka Benabena

Kamano & Agarabi Kafe Kainantu Yagaria Yate Gadsup

Keyagana & Kanite Tairora Gimi Auyana

Fore

Awa

10km

Figure 1: Ethnic Groups of the Eastern Highlands Province

What is common to all these different types of sorcery is that throughout most parts of the Eastern Highlands they are all performed exclusively by men. Accounts from the Gadsup (Leininger 1966:145), the Tairora (Johnson 1980:26; Mayer 1987:100; Watson 1983:319), the Auyana (Robbins 1982:28), the Kamano (Levine 1977:50), the Gimi (Bragginton 1975:210; Gillison 1993:297; Glick 1963:118), and the Benabena (Johannes 1976:128, 148; Langness 1967:166) all explicitly state that sorcerers are exclusively adult males, and that women are incapable of sorcery. Other reports on sorcery do not specifically mention that women are incapable or ignorant of sorcery, but describe sorcerers always as men, as among the Agarabi (Westermark 1981), the Keyagana, Kanite and Yate (Bamler 1963), the Gahuku-Gama (Read 1954:27-28) and the Siane (Salisbury 1965:58).

Berndt (1962:219-222) and Lindenbaum (1979:59) for the Fore, Meigs (1978:306) for the Yagaria, and Hayano (1972:58, 1973:190) for the Awa report female sorcerers, but their techniques are limited to the use of menstrual blood (or their own fingernails in the case of the

Yagaria) to harm men, typically their husbands, or unmarried men who steal food from their gardens. Menstrual blood in these cases is either mixed with food, or women collect bodily leavings or food scraps and bring them into contact with menstrual blood. As menstrual blood is a substance deemed polluting all over the Highlands, these acts show that there is a blurry line between the categories of sorcery and pollution.1 Among the Tairora and Auyana, where women also have the ability to render their husbands sick through getting them or their food scraps into contact with menstrual blood, people apparently do not classify this as an act of sorcery (Mayer 1987:100; Robbins 1982:28). Among the Fore at least, this type of female sorcery seems to be rather marginal, and women could be moved by pity to reverse the damage they inflicted. Among the South Fore, Lindenbaum records not a single death blamed on female sorcerers (Lindenbaum 1979:121). Only among the Awa are female sorcerers a recognizable if minor threat. Of the 15 deaths that were blamed on sorcerers residing within the same community (which accounts for 20% of all deaths due to sorcery over a 50-year period), three were blamed on women (Hayano 1972:59-60). It is interesting to note that no individual was physically attacked or banned from the community in these cases, but that the preferred method to deal with these individuals was the use of counter-sorcery (Hayano 1972:61).

It is only in the north-western corner of the Eastern Highlands Province, among the Dano- speaking Gururumba in the Asaro valley (Newman 1962:100-111, 1965: 86-87), where women are seen as seriously involved in mystical violence. While sorcery, categorized as a technique that had to be learnt and applied purposefully, is still deemed to be exclusively performed by males, women here are often accused of witchcraft, in the sense of possessing an innate anti- social quality or substance nourished or activated by greed and envy that leads them to perform certain acts of mystical violence against co-residents. This distinction between sorcery and witchcraft, first established by Evans-Pritchard (1937) in his study on the Azande, thus fits the situation in the Eastern Highlands Province quite neatly (see also Glick 1973). This belief in witchcraft among the Gururumba is closely connected to the Kumo/Kum-belief system found further west, in Simbu province (Gibbs 2012; Zocca 2009) and the Wahgi valley in the Western Highlands (Reay 1987).

Traditional sorcery beliefs in large parts of the Eastern Highlands thus do not feature female sorcerers.2 The only mystical power women have access to is in the realms of love magic or garden magic (Gillison 1993:155-159; Newman 1962:102-103; West 2013). Women in some ethnic groups in the Eastern Highlands could on occasion be accused of providing male sorcerers from their natal clans with substances used in sorcery, especially semen taken from their husband through intercourse (Berndt 1962:211, 214; Glick 1963:137; Leininger 1966:145; Newman 1962:96; Robbins 1982:28; Smith 1981:58; Zuckerman 1984:38, 57). At least for the Gahuku-Gama around Goroka, this kind of betrayal by women is seen as the principal way for sorcerers to access substances needed for leavings sorcery (Read 1954:27-28). Johannes (1976:127) for the Benabena and Du Toit (1975:57) for the Gadsup on the other hand explicitly state that men are not afraid of women stealing their semen or other bodily fluids for nefarious purposes. Among the Gimi in the Beha valley, some men suspect that women sometimes hire sorcerers to act against their own husbands, while other men categorically deny that women would do such a thing, stating that women are only concerned with their gardens and pigs (Bragginton 1975:209-210). This characterisation and stereotyping of women as ignorant,

irresponsible and erratic (Glick 1963:118) corresponds with the assertion that women are incapable of conducting sorcery. In addition, illness and death caused by sorcery is considered the product of inter-community antagonisms, and females just do not play an important enough role in these relations (Glick 1963:163-164).

In fact, in most Eastern Highlands societies, serious illness and death is usually blamed on the workings of sorcerers from other local groups.3 Sorcery and sorcery accusations are therefore an issue of inter-group relations. Sorcery is often described by anthropologists as one of the main criteria by which important political groups can be delineated and distinguished, and in the case of Eastern Highlanders this is certainly the case. Lindenbaum (1972:241-242, 1979:42) shows how sorcery among the Fore serves to define the boundaries of local groups and guarantees internal cohesion among these groups against outside enemies. When sorcery accusations are at times directed against sections of the same local group, this signalled tension in the political group, which in most cases leads to conflict and physical separation. Armed conflicts triggered by such sorcery accusations within local groups are particularly vicious and deadly (Gillison 1993:302; Schwoerer 2016:142-144), an indication of the moral outrage ensuing from such an extraordinary and evil attack on fellow co-residents.

That sorcery is thus normally conceptualized as an inter-group affair and not an individual act is also shown by the various divination methods. These are primarily concerned with establishing the location of the perpetrator, and only secondarily with his identity. A common divination technique is to cook several rats or possums or sweet potatoes in a bamboo tube with each item representing a specific suspected village. When the cooked tube is opened, an item that is still uncooked is considered proof that the sorcerer is from that particular village. After establishing the village, then the procedure may be repeated to find out which of the particular sub-groups of the village is responsible for sorcery, and only in another repetition will the suspected individuals within this sub-group be identified. As outcomes of each of these rituals are often ambiguous and have to be repeated several times before a general consensus emerges, it is not always carried beyond establishing the responsible village (Gillison 1993:123-127; Hayano 1973:185-187; Lindenbaum 1972:244, 1979:69-71, 124-125; Mayer 1987:82; Watson 1983:316). As revenge will usually be directed at the whole village and not only the suspected (male) sorcerer, establishing his identity is of lesser importance. Retaliation for deaths by sorcery most commonly take the form of early morning raids against the suspected village or hamlet. If the identity of the actual sorcerer is thought to be known, a war party consisting of the closest relatives of the sorcery victim might sneak close to the enemy sorcerer’s gardens in an attempt to kill him. However, if they should fail to encounter him, any other member of his local group is considered jointly culpable and could be legitimately targeted.

PRECOLONIAL WARFARE

In light of the foregoing, it is not surprising that many anthropologists studying precolonial warfare stress the connection between sorcery and the eruption of intergroup warfare. Reo Fortune (1947:4), in one of the earliest anthropological accounts of warfare in the Eastern Highlands, reports for the Kamano that warfare ‘normally broke out, in each case observed, a few days after the natural death of an adult male in a village,’ which in the view of the Kamano

was due to ‘evil magic or soul-stealing.’ Berndt (1962:233) defines warfare among the Fore, Usurufa, Kamano and Yate as ‘justified coercive action on the part of one unit to exact compensation or revenge from another for a real or imagined injury,’ and points out that sorcery is often diagnosed as the cause of such an injury. At the same time, sorcery is based on inter- group distrust and is always seen as a retaliative action, which means that Berndt considers warfare and sorcery as two different options for dealing with the same situation (Berndt 1962:208-268, 1971:392-395). Among the neighbouring Auyana, Robbins (1982:214-215) offers concrete data showing the links between sorcery and precolonial warfare. He collated information on a sequence of wars over a 25-year period before pacification and ascertained the causes for these fights. It is unclear how he exactly established causation, but looking at the examples and answers given, it is most likely that he asked about the incidents that immediately triggered the fighting and did not try to establish underlying causes for conflict, enmity and warfare. His numbers for all types of armed violence, ranging from minor skirmishes to major wars involving allies, show an equal distribution of the three triggering categories: retaliation for sorcery or homicide, arguments over women, and arguments over pigs. Each category is responsible for about a third of all fights (see Table 2 below). Retaliation for sorcery alone, however, is the dominant trigger for the more serious conflicts, where other communities were involved as allies, making up eight of 17 cases.

Table 2: Triggers for fights among the Auyana, 1925-1949 (Robbins 1982:215) Triggers Major Wars Minor Wars Skirmishes Categories Sorcery 8 Revenge: Homicide 5 13 Adultery / Rape 3 2 Women: Bride Price 2 12 Runaway Wife 2 3 Pig Theft 1 5 7 Pigs: 13 Other 1 3 Other: 4 Total: 17 10 15 42

This does not mean, however, that all cases of suspected sorcery do indeed lead to warfare. Sorcery might just be countered by sorcery alone. In my reconstruction of the history of precolonial warfare through oral history interviews among the Fore in Purosa, I collected the story of a case in which two local groups were engaged in just such a cycle of sorcery and counter-sorcery, without it leading to an escalation into warfare (Schwoerer 2016). It is clear then, that there are always political deliberations on how and when to respond to sorcery. Who to blame for deaths is likewise not random, as Hayano (1973) demonstrates for the Awa, as the likelihood of accusations generally decreases with distance, and can be influenced by negative stereotypes about other groups. These stereotypes seem to follow the pattern outlined by Lindenbaum (1979:137-143), who shows that there exists a ‘geography of fear’ in the Highlands of New Guinea in general, in that more densely settled regions in the centre generally fear the more sparsely settled regions at the periphery to be sources of sorcery. And what is true for regions as a whole also applies to individual groups. Data on precolonial warfare collected during my fieldwork (Schwoerer 2016) show that it is generally the powerful groups – powerful in terms of numbers, military strength, internal cohesion and economic success – who fear sorcery of the less powerful with whom they maintain close social relations. Sorcery suspicions 8

are therefore full of strategic considerations: the main suspects are usually those other groups with which the relationship was already strained, and from among these groups, suspicion is mainly directed against groups who are deemed weaker and might thus resort to sorcery as their only chance to gain power or redress an injustice.

CHANGES IN SORCERY BELIEFS

From colonial times until today, there have been important changes and developments in the domain of sorcery. With colonial pacification and the ending of open warfare, most ethnic groups in the Eastern Highlands experienced an intensification of sorcery (Johannes 1976:149; Levine 1977:49; Mayer 1987:44; Watson 1983:295; Zuckerman 1984:106, 181). Sorcery attacks were now considered to be the only feasible avenue for intergroup hostility and retaliation. There are, however, regional and local differences in the trajectory of the increase in sorcery and sorcery accusations. In the case of the Awa, Hayano (1973:187) reports that deaths from sorcery did not increase after pacification in the village of Tauna, but Boyd (1996:47) notes, a few years later, that in the neighbouring village of Irakia, sorcery attacks had greatly increased. Among the Agarabi and Northern Tairora, sorcery cases at first even decreased after pacification, before sharply increasing again in the 1960s and quickly surpassing precolonial levels, coinciding with increasing conflicts about land (Westermark 1981:93-95).

With pacification also came a relative freedom of travel on government roads, which apparently did not escape the attention of sorcerers. Sorcerers were now rumoured to travel long distances and offer their services to anybody with a grudge (Gillison 1993:30; Lindenbaum 1981:120; Zuckerman 1984:183-184). The increased inter-ethnic contact also contributed to a diffusion and proliferation of sorcery techniques. There were soon new forms of sorcery rumoured to be spreading throughout the Eastern Highlands, new forms that were much more powerful than the old types, and for which there were no known countermeasures. The Fore people expanded their knowledge about different types of sorcery from six to sixteen within a decade after pacification (Lindenbaum 1979:74). Some newer types of sorcery no longer need any sorcery implements, for they work through the utterance of spells, like Sa’a sorcery among the Auyana, which had been introduced from the Tairora area. Other forms of sorcery that were already known were modified using modern objects or substances. One of the most dreaded forms of attack sorcery, called Tokabu, spread from the Fore and Auyana to the neighbouring groups of the Kamano, Agarabi and Tairora (Lindenbaum 1981; Watson 1983:295-298; Westermark 1981:94). Tokabu sorcerers would make themselves invisible by using magical leaves, knock a victim unconscious, and then slip little slivers of bamboo or wood into the intestines, the joints, or the heart. Then they wake the victim up, who would stumble home disoriented and die several days later (Bamler 1963:131-132; Lindenbaum 1981:120-121). Nowadays, the Tokabu sorcerers are held to no longer use wooden but iron needles or bicycle spokes that they first dip in battery acid or pesticides before inserting them into the body of the victim (Lindenbaum 2002:S67; Westermark 1981:94; also see Johnson 1980:28 for the substitution of traditional materials in direct poisoning with battery acid and DDT). The influx of new forms of sorcery continues to this day. Lindenbaum (2013:191) for example reports of a new form of sorcery transmitted by handshake called Tauwa, which had arrived by 2007 in the Fore region from the neighbouring Gimi.

The belief in female witchcraft (called ‘sanguma’ in these parts of the Highlands) had also spread down the Goroka valley, as there have been reports of women blamed and killed for witchcraft among the Siane (Silas 1993) and around the city of Goroka (Eves and Kelly- Hanku 2014; OHCHR 2010:6-7). While some migrants from other areas of the Eastern Highlands settling in Goroka have been implicated in these killings, accusations of witchcraft have been contained to the wider Goroka valley, including Unggai-Bena and some parts of Lufa District, and have not yet reached groups in the eastern and southern parts of the Eastern Highlands Province. During my fieldwork in 2006 among the Auyana, Tairora and Fore of the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara Districts, I never heard people refer to female sorcerers or witches. People are aware that women do get blamed for witchcraft and sorcery elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, and they are, to a degree, suspicious towards inmarried women, particularly from Simbu province and the coastal areas, but they were adamant that their own women could not possibly conduct sorcery. Similarly, among the Gimi, it is only in-married women from Simbu and Gulf province, who are accused of sorcery (West 2013). While the latest report I received from the North Fore indicate that people are suspicious about ‘sanguma’ by in-married Simbu women, no deaths have yet been blamed on it.

Not only the number of sorcery cases and sorcery techniques increased in the Eastern Highlands, but also the direction that sorcery was deemed to emanate from. Traditionally, it was clear that enemy local groups were responsible for inexplicable deaths. Sorcery within a hamlet, within a local group (village) or even between traditional alliances was either a rare occasion or completely unheard of. But as observed by Westermark (1981, 1984) in the 1970s among the Agarabi, this rule no longer held, and people started suspecting co-villagers thought to be jealous and attacking them through the means of sorcery. Westermark demonstrates that this was due to increasing competition inside regional and local groups brought about by socio- economic changes, and the involvement of groups in coffee and cattle projects needing large tracts of land. Boyd (1996) shows for the Awa in the village of Irakia how this suspicion of sorcery from within completely undermined the stability and vitality of the village, as the raising death toll contributed to an exodus of people to other communities or coastal employment.

As Lindenbaum (1981:119-120) similarly points out, the ‘zones of safety’ thus contracted over time, with sorcery now originating from within social groups that were formerly deemed safe, and there is a palpable change from exo- to endo-sorcery. Lindenbaum likewise explains this increase of sorcery within communities by the incompatibilities in values that arise when kin-based communities increasingly interact with larger spheres of trade and wage labour. I have observed similar developments among the Auyana and Fore, but would like to point out that this shift is also due in part to the rapid growth of local groups. A lot of larger local groups are no longer the face-to-face communities that they once were two or three decades ago, and for almost all practical purposes ceased functioning as coherent local groups. They are to some extent still integrated through a system of local level government, which has not evolved in synch with the population growth, but this political administration is finding it increasingly difficult to overcome differences and conflicts between segments of these large local groups. The Auyana local group of Amaira is a case in point: while Amaira in 1953 consisted of 245 inhabitants living in two fortified hamlets situated on adjoining spurs (Burge 1953), by the year

2000 its population had tripled to 745 people (National Statistical Office 2002:41), living in four clearly separated settlement clusters, each consisting of several hamlets. It is not surprising then that sorcery accusations were rife between the two most distant settlement clusters during the time of my fieldwork, and erupted into armed conflict at the end of 2006 after an unexplained death was blamed on sorcery.

RESURGENCE OF WARFARE

Westermark (1984:122) sees the shift from exo- to endo-sorcery as the main reason why warfare among the Agarabi in the Eastern Highlands, where he conducted fieldwork in the late 1970s, was rather limited in contrast to groups in the Western Highlands. Accordingly, constant suspicion between local groups had undermined the traditional support network between allies that was necessary for warfare. Without reliable allies, the escalation of conflicts into warfare would have been too risky, too much fraught with uncertainties. Zuckerman (1984:184), who at the same time did fieldwork among the Kamano, holds an even more functionalist view on sorcery by stating that the continuation of sorcery even prevented the resurgence of tribal warfare, as it provided an outlet for inter-group hostility.

Westermark's and Zuckerman's explanations, however, that see in sorcery a limiting factor for the resurgence of warfare, do not apply in other areas, because at the same time that they were conducting fieldwork among the Agarabi and Kamano in the North and West of Kainantu, groups of the Tairora in the far South of Kainantu were already facing each other on the battlefield, carrying wooden war shields, and firing hardwood-tipped arrows at each other just as their grandparents did. And all this occurred not in spite of sorcery, but precisely because of the triggering element of sorcery. Just after 1975 and independence, Bibeori villagers responded with weapons to the accusation that one of their men had tried to kill a Kobara man by means of sorcery. The fighting only lasted one day, before the local administration representative informed the police, who rounded up all adult males of Bibeori they could apprehend and jailed them for a week. In 1978, a public dispute between the villages of Dosara and Numbaira over a schoolboy who died of suspected sorcery also escalated to warfare, with their respective allies joining in. The fighting went on for about four weeks, until a large contingent of riot police arrived in the area. They were unsuccessful in apprehending anybody, but broke into houses, and remained in the area for a few days, thus dousing the spirit of all parties to the conflict, as people had to spend several days camping out in the forest. The first war in the Auyana village of Amaira after more than thirty years of peace occurred a few years later in 1982 because one Amaira man living in the neighbouring village of Avia was severely beaten up by his co-villagers, who suspected him of conducting sorcery against them. The nature of his injuries, especially the broken Adam’s apple, led the Amaira people to believe that the Avia were the real sorcerers. Breaking the Adam’s apple is standard repertoire of Tokabu sorcerers, to mute the victim so that he can’t call for help, before they knock him unconscious and insert slivers of bamboo into his joints. This war between Amaira and Avia went on unchecked for more than a year. Police in this case were either unable or unwilling to intervene, due to the number of other fights going on at the same time and deteriorating road conditions. Both sides received ample support from allies, and the fighting led to at least eight confirmed

deaths, before it could be stopped by mediation from important men and politicians of the surrounding villages.

As these and other cases in my sample show, sorcery suspicions and sorcery accusations have directly contributed to the resurgence of warfare in these parts of the Eastern Highlands. The Amaira – Avia conflict also shows that what started as a sorcery accusation within a village could quickly escalate to an inter-group war, as kin supported a man accused of being a sorcerer. It is also clear that state institutions found it more and more difficult to decisively intervene in instances of contemporary warfare. That sorcery accusations triggered the outbreak of inter- group warfare, instead of limiting it as postulated by Westermark, can be attributed to several overlapping factors. The shift from exo- to endo-sorcery observed among the Agarabi in the 1970s is a much later occurrence in areas south of Kainantu, or has not occurred at all. As Mayer (1987:83) reports for the Obura area in 1975, no such shift has taken place, and the people of Sonura still believed that a sorcerer would meet the same fate as his victim if he attempted to use sorcery within the village. During my own fieldwork 30 years later, it was still the case that there were no sorcery accusations within a village. Mayer (1987:83) states that inter-group tensions were still held in check by the need to show a united military front against neighbouring villages, and reports that deep suspicions prevented her from visiting neighbouring groups. It must be kept in mind that the Southern Tairora were only nominally pacified in the early to mid-1960s and that even afterwards, there had often been altercations and brawls between local groups over sorcery accusations. Thus, there had never been a period of relative peace, in which the constant guard against enemies was relaxed, and in which intra-group ties and intra-group solidarity became less important. The Auyana and Fore on the other hand were already pacified in the early 1950s and had a period of relative peace spanning a whole generation. The few cases of intra-village sorcery accusations that led to warfare in my sample come from these areas.

In addition, warfare in the more mountainous southern parts of the Eastern Highlands was already in precolonial time less dependent on allies than in the northern wide valleys and rolling hills where Westermark did fieldwork. Robbins in his study on Amaira precolonial warfare points out that only 17 out of 42 cases of armed altercations involved other groups as allies (Robbins 1982:215, see table 1). That sorcery might have damaged relations between allies was thus less significant. Most cases of warfare from the sample I collected further show that relations between allies were less strained than what Westermark observed among the Agarabi. Sorcery accusations were usually directed at precolonial enemies, not allies. The traditional alliances still held and were called upon in most of the fights of the 1970s and 1980s.

Lastly, the rapid population growth led to the situation wherein one single village can now mobilize just as many men as a whole alliance of villages in precolonial times. Whereas local groups consisted of 180 to 240 inhabitants on average in the early 1960s, sharing a range from 41 to 525 inhabitants (Glasse and Lindenbaum 1971:362; Pataki-Schweizer 1980), the census of 2000 for the census wards or units that are based on local groups shows populations doubled or tripled on average, with only a few local groups below 500 inhabitants (National Statistical Office 2002). It becomes clear that with the growth of local groups, armed conflicts are increasingly fought on a lower structural level. Conflicts no longer take place between

alliances of several villages, but between single villages and even between settlement clusters within villages. In the Ivaki area of the South Fore, where several villages were traditionally allied with each other, the first instance of warfare in 1988, attributed to sorcery, pitted the whole area against another alliance of Gimi villages on the other side of the mountain range. Ten years later, a conflict over sorcery broke out between Atori and Andupindi, two villages inside the Ivaki area. And just another two years later, a conflict again over sorcery broke out between two hamlets of another village, Kari, splitting the village in half. Similar developments were also observed among the Auyana, but not yet among the Southern Tairora. In all of these cases, sorcery increasingly undercuts relations between traditional allies or even between members of the same local group, pitting structurally smaller but numerically still quite large groups against each other.

CONTINUITIES IN WARFARE AND SORCERY

Sorcery and sorcery accusations are in fact the most dominant triggers for the outbreak of inter- group armed violence in many part of the Eastern Highlands Province. I select the word ‘trigger’ here on purpose, because wars do not start out of the blue, and thus cannot be said to be ‘caused’ by sorcery alone. In all cases where wars erupt, a long history of tensions and animosities between local groups has finally made it impossible to pursue a route of peaceful conflict settlement through an appeal to the various judicial forums that exist in the context of legal pluralism. During my fieldwork between late 2005 and early 2007 in four different villages of the Tairora, Auyana and Fore language groups in the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara Districts of the Eastern Highlands Province, I collected 37 cases of armed conflicts that occurred between 1975 and 2006, ranging from one-day confrontations to wars lasting several years, and from armed altercations with only bows and arrows to those involving homemade or factory-made guns.4 Of these 37 cases, 22 (or 59%) were triggered by events connected with sorcery and sorcery accusations (see table 3).

Table 3: Triggers for warfare among the Auyana, Tairora & Fore, 1975-2006 Triggers Cases Percentage Casualties Sorcery 22 59% 60 Homicide 3 8% 17 Land 3 8% 6 Crime 3 8% 3 Others 6 16% 13 Total 37 100% 99

The accounts for these 22 cases are remarkably uniform: one side points to the death of a co-villager that could be clearly attributed to sorcery emanating from another village as the trigger that led them to take up arms, while the other side invariably points out that they were attacked because of vicious and baseless lies that the other side spread about them being sorcerers. A few conflicts were started by the side that had been accused, and in these cases, they cite the constant accusations of the other party as the trigger that led to fighting. Some conflicts could be settled quickly before any serious casualties resulted, others led to devastating wars, with a maximum of 24 casualties in one war alone. It was difficult to establish exact casualty rates for each of these conflicts, as numbers could vary from source to source, but a 13

conservative estimate puts the total death toll from all 37 conflicts at around 100 people, men, women and children, of whom 60 died in the 22 wars triggered by sorcery.

Interestingly enough, there is no significant increase in the absolute number of armed conflicts over time, nor in the conflicts triggered by sorcery (see table 4). I collected 10 cases from the first decade from 1975-1985, of which 7 (70%) were related to sorcery, 15 cases from the decade 1985-1995, of which 8 (53%) were triggered by sorcery, and 12 cases from the recent decade from 1995-2006, of which 7 (58%) were associated with sorcery. There is, however, a clear trend in terms of severity. Casualties are highest in the second decade from 1985-1995, where some of the bloodiest wars were fought, coinciding with the introduction of homemade shotguns and factory-made firearms, which replaced bows and arrows in most conflicts from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. This temporal pattern might not be representative for other areas of the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara Districts, because I only selected villages as field sites where warfare was not currently underway. This potential bias against ongoing conflicts is alleviated to some extent by the inclusion of more recent cases that I encountered while trekking between villages. And at least in one case, violence erupted less than a year after I left the field, and I was able to speak with witnesses to this conflict.

Table 4: Conflicts per decade among the Auyana, Tairora & Fore Decade Total Conflicts Sorcery-Related Conflicts Percentage Casualties 1975-1985 10 7 70% 27 1985-1995 15 8 53% 58 1995-2006 12 7 58% 14

In other parts of the Eastern Highlands, similar or even more drastic numbers have been reported. A study of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR 2010:4)5 documents that in the Kainantu district, seven of the 11 reported instances of ‘tribal fighting’ between 2005 and 2007 were related to sorcery (64%), while in Henganofi district to the West for the same period, 25 out of 31 cases were triggered by sorcery (81%). In Unggai-Bena district further west, all seven cases of warfare reported for the period between 2002 and 2006 were connected to sorcery.6

My study shows, that sorcery as a triggering factor is evident and relevant to the explanation of the resurgence of contemporary inter-village and inter-clan warfare just before and around the national independence of Papua New Guinea in 1975, after most Highland communities had enjoyed a brief period of peace during the colonial era. Most studies on this resurgence of warfare focused on the Western Highlands and Enga provinces, where it occurred earlier and was more prevalent. Explanations have thus initially considered causes relevant to those regions, namely increasing competition over land resulting from population increase and the expansion of cash cropping, and the decreasing reputation and efficiency of state institutions charged with delineating land boundaries and settling land conflicts (Gordon and Meggitt 1985; Meggitt 1977). Other researchers have subsequently analysed additional factors as causing or contributing to the spread of inter-group violence in the Highlands, ranging from the enlargement of the traditional political sphere and the cleavages generated by electoral politics (Rumsey 1999; Strathern 1992), to the decrease of inter-group marriages that formerly

constituted avenues for conflict settlement (Podolefsky 1984), from the introduction of firearms and the shift in war leadership to the young men that operate these weapons (Strathern 1992; Wiessner 2010), to the widespread consumption of alcohol (Dembach and Marshall 2001), and lately the availability of mobile phones, which make coordinated attacks much easier (Macdonald and Kirami 2017).

It is interesting to note that sorcery as a triggering factor to contemporary warfare is largely absent in all these accounts. This can be partly explained by the fact that even precolonial warfare was rarely connected to sorcery among many people, for example the Huli (Glasse 1968) and the Wola (Sillitoe 1979) of the Southern Highlands, and the Enga of Enga Province (Meggitt 1977; Wiessner and Tumu 1998). In these areas, sorcery beliefs either did not exist precolonially or were of lesser significance in explaining illness and death. Nonetheless, Reay (1987) notes the importance of sorcery in warfare among the Kuma in the Wahgi Valley, and Vicedom (1943:147) calls sorcery – or poisoning – one of the main reasons for warfare among the Hagen tribes.

UNDERLYING CAUSES

Sorcery has remained a preoccupation with many communities in the Eastern Highlands during both colonial and precolonial time and has once more triggered the outbreak of renewed violence from the middle of the 1970s onward. Focusing on some of the underlying and structural reasons for the outbreak of violence in the Eastern Highlands, we can discern some of the same processes mentioned above that hold for the Western and Southern Highlands. As already mentioned before, the effectiveness of police forces in curbing violence has decreased significantly over time. While police forces did respond to most of the conflicts in the 1970s and early 1980s, conflicts in the 1990s were no longer attended to or stopped by the police.

Regarding economic strain as a contribution to conflict, there also had been an increase in coffee planting to the extent that land suitable for coffee had become scarce in certain areas. The war between the Auyana communities Avia and Amaira over sorcery in 1982 was preceded by a long history of disputes over garden and coffee land situated between the two villages, and five years after this first war, a violent dispute between two families from Avia and Amaira over garden land erupted into a second war. In addition, uneven economic development and provision of infrastructure (roads, schools, aid posts) between villages were cited by informants to be the main reason for sorcery, as they blamed envious sorcerers of more remote and economically disadvantaged villages to be behind unexplainable deaths. The ‘geography of fear’ identified by Lindenbaum (1979:137-143) is thus still in place, and simultaneously becomes more complex, as it nowadays translates to remote villages being held hostage by the threat of violence from communities situated along the (often only) road they have to take to reach the nearest town.

DEALING WITH SORCERY

The last few years are not the only time that sorcery accusations and sorcery fears have become rampant. Already in the early 1980s there was a concern among social anthropologists that

beliefs in sorcery have increased dramatically (Lindenbaum 1981:119). At the same time, local communities have developed many ways of dealing with this perceived increase in sorcery. That sorcery was considered a huge problem already in colonial times is demonstrated among the Auyana by the actions of the first ward councillor of Amaira, the first elected representative of the Local Government Council system that was introduced in 1967 (Foran 1967). He was a respected man from Amaira village and he started a sorcery eradication campaign, exhorting suspected sorcerers to give up their nefarious acts, and confiscating and burning sorcery implements. Similar sorcery eradication campaigns also took place five years earlier in the Fore area, where people under the impression of staggering deaths from Kuru held large public gatherings to discuss sorcery, enforce confessions and have everybody swear to abstain from sorcery in the future (Lindenbaum 1979:100-108). Burning of sorcery implements was also sometimes undertaken by missionaries and evangelists, for example in the late 1960s in Obura, as well as by one government official in the Fore area in 1954 (Macarthur 1954). These, at best, had only temporary effects, and sorcery accusations quickly resurfaced once the eradication campaigns petered out. In Amaira, for example, when the next elected ward councillor was a man from the village of Avia, the people in Amaira reasoned that the Avia sorcerers were emboldened to continue their practice through this political victory of one of their own.

During my fieldwork among the Auyana and Southern Tairora, the elected Local Level Government (LLG) ward councillors and the village leaders were still the only officials that attempted to deal with sorcery. The Auyana and Southern Tairora areas did not yet have village courts in 2006, and thus no official local-level judicial system that could possibly deal with sorcery. Although the extent to which village courts deal with sorcery seems to vary across PNG (Westermark 1981; Zuckerman 1984:383-388), village leaders hoped the provincial administration would set up such courts in their areas in the future. Based on people’s accounts, the local district police did not visit remote villages where I did fieldwork to deal with sorcery or sorcery-related violence. The local district police station was located in Aiyura, near Kainantu, a day’s walk away, and the police were content to control the road in and out of the area, dealing with issues brought to them, and only rarely ventured far away from their post to intervene in conflicts or settle disputes.

This left the task of keeping law and order in the hands of the elected LLG ward councillors, the local village komitis7 and the village leaders (Schwoerer in press). During fieldwork and in interviews, I observed that councillors at times struggled with this task, and that they eschewed litigating in sorcery cases in their unofficial village courts, but that they could also be quite adept at mediating in sorcery disputes and finding a compromise. Officially, councillors are supposed to send major disputes, such as sorcery accusations, to the district headquarters in Aiyura, where an official mediation group consisting of policemen, village court magistrates from the Northern Tairora area and officials from the District Court attempts to mediate the dispute, before it is tried in the District Court. I did hear of cases that were successfully settled this way through compensation, but often both parties to the conflict are prohibited by the bad or non-existing road infrastructure, the unreliability of transportation, and criminal activities along the road to undertake the one-day-journey to Aiyura. Sorcery accusations are thus dealt with by the councillors and komitis from both sides and from neutral villages on the spot. As accusations are focused on whole communities and not just individuals

(or if they are focused on individuals, their kin and co-residents form a supporting block), there is room to find a compromise in the form of compensation payments to keep the peace. When an angry delegation from the Tairora village of Nompia came and accused the village of Baira- 1 of conducting sorcery on them and threatened them with war if they were not compensated with 70 bags of coffee, the village leaders of Baira-1 protested their innocence. The councillor from Baira-1 was finally able to negotiate a settlement, in which Baira-1 paid Nompia 20 bags of coffee (valued at around 4’000 Kina at the time) to placate them.

But mediation is not always successful. In the conflict about sorcery between two hamlets of Amaira in late 2006, the councillor and komitis initially tried to get both sides together to discuss the accusations. When the accused side failed to show up twice, forcing the councillor to postpone deliberations, the accusers from the hamlet of Afatarampa mobilized some allies and at night sneaked towards the hamlet of Waisampa with homemade guns for an early morning raid. Some people from the neutral hamlets of Tuenampa saw the war party, and quickly informed the councillor. At great personal risk, the councillor raced to the targeted hamlet of Waisampa, and was able to warn the inhabitants, who then quickly fled with their women and children to a neighbouring village, while some of the adult men held off the attackers in a rear-guard action. When the first shots were fired, the councillor attempted to get in between the lines and hold both sides off, but realized that it was too dangerous.

Due to the advance warning, there were no casualties, and hostilities stopped soon afterwards. The councillor and the komitis from the other hamlets in the ward immediately and successfully negotiated a settlement between the two parties. The original demand of Afatarampa was 14’000 Kina, two pigs and two teenage girls from Waisampa to be married to Afatarampa men as a compensation payment for the sorcery deaths. In the end, this was reduced to 5’000 Kina and two girls to be married off. Waisampa paid a first instalment of 1’227 Kina as ‘bel-kol moni’ (appeasement payment), with the promise to pay the rest and marry the girls off after the next coffee season. That compensation demands included girls of marriageable age to marry into the other group is a phenomenon not (yet) observed elsewhere in the area. It seems to be part revitalisation of traditional peace procedures, which included intermarriage, and part insurance against further sorcery, as it is assumed sorcerers would not attack a family their own daughters or nieces married into.

Councillors at times abstain from having to get involved in sorcery disputes. In one public dispute between the Southern Tairora villages of Samura and Saurona that I was able to observe, the councillors of neutral wards made it clear that, as representatives of the government, they were not supposed to believe in sorcery or condone accusations, but would observe the proceedings and ensure that the dispute did not get out of hand and lead to violence (which it nearly did). The councillor of Bibeori likewise reported in an interview that as a representative of the government, he does not believe in sorcery.8 At least in these cases it becomes clear that nobody was aware of the existence of the then still valid 1971 Sorcery Act, which stipulated that the state did in fact recognize sorcery and witchcraft. All my interlocutors, in one way or another, complained that they were left to deal with the problem of sorcery on their own, and that state institutions like the District Court are neither interested nor knowledgeable enough to hear sorcery cases. This should give us pause to think about what was actually achieved by

repealing the 1971 Sorcery Act in the wake of protests against witchcraft-related killings in 2013, out of fear that the existence of this act somehow validates the belief in sorcery and contributes to the lenient treatment of people accused of killing suspected witches and sorcerers (Forsyth 2015: 214). This repeal only confirms remote communities in their assumption that the government offers no options for settling sorcery-related conflicts. Instead of focusing on legal changes, it would be worth considering the importance of local structures and community- level abilities that historically have been adaptive to changes.

Forsyth (2015) suggests that one of the options for the state to deal with the issue of sorcery-related violence is to support non-state or hybrid institutions like village courts, in which sorcery suspicions could be voiced and dealt with in a non-violent manner. In Simbu and Jiwaka Province, some communities have drafted their own community laws that prohibit sorcery and witchcraft accusations (Eves 2017). That such initiatives are also successful in preventing warfare has been shown by Wiessner and Pupu (2012) for the Enga province, where local leaders came up with their own adaptions of customary or local Christian institutions to curb violence and propagate peace. The challenge is thus to find concrete ways to support practical and innovative initiatives by recognized village leaders and community members, both women and men, and young and old through their particular local formations, alongside their LLG ward councillors and their komitis in their efforts to prevent or mediate cases of sorcery accusations.

CONCLUSION

The current anthropological attention on witchcraft and the torture and killing of individuals is certainly not only warranted but also urgent, considering the apparent increase in number and the brutality with which the witch-hunters operate. What should not be neglected, however, is that there are crucial differences in the belief systems, especially regarding the gendered notions of sorcery and witchcraft, which lead to different forms of violence (or non-violence) against supposed perpetrators. In the Eastern Highlands, where sorcery is an exclusively male domain that operates mostly between social groups, sorcery and sorcery accusations can easily lead to not one or two, but half a dozen or more victims, as sorcery-related violence here takes on the form of inter-community warfare, in which guns take a heavy toll and whole communities are devastated. In the Eastern Highlands, sorcery is thus intimately intertwined with warfare, as it is sometimes trigger, sometimes instrument in, and sometimes alternative to warfare. While wars in certain areas nowadays also break out between groups within one village, mostly due to demographic changes and rapid population growth, which changed the formerly face-to-face nature of these communities, this form of violence should not be conflated with witchcraft accusations and killings in other parts of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, that take place within the most intimate of relations. It is therefore crucial to understand the historical-cultural background behind any sorcery- or witchcraft-related violence and to be aware of broader regional or even local differences before we can begin to address the issue on how to respond to or even prevent these acts of violence. In the Eastern Highlands at least, a solution to the current ‘sorcery crisis’ cannot be attempted without dealing with contemporary warfare, and the distinctive socio-political processes and structural causes underlying these conflicts. The most pressing shortcomings in this regard are the unequal economic development, the lack in

fundamental service delivery, and the inability of the state to offer alternative institutions to successfully regulate inter-group conflict.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe the greatest debt to the people of the Eastern Highlands with whom I have lived and worked between 2004 and 2007. The fieldwork for this research has been generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (7352). This paper has profited enormously from discussions at the Swiss Anthropological Conference in Berne in 2010 and the Sorcery and Human Rights Conference in Canberra in 2013. I would like to thank Richard Eves, Miranda Forsyth, Juerg Helbling, Don Gardner and the anonymous reviewer for comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Doris Bacalzo for assisting me in fieldwork and editing this article.

NOTES

1 See Faithorn (1975), Mandeville (1979) and Meigs (1976, 1978) for descriptions and interpretations of the concept of pollution in the Eastern Highlands.

2 Faithorn (1990:272) mentions that while most men and women among the Kafe say that sorcery is exclusively performed by men, there are exceptionally strong women who are said to ‘think like a man’ and help their husbands in performing sorcery, or even more rarely practice sorcery themselves. It is not clear from her description what technique of sorcery these women practice, however.

3 Local groups in the Eastern Highlands consist of one to several clearly defined settlement clusters (or hamlets). Anthropologists have used various terms like ‘local group’ (Watson 1983), ‘village’ (Du Toit 1975), ‘sovereignty’ (Robbins 1982, Hayano 1972), ‘district’ (Berndt 1962), ‘parish’ (Lindenbaum 1979) or ‘bounded complex’ (Pataki-Schweizer 1980) to designate this most important social and political structure, often to stress the importance of territoriality and co-residence over kinship as the defining organizing principle. Throughout this text, I use the terms ‘local group’ and ‘village’ interchangeably to refer to this most prominent socio-political and geographical entity.

4 I collected in-depth data for this article during fieldwork in the villages of Amaira and Purosa in the Okapa District, and Bibeori and Obura in the Obura-Wonenara District between February 2006 and January 2007. I stayed approximately three months in each village, and conducted individual and group interviews with village leaders, participants, and male and female witnesses to contemporary conflicts in these four and fourteen neighbouring villages with which they fought. On several exploratory treks between these four villages in July 2004, December 2005 and January 2006, I conducted rapid-appraisal-style focus group interviews in ten additional Fore, Auyana and Tairora villages I passed on the way with village leaders, witnesses and participants to recent fights, and asked about causes and casualty numbers.

5 While the report makes for interesting reading, it is in a sense also deeply flawed in not recognizing regional differences, and thus insinuating that there is a direct connection between witchcraft-related violence against individual women and sorcery-related violence leading to ‘tribal warfare.’ As I show in this paper, most witchcraft-related violence against women have been reported from areas of the Highlands to the West of Goroka, while the data of sorcery-related violence leading to ‘tribal warfare’ stems from the areas to the East of Goroka. This is important since this demarcates an important boundary regarding the gendered notions of sorcery and witchcraft.

6 These numbers contrast starkly with the only other recent figures I could find, from Enga province where sorcery beliefs are a recent introduction. Of the 254 inter-group conflicts that escalated to open warfare in Enga province between 2006 and 2009, only one case had anything to do with poison/sorcery. Among the Enga, inter-group conflicts due to sorcery seem to be conflicts that can efficiently be dealt with by village courts, as 17 other conflicts about sorcery were solved by mediation. This means that village courts had a success rate of 94% in cases involving poison/sorcery, significantly better than in almost all other types of conflicts (Wiessner 2010:16-17).

7 Komitis are a form of local self-government within the council wards. These are committees consisting of members elected by the ward members or appointed by the LLG councillor. They support the LLG councillor in the running of community affairs, mainly concerning law and order, community work and the running of school and aid posts.

8 ‘Mipela olsem makim maus bilong gavman na stap, na poison, mipela i no belivim.’ (We are like spokespersons of the government and we don't believe in sorcery.) Interview with LLG Ward Councillor, 11.06.2006.

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