Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia

315 Pages·2017·2.611 MB·English

by  Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy, Ruy Blanes (eds.)

CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
Pentecostalism
and Witchcraft
Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia
EDITED BY KNUT RIO, MICHELLE
MacCARTHY, RUY BLANES
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
Series editors
Don Seeman
Department of Religion
Emory University
Atlanta, GA, USA
Tulasi Srinivas
Department of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College
Boston, MA, USA
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion is the official book series of
the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American
Anthropological Association. Books in the series explore a variety of
issues relating to current theoretical or comparative issues in the study of
religion. These include the relation between religion and the body, social
memory, gender, ethnoreligious violence, globalization, m odernity,
and multiculturalism, among others. Recent historical events have sug-
gested that religion plays a central role in the contemporary world, and
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion provides a crucial forum for
the expansion of our understanding of religion globally.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14916
Knut Rio · Michelle MacCarthy · Ruy Blanes
Editors
Pentecostalism and
Witchcraft
Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia
Editors
Knut Rio Ruy Blanes
University of Bergen University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway Bergen, Norway
Michelle MacCarthy
University of Bergen
Bergen, Hordaland Fylke
Norway
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
ISBN 978-3-319-56067-0 ISBN 978-3-319-56068-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940340
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. This book is an open access publication.
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A
cknowledgements
This volume is the result of two workshops, the first held at the University
of Bergen in June 2014 and the second at the American Anthropological
Association meeting in Washington D.C. in November 2014. Both meet-
ings were funded by the project Gender and Pentecostal Christianity: A
comparative analysis of Gender in Pentecostal Christianity with focus on
Africa and Melanesia led by Professor Annelin Eriksen at the University
of Bergen. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and
this book is an important part of the dissemination of that project.
The book is also supported by the ERC Advanced Grant project
Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons led by Professor Bruce
Kapferer at the University of Bergen, through the work put into it by
Myhre, Bertelsen, and Rio who have all been part of this project also.
The conceptual combination of Pentecostalism and Egalitarianism pro-
vided an important starting point for this book project, and Eriksen and
Kapferer have provided a lot of inspiration for this work.
We also want to thank the editors of the bookseries ‘Contemporary
Anthropology of Religion’, Don Seeman and Tulasi Srinivas, for their
support of this project from the start, and Alexis Nelson and Kyra
Saniewski at Palgrave MacMillan for professional and generous handling
of the manuscript. We are also grateful for valuable comments from the
anonymous reviewer.
We also thank The University of Bergen for a generous grant that made
it possible to publish the book with Open Access. This makes it more
likely that people in the regions of Africa and Melanesia can also access the
book and take interest in these issues that are of global relevance.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual
Politics in Africa and Melanesia 1
Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy and Ruy Blanes
2 German Pentecostal Witches and Communists: The
Violence of Purity and Sameness 37
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
3 Becoming Witches: Sight, Sin, and Social Change in the
Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea 67
Thomas Strong
4 The Ndoki Index: Sorcery, Economy, and Invisible
Operations in the Angolan Urban Sphere 93
Ruy Blanes
5 Branhamist Kindoki: Ethnographic Notes on
Connectivity, Technology, and Urban Witchcraft in
Contemporary Kinshasa 115
Katrien Pype
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Jesus Lives in Me: Pentecostal Conversions, Witchcraft
Confessions, and Gendered Power in the Trobriand
Islands 145
Michelle MacCarthy
7 The Power of a Severed Arm: Life, Witchcraft, and
Christianity in Kilimanjaro 163
Knut Christian Myhre
8 Demons, Devils, and Witches in Pentecostal Port Vila:
On Changing Cosmologies of Evil in Melanesia 189
Annelin Eriksen and Knut Rio
9 Spiritual War: Revival, Child Prophesies, and a Battle
Over Sorcery in Vanuatu 211
Tom Bratrud
10 Learning to Believe in Papua New Guinea 235
Barbara Andersen
11 Witchcraft Simplex: Experiences of Globalized
Pentecostalism in Central and Northwestern Tanzania 257
Koen Stroeken
12 Afterword: Academics, Pentecostals, and Witches:
The Struggle for Clarity and the Power of the Murky 281
Peter Geschiere
13 Afterword: From Witchcraft to the Pentecostal-Witchcraft
Nexus 293
Aletta Biersack
Index 307
e c
ditors And ontributors
About the Editors
Knut Rio is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Bergen, Norway, and is responsible for the ethnographic collections at
the Bergen University Museum. He has worked on Melanesian ethnog-
raphy since 1995, with fieldwork in Vanuatu. His work on social ontol-
ogy, production, ceremonial exchange, witchcraft and art in Vanuatu
has resulted in journal publications and the monograph The Power of
Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu
(2007). He has also co-edited Hierarchy. Persistence and Transformation
in Social formations (with Olaf Smedal, 2009), Made in Oceania. Social
Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific (with Edvard
Hviding, 2011), and The Arts of Government: Crime, Christianity and
Policing in Melanesia (with Andrew Lattas, 2011).
Michelle MacCarthy is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Anthropology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. She
was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of Bergen (where she undertook the
research and writing of the chapter in this book), and where she was a
contributor to Annelin Eriksen’s Norwegian Research Council–funded
project on gender and Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia. She
completed her PhD at the University of Auckland in 2012. Her mono-
graph, entitled Making the Modern Primitive: Cultural Tourism in the
ix
x EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Trobriand Islands (2016), examines tropes of primitivity and authen-
ticity and mechanisms of cultural commoditization. She recently co-
edited (with Annelin Eriksen) a special issue of The Australian Journal
of Anthropology on Gender and Pentecostalism in Melanesia (August
2016).
Ruy Blanes is a postdoctoral researcher on the Gender and
Pentecostalism project. He has been postdoctoral researcher at the
Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and Visiting
Fellow at Leiden University (2007–2010) and London School of
Economics and Political Science (2007–2013). He has worked on the
anthropology of religion, identity, politics, mobility, and temporality. His
current research site is Angola, where he explores the topics of religion,
mobility (diasporas, transnationalism, the Atlantic), politics (leadership,
charisma, repression, resistance), temporalities (historicity, memory, her-
itage, expectations) and knowledge. He has published articles in several
international journals and edited volumes on the corporeality in religious
contexts (Berghahn, 2011, with Anna Fedele) on spirits and the agency
of intangibles (Univ. Chicago Press, with Diana Espírito Santo), and on
‘Prophetic Trajectories’ (Berghahn). He is also a board member of the
APA (Portuguese Anthropological Association) and co-Editor of the
journal Advances in Research: Religion and Society, edited by Berghahn.
Contributors
Barbara Andersen Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Aletta Biersack University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
Ruy Blanes Spanish National Research Council, Santiago de
Compostela, Spain; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
Madrid, Spain
Tom Bratrud University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Annelin Eriksen University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway