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DO WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT?

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 DO WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT?

Inge Riebe
Casino, New South Wales

INTRODUCTION
Ralph Bulmer’s respect for other people’s beliefs (including those they called knowledge), without ever
abandoning his critical mind, was the linchpin of his enormous contribution. It was this respect for other
world views that led to his work being a contribution, not only to the understanding of Kalam culture, and
culture in general, but also to the world pool of knowledge about fauna and flora.
He also retained great open mindedness about his own beliefs, including those he and others might be
tempted to call knowledge. I quote from a “Letter to Posterity” he included in his 1980 letters to me. The
purpose of it was to explain some things to “the scanning device of some post electronic archives (for
doubtless by then reading and writing will be old hat)”. He said there among other things:

Deaths [that the Kalam claim responsibility for] that I at least find it hard not to attribute, in most cases
(note, I say most) in rational-material terms as due to disease and accident. But yes, Posterity, I do realize
that sickness and death are not phenomena to be accounted away simply by counting bacteria and viruses
(Bulmer 1980 IR/35; emphasis in original).

I first met Ralph Bulmer at ANZAAS in Auckland in 1964. As a result of our discussions at that time I
joined him in the field in December 1965. His field site was at Gobnem, mine at Kabdarjleb, about 1.3
kilometres distant. Throughout the many years we both did field work in the area we were only in the field
simultaneously on three or four occasions. At other times we exchanged letters, which mostly contained
questions from the out-of-field correspondent, and news from the in-field correspondent.
Two periods of correspondence were particularly lengthy due to the happenstance that I was in the field
when the son of his host, brother and dearest friend died in 1975; and he was in the field when the son of my
host and much loved elder brother died in 1980. The aspect of this correspondence that interest me here is: the
issue, raised directly by Ralph in the letters, of whether or not I credited witchcraft as an explanation of death.1
This is part of the wider issue of anthropologists as informants about the interface between two cultures. It is
in relation to witchcraft that beliefs about death of the two cultures are in sharpest contrast, and where being at
the interface between the two cultures makes the greatest demands on the anthropologist.

DEATHS IN THE HELD

Having written and told Ralph briefly of the death of Bos, a letter written in shock and with some haste that
I do not have a copy of, I received his answering letter asking for more details and about the condition of Wpc,
the boy’s father.
In answer I wrote:

A common theme here is that these young boys should not be killed like that [with witchcraft] for they
have no talk attached to them. But then young boys were not meant to be sold in labour by their parents
wanting riches either. [It] should be the father who teaches the son how to invest here, and perhaps start
him with a stake. There is something very wrong with children being left without the wisdom of their
fathers so that they can labour among strangers for money for them. You say Bos should have gone
home. He hated working in Moresby, but meanwhile Dad was boasting about what a good son he had and
how much money he sent home to him and how other people’s sons weren’t so good. Bad mistake that
boasting. None of the people who got tabal [Papuan Lory feathers] that Bos bought and sent
complained either about him being away. The house of the tabal it was called. Well they’ve buried the
money and the tabal with him now . . . (Riebe 1975 RB/1).

In August 1980 Ralph wrote to me as follows:

I have to write to you for a sad reason. Jwdn died on Saturday night and I have just returned from the
wake, which is being held right at Kabdarjleb, in houses hastily constructed on Bsky’s old house-site, 20
yards from our old camp, just below the tanket. . . Bsky [father of the dead boy] was still very much in
command this morning, in spite of his obvious misery - animated - at one point he mimed a lorikeet in
flight, hands stretched out, elbows bent, most vivid . . . (Bulmer 1980 IR/1).

317
318 IngeRiebe

I was very upset myself, couldn’t bring myself to ask if I could photograph the corpse, or take a tape-
recorder with me. I kept thinking of Jwdn when I first saw him as a toddler in 1963, dolled up in beads
and feathers and fancy apron at the nose-shooting and pig-killing down just above your house, the apple of
his father’s eye. And thinking that he must be just about the same age as David [Ralph’s elder son]
(Bulmer 1980 IR/4).

The A nthropologists’ Response

The question I most directly wish to address concerning the anthropologists is whether or not we believe in
witchcraft.
When he first heard that Bos died (a death that had no easily identifiable medical causes), Ralph wrote and
asked did I think koyb had killed him. At the time I gave two rather unsatisfactory answers. One was

I would say that it is more than likely that there were some shells out to kill Bos (probably as one
possible [victim] among a number) whether they were activated or not (Riebe 1975 RB/6).

The other

Whether koyb killed Bos is hard to answer. If you would allow me that koyb is a killing agent
generated by a mixture of the victim (and those close to him) seeking success, to some degree obtaining
it; and the slayer envying or resenting this success, then the answer is ‘yes’. People are behaving in new
ways and thus koyb is striking in new ways (Riebe 1975 RB/2).

Neither of course really commits itself to a view on the efficacy of witchcraft. The second answer gives an
argument as to the cause of witchcraft (one that I would not now agree with) and presents that as some sort of
claim that witchcraft works. This failure to make a firm stand as to whether witchcraft works or not while
launching straight into arguments as to its nature is not unlike the Kalam response.
The Kalam language makes it impossible to say ‘Do you believe X exists’, one needs must ask either ‘have
you seen it’ [literally eye-perceived it] or ‘have you heard it’ [literally ear-perceived it] specifically of one of the
senses or one can ask ‘have you thought-perceived it’. Generally the latter is answered with a ‘yes’, all the
former with a ‘no’. If one asks whether it is true or false when people say that witches do exist, the literal form
of ‘true’ is ‘having perceived they speak’. The answer I elicited to this was always ‘I haven’t perceived’
transliterated as ‘I don’t know’. The answer meant: I don’t know whether they are talking having perceived it,
or are just saying it. The question of belief or otherwise is unresolved. People prefer to discuss the details of
it.
Despite this reluctance to be put on the spot, Kalam, as well as anthropologists, do sometimes discuss the
existence or otherwise of witchcraft. But such discussions, when looked at in context, are more an ideological
debate engendered by interests of the moment than a clear statement of people’s enduring world view.
Ralph in one letter quoted the following:

[They told me] that the wrong . . . is not with Banan, or with . . . Pyaw, or with Lrjlg but with Bsky
himself: he must now search around and find where another jbog [Little red Lory] (young boy) has died,
because of the koyb contracts he fouled up, and look there to see the cause of Jwdn’s death.
In the same breath Saem, Km [both younger men] and Roy say they know that deaths aren’t really caused
by koyb, this is just giaman [false], they are caused by sickness, but as long as all the Big Men continue
to believe in the powers of koyb , this trouble will go on. (In part a sop to me?) (Bulmer 1980 IR/3).

Roy Alyag is Wpc’s son and half brother to Bos who died in 1975, and a man of some position since his
father’s death. This is why Ralph has underlined his acquiescence in the above quote. Here are various other
quotes from Ralph on Roy’s views:

I find Roy very interesting in his stance on koyb. I think he genuinely would prefer not to believe in
them, for all sorts of reasons and not just the nasty situation he is in over Bos’s and his father’s deaths,
but because of his on-the-whole ‘modem’, pro-school, pro-church and pro-development stance. But he is
trapped right in the system, and no way can he really act as though he didn’t believe in koyb (Bulmer
1980 IR/12).

. . . he [Roy] did go on to ask me if people in my country died the way people did here, young men in
their prime, big men etc etc, not just the elderly; and if men among my people also came trying to extract
wealth from each other by pretending they had killed someone on the other person’s behalf; and whether
we believed in koyb. A somewhat inconclusive disquisition on my part . . . followed (Bulmer 1980
IR/15).2
 D o We Believe in Witchcraft? 319

. . . .Roy said he had assumed that it was the Pwdwm people who had killed Bos (and also Wpc?); and he
had sent kwbap [greensnail shells] to kill someone there; but afterwards he had taken his kwbap back,
and sent coffee seeds instead to his koyb line at Pwdwm saying that both they and he should just think
of getting up business and forget further payback.3 But a man called Bos of Pwdwm had died, which was
very fitting payback.4 (Bulmer 1980 IR/10).

Rather than an opposition between those who believe in the existence of witchcraft and those who don’t,
the opposition is between those who wish to take part in and maintain the witchcraft system, and those who
wish, at least at times, to give it up.
It is possible for this opposition to be explicitly expressed because of the changes that have taken place in
Kalam culture (Riebe 1987:234ff), from a time when witchcraft was always morally reprehensible and never
admitted to, to the present situation where to quote Ralph; “ . . . it now being quite respectable to admit, even
to stress the moral rectitude, of employing koyb lines to take morally justifiable vengeance. All of which I
find very astonishing” (Bulmer 1980IR/45).
As to what one believes, of course context is everything. When his brother was dying Roy Alyag sang out
down the valley many times and with great passion for the koyb to let him go. Ralph also wrote in a later
letter that Roy joined Apkoy in shouting at koyb that had thrown stones on his roof. In discussing views of
witchcraft I am moving between at least three contexts: the immediate response to witchcraft activities; the
longer term response in the political arena; and the metaphysical discussion. I want now to discuss witchcraft
in each of these contexts.

WITCHCRAFT IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS

The Immediate Response to Interactions between People and Witches
Feelings about witchcraft include anxiety, fear, fascination, hate for the witch, and a feeling of power due
to having access to a witch. These feelings can become intense for brief periods, and can also preoccupy
people for months at a time. However an underlying political pragmatism and emotional balance eventually
prevail.5
At times people declare themselves to be tormented by witches. This torment takes the form of whistling
noises at night, doors opening and winds howling through the house, stones being thrown on the roof, and the
movements of unexplained lights. The usual immediate response is to shout loudly for the witches to stop this
activity and to get other people to join in the shouting.
If such activities persist they often develop into other types of actions attributed to witches viz. theft,
destruction of property and the leaving of signs where the targeted persons will walk.
A person under such attack will evince symptoms of considerable anxiety, often not sleeping well and
frequently changing the sleeping place; talking agitatedly about the matter, and sweating and shaking. Their
activity is directed totally toward trying to find out who the witches are, and why they are doing it. Some of
the techniques for doing this are: asking a professional dreamer to dream for you; and accusing people who
you think may be the culprit. Sometimes the person under attack will succeed in instigating a large moot to
discuss the issue. If the source of the conflict is discovered then payments may be made to those with reason
for hostility in order to ward off the witchcraft.
In the context of such fears of witchcraft, having some of one’s property stolen or destroyed is dealt with
not as an act that is of itself damaging, but as a warning of intended killing by witchcraft. The victim’s and his
supporters’ energy is directed towards finding out the cause of the hostility, and to trying to have the witchcraft
contract revoked. Energy is not directed to identifying the thief or the vandal as such.6
An instance of destruction of property dealt with in this way was described by Ralph in his 1980 letters:7

I’d just set up . .. when all hell broke out outside, women screaming from three different directions, and
they kept it up for about ten minutes. Km said it was about stolen say [string skirts] (Bulmer 1980
IR/46).

It turned out that while people were away at a dance festival two skirts had gone missing and a girl thought
to be short of skirts, who had also had opportunity, was suspected. A young girl was sent to take some skirts
belonging to the suspect; the latter on discovering them gone, was furious:

She demanded to know on what evidence she was being accused of stealing; and this morning, began
destroying her own netbags, etc. Roy sent his wife down to get the councillor to hold court, fearing that
if the matter wasn’t settled, one of the women might hang herself. . . (Bulmer 1980 IR/46).
But before the shouting over the say had died down, a new round started up. Penep8 . . . found one of her
large pigs limping; and when she looked more closely it had multiple wounds [on] ears, flanks, belly and
320 Inge Riebe

feet; newly inflicted and (in my judgment) with a sharp carving knife or kitchen knife, not an ax or a
bushknife . . . (Bulmer 1980 IR 46/7)

When I asked who could have done it (no-one even thought to go to search around for blood-stains etc. to
find the scene of the crime .. .) Bosboi immediately said koyb [witches]. He had had this done to his
pigs twice by witches . . . On being told the story of the pig, Kiyas immediately agreed with Bosboi, it
was koyb, it was well known that witches did this to a man’s pigs before attacking the man himself; it
had not only happened to the Bosboi, but up here at Gobnem, shortly before Bos’s death. In both cases
Womk men had been seen lurking [and were thought to be] responsible . . . (Bulmer 1980 IR/47).

Bosboi described how he had been persecuted by these Womk koyb in the period [between] 1972-74, until
he paid them to stop. They had come and hung around to waylay him, normally at night. . . had opened
the doors of his house at night, and also climbed up on the roof - so that whichever way he turned to
shoot at them they were somewhere else; and came past him into the door of his house in the shape of
rats and making a noise like wind. He had first tried hanging kwbap [greensnail shells] on sblam
[cordyline] for them to take, but this hadn’t worked. The issue had been [his father’s] death, which had
been avenged by Wpc shooting someone. All that had been settled, so Bosboi hadn’t seen why he should
pay anything more to the Womks . . . [But he] had paid the Womks to lay off and they had stopped
bothering him (Bulmer 1980 IR/47).

As to the injured pig, Ralph, as detective, had his own ideas of the culprit, combining motive from the
matter of the string skirts episode; opportunity and capacity to inflict such wounds; and behaviour he happened
to observe at the time the pig’s injuries were discovered, to arrive at his conclusion. He commented that
it would be very disruptive to voice these suspicions, given the high esteem in which her [brother] is held by
all, and the fact that a settlement with only five adult men cannot afford to lose anyone” (Bulmer 1980IR/50).

From the Kalam point of view an explanation was settled on in the following days: Two young men from
Womk had spoken out about one of Roy’s plans to avenge his brother, which made Roy very angry.
Subsequently they came to claim that they had avenged Bos themselves. The person they had killed came from
the same place as Roy’s mother so

. . . he absolutely refused to pay them, saying also that he had not commissioned them to kill anyone
anywhere. But they kept coming to him, and he got very angry and said they were never to come near
Gobnem again. They stole a pig of his to help make their point. Now it’s obvious it’s they who are
responsible for the savaging of his pig9 two days ago (Bulmer 1980 IR/50).

In this instance, if Ralph’s detective work was correct, it seems that the witchcraft interpretation of the
damage to the pig allowed for the covering over of a conflict internal to the settlement in favour of a more
distant villain. The witchcraft interpretation decreased the emotional involvement in this episode.
This aspect of witchcraft as a structure allowing for social control of highly volatile emotional states is also
evident during mourning. In the process of mourning, the grief and anger and guilt felt at the death of a
kinsperson is channelled into the hunt for the witch that killed that person.
This turning of grief and anger into the hunt for the culprit results in political activity in which the witch
reappears as the saviour who helps avenge one’s kin. I deal with this at some length elsewhere (Riebe:PhD
thesis in preparation). The point to make here is that the anger is channelled into searching for the witch-killer;
the guilt is channelled into searching for the weak point in one’s own past killing ventures; and the grief is
directed towards the vengeance seeking which when successful will return the dead person to one, and thus
conclude the grief of separation. In all of these activities there is a strong factor of social control in the form of
imposed political expediency in the idiom of the politics of witchcraft.
Some of the political aspects of this I will now deal with.

The Witch as Politician

The relation between witchcraft and power and wealth is forged by the part it plays in the avenging of
deaths. I noted above the role of vengeance in transforming the emotions of grief and assuaging the anger at a
death. The person who succeeds in organizing the revenge taking, and has control over the choice of victim,
has a claim on the available wealth for that revenge killing, a claim that can extend to claims on the bridewealth
of daughters and sisters of the deceased.
Whether or not the organiser of the witch slaying has control over the actual physical death of the chosen
victim, he has control over the linking of that particular death to the death to be avenged. It is this link that
establishes future avoidance relations and remoulds relations between protagonists on either side. To be
dominant in the decision as to the appropriate and authentic revenge is to have control over future associational
 Do We Believe in Witchcraft? 321

networks. To be involved in the ‘witchcraft stakes’ is to make a bid for political power. This can be with
intent and by conscious manipulation, but it can also be thrust upon one. The case of Roy depicted in Ralph’s
letters is a case of the latter.
Roy Alyag although the elder son of Wpc the Big Man of Gobnem10 was a gentle and extremely likeable
man with, it seemed, no great taste for the games of politics. His younger half-brother Bos showed more
interest, and seemed likely to grow into at least some of Wpc’s role. However Bos’s death at eighteen changed
all that. In the first large moot four weeks after the death of Bos, Roy Alyag, still wearing the white clay of
mourning, attempted to cut short the deliberations about shell exchanges saying:

You people stop talking about it all the time. He is not your son. He came here and his father and I had
not made any gardens and he went hungry and he died. I don’t want to hear more about it. Leave it.
(Riebe 1975(a)3/45).

At the time, watching him, it really did seem to be a distaste for making a personal loss into a political game
that created the intensity of this speech. But now, looking back, the fact that its effect was also to take some
control over the deliberations seems as important. The current of the game draws people in, regardless of their
feelings. As Ralph wrote:

After Bos’s death the Big Man [Wpc] had left all negotiations over compensation etc. to Roy, saying he
was going to die soon and Roy would have to take over any agreements he entered into, so Roy had better
make these anyway. So anyone coming to Wpc with suggestions of claims was referred to Roy (Bulmer
1980 IR/50).

This was the first step in politicizing Roy Alyag. The effect of being the main mourner for a death
continues for a long time. Ralph wrote in June 1980, five years after Bos’s death:

. . . poor Roy has scarcely had time to mend his garden fences from January to now he has so often had
to go out, generally down to Simbai, to try to straighten talk. Kanej says that just about every death that
has occurred in the Asai, Simbai, Pwdwm, Pwgoy, Kaytog, Womk, Aynog right down to Kopon and
over Jimi-side, has been attributed to Roy, as vengeance for Bos, with allegations that he has given or
received kwbap etc. etc. He spent two days at Simbai last week,. .. Roy himself told me that though he
himself and other [younger men] knew perfectly well that most deaths were just the result of sickness,
accident etc. there seemed no way to stop Big Men from shooting this kind of giaman tok [falsehood].
Someone says that it is partly Alyag’s tallness that makes people suspect him (which followed to its
logical conclusion would be bad news for me!) (Bulmer 1980(a) IR/6).

I want now to go into more detail about the ideological opposition between pro and anti witchcraft factions
mentioned earlier and again evident in the above quote. Roy Alyag’s belief in the illness and accident theory of
deaths is an espousal of a new ideology among Kalam. He says the Big Men cannot be stopped from the
witchcraft talk.
Witchcraft talk and its resultant shell and money exchanges operate to maintain a distribution of available
resources controlled by older males with traditional authority. Young men returning with town earnings,
perhaps with ambitions of starting a trade store or other business, must struggle to keep their resources from
being used for funeral, death and revenge payments. To believe in European-style explanations of death is to
desire to remove the resources from the traditional rounds of redistribution in order to invest them in business.
The situation is not however resolving into a dualistic conflict between young and old because traditionalists
still controlling resources within traditional distribution patterns can also invest these in business enterprises
viz. cattle or gold mining.
Rather it is a struggle over new wealth sources and their threatened effect on existing power relations. This
pattern has repeated itself among Kalam and other Highlands areas where first pigs and sweet potato, and then
increased influx of shells, and now money earned outside, threaten to alter the balance of power and control.11
The increase in time spent in witchcraft moots from the mid 60’s to the present is due not only to the
increase in deaths, but also to the energy being invested in the ideological struggle over the place of witchcraft
in Kalam society - a struggle essentially about the social control of economic resources.
This discussion has taken us into the realm of the social effect of witchcraft. It is a study of witchcraft as
the idiom of social conflict. The question I now want to direct myself to is - what is the nature of this idiom?
What sort of a picture of the universe does the Kalam view of witchcraft fit into?
322 Inge Riebe

The metaphysics o f witchcraft

Among Kalam, people aim not only to maintain physical well-being, but also a state of well-being in
relation to the spirit elements in the universe. Dreams, portents, signs, spirit communications of various kinds
are understood and given validity. This contrasts with the rationalist view that denies that these experiences
have something valid to say about external realities.
Within this context witchcraft beliefs are related to non-material relations between human beings,
particularly a negative spirit element possessed by some human beings that affects others. Witchcraft beliefs
are a theory about a power exercised between people, with fatal effects. The power is called into play by
anger, frustration, envy or greed.
Thus witchcraft beliefs are explicitly beliefs about the forces of hostility between human beings. These in
turn are tightly interwoven with the experience of death.
European views of witchcraft have altered over time. In the heyday of witchcraft beliefs in Western
society, the power of witchcraft was believed to be efficacious and to result from a pact with the devil. Later
the power of witchcraft was no longer thought to be real, but the pact with the devil, that aspiring witches
made, was still regarded as sufficient cause to bum them. Nowadays theories of witchcraft in Western society
are largely theories of how and why other people believe in witchcraft.
In theorizing about witchcraft does it matter whether one believes in witchcraft or not? There are some
statements where it does not matter. To use another theory about death - the germ theory of illness - as an
illustration: The statement that belief in germ theory allows people some feeling of control over the illness they
fear by ritual acts of washing their hands, is not affected by whether one believes in germs or not.
One difference between belief and non-belief is in the amount of explanation required. If there are witches
then some explanations are overkill. If there are not, then more needs to be explained than some indigenous
theories give us.
A great deal of anthropological discussion about witchcraft is about the process of witchcraft accusations.
The process focused upon is not the process of bewitching but the process of accusing the witch. Thus we
have theories of ‘scapegoat’ mechanisms and projections onto the witch, as well as sociological theories about
the relationship between accuser and accused.12 Because these theories assume that witchcraft does not exist,
they seek for explanations of the hostility felt against the witch other than hostility to witchcraft; and they seek
for reasons behind the choice of witch that are not based on that person being a witch. In assuming that
witchcraft is not real these theories assume that the hostility is generated elsewhere, due to some other cause.
In the early years of my research Ralph pointed out to me that the people regularly suspected of witchcraft
dealings in the Kaytog/Gobnem area were men who had been disadvantaged by the abandonment of the
Gwlkm settlement enforced by the administration. This caused me to look into a number of case histories. I
found a number of men who had suffered stress and loss, who had reason to be angry at the fate dealt to them
and at the fact that they, rather than the whole community, had borne the brunt of the disadvantage. They
expressed frustration, and said that they felt sharply that they were wronged. They could not and did not
express anger directly at the administration nor at the people whom they felt had benefited from their situation.
//projected emotions of anger and frustration are the basis of witchcraft accusations one might expect that
these men would express some of their anger and frustration by accusing someone of being a witch. Or they
might become particularly active in witch moots, or take part in group sessions vilifying witches. Or they
might become prone to signs of witches paying them attention like winds in their houses, stones on their roof
etc.
But they did none of these. All tended to avoid witchcraft moots and to be very low keyed if present. They
did not instigate witchcraft accusations. They were, as Ralph had pointed out of some of them, themselves
prone to accusations of being witches, although not actively moved against.
Kalam theories of witchcraft would expect this. In the Kalam view the anger that leads to an accusation of
witchcraft is not the anger in the accuser seeking an outlet in an acceptable target, but the anger assumed or
perceived to exist in a wronged person who turns to witchcraft. It is the postulated and seemingly justified
anger of the accused that attracts the witchcraft accusation.
For believers in witchcraft, witchcraft is an activity that causes hurt to the bewitched - the target of the
witch. Witchcraft is an expression of anger against the bewitched by the witch. It is the angry person who
does not express anger directly but who has a known cause for anger that is not openly expressed, that has the
prerequisite for being a witch.
Both Kalam theory and anthropological theory are dealing with interpersonal anger, where that anger is not
directly expressed, or not adequately dealt with. The Kalam view is that someone who is angry and is not
directly expressing that anger, or whose anger is not able to be placated, is likely to use witchcraft against the
person he is angry with.
Anthropological theory more often postulates that someone in that situation is likely to make an accusation
of witchcraft against the person he is angry with.
 Do We Believe in Witchcraft? 323

Kalam look at social situations and see witchcraft operating, anthropologists look at the same situation and
see only witchcraft accusations operating. This difference of view is based on the different beliefs that each
hold as to what is possible.
Kalam believe in witches and so they look for the cause of the anger motivating the witch. This is the anger
they see as dangerous. Anthropologists who do not believe in witchcraft look for the cause of the anger of the
accuser. This is the anger they see as active.
Both the indigenous and the anthropological theories are theories about the potency of and drive for
expression of human anger. They are statements about the manifestations of internal emotions of anger. In
one case these feelings manifest as spirit power, in the other as social power.
Kalam believe that there are people who can control certain non-human spiritual animus. Anthropologists
believe that there are people who can control certain sociological forces regulating social life.
The way in which I originally made sense of the wronged person becoming the witch was to suggest that
the guilt and resultant discomfort the wrongdoer felt at the sight of the wronged one, was the feeling that was
interpreted as being bewitched by that wronged one. In this explanation the transmission of negative feeling is
internal to the person feeling bewitched. Guilt triggered by the sight of the wronged person causes discomfort.
This resists the idea that negative energy from the wronged person might cause discomfort.
In format this is rather similar to the ‘auto-suggestion’ explanation of ‘inexplicable’ deaths. In Western
popular culture it is easier to believe that our own minds can affect our bodily functions to the point of death,
than that another person’s mind can do so. We can accept that an idea planted from the outside can take over
our minds even against our own self preservation instincts. An example is the popular view of ‘pointing the
bone’ where the person’s belief that their death has been caused, causes that death. We don’t believe that
another person’s mind can affect our bodily functions directly. Thus both with bone-pointing, and magic
practices on effigies, the prevailing popular view is that it only works if the person knows about it, that the
victim’s own thoughts do the actual damage.
A priori I can see nothing more or less ‘supernatural’ in the two beliefs. In the form we find believable the
individual is both causative agent and the object. The individual is a closed system in terms of ‘supernatural’13
energy, as the information that the bone has been pointed, or whatever, is transmitted naturally. What we do
not find believable is that ‘supernatural’ energy passes from one individual to another.
I would argue that, rather than one theory being more ‘supernatural’ than the other, the different appeal of
the two theories depends upon the viewer’s beliefs as to what constitutes wholeness, uniqueness, or ego
boundary.
Witchcraft beliefs may seem to some of us clearly false, but this judgment is made as much from within a
cultural ideology as is the judgment that witchcraft is true or at least possible.
Explanations of witchcraft beliefs in terms of the social effects of witchcraft beliefs or in terms of ideology,
or metaphysics, do not confront the content of the character of the witch; they only deal with the intellectual and
social use people make of the belief. For this reason I want very briefly to look at some possible psychological
underpinnings of the archetype of the witch. It is these theories about the nature of the human psyche and the
creatures it creates that most directly attempt to explain the character of the witch.

The Witch as Archetype

Psychological explanations of the symbolism of witchcraft appear to presume that we do not accept the
witch as part of the real world. Such explanations assume that the witch is the creation of inner psychological
processes.
In this view the witch is created by projection and is a common archetype of the human psyche.14 In the
classic sense projection is: having a desire; repressing that desire and the knowledge that one has it because it
is unacceptable to the ego; then claiming that someone or something else has that desire; and then hating and or
fearing the person or thing one has projected that desire onto.
In the case of the witch, there are various candidates for the suppressed desire. One is suggested by the
ubiquitous characterisation of the witch as cannibal. The cannibalistic greed attributed to witches has echoes in
the “ . . . nursling’s angry greed, its wild yearning to own, control, suck dry the source of good, its wish to
avenge deprivation . . . ” (Dinnerstein 1976:97).
In this view cannibalistic desires are projected on the archetype of the witch, which is then feared. This
relates to theories of the good and bad mother, and speculations about the relations between male and female.
Among Kalam, men are more involved in witchcraft matters, and more concerned about them than women.
On the one hand this relates to political and economic institutions that keep women from attaining public
positions of influence, or taking an active independent role in those spheres. On the other hand there may be
psychological reasons why men are more involved in the projection on to the witch, and the resultant fear of
witches.
324 Inge Riebe

The avoidance of women achieved by sex-segregated institutions, and the projection of one’s own infantile
greed and cannibalistic desires onto witches, are two possible solutions to the same problem. Both are ways of
dealing with the negative attitude clusters to the mother. One projects this negative cluster on to women, the
other on to witches.
Another outstanding aspect of the Kalam view of witchcraft is the dualism between public and open on the
one hand, and private and secret on the other. This is symbolically expressed as the dualism between phallus
and anus.
According to Bory and Hocquenghem this underlies the male heterosexual/homosexual opposition in our
society which is based on the domination of the heterosexual norm at the expense of repressing the homosexual
libido. This leads to a phallocentric society:

The anus is excluded from the social field, and the individuals created by the rule of the bourgeoisie believe
that everything revolves around the possession of the phallus, the seizure of other people’s phalluses, or
the fear of losing one’s own (Bory and Hocquenghem 1976:47).

In Kalam society kwbap [greensnail shells] are said by Kalam themselves to be symbolic phalluses, and the
hoarding of them, exchanging of them and the public pre-occupation with them fits the Hocquenghem
description of phallocentric public activity. Witchcraft on the other hand is associated with the anus: One sign
of witchcraft is a blue light at the anus of the witch; the koyb hlwk [witch young essence] enters the body of
its host through the anus; the witch essence also enters the victim anally; and to be found harbouring a witch is
‘to hear a whistle at your own anus’.
The phallic shell-based economy struggles to contain the witches’ actions by subsuming witchcraft
transactions within it. But it is a never-completed struggle and the cannibalistic, anally-oriented witch figure
seems always about to destroy the social order. It may break out into unreasonable uncontrolled cannibalistic
passions (like eating young boys) or it may bring the very basis of exchange into question, every exchange
becoming tainted with the suspicion of being related to witchcraft.
These sorts of explorations of the nature of witchcraft beliefs seem more than others to explain away
witchcraft, to reduce it to a projection of inner realities.
My own view is that the world is real enough, but we are unable to perceive it as it really is. Different
cultures teach us to live with different approximations.
What the scientific revolution did was produce a culture with a very reduced range of experiences of the
psyche that could legitimately be stated as being part of the real world. The psychic responses outside this
accepted range were declared ‘psychic’ phenomena and not regarded as pertaining to the external environment.
It seems that science preferred us to accept as real only what it could explain and only what instruments could
measure.
This is not to say that I am recommending that we should believe in witchcraft, rather I am suggesting that
if we are not to believe in it, we must examine critically the reasons why this should be so.

CONCLUSION
This paper’s main aim was to consider the question raised by Ralph whether to believe in witchcraft or not.
The consideration of this has led to looking at the power of the concept among Kalam, and also to question the
basis for coming to a decision one way or the other in our own scientific tradition.
In looking at the concept we have noted psychological aspects, both in terms of sexual identity and dealing
with grief at mourning. We have also noted the economic and political aspects and its power as an explanation
of the nature of interrelations between people. I have attempted to indicate that the issue of what is real and
what is not real is not a simple one, and that, in my view, the question of the nature of the real world should be
left at least as open in anthropology as it is in physics.
I am left with an answer to Ralph’s question that whether to believe in witchcraft or not depends on how
one wants to live.
Bloch and Parry (1982:37) say “ . . . what would seem to be revitalized in funerary practices is that
resource which is culturally conceived to be most essential to the reproduction of the social order.”
Among Kalam this resource is continuity of exchanges and the maintenance of good relations with the
ancestors via the creation of a chain of linked ‘good’ deaths, a good death being an appropriately avenged one.
The social order that this process is reproducing is that of the current play of authority and power;
where there is no transcendental authority to be created the dead can be left alone” (Bloch and Parry 1982:97).
My own tendency is to believe in witchcraft because of the quality of life that the traditional authority
structure among Kalam created, a quality of life that the new authority structure, moving into the power of the
markets of fringe capitalism, is rather eroding. To quote Ralph on the authority of Wpc: “ . . . the wit and
 Do We Believe in Witchcraft? 325

exuberant good humour which sustained a truly marvellous quality of life in the little community he dominated”
(Majnep and Bulmer 1977:15).
I could add my own praises for the community I lived in and others I visited. The general point I would
make is that where authority must still be maintained by charisma and personal achievement it is compatible
with a good quality of life. If witchcraft could help retain this basis for authority then I would believe in it.
Ralph himself wrote:

. . . by the agency of koyb, the influential men who still dominate the local scene are fighting a rearguard
action to sustain some substantial degree of control over their own affairs . . . More profoundly, by thus
asserting that they themselves - the Kalam - are collectively and basically responsible for each others’
deaths, even for deaths of young men in quite distant parts of Papua New Guinea, they are . . .
protecting the identity and integrity of Kalam society within the new nation-state.15

EPILOGUE
Ralph’s long period of illness allowed many to say last farewells. I suspect that in his somewhat overly
humble estimate of his stature among his colleagues (perhaps some sort of inverse legacy of his height) he may
have viewed this much as he reported of one of his field friends: “He said he was amazed by the number of
people who came when they thought he was dying, from as far away as Basaben and Pig and Kopon” (Bulmer
1980/IR 21).
Ralph had a great respect for the Kalam sense of humour, and an awareness of their consummate skill in
manipulating information to their own ends, but most importantly this did not lead him to cynicism. I noted at
the beginning of this paper his respect for other people’s beliefs. There was also the joy he took in them: “It is
marvellous to be back here, Inge, in spite of present grief [due to Jwdn’s death]”, and his acceptance of their
great importance to him. He suffered considerably under the ethical taints that have haunted the enterprise of
anthropology. As he wrote to Posterity:

Many of the people about whom I write are friends of mine: friends in the sense that I feel as warmly and
as complexly about them as I do about any of my friends, even closest friends, in other places. If that
does not come through in these notes, please understand our in-vogue platitude that every text has context,
and pause before you condemn my cynicism or heartlessness or other shortcomings in terms of whatever
values are current in your post-electronic age, and try to see the contexts in which I write (Bulmer
1980/IR 35).

Certainly reading him in this not yet post-electronic age, there is no tone of cynicism or heartlessness; rather
there is love, a desire and capacity to understand, and humour.

NOTES

1. I quote from these letters with due caution as Ralph expressly instructed: “You are most welcome to cite these
notes judiciously . .. you can cite them as Bulmer Fieldnotes 1980 IR 20 or whatever pages.”
2. Unfortunately the details of this are not quoted in the letters. However the fact that Ralph calls it ‘inconclusive’
is indicative.
3. Bulmer quoted this case in an unpublished paper, ‘Trying not to believe in witchcraft in the Kaironk valley’,
(1982:3), as an instance of skepticism about witchcraft.
4. A complicating factor here for the sceptical view is that I was told of payments being made for this intended
revenge a few months before the death, when the young man was still very healthy.
5. See Reay in Stephen (1987:115) for her comments about maintaining a balanced view of the effect of witchcraft
beliefs.
6. This of course indicates a different view of property in Kalam society to our own. What is wrong with the
destruction of property, for Kalam, is the hostility directed towards, and hurt felt by the person. Among Kalam
the relations between people are not mystified by being described as relations between people and things. In our
own social system where inequities are justified on the basis of private property such mystification is central to
our ideology. Property with us has become an inviolable principle, the protection of which by law is a comer
stone of our social control. This is not so among Kalam.
7. The case here cited in detail is mentioned in Bulmer 1982:4. Bulmer here uses it as an instance of a phenomenon
known, at least by some, not to be caused by koyb, yet being widely accepted as being so.
8. Penep is step-sister to the deceased Bos and was one of the central female mourners at his wake. She is a woman
of some position in the hamlet and among those who suspected the skirt stealer.
9. This pig was referred to as his sister Penep’s pig earlier. Looked after by Penep it was her pig in the context of
sustaining its injuries. However as it will be his pig to exchange the wrong is here assumed to be against him.
10. See Majnep and Bulmer (1977:15) for a statement of Wpc’s status and role.
11. See Golson in A.J. Strathem (1982:133).
 326 Inge Riebe

12. See Stephen (1987:250ff) and Mair (1969:199ff).

13. I use this term rather than mystical or non-empirical, but place it in quotes because I do not want to imply a
view that these things can never be understood or encompassed within our view of the universe.
14. See Needham (1978:33ff).
15. Bulmer: 1982:5.

REFERENCES

BLOCH, Maurice, and Jonathan PARRY (eds), 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge University Press.
BORY, Jean-Louis, and Guy HOCQUENGHEM 1976. Comment nous appelez-vous deja? Ces hommes que I’on dit
honosexuels. Paris, Calmann-Levy.
BULMER, R.N.H., 1982. Trying Not to Believe in Witchcraft in the Kaironk Valley. Paper given at a Conference at
La Trobe University, May 1982, on “Sorcery, Healing and Magic in Melanesia”.
DINNERSTEEN, Dorothy, 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New
York: Harper & Row.
GOLSON, Jack, 1982. The Ipomoean Revolution Revisited: Society and the Sweet Potato in the Upper Wahgi Valley,,
in A.J. Strathem (ed.), Inequality in the New Guinea Highlands. Cambridge University Press, pp. 109-36.
MAIR, Lucy, 1969. Witchcraft. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
MAJNEP, Ian Saem, and Ralph BULMER, 1977. Birds of My Kalam Country. Auckland, Auckland University Press.
NEEDHAM, Rodney, 1978. Primordial Characters. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia.
REAY, Marie, 1987. The Magico-Religious Foundations of New Guinea Highlands Warfare, in Stephen (ed.), pp.83-
120.
RIEBE, Inge, 1974. “And Then We Killed.”: a History of Fighting. MA thesis, University of Sydney.
----------- , 1990. “. . . Now They Have Put out the Fire”: Witchcraft and Social Change in the Kaironk Valley 1960-
1980. PhD diss., (in progress).
STEPHEN, Michelle, 1987. Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia. Melbourne University Press.

BUKA MARRIAGE RITUAL AND THE POWER OF TSUNONO

Eleanor Rimoldi and Max Rimoldi

University of Auckland

This essay is a discussion of two wedding rituals on Buka Island (North Solomons Province, Papua New
Guinea), two ceremonies where people perceived many errors in the performance. The first ceremony shows
the necessarily ambiguous outcome of attempts to achieve “perfect performance”, even when the ceremony is
designed to exemplify the selection of the correct traditions in the transmission of power and when those who
hold such power are demonstrably reverent towards the revival of a rarely enacted ritual.
The second wedding also follows the contours of established ceremonial practice on Buka and reflects in a
less guarded way conflicts that always beset the negotiation of marriage alliances. The problems, openly
addressed on this occasion, include the inflation of brideprice in cash payments and the novel pressure on
standard formulae for adjusting the claims of descent and alliance. The issues surrounding this wedding
involve the immediate history of the attempts by the Hahalis Welfare Society to adjust and reconcile customary
marriage practices.
Our discussion then proceeds with an examination of power and alliance in village Buka as issues raised in
each of the ceremonies and we attempt to take up the changes emerging and the differing perspectives on
change for those with power and those without.
A Buka scholar, Alexis Sareri (1974) has written an analysis of the effects of Christian missionary
teachings on traditional marriage among the Solos people of Buka, whereas our research focuses on the Halia-
Haku language groups. The action discussed here ranged over the villages of Lontis, Lemanmanu and
Hanahan on the north and east coasts of Buka although most of our research was carried out at Hahalis village,
the headquarters of an organisation which reached into the other villages. The Hahalis Welfare Society was a
populist movement which set itself up as an autonomous, independent economic and political unit generally
opposed to and suspicious of domination by Australian political and economic institutions.
In the late 1950’s a group of headmen ( tsunono ) from the two matrilineal moieties - Naboen and Nakaripa
- chose John Teosin to serve as a new kind of leader - one who would help them to cope with the demands

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