In accounts of "traditional Melanesia," we learned that witchcraft was an underlying structural condition of relations between men and women and an ever-present potential of social relations themselves. In many ways, traditional sorcery practices were considered legitimate and morally "good" However, there are reasons for thinking that recent upscaling of beating, burning, or killing of witches in Melanesia can be related to the Pentecostal beliefs that align witchcraft with evil and individual morality. In Vanuatu today, especially in urban areas, there is hectic activity aimed at sorting out the problem of sorcery and witchcraft in the new Pentecostal churches, and these churches are designed for exactly the purpose of healing and exorcism. They move into suburbs with what they call "spiritual warfare" and cleanse whole neighborhoods for signs of hidden evil. Whereas the locus of the divination practices in Pre-Christian Melanesia was a realm of forces beyond human control, the modern equivalent ritual is directly attacking the moral person and making that into both an instrument of divination and a sacrificial body.

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189

CHAPTER 8

Demons, Devils, and Witches in Pentecostal

Port Vila: On Changing Cosmologies

of Evil in Melanesia

Annelin Eriksen and Knut Rio

IntroductIon : P entecostal Port V Ila

Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, is a small but growing Melanesian

city. In the last decade, an increasing number of migrants from around

the archipelago have arrived to take part in the country's growing tour-

ist industry—as taxi-drivers, in hotels or as domestic workers, cleaners,

or shop assistants. Many migrants also arrive without work, and spend

periods of time just "hanging around" or as "SPR - sperem pablik rod "1

as they are locally phrased, before most of them go back to their island

or nd some low-income work. The city center itself is dominated by

tax-free stores, restaurants, coffee bars, and local handicraft markets, a

generally modern sphere of consumerism and wealth that is not really

available to most ni-Vanuatu. Few people of Vanuatu origin live in the

© The Author(s) 2017

K. Rio et al. (eds.), Pentecostalism and Witchcraft, Contemporary

Anthropology of Religion, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7_8

A. Eriksen (*) · K. Rio

University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

190 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

city center itself. Some of the most centrally based residential neighbor-

hoods and gated communities are almost exclusively settled by white

ex-pats, who operate on the managerial levels of the tourist industry,

as advisors or NGO-workers. The migrants from the different islands

of the country live in semi-formalized neighborhoods at the outskirts

of the city center. From the perspective of a village-dweller in the rural

areas, these urban settlements are somewhat strange and alien places.

This is also often pointed out in urban discourses: Vila i difren or Vila

i tanem kastom ("Port Vila is a different place" or "Port Vila changes

traditional life"). As a small city, it is not just a big composite village

or a more compact version of a Melanesian place. Whereas in a vil-

lage context kinship systems, avoidance rules, ceremonial obligations,

marriage patterns, and agricultural routines order everyday life, in the

urban neighborhoods people from different islands live side by side

with different languages, different kinship systems, and marriage prin-

ciples, and social life is regulated by completely different regimes. The

workplaces, the playgrounds, health services and schools, the different

settlements and their numerous kava-bars2 and stores, the many differ-

ent church communities,3 all form a new order of life. What matters

is not that the city brings people much closer in terms of access to the

market, to the state or to modernity, or that people abandon their kin-

ship awareness or relational obligations—but that city life represents

a unique situation with other social parameters and values (see also

Mitchell 2011 ). It has other spiritual, moral and ritual bearings. The

city of Port Vila can, therefore, be understood as "another world," and

we argue that we might see this as a Pentecostal world.

Since 2006 we have done research on Pentecostal churches in Port

Vila.4 In the rst phase of this research, we were eager to dene what

kind of churches were Pentecostal and which were not. More recently,

however, we have found that this was not necessarily the most useful way

to operate. It has recently dawned on us that it might be more reveal-

ing for our understanding of Port Vila if we viewed the whole city as

a Pentecostal context (see Eriksen 2009a , b ; Eriksen forthcoming).

First, because the wave of what we might call charismatic and spirit-

ual inuence affects the Catholic, the Presbyterian, and the independ-

ent churches as much as it does the self-declared Pentecostal churches.

Thus, the practices by which we often identify the Pentecostal faith,

such as speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, and spiritual heal-

ing, are now as much a part of, for instance, the Presbyterian register as

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 191

they are the Pentecostal (see Bratrud, this volume). Second, and even

more importantly, the core ideas and perspectives that emanate from

the Pentecostal worldview are not just relevant for a "religious" context.

Rather these ideas and practices are structuring everyday life in a total

sense. People relate to the presence of the Holy Spirit everywhere; as

much in the grocery store where there is a healing room in the back, as

in the market where women heal or talk about healing in-between sell-

ing fruits and vegetables, or in the schoolyard where secondary school

students talk about their experience of trance and encounters with the

Holy Spirit. But Pentecostalism has a total presence also for the non-

converts who relate to the claims, observations, and stories of spiritual

and divine presence. In this chapter, we claim, in accordance with the

general argument of this book, that an escalation of witchcraft and sor-

cery activity is integral to this Pentecostal world (see also Newell 2007 ).

Furthermore, we argue that in order to understand the reason for the

escalation, we need to understand the emergence of what we will call a

new cosmology of evil. Thus, in this chapter, we present ethnographic

glimpses from eldwork in 2010 and 2014, when we experienced an

intensication of cases of witchcraft and sorcery and the issue of spiritual

insecurity in Port Vila.

a cIty In n eed of ProtectIon

At the same time as we were going around the city to document the

many new charismatic so-called "break-away churches," in the spring

of 2010, we also became aware of numerous allegations of mysterious

illnesses, magical robberies, and suspicious deaths (see also Rio 2011 ).

This was a period of intense attention to new forms of magic and sor-

cery, articulated in conversations between people in the streets and

settlements, in kava-bars, in churches, and in the media. As much as pos-

sible we tried to get close to the events and tried to nd people who

were involved. We got partial accounts of these happenings, some from

the pastors we interviewed, some from old friends, and some from news-

papers reports. We do not have space here to ll in the total picture, but

we will try to convey a few snapshots of this many-sided situation.

Just after we arrived in January of 2010, we were talking to one of the

Pentecostal pastors about politics and the presidential election that had

just taken place in the fall of 2009. He was eager to tell us that in the

build-up to the election the Port Vila Council of Churches had decided

192 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

to run a spiritual campaign, in order to "protect the nation" at this criti-

cal point. The pastor and his fellow preachers from other churches had

surrounded the city with spiritual protection. They set up prayer sites at

the geographical points that marked the city's boundaries—one on Ira

Island to the east, one close to the national airport in the north, one on

the Bellevue hill to the east and one on Pango Point to the south. This

was to ensure that "evil" and "dirt" and "corruption" should not enter

into the election, and the league of pastors with their intense prayer and

spreading of holy water hence upheld the moral integrity of the city dur-

ing that election weekend. At the same time, all the people in the various

churches around the city also joined in prayer directed toward the city as

a circumscribed realm. The people of the churches thus fenced in the city

at this liminal moment.

It should be noted that whenever political decisions are being made

people in Port Vila suspect that magic is also being used to inuence pol-

iticians as well as voters. One of the pastors we talked to added that every

rst Monday of each month, the Prime Minister prayed in his house with

two or three chosen pastors from different Pentecostal ministries. They

prayed for upcoming sessions of the Parliament if there were unrest, frag-

mentation, or motions of no condence; they prayed for the progress

of the national economy; they prayed for the success of the building of

a new road, or they prayed for better health and less sorcery and evil.

These are all things that threaten to harm the benevolent nation by con-

tinuously exposing it to the powers of fragmentation and inequality.

Here, we are already touching on what we imply when we refer to

Port Vila as a Pentecostal city. It is a space that is held out by its citi-

zens as a special, almost holy realm, and a personied realm that is like

a person in need of protection, care, and leadership. It might easily be

corrupted by evil, through the inuence of overseas businessmen or mis-

sionaries, or from ancestral traditions brought in from the outer islands,

but also from within the city itself in terms of envy, selshness, and greed.

These corruptive and disruptive inuences are the foundation for the

"Pentecostal witchcraft" (see Newell 2007), that the many new churches

around Port Vila are focused on. They dene this realm very widely and

populate it with "demons," "spirits," (devil in Bislama), "black magic,"

"poisoning" with herbs, and sorcerous remedies such as su (instruments

of homicidal sorcery). When there is an illness in a household or in a

neighborhood people often speculate if a su or other magical remedies

such as human ashes or bones of stillborn babies are buried in the ground

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 193

or hidden behind the house of the victim. The new "healing ministries"

specialize in spiritual warfare raids into such neighborhoods to clean them

out and to detect such remedies. Our student Hildur Thorarensen, also

did eldwork in Port Vila in the spring of 2010, on the Survival Church

in the neighborhood of Freswota. She describes in detail such a spirit-

ual warfare raid in her Master Thesis. A family came to the church asking

for help because they were afraid there might be some sort of nakaimas

(sorcery) in their house. There has been a lot of suspicion of black magic

going on in that street, and four persons were said to have died in mys-

terious ways. The members of the church prepared "spiritual warfare,"

and one night the congregation walked together to the cursed house, the

pastor and his wife, some of the older founders of the church, some of

whom were "Prayer Warriors" and one was a "Prophetess," in addition

to some choir girls and boys from the Youth Group. They were met by

the family, sitting quietly on a mat inside their corrugated iron house.

The congregation stopped outside, and the Pastor started giving instruc-

tion for the ceremony. Most were to stand in the back singing, some were

to pray out loudly. They were now watching for something to react to

the singing or praying, a rat, a gecko or an insect, since that would be a

'devil'. Members of the group were to give notice or try to kill it imme-

diately. The Prophetess, the Pastor, and the Prayer Warriors went inside

the house and started praying, while the rest of the congregation stood

outside and began to sing. Thorarensen writes:

Suddenly the Prophetess came running out of the house, her eyes are closed

and her arms are shaking; a usual sign of her being possessed by the Holy

Spirit. The Prayer Warriors and the pastor follow right behind her, still pray-

ing loudly, as the prophetess runs away from the house and down a path.

After them follows the family, and nally the rest of us, still singing. At this

point a girl from the Youth Group whispered to me that the Prophetess has

now felt the presence of evil spirits, and that she has begun chasing them.

The chase continues up and down narrow paths around the neighboring

houses at such an increasing pace that in the end we are all running, and

nally uphill towards some banana trees. The Prophetess and the Prayer

Warriors start hitting the trees, chopping them down to the ground with

their bare hands. Some Prayer Warriors are still praying, and one of them is

angrily shouting "Out, devil! Out". (Thorarensen 2011: 91–92)

What Thorarensen describes here was going on in many parts of the

city. These local events were about protecting neighborhoods that were

194 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

marked by evil spirits, either as outside inuences or internal corruptions.

This particular form of spiritual warfare also denes the general measures

taken for protection, being as relevant on the level of the nation and the

capital as inside the household and toward the individual.

During our explorations of Pentecostal Port Vila in 2010, we also

talked to some of the members of the Melanesian Brotherhood, an

action-oriented branch of the Anglican Church that is dedicated to sort-

ing out spiritual, demonic, and sorcery-related problems. They wear

black robes as uniforms, and all brothers have a powerful walking stick

that is highly respected and widely reputed to perform miracles. The

brothers gave us accounts of two episodes that had taken place in the

last months. The rst one concerned one of their members who had

died suddenly after leaving Port Vila for his home island. As part of their

spiritual investigation of what they perceived to be a suspicious murder,

they had traced his movements during his last days in Port Vila. They

were convinced that he had been victim to a sorcery attack in Port Vila,

and by following "spiritual leads" around town they were on the track of

the killer. Their search became a detailed spiritual mapping, where they

found hotspots for evil forces in certain locations of the city and tried to

divine these places as part of the investigation. They had formed a com-

plete picture of the deceased person's trajectory toward his death and

the various human and spiritual agencies involved in it. They had con-

cluded that their brother was already dead in the Port Vila harbor when

he set his foot on the ship that was to take him to his home island. He

had only appeared to be still living on board the ship and when going

ashore at home two days later–because he was put in a zombie state by

the sorcerers who had killed him in Port Vila. As a result of this killing,

the Melanesian brothers now considered themselves to be implicated in a

spiritual war. They were under attack from a league of sorcerers that they

believed wanted to control the city.

Another case that had occupied them in this spiritual war concerned

a young man who had become a "vampire" (fampa in Bislama). The

vampire was rst held captive by the chiefs in his neighborhood, and the

Melanesian Brothers were called in since they were the only ones who

could come close to him and detain him. He had superhuman strength

and they had to ritually pacify him, they told us. This was a young

man in one of the squatter settlements who had been transformed into

a phantasmagoric creature, half man half animal. The brothers had

deduced that it had all began because the boy had been smoking a lot

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 195

of marijuana and living an outgoing and "wild" life. In their reasoning,

they pinned down the start of his transformation to one particular night

when he had smoked so much marijuana that he had become completely

unconscious. The Melanesian Brothers believed that it was at this time

that a witchcraft creature had entered his body and that this creature was

now controlling him. He was publicly exposed as a vampire when his

girlfriend had to go to the hospital because she lost her strength, and

the doctors conrmed that she was low on blood. At the hospital, she

had told her family that her boyfriend had regularly been sucking blood

from her (see also Rio 2011: 57). When reported in newspapers, TV, and

gossip, the case caused much alarm and conrmed the widespread worry

about the spiritual siege that the city was under. When we talked to the

chiefs of the vampire's settlement they also emphasized the special role of

the Melanesian Brothers. It was because of them that they had managed

to restrain him, to pacify his powers and liberate him from the grasp that

the witchcraft creature had over him. After he had been treated by the

Brothers, the boy was sent to prison, but he was released after a while

since he collaborated with the police and gave up the names of the peo-

ple who were behind the witchcraft. Again the idea—equally widespread

among the Brothers, inside the system of law as well as on the streets of

Port Vila—that there was a league of sorcerers that wanted to control

the city, and that anyone and everyone would be victim to their superhu-

man powers.

We experienced that these circumstances were new and surprising for

people in Vanuatu. Not only because it was so widely publicized in the

news, and since it implicated the Melanesian Brotherhood, the police

and courts of law in new alliances around the occult scene, but also

because people could not recognize in it any traditional forms of spirit

possession, sorcery or witchcraft. On national television, it was said that

a "White millionaire" was behind the league of criminals and that he had

supplied them with magic that originated in the Western world. It was

added that as the boy drank blood from his girlfriend, he would become

a white woman. Reportedly, the special tooth that he used for sucking

blood had been an instrument from African magic. All sorts of mixed

rumors and speculations of this kind arose, and people pointed out to

us that it was as if the city was under attack or that their city security had

been breached. Despite the intensive measures for protection set up by

the churches and healers, unknown occult powers of evil were on the

loose inside their own city.

196 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

Another case that got our attention at the same time was a court

case around police brutality. In 2009, the police had launched a cam-

paign called "Operation Clean-Up," where the aim was to recapture a

group of escaped prisoners. One of the captives was probably killed

during the man-hunt, although never found, another was killed dur-

ing interrogations. He suffered "32 different injuries to his head, chest,

abdomen, right upper limb, left upper limb, right lower limb, left lower

limb, and back" (Daily Post, March 5, 2010). The violence of the opera-

tion shocked the urban population as they read about it in the newspa-

pers. Because of this extremely violent death, an Australian coroner was

appointed to lead an ofcial enquiry into its circumstances. During his

work, it became clear that members of the police sabotaged his work

and even threatened him (Dawson 2010: 33). Police ofcers excused the

death by saying that "the deceased was not looking normal, being overly

aggressive and under the inuence of drugs" and that it was the drugs

that had killed him (Dawson 2010: 17).

Generally, it seems to us that in this case, the intense activity of detect-

ing evil in the pentecostalised protection of the city spilled over into the

state apparatuses in a very brutal and direct way. We knew from our visits

to the healing ministries and new church congregations that these spe-

cic members of the police force were eager participants in one of the

new international charismatic churches in town. There were thus clear

parallels between "Operation clean-up" and Pentecostal crusades, spir-

itual warfare, and campaigns for a moral cleansing of the city. The people

performing the latter were also the chief agents of the former (see also a

comparative case from Fiji, Trnka 2011). The newspaper writings as well

as the coroner's report revealed the police understanding of the prisoners

as "sinners," due to their breach of a moral code around rape, alcohol,

and marijuana. This breach of a moral order and thereby the tainting

of the city's larger moral integrity provided the energy with which the

police found the escaped prisoners, the violent punishment as well as

their treatment of the foreign Coroner who was also seen to be invad-

ing and trespassing into the moral order of the city. In this latter case, we

can see the ways in which also the state becomes part of the totalizing

Pentecostal context.

The issue of marijuana ran through many of the cases and much of the

talk of the city. We became painfully aware of this in relation to another

situation that came up during our stay. A close relative of the family with

whom we had stayed during our previous eldwork back to 1995 was

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 197

seriously ill. The young man had been working as crew on one of the

cargo ships that deliver goods to the outer islands, and his father, himself

a member of a small independent church in one of the settlements, told

us that for the last few years his son had been smoking a lot of mari-

juana. This drug, more than alcohol, in these circles of Port Vila, is seen

to draw evil forces to a person, as the intoxication leads to unconscious-

ness and change of mind. Seemingly, this state of mind implies a corrup-

tion of the person that is very much a target of Pentecostal warfare in

Port Vila. In the case of the young man, it also became clear why. The

problem with marijuana is that it blocks one's capacities for communicat-

ing with God and the Holy Spirit. A clear mind and alert perception are

required to be a good Christian. At one point we were invited to see the

sick man and his family on the outskirts of the town. He was lying on the

oor, trembling and delirious. His father and mother and other members

of the family were sitting around him, praying. They had been doing

this continually for a few days, each taking their round so that the prayer

could be kept up around the clock. But, as they explained, it couldn't

be fully effective, since the boy himself wasn't able to communicate with

God because of his delirious state. As in the case of the vampire above,

the problem was that the marijuana had taken hold of him and blocked

his abilities for communicating with God. It turned out in our later com-

munications with the father that when he said "marijuana," he meant

this in a broad sense. It was also a form of sorcery (posen in Bislama) that

came with the marijuana that had put him in such a delirious state. "It

had entered his blood," he said, so that there could be no cure for it.

His father speculated that the marijuana lifestyle on board the trading

ship had made him an easy target for the sorcery from one of the outer

islands. The boy died a couple of days later. At the hospital, they told us

that he had cancer in his blood and that he couldn't have been helped by

doctors or medicine.

These few glimpses of rumors, concerns, and activities related to

witchcraft and sorcery in Port Vila in 2010, reveal the moral warfare that

was taking place at all levels of city life. When we argue that Port Vila

is a Pentecostal city in a broad sense, we imply not only that the city

sees a growth in Pentecostal, or Pentecostal-like congregations, but that

concerns and activities which we identify as Pentecostal, such as spiritual

warfare and healing, take place at all levels of social life (in the police

force, in family life, in prayer circles, in politics, in media, etc.). These

activities involve an intense occupation with where evil comes from,

198 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

cleaning it up, and providing protection from it. Let us now turn closer

scrutiny to what this concern with evil is about.

toward an a nthroPology of eVIl In Port V Ila

In this Pentecostal world the distinction between good and evil, between

prayer and sin, between past and present is paramount. It is the world

where binaries are center stage. Pentecostalism produces this black and

white world. The order that emerges in the neighborhoods of Port Vila

displays a very specic historic and cultural dynamic, but it has also much

in common with places like Luanda in Angola (see Blanes, this volume)

or Kinshasa in The Democratic Republic of Congo (see Pype, this vol-

ume), or for that matter Guatemala City (see O'Neill 2010); anywhere in

the world where Pentecostals engage in "world-making and world-break-

ing" (see Jorgensen 2005).

Evil is often understood in a personied form in Christian think-

ing. Evil takes the form of the devils and demons. Surprisingly little is

found in the Bible about the devil, but it is important in the teaching

of particularly Protestant thinkers and theologians, as Calvin and Luther

(see Meyer 1999; Russell 1986). As has been pointed out by histori-

ans of religion, theologians, and anthropologists alike, evil has a specic

signicance in Christian cosmology. This is true both for its European

development (see Russell 1986 , 1987 ) and in missionary activities in for

instance Africa (Meyer 1999; Englund 2004) in Oceania (Barker 1990 ;

MacDonald 2015 ) and elsewhere in the global south. One might say

that the concept of the devil creates a phantasmagoric space where cru-

cial world-making processes take place.

In spite of this, there has been little focus and discussion about the

role of this conception of evil and of the devil, as Christianity has arrived

outside of the areas where it has had its historical origins. However, with

the rise of Pentecostalism, ethnographic descriptions of articulations

of the devil have emerged. Meyer, working among the Ewe in Ghana

(1999 ), has argued that Pentecostals became successful exactly because

they took the devil, the personied form of evil, seriously. Ewe Christians

who had heard from established Presbyterian missions that Ewe ances-

tral spirits were diabolical and proof of the devil's work, were caught in

a paradox; if their heathen traditions belonged to the devil, how could

one be free from them? Free from one's past and what was understood as

the devil's work? With the Pentecostals' focus on deliverance, a new tool

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 199

to deal with the devil was introduced. Barker (1990) has pointed to the

signicance of the specic discourse on evil for the Maisin of Papua New

Guinea. In the encounter between the missionaries and Maisin ideas

of sorcery and witchcraft, a space for a re-articulation of Maisin spirit-

ual ideas opened up. Sorcery and witchcraft became an integral part of

Maisin Christianity as a representation of evil, much in the same way as

Meyer has described it for Ghana.

Returning to Port Vila, one of the key aspects of life in this

Pentecostal context is the new signicance of evil. As we have seen, social

life in Port Vila neighborhoods rotates around ideas, speculations, worry,

and preventive action against very tangible and highly present forces of

sorcery and demons. Spending an afternoon in any household in one

of these neighborhoods one is quickly drawn into this world: in gossip

about the neighbor, in discussions about the cause of someone's sickness,

or in getting advice about which path to take to the grocery store, or

which grocery store to go to in the rst place. There is an overwhelm-

ing presence of an idea of spiritual danger, which is just around the cor-

ner, ever-present and threatening (see also Strong, this volume, where

"witches are everywhere").

In our most recent eldwork in 2014, we worked with a selection of

healers, from different denominations, who all work though the Holy

Spirit. Although the idea of evil is present in everyday discourse, the

healers are more articulate than most people about the nature of evil.

The word "evil" itself is not so current in these narratives. It is more

talk of "demons," "devils," "poison," or "dirty," "no good" things. The

healers develop specic images that they use in their communication with

patients to alert them to danger. One of the healers pointed out that the

work as a healer is rst and foremost about giving protection to people

from the roaming danger, a constant presence and threat of malignant

spirits always lurking in the vicinity. She and other healers talk about Port

Vila as "a jungle." Therefore healing is not only about helping people

who are sick, but also doing work in the neighborhood to prevent the

moral conditions that cause sickness, death, and misfortune. Because evil

spirits are all around, this is constant work, a nonstop effort. By look-

ing at the ways in which the healers talk about the jungle of bad things

and how it operates in this world, it is possible to give a portrait of what

evil looks like in this context. Understanding what evil is, is also the key

to an understanding of how a social order emerges, and thus, as we will

show, what the effects of Pentecostal witchcraft are. If Pentecostalism is

200 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

a machine producing Manichean binaries, and the binary between good

and evil is the most signicant, this fundamentally shapes social life. The

nation of Vanuatu, the city of Port Vila, the specic neighborhoods, and

household, as well as interiors of persons, are spaces where evil is to be

kept at a distance. With tools like discernment, prayer, healing and spirit-

ual warfare, protective boundaries against evil are erected. These bound-

aries need constant ritual work and maintenance. Thus, there are mainly

three aspects of healing; rst, seeing (or "discernment" as the healers

call it) where evil is located and, second, casting out the demons and

banishing them from the perimeters, and, third, erecting and keeping

boundaries between the good and the evil. The most effective healers,

and those with the most prominent reputation have different versions of

what they call the gift of discernment. They have x-ray sight, they can

see in dreams, or they receive specic sensations when evil approaches

(as a throbbing pain in the forehead or in the palms of the hands). These

abilities mark the healers as distinct from others. Most people cannot see,

nor feel, where and how the evil will approach. Therefore most people

are dependent on the healers for protection.

Also in Port Vila evil takes a personied form. "Demons are all

around us," one of the healers told us. When she walks the streets of

the city center in Port Vila, she does not see the faces of ordinary peo-

ple passing by. Rather she sees the grotesque faces of demons. She can

see what others cannot, and even the people who are possessed by evil

demons might not know it.

The healers are often just known as "women who pray."5 One of

the ways in which one can protect oneself from the demons is through

prayer. If one regularly attends prayer meetings, organized by the heal-

ers, one can achieve a certain protection. However, very often, people

neglect to "trust God," and for instance listen to advise given by well-

meaning relatives to drink herbal brews, to wear specic protective items

to guard against specic magic or to heal specic symptoms. According

to women who pray these remedies open the way fully for demons: these

are the very media through which the demons enter the body and, ulti-

mately, the soul.

Sorcery, or posen and nakaimas, can appear in many different ver-

sions, but the healers often detect it as material or territorial technologies

which are instantiated consciously by someone to inict harm on some-

one else. For instance, this can be a parcel made from specic bones and

ashes planted outside a house to inict harm on those living there. One

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 201

of the healers we worked with has the gift of X-ray sight, and she can

see right through persons or materials. She is also a popular healer for

businessmen who are afraid of competitors who might target them with

nakaimas to drive them out of business. A healer is therefore often asked

not only to bless new businesses, and thus protect them, but also, regu-

larly, to "scan" the places for sorcery. The healers adjust their treatment

to the specic kind of evil that is in question. If a person is possessed

by a demon, the healers need to identify the medium though which

the demon has gained access to the patient's body. If the symptoms are

different, for instance just trouble at work, in marriage or politics, the

cause might not be a demon but nakaimas. However, the healers often

articulated that the differences or nuances between instruments or causes

didn't matter to them. Whether an afiction was caused by ancestral spir-

its, urban demons, overseas magic or local sorcery items it still had the

one and same origin and cure. It was the result of an opening or a crack

in the moral constitution of the person–a crack that had allowed the

evil forces inside the self – and the crack had to be closed by the Holy

Spirit through discernment and prayer. In Port Vila evil is becoming an

absolute phenomenon; there are no "grey" areas. There are no forms of

sorcery or witchcraft or demons that are only slightly evil. And the ques-

tion of evil must be located to the integrity of the person affected by

it. As an extension of the argument forwarded by Robbins in his arti-

cle on Pentecostal ritual (2004) we should add that probably the most

important factor for explaining the popularity of Pentecostalism must be

the role that healing rituals and rituals of discernment play for reden-

ing an entirely new eld of "spiritual powers" around the individual per-

son. The cleansing of neighborhoods, cities or nations–where the ritual

is taken out of the church building and into the streets, brings about the

change that is the Pentecostal revolution. This is what Robbins calls "the

Pentecostal promotion of ritual as a mode of sociality" (Robbins 2009 :

63). People leave behind the church building and its ritual services and

instead cast the everyday as a platform for generalized ritual activity. By

ritual, we here imply a form of routinely engagement with forces that

lie beyond the observable and tangible, that pertains to the sorting out

of invisible forces that have penetrated into persons, things, or relations.

The object of the rituals is the discernment of these invisible inuences,

their cleansing or casting out and the reestablishing of the normality of

the situation. In Port Vila everywhere you go you are subject to attacks

from these spiritual inuences, and so the city is also becoming obsessed

202 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

with purity on all levels. The sources of evil might be from ancestral spir-

its from your homeland, it might come from foreign products like the

canned food in the Chinese stores, it might enter through your mobile

phone or through television or the Internet, or it might arrive in the

form of intentional sorcery in the form of magic parcels of sorcerous

remedies planted under your porch or in your garden.

What is new in the situation is not that people in Port Vila are under

the inuence of destructive forces, and, as elsewhere in Melanesia and

the rest of the world, people in Vanuatu have probably always taken

very seriously the negative inuence from other human and non-human

beings. What is new in the Pentecostal circumscription of social life in

Port Vila is both that people subject all afictions to a unitary language

of Pentecostalist warfare and healing and that they perceive their life,

wellbeing, and personhood to be primarily related to protection and a

hygiene of spiritual cleanliness. This cleanliness is no longer associ-

ated with specic customary taboos, avoidance of certain relatives, nor

achieved through measures of generosity and gift-giving. It is no longer

possible to keep ancestral spirits at a distance by performing initiations or

sacrices. Instead, the ancestral spirits are now purely penetrative agen-

cies who roam free in the urban setting, in accompaniment with all the

other destructive agencies that cause danger to person and community.

The Pentecostal way of life is a form of constant warfare, which also

results in the direct attacks on the specically local diversity of spiritual

forms. Pentecostalism invests a lot of energy into this local diversity but

only in order to attack it and try to overcome it with its own form of

universalism. In the recent decade in Vanuatu this has also resulted in

violent attacks on accused witches, and sometimes even the murder of

witches (see Rio 2011; Bratrud, this volume).

oVerturnI ng a tra dItIona l V ocabulary

As noted in the introduction to this volume the vocabulary of sorcer y

and witchcraft is always written into histories of translation and social

change. Similarly, posen and nakaimas in Port Vila are concepts that

reproduce and reinvigorate and sometimes overwrite former usages.

They are Bislama words that have absorbed in them especially the life

in the city and the danger of being exposed to other people's traditions.

They become key words for sorcery and witchcraft which are practiced in

different ways around the many islands of Vanuatu. Although the words

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 203

in Port Vila are now unied around ideas of evil, it is not necessarily so

elsewhere in Vanuatu. On the island of Ambrym where we did eld-

work previously, in the 1990s, abiou as a local concept was understood

and explained in a very different way. Most importantly, the Ambrym

concept of abiou was not necessarily understood as evil (see Rio 2002 ;

Rio and Eriksen 2013), and as it has also been the case in the rest of

Melanesia, sorcery was often a legitimate form of governance and con-

trol (see Stephen et al. 1987; Dalton 2007). Although Ambrym has

had a long history of Christianity, beginning with the rst missionaries

in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the binary notion of good

and evil had lesser signicance for the concept of abiou. Catholicism,

Presbyterianism, and SDA forms of Christianity had an inuence on peo-

ple's lives and in particular on gender relations and notions of equality

(see Eriksen 2005 ; 2008 ). Social life was structured on the continuity of

kin relations and on the value of connectedness, but not so much around

good and evil6 . In this discourse of abiou, it was not easy to determine

who the guilty one was since spiritual powers were per denition ambig-

uous, ephemeral, and hard to determine. The gure of the diviner was

determining cures based on relational skills and herbal knowledge and

not so much judging either victim or sorcerer on moral grounds. This is

in line with many accounts of Melanesia, where we have learned that sor-

cery and witchcraft were underlying structural conditions of relations and

an ever-present potential of social relations (Hocart 1925; Malinowski

1926; Layard 1930; Fortune 1932). Sorcery and witchcraft were hetero-

geneous and multivocal aspects of ordinary intimate relations (see also

Geschiere 2013 ; Stroeken, this volume). Abiou on Ambrym worked in a

clearly non-personied form; it was neither caused by a specic, unitary

person nor did it attack a unitary victim as much as his or her relational

capacities. It was dangerous, something to be aware of and be careful

about, but at no point related to the moral qualities of the inner unitary

person, classied as "evil" and opposed to "the good". We can thereby

say that there is a long stretch, and an ontological rupture, between the

world of Ambrym abiou and Port Vila nakaimas or demon.

In Port Vila in its Pentecostal state, evil is becoming personied not

only in the sense that the devil, demon, witch or sorcerer is a person who

wants to harm you, but also in the sense that the result of evil is the

eradication of the person. In other words, the cause of evil is personi-

ed but the target of evil is also the inner self. Thus, when the healers

work, they need not only to identify the cause of the patients' suffering

204 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

(the form of corruption, who or what has caused it etc.), but also to

restore the person. When a person has experienced becoming possessed

by a demon, the healer needs to not only rid the body of the evil, but

also to restore the boundaries of the person. One might say that in order

for the moral person to appear healed after possession, the person needs

to be reconstituted through the reestablishment of the active, conscious

self. In cases of nakaimas sorcery and demon possession, this is what the

healer does; she reestablishes an internal subject in active possession of

one's own body and mind (see also MacCarthy, this volume).

Demons threaten the subject by extinguishing the internal self. That

is, the demon (also in the form of marijuana) is a force that captures the

consciousness of the person and takes over the will, the agency and the

outlook on the world. It transforms the person into a desiring and crav-

ing gure—wanting what others retain; therefore envy is often the sign

of evil. A person possessed by a demon, or a person with access to nakai-

mas, is fueled by envy; for other people's wealth, but also for other peo-

ple's personhood; for their "inner selves," as one of the healers expressed

it. In order to protect oneself against this roaming evil one thus needs

to always be conscious of oneself; of whether one's actions are in line

with God, or following the words of God. In order to trust God and to

pray, however, one needs the intact "inner self"; if not, one cannot be

"saved" from evil. In other words, healing demands of the person to be

conscious (i.e., "awake"), to be able to engage consciously with God,

as we saw above. Thus, the healer addresses a eld of relationships that

are entirely contained inside the person—in the interplay between being

awake and being asleep, conscious and unconscious, alien and authentic,

healing and corrupting, and good and evil. It is this binary struggle that

gives energy not only to the healing process but to the social dynamics

of this Pentecostal context; it is from these binaries that the fundamental

social mechanisms emerge and shape the constitution and governance of

both the person and the household—and, one might argue, the city and

the nation.

trust In god

So far we have argued that the binary distinction between good and evil

is fundamental for social life in Pentecostal Port Vila and for Pentecostal

witchcraft in particular. We have also argued that evil takes a personied

form and it attacks the integrity of the person, of the neighborhood and

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 205

the entire city. For instance, one of the healers we worked with (in 2014)

had identied a so-called "clever", a man with particular knowledge of

herbal medicine, as a person who had inicted harm on others. She had

repeatedly noticed that the neighborhood he was living in had been

particularly inicted with sorcery. She also knew the cause. She knew

that this older man, who had for long been respected for his particular

knowledge of traditional medicine, now gradually was losing his posi-

tion. Few people consulted him anymore, as healers who worked with

the Holy Spirit had become more popular and more accessible, and as

the new churches and the new style of worship had become more wide-

spread. After a particular incident, where she had detected a particularly

malignant form of sorcery in this neighborhood (bones of a dead baby

buried at the entrance of a house), she decided that he had to be named.

There is a lot of evidence here, she told us. Not only has almost all his

neighbors been affected by his black magic; some had become sick, oth-

ers had domestic problems, and some had problems at work. Even more

signicant as evidence, however, was the fact that his wife had an ulcer

on her leg that would not heal. She had heard this from a person who

had recently visited the house of the old man and his wife. The wife had

been sitting on a chair nearby as the visitor consulted the kleva. He had

seen that the wife had been hiding a sore under a calico. This was no

ordinary sore; it was big, open, and smelly. According to the visitor,

the sore revealed a leg that was in the process of decomposing. In itself,

this is evidence, the healer pointed out. The sore reveals the presence

of evil. The sore is evidence that the so-called "clever" cannot heal her.

Furthermore, it is proof of his lack of will to seek real help; to be healed

through the Holy Spirit. Lastly, he had good reason to be envious; as he

was losing his ground as a knowledgeable man.

There is a pattern to the location of nakaimas in Port Vila: If people

are poor, miserable, sick or victims of bad luck, they have all the more

reason to be envious of others. The feeling of envy attracts evil through

demons. Dealing with herbal medicine is proof of the lack of trust in

God and thus the proximity to evil. Since God is always good to the

righteous he will always give blessing and healing to those who deserve

it. Every person is responsible for his or her own commitment to God. It

is thus very likely that people who suffer from poverty or illness, like this

man and his wife whose wound would not heal, have actually welcomed

evil and not committed themselves to God.

206 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

conclusIon

There is zealous sorting out of the problem of sorcery and witchcraft

taking place in the neighborhoods of Port Vila. Many of the churches

are designed for exactly the purpose of healing and exorcism, and they

attract followers because people come to know them as "healing min-

istries." Every church and every congregation have several women who

specialize in different forms of healing, exorcism, and discernment. In

similar ways to what is going on, say, in South Africa or Nigeria, these

churches move into suburbs with what they call "spiritual warfare"

and approach, clean out or exorcise whole neighborhoods for signs of

witchcraft. In the jungle of evil, the healers can see what others cannot,

and help in the process of creating order by discerning between good

and evil, and thus between God and the devil. This cosmology of evil

rests on a kind of "absolutism," of a clear distinction between black

and white, clean and unclean, good and evil. This Manichean form of

reasoning also triggers social activities that pursue this logic: the logic

of warfare, of "cleaning up" and the erection of protective boundaries.

Healers are essential in this work, but they are not the only participants.

Rather, this is an effort a whole neighborhood can at times be involved

in. Accused witches in these suburbs of Port Vila are held captive in their

neighborhood and the righteous people of the community legitimately

beat them up over several days, in order to get them to tell the truth

and confess. In neighborhood trials, imitating Western court cases, the

individual suspected of evil is confronted with intent, motive, and cir-

cumstantial evidence (see Rio 2014). The direction the witch hunt takes

in this Christian context is ambiguous. For outsiders, it may look like

punishment or vengeance, but for relatives of the accused it is about

separating the good from the evil so as to restore moral integrity and

balance in the person. As such, it is rst and foremost an act of order

and purity, and in the process, the patient should be relieved of demons

whereas witches should be exorcised or killed. Christianity's language of

sacrice thereby places itself into and transforms a social ontology that

holds sorcery to be a fundamental underlying, constitutional category of

social forces.

Witchcraft and sorcery in Port Vila today is thus fundamentally

Christian, more specically Pentecostal. In the discourses about healing

and spiritual warfare one can see worries about a "heathen" past where

spirits from "taem bifoa" (the past) or from foreign places emerge in new

8 DEMONS, DEVILS, AND WITCHES IN PENTECOSTAL PORT … 207

disguises, and one can detect a will for another future, where success,

material and spiritual, will remove the fear of evil. Establishing protective

borders against evil is crucial for social life in Port Vila. These aspects of

the universalism of Pentecostal demonology have been widely described

from all corners of the world. But Pentecostal healing ministries are also

premised on a basis of local engagement. They are popular movements

that take seriously the underlying social predicaments of the congrega-

tion but not by turning to historical or social conventions about what

these predicaments are. Their popular power rather comes from rede-

ning the spiritual and interhuman realm altogether. Their language of

"warfare," "spiritual mapping," and "discernment" reveal their intense

activity of renaming and reorganizing the inventories of the spiritual

realms. People in Port Vila, coming from various islands of the archi-

pelago as they do, used to differentiate between for instance people with

magical skills and people who unconsciously embodied cannibalistic

desires, between ancestor spirits who had been safely transported to their

origin place after death and those who hadn't, between many different

remedies such as stones for producing pigs and other stones that would

kill people and destroy crops. It was the work of the diviner to address

the multiplicity of signs and to create order and remedy out of the mul-

titude. If you ask people in the Pentecostal churches today they will tell

you that all this differentiation was itself part of the problem of evil, as

was the idea that people from the different areas of the country used

to live according to their own "law". The gure of the diviner, merely

through his work of disentangling the multiplicity, is now also seen as

instead entangling himself into the evil of the multiplicity. It appeals

strongly to them that they can now subject all these differential aspects

of their past to a unitary and universal cure.

notes

1. "Sperem rod " means, literally, "spearing the road," indicating youth just

walking up and down the street.

2. Kava is an intoxicating drink prepared from the roots of the Piper

Methysticum plant.

3. Eriksen and Andrew (2010) reports on over 50 new Pentecostal churches

in Port Vila.

4. Eriksen and Rio have done eldwork together in Port Vila during repeated

visits in 1999, 2000, 2006, 2010, and 2014.

208 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

5. It is mostly women who operate as healers. With a few exceptions of ado-

lescent boys, we never heard of male churchly healers.

6. We are here talking about Ambrym in the mid-1990s. Ambrym today

might, and most probably is, part of a slightly different religious landscape,

with an increasing presence of Pentecostal churches.

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210 A. ERIKSEN AND K. RIO

authors ' b IograPh y

Annelin Eriksen is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology,

University of Bergen, where she leads a project on Gender and Pentecostalism.

She has worked since 1995 in Vanuatu, rst on Ambrym and later also in Port

Vila. Her work deals with social and cultural change, Christianity and gen-

der relations. Her publications include Gender, Christianity and Change in

Vanuatu: An Analysis of Social Movements in North Ambrym (2008), New

Life: Pentecostalism as Social Critique in Vanuatu (2009) and Contemporary

Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation State (co-edited with Bruce

Kapferer and Kari Telle; Berghahn, 2010).

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 ethnography since 1995,

with eldwork in Vanuatu. His work on social ontology, 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 Pacic (with Edvard

Hviding, 2011), and The Arts of Government: Crime, Christianity and Policing in

Melanesia (with Andrew Lattas, 2011).

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... le voisin qui observe votre propriété, votre femme, vos enfants, votre nouveau moteur hors-bord ou votre nouvelle télévision, peut déclencher une force du mal (demon en bislama) qui a le pouvoir de vous posséder, de vous manger ou de vous détruire. à Port-vila, et comme le montrent eriksen et Rio (2017), jelas et demon sont de nos jours les causes de maladie ou de malheurs les plus souvent évo-quées. On peut peut-être expliquer cela comme un phénomène de nivèlement existant en regard de l'impératif moral du partage, et impliquant le don et le transfert de toutes ses possessions aux autres membres de la communauté familiale. ...

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Endemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of discerning people's intentions. Established ethnographic and linguistic data from PNG meanwhile document witnesses as imagined to be embodied, interested, lacking a privileged relationship to truth, and thus susceptible to coercion. Recasting the PNG corruption issue in terms of witnessing foregrounds a perceived cultural conflict between inclusion and duty; it also reveals how and why the Christian God was invoked—using debt and obligation rhetoric—to end corruption at the national scale.

  • Tom Bratrud Tom Bratrud

The past decade has seen a renewed anthropological interest in values, morality, and ethics. This article engages with this field by demonstrating how values can be strategies as well as ideals, prone to destabilize social order and divide people precisely because they are thought to be shared. The concept of 'love', referring to everyday practices of concern and care for others, is a core value for living on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu. However, adherence to the same core value does not necessarily create an ordered social world. Analysing three ethnographic cases, one of them a dispute with fatal consequences, I propose a model for studying values that accommodates ambiguity by uniting the notion of shared social values with individual experience and strategy. A methodological argument is that it is crucial for anthropological studies of values to assess the context for people's shifting interpretations and articulations of value in practice. Qu'est‐ce que l'amour ? La relation complexe entre valeurs et pratique au Vanuatu Résumé Ces dix dernières années, le champ de l'anthropologie des valeurs, de la moralité et de l'éthique a connu un regain d'intérêt. Cet article y contribue en démontrant comment les valeurs peuvent constituer des stratégies autant que des idéals, tendant à déstabiliser l'ordre social et à diviser les personnes précisément parce qu'elles sont supposées être partagées. Le concept d'« amour », entendu comme un ensemble de pratiques quotidiennes d'intérêt et de considération pour autrui, est une valeur fondamentale de la vie sur l'île d'Ahamb, au Vanuatu. Pourtant, l'adhésion des personnes à une même valeur fondamentale ne se traduit pas nécessairement par un monde social où règne l'ordre. En analysant trois cas ethnographiques dont une situation conflictuelle à l'issue fatale, l'auteur propose un modèle d'étude des valeurs qui intègre l'ambiguïté en combinant la notion de valeurs sociales partagées avec l'expérience et la stratégie individuelles. Il avance qu'il est crucial, d'un point de vue méthodologique, que l'étude anthropologique des valeurs évalue le contexte des variations d'interprétation et de signification donnée à ces valeurs dans la pratique.

This study examines sociodemographic and wellbeing factors associated with forms of religiosity involving conventional religious belief (CRB) and daily spiritual experience (DSE), and unconventional paranormal beliefs in lifeforms (UPBL) and paranormal beliefs excluding extraordinary lifeforms (UPBEEL). Self-reported data collected from Australian Facebook users (N = 760; Female: 57%) suggest that CRB was significantly higher in Christian participants and lower in those who identify as non-religious and spiritual. However, levels of unconventional religiosity involving UPBL and UPBEEL were significantly higher among Pagans and those who identify as spiritual but not religious, but lower among non-religious participants. Compared to Christian participants, being spiritual and pagan were negatively associated with the level of security. After controlling for relevant sociodemographic characteristics, conventional forms of religiosity involving DSE were positively related to life satisfaction, life security, and trust level. UPBL was also positively associated with wellbeing outcomes but UPBEEL was inversely related to all wellbeing outcomes. Further analysis reveals that religious status moderates the links between conventional and unconventional forms of religiosity, such that paranormal beliefs tended to be higher when CRB and DSE each had a unique interaction with religious status. These results show that forms of religiosity are related to wellbeing differently and suggest the influence of cognitive biases related to religious/spiritual teachings and experiences in enacting the quest for deeper spiritual, paranormal experiences. Study limitations are discussed.

  • Rachel Smith Rachel Smith

'Theory of mind' in developmental psychology focuses on how children develop the ability to infer others' beliefs, desires, and intentions. Anthropologists have taken up the notion of 'theory of mind' to explore the way cultural differences in representations of beliefs, desires, and intentions affect everyday lives. In Oceania, anthropologists have noted that inferences about others' intentions are not accorded a privileged role in social interaction. In Vanuatu, I find, it is often the material, rather than immaterial, aspects of relatedness that are elaborated upon. People think about knowledge, creativity, meaning, and intention not as confined to a bounded mental or inner domain, but as discoverable through the body, and in the world at large. I argue here that this propensity to locate meaning and moral purpose as external to the mind corresponds to a 'porous' view of self and mind, and that this in turn may open people to experience vivid, intense, and often tangible forms of spiritual encounter. Imagination agissante et vulnérabilité mentale : théorie locale de l'esprit et expérience spirituelle au Vanuatu Résumé En psychologie du développement, la « théorie de l'esprit » décrit la manière dont les enfants développent la capacité de deviner les croyances, désirs et intentions des autres. Les anthropologues ont repris cette notion pour explorer la manière dont les différences culturelles de représentation des croyances, des désirs et des intentions affectent la vie quotidienne. En Océanie, ils ont remarqué que la déduction des intentions de l'autre ne jouait pas un rôle privilégié dans les interactions sociales. Au Vanuatu, ce sont souvent les aspects matériels des liens, plutôt que les aspects immatériels, qui sont développés. La connaissance, la créativité, la signification et l'intention n'y sont pas confinées à un domaine mental ou intérieur délimité mais peuvent être découvertes à travers le corps et, plus largement, dans le monde. L'autrice avance que cette propension à situer la signification et le but moral à l'extérieur de l'esprit correspond à une vision « poreuse » de soi‐même et de l'esprit, ce qui peut ouvrir à des rencontres spirituelles vivaces, intenses et souvent tangibles.

  • Annelin Eriksen Annelin Eriksen

In this article, I question regional context as primary context in anthropological analyses. I argue that the idea of historical continuity in a geographical locality/region might prevent us from understanding not only radical change, but also more gradually emerging social patterns that connect the ethnography to very different kinds of histories and places. Concretely, I focus on the global Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, and as an experiment, I ask whether it is possible to go to 'Pentecost', instead of going to Melanesia. With 'going to Pentecost' as a heuristic device, I suggest it is possible to overcome methodological challenges in the study of global religious movements. In this article, I thus trace the practices and articulations of my interlocutors as part of a wider Pentecostal universe. I show how notions of seeing, borders, separations, and protection are crucial in 'Pentecost', and I connect this to key Christian ideas and values.

  • Knut Rio Knut Rio

In Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign government aid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create 'good governance' and to shape Vanuatu's national developments. However, these measures also coincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especially of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becoming part of the articulation of new occult understandings of wealth and power. These developments are traced back partly to the history of colonial governance and the idea of righteous violence, but also to current restructurings of the Vanuatu state and growing Christian conceptions of Vanuatu as a holy nation.

Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of men's ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.

  • Joel Robbins

In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote people never directly "missionized," the Urapmin began in the 1960s to send young men to study with Baptist missionaries living among neighboring communities. By the late 1970s, the Urapmin had undergone a charismatic revival, abandoning their traditional religion for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness and driven by a constant sense of millennial expectation. Exploring the Christian culture of the Urapmin, Joel Robbins shows how its preoccupations provide keys to understanding the nature of cultural change more generally. In so doing, he offers one of the richest available anthropological accounts of Christianity as a lived religion. Theoretically ambitious and engagingly written, his book opens a unique perspective on a Melanesian society, religious experience, and the very nature of rapid cultural change.

  • K. O'Neill

In Guatemala City today, Christianity isn't just a belief system--it is a counterinsurgency. Amidst postwar efforts at democratization, multinational mega-churches have conquered street corners and kitchen tables, guiding the faithful to build a sanctified city brick by brick. Drawing on rich interviews and extensive fieldwork, Kevin Lewis O'Neill tracks the culture and politics of one such church, looking at how neo-Pentecostal Christian practices have become acts of citizenship in a new, politically relevant era for Protestantism. Focusing on everyday practices--praying for Guatemala, speaking in tongues for the soul of the nation, organizing prayer campaigns to combat unprecedented levels of crime--O'Neill finds that Christian citizenship has re-politicized the faithful as they struggle to understand what it means to be a believer in a desperately violent Central American city. Innovative, imaginative, conceptually rich, City of God reaches across disciplinary borders as it illuminates the highly charged, evolving relationship between religion, democracy, and the state in Latin America.

  • Fraser Macdonald Fraser Macdonald

This paper examines the diabolisation of Oksapmin tamam (here glossed as 'witchcraft') as an example of negative cosmological integration. The article takes as its point of departure Robbins's model of cultural syncretism developed in a series of recent papers, wherein diabolisation occurs as people insert those aspects of their indigenous religion that do not contravene the Christian God's paramount creative power into the Christian cosmos as representatives of the Devil. Through my own discussion of the diabolisation of Oksapmin witchcraft, I build upon the model in three main ways. First, I draw attention to the role of the mission in providing and enforcing these negative moral terms of reference. Second, the article highlights that in cases of negative cosmological integration, whether within or outside the frame of Pentecostalist Christianity, syncretic melding and mixing may occur, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary. Finally, I point out that the subordination of indigenous religious realities within the Christian cosmos does not necessarily entail their restriction or reduction of expression, as Robbins shows for the Urapmin nature spirits known as motobil. Indeed, in the case of witchcraft, integration into the Christian cosmos and related complexes of deliverance may actually serve to intensify and amplify their expression.