Learning to Believe in Papua New Guinea

Bibliographic Data

ID20065012
AuthorsBoris Andersen (0000-0002-3478-3205, Massey University, corresponding author), Barbara Andersen
Year2017
Pages235-255
Publication date2017-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenuePentecostalism and Witchcraft (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherSpringer International Publishing (PUBLISHER • SG)
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7_10
OpenAlexW2765864936
ISBN9783319560687
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited14

This chapter examines how witchcraft and sorcery beliefs are reproduced among the educated working and middle classes in Papua New Guinea. In a context where tertiary schooling is accessible only to a tiny segment of the population, many educated people in PNG feel anxious about their social position and worry that their upward mobility will provoke envy and resentment in the less fortunate. This anxiety is projected most strongly onto the “ples lain” or rural population, who are thought to maintain many traditional practices, including witchcraft and sorcery. Drawing on ethnographic research among nursing students in the Eastern Highlands, I examine the ways that class identity and Pentecostal social forms coalesce, giving students resources for narrating, understanding, and resisting the dangers they face as social outsiders and (future) employees of a neglectful state. Looking specifically at events during a nursing practicum in rural Eastern Highlands Province, I describe how students and their teachers collapsed different forms of invisible violence—both traditional and contemporary—into a generic evil to be discerned and resisted

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnography · Ethnology · Geography · New guinea · Political science · Population · Resentment · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development

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