CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION Pentecostalism and Witchcraft Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia EDITED BY KNUT RIO, MICHELLE MacCARTHY, RUY BLANES Contemporary Anthropology of Religion Series editors Don Seeman Department of Religion Emory University Atlanta, GA, USA Tulasi Srinivas Department of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies Emerson College Boston, MA, USA Contemporary Anthropology of Religion is the official book series of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Books in the series explore a variety of issues relating to current theoretical or comparative issues in the study of religion. These include the relation between religion and the body, social memory, gender, ethnoreligious violence, globalization, m odernity, and multiculturalism, among others. Recent historical events have sug- gested that religion plays a central role in the contemporary world, and Contemporary Anthropology of Religion provides a crucial forum for the expansion of our understanding of religion globally. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14916 Knut Rio · Michelle MacCarthy · Ruy Blanes Editors Pentecostalism and Witchcraft Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia Editors Knut Rio Ruy Blanes University of Bergen University of Bergen Bergen, Norway Bergen, Norway Michelle MacCarthy University of Bergen Bergen, Hordaland Fylke Norway Contemporary Anthropology of Religion ISBN 978-3-319-56067-0 ISBN 978-3-319-56068-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940340 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by Thomas Howey Photo: © Jan Sochor/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgements This volume is the result of two workshops, the first held at the University of Bergen in June 2014 and the second at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington D.C. in November 2014. Both meet- ings were funded by the project Gender and Pentecostal Christianity: A comparative analysis of Gender in Pentecostal Christianity with focus on Africa and Melanesia led by Professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and this book is an important part of the dissemination of that project. The book is also supported by the ERC Advanced Grant project Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons led by Professor Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen, through the work put into it by Myhre, Bertelsen, and Rio who have all been part of this project also. The conceptual combination of Pentecostalism and Egalitarianism pro- vided an important starting point for this book project, and Eriksen and Kapferer have provided a lot of inspiration for this work. We also want to thank the editors of the bookseries ‘Contemporary Anthropology of Religion’, Don Seeman and Tulasi Srinivas, for their support of this project from the start, and Alexis Nelson and Kyra Saniewski at Palgrave MacMillan for professional and generous handling of the manuscript. We are also grateful for valuable comments from the anonymous reviewer. We also thank The University of Bergen for a generous grant that made it possible to publish the book with Open Access. This makes it more likely that people in the regions of Africa and Melanesia can also access the book and take interest in these issues that are of global relevance. v c ontents 1 Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia 1 Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy and Ruy Blanes 2 German Pentecostal Witches and Communists: The Violence of Purity and Sameness 37 Bjørn Enge Bertelsen 3 Becoming Witches: Sight, Sin, and Social Change in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea 67 Thomas Strong 4 The Ndoki Index: Sorcery, Economy, and Invisible Operations in the Angolan Urban Sphere 93 Ruy Blanes 5 Branhamist Kindoki: Ethnographic Notes on Connectivity, Technology, and Urban Witchcraft in Contemporary Kinshasa 115 Katrien Pype vii viii CONTENTS 6 Jesus Lives in Me: Pentecostal Conversions, Witchcraft Confessions, and Gendered Power in the Trobriand Islands 145 Michelle MacCarthy 7 The Power of a Severed Arm: Life, Witchcraft, and Christianity in Kilimanjaro 163 Knut Christian Myhre 8 Demons, Devils, and Witches in Pentecostal Port Vila: On Changing Cosmologies of Evil in Melanesia 189 Annelin Eriksen and Knut Rio 9 Spiritual War: Revival, Child Prophesies, and a Battle Over Sorcery in Vanuatu 211 Tom Bratrud 10 Learning to Believe in Papua New Guinea 235 Barbara Andersen 11 Witchcraft Simplex: Experiences of Globalized Pentecostalism in Central and Northwestern Tanzania 257 Koen Stroeken 12 Afterword: Academics, Pentecostals, and Witches: The Struggle for Clarity and the Power of the Murky 281 Peter Geschiere 13 Afterword: From Witchcraft to the Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus 293 Aletta Biersack Index 307 e c ditors And ontributors About the Editors Knut Rio is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and is responsible for the ethnographic collections at the Bergen University Museum. He has worked on Melanesian ethnog- raphy since 1995, with fieldwork in Vanuatu. His work on social ontol- ogy, production, ceremonial exchange, witchcraft and art in Vanuatu has resulted in journal publications and the monograph The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu (2007). He has also co-edited Hierarchy. Persistence and Transformation in Social formations (with Olaf Smedal, 2009), Made in Oceania. Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific (with Edvard Hviding, 2011), and The Arts of Government: Crime, Christianity and Policing in Melanesia (with Andrew Lattas, 2011). Michelle MacCarthy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen (where she undertook the research and writing of the chapter in this book), and where she was a contributor to Annelin Eriksen’s Norwegian Research Council–funded project on gender and Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia. She completed her PhD at the University of Auckland in 2012. Her mono- graph, entitled Making the Modern Primitive: Cultural Tourism in the ix x EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Trobriand Islands (2016), examines tropes of primitivity and authen- ticity and mechanisms of cultural commoditization. She recently co- edited (with Annelin Eriksen) a special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology on Gender and Pentecostalism in Melanesia (August 2016). Ruy Blanes is a postdoctoral researcher on the Gender and Pentecostalism project. He has been postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and Visiting Fellow at Leiden University (2007–2010) and London School of Economics and Political Science (2007–2013). He has worked on the anthropology of religion, identity, politics, mobility, and temporality. His current research site is Angola, where he explores the topics of religion, mobility (diasporas, transnationalism, the Atlantic), politics (leadership, charisma, repression, resistance), temporalities (historicity, memory, her- itage, expectations) and knowledge. He has published articles in several international journals and edited volumes on the corporeality in religious contexts (Berghahn, 2011, with Anna Fedele) on spirits and the agency of intangibles (Univ. Chicago Press, with Diana Espírito Santo), and on ‘Prophetic Trajectories’ (Berghahn). He is also a board member of the APA (Portuguese Anthropological Association) and co-Editor of the journal Advances in Research: Religion and Society, edited by Berghahn. Contributors Barbara Andersen Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand Bjørn Enge Bertelsen University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Aletta Biersack University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA Ruy Blanes Spanish National Research Council, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain Tom Bratrud University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Annelin Eriksen University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway