Introduction

In October 2013, a group of six men and one woman, armed with sticks and stones, invaded the church of Muxima—the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in Angola . In the middle of Sunday Mass, they proceeded to destroy the statue of Our Lady of Muxima. Before they could complete their mission, however, they were cornered and pinioned to the floor. The group belonged to a Pentecostal church known as the Prophetic Church of Judaic Bethlehem’s Ark. According to media reports, they wanted to destroy the statue because they had identified it as a potent symbol of witchcraft-fueled idolatry. They had carried out their attack to mark their position in a larger spiritual battle. Not only is Muxima a key pilgrimage site for the Catholic Church , it is also believed to be a powerful spiritual site at which several prophets (Christian and non-Christian) carry out their work and obtain their power, be it “good” or “bad” (see Blanes, this volume). 2

A similar case occurred in Port Moresby , Papua New Guinea (PNG), and this gained considerably wider media exposure. In late 2013, the devout Christian Speaker of Parliament, Theodore Zurenuoc, tried to expunge a number of spirit carvings from Parliament House. These had been intended to represent the country’s cultural diversity, but he referred to them as “ungodly images and idols” (Eves et al. 2014; Silverman 2015). Zurenuoc (2013) claimed that the images represented “ancestral gods and spirits of idolatry, immorality and witchcraft.” Workers attacked the carvings with chainsaws in an effort to purge these “demons” from Parliament House. Zurenuoc sought to replace the “blasphemous” carvings in the Grand Hall of Parliament with what he called a “National Unity Pole,” which incorporated carvings of images from the Bible, the PNG constitution, and the word “unity” in each of the country’s 800 or so vernacular languages; it also depicted an eternal flame, “symbolizing the light that comes from the Word of God” (Zurenuoc 2013). The Unity Pole was meant “to usher in an era of morality and prosperity by renouncing Satan and rebirthing the country as godly” (Silverman 2015, p. 361).

The cases of Muxima and the PNG parliament demonstrate the energy and determination with which Pentecostals target public spiritual sites that they associate with witchcraft and evil. On behalf of the nation, the city, or the neighborhood they make into tangible enemies those symbols that are deemed bad for health , security, unity, prosperity, and development. They go on crusades and engage in warfare against invisible demons that they believe corrupt public displays and agencies. They ask: who is really running the church; who is really in charge of the nation; who is really benefitting from business deals? When they pronounce the answers, they often identify “witchcraft” and “sorcery” as their targets.

This book is about such recent trends in what we might call spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. In using this concept, we suggest that much of current politics, governance, and public debate is rooted in a world of invisible powers—of witches, spirits, and demons (see also Marshall 2009). Indeed, Africanists have long been keen to point out that the concept of political power in these regions is often difficult to disentangle from concepts of sorcery and witchcraft (Geschiere 1997).This notion also draws on Harry West’s (2005) observation in his monograph on Mozambique that there has been a reopening of the space of the occult by the church, and that this has involved a radical redefinition of the potent space of governance. West’s work, in turn, follows Achille Mbembe’s (2001) insistence that an understanding of the development of African democracy requires that attention is paid to alternative “languages of power” that emerge from people’s daily lives. The sorcery discourse described by Harry West (2005, p. 3) is just such a language of power that demands to be included in policy-making and governance: “[s]o long as policymakers and citizens speak mutually unintelligible languages of power, the project of democracy is impossible.” West suggests that for his informants, uwavi (sorcery) is a distinctive way of seeing and understanding the world, and for them, sorcerers move in a realm beyond the visible world. From this vantage point, they envision the world differently to ordinary people. According to the PNG parliamentary Speaker, ritual art had carried this type of demonic spiritual agency and language of power right into the heart of national politics and had to be destroyed, because it had the potential to undermine democracy. In the case of the Muxima church vandalism, the statue was also seen as a vessel for witchcraft that would have a corrupting influence on worshippers. In a similar vein, Adam Ashforth emphasizes that in a system that recognizes witchcraft as a major force, “spiritual insecurity” must be considered as a key element in the formation of democracy (Ashforth 2005, p. 18; see also Van Dijk 2001; Badstuebner 2003; Blanes, this volume) .

Thus, in a sense, this is where anthropologists and Pentecostal churches share a particular perspective. Given their sensitivities to the detail of daily life and discourse, anthropologists acknowledge that there is a gap between official politics and grassroots concerns—and especially so when witchcraft and sorcery are involved. Pentecostals have become successful across Africa, Melanesia, and the rest of the world because they also acknowledge this gap as both an existential problem and a governmental problem. Unlike policymakers, politicians, development agencies, and NGOs, the Pentecostal churches take seriously the idea that a different platform of power exists from that of policy and government. As a remedy, they have designed a form of evangelism that might be termed confrontationist, which has as its foundation a direct attack on the power of the invisible realm itself through “spiritual warfare ,” “spiritual mapping,” “discernment,” and “healing.” This is the source of their considerable appeal—that they enter into a hidden world of sorcerers and witches as matters of life and death. As Harry West (2005, p. 10) observes, the importance of their message is that they “see the unseeable” in order to “know the unknowable, and … make sense of the senseless.”

Sorcery, Witchcraft, and Pentecostalism

Before addressing these issues more fully below, it will be helpful to clarify the concepts of “sorcery” and “witchcraft” as they are used throughout to explore the regions of Africa and Melanesia. While each term has particular anthropological connotations and definitions , they are unified in that they both encompass harm to persons or their belongings inflicted by human or spiritual beings. The implication of sorcery or witchcraft in illness, bad luck, or death means that the infliction is not related to accidents or chance encounters, to viruses, bacteria, or other types of occurrence. Sorcery and witchcraft are human-centric, relational ways of understanding health , well-being, and social processes.

When this human-centric definition of the two concepts is acknowledged, it can be seen that Christianity is both deeply allied with these phenomena and, at the same time, adversarial in regard to them. Christianity shares the human-centric belief that misfortune is caused by the malevolent intentions of others, and Christianity’s remedy—doing good in the world—takes place through acts of prayer , renunciation, redemption, and sacrifice. In Christianity, demons , the devil , and Satan take hold inside a human being, and Christians find in sorcery and witchcraft the same kind of parasitical anthropomorphic agencies: thus, they find it natural to confront these forces as extensions or translations of their own demons. Although there is little written about the devil, Satan, or demons in the Bible, many Christian theologies, and especially the Pentecostal theologies that are the subject of this book, are consumed with working out how evil operates in human relations and in attempting to remedy this by engaging in “spiritual warfare .” In a broad sense, then, Christianity reformulates sorcery and witchcraft in an effort to keep illness and death within the reach of human agency. It makes the attempt to do so by importing such concepts into their existing demonology.

Through this entanglement of Christian demonology and local beliefs, the concepts of sorcery and witchcraft have become almost universally accepted. They not only translate local beliefs, but also shape these beliefs according to the particular history of that translation (see Bertelsen, this volume). This history is marked by a number of factors and perspectives to do with Christian conversions, modernity , life in the colonies, and relations between masters and servants, but also perspectives on an alternative source of power, on where wealth and prosperity comes from, and on how social life works. In Africa and Melanesia, as outlined in the various chapters in this collection, sorcery and witchcraft are powerful concepts that gain considerable attention and energy in both political and economic arenas, as well as in religion and ritual. They no longer feature only in anthropological conferences, or in churches and church crusades, but also in courts of law, in policy documents, and in media coverage.

To begin with, then, some definitions are in order. The concepts used throughout this book are close to the prototypical definitions given in early colonial anthropology (see Turner 1964). Here, “witchcraft” refers to unconscious cannibalistic acts wherein a creature takes hold of a person and dictates that they should prey on and steal other people’s vital substances. “Sorcery” is often considered to be different: it refers to conscious acts of poisoning or hurting someone by the use of magic remedies or techniques. In analyses of African settings, witchcraft is often synonymous with “power,” and is therefore implicated in any display of high status, wealth, government, or violence :

The close link between witchcraft and political power expresses, therefore, a deep mistrust of politics and power that is characteristic of these societies. But this is combined with the insight that power, and therefore the occult forces, are indispensable to the very functioning of society. (Geschiere 1997, p. 200)

In Melanesia, this association with power encompasses other factors, and it is difficult to translate “occult forces” and “politics” from Geschiere’s Cameroon example to the Melanesian context. That is, there are few cases in Melanesia where successful politicians or businessmen have been suspected of controlling “occult forces” as the source of their influence. Rather, the general impression is that such high profile characters would be considered targets by envious witches. Traditionally, leadership in Melanesia has not been tied to titles, possession, and power but more to fluid notions of guardianship or administration. “Big Men” have been described primarily as managers of wealth: they are organizers of ceremonies and aggregate place, village, or lineage (see Strathern 1991b; Robbins 2007) . In many cases in the past, in fact, it was reported that sorcery was an instrument of legitimate Big Man control (see Malinowski 1926; Zelenietz and Lindenbaum 1981; Stephen 1996; Dalton 2007, p. 43), and thereby to some degree it was similar to Geschiere’s djambe concept of power in Cameroon (Geschiere 1997). But in contemporary Melanesia we instead read about witches as being sick, old, ugly, and unskilled, as well as envious and greedy. In this context, they are perhaps more figures of anti-power (see Knauft 1985; Kelly 1993; Lipuma 1998).

In all the various usages—be it in ethnography, documents of law or policy, or in Christian campaigns—the two forms of doing injury to others are complementary and closely related to one another. The concepts have retained their strength in a globalized world because of the durable position of a Christian human-centric worldview that hinges on the concept that a person is always under attack from evil influences. Thus, the person is in need of protection. Indeed, this is becoming a global truism that effectively cancels out the diverse beliefs and pluralist practices previously glossed under the concepts of witchcraft, sorcery, and divination (see Stroeken, this volume). The various chapters of this volume follow ways in which this global discourse of demonology proceeds when adopting and encompassing the heterogeneous phenomena of the world into its vocabulary, and the contributors highlight what happens when people place locally specific forces of life and death within universalist Pentecostal demonology and its confrontational methodology.

The topic will be of particular interest to anthropology—with its regional models of society and person, and its plural cosmologies and ontologies—since synchronized indigenous Pentecostal movements directly denounce such regionalism and pluralism and engage in profound and effective practices of unification and universalization. Indeed, this book follows Pentecostalism in its effort to bypass regionalism. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia thus starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery as universal concerns of life and death, good and evil.

Pentecostal Universalism and Global Spiritual Warfare

A major theme of this work is how the movement of Pentecostalism changes the parameters of social life by penetrating deeper into the minutiae of everyday life than earlier Christian churches, state governance, or market relations have managed to achieve. The key to its success lies in Pentecostalism having taken control of the forces of life and death, with universality as a key technique.

By Pentecostalism, we refer to Christian beliefs and practices that emphasize connectivity with the Holy Spirit , and to Christian movements that typically value prophecy, visions, prayer, healing, and deliverance from evil spirits . This is a necessarily broad definition of Pentecostalism, precisely because it enables us to accommodate the diversity and heterogeneity of traditions, expressions, materializations, and manifestations framed within the umbrella term of Pentecostalism in the social science study of religion. In this respect, we are less interested in canonical definitions of Christian denominations, and more in the dynamics and fluidity of their practices and ideologies, in which the above-mentioned connectivity seems to play a central role. Indeed, as seen in several of the following chapters, one need not be directly associated with a Pentecostal church or congregation to be filled with the spirit. Therefore, Pentecostal churches themselves downplay denominational divisions. They often also downplay the centrality of their pastor, their church building, and the Bible, and tend to move out into public spaces in parades, crusades, healing missions, and into targeted neighborhoods: they use prayer tents, street occupations, public squares, and rural crossroads. They are known to oppose traditional forms of leadership, ritual regimes, and hierarchical social structures. They also encompass popular social movements that seem to be intensely preoccupied with the idea of evil as spatially and territorially inherent in people’s lives. Their notion of “spiritual warfare” addresses particular neighborhoods, companies, or persons, and even whole continents or nations, as harboring evil and being subject to ritual cleansing. These Pentecostalists also move into political spheres, actively engaging in political campaigns and forming parties, but they also build schools and social infrastructure and have become a driving force behind new economic developments, such as microcredit loans, savings accounts, or ostentatious consumption; they also become involved in the moral constitution of state apparatuses such as policing (O’Neill 2010; Rio 2011; Trnka 2011) or healthcare (see Andersen, this volume).

Pentecostalism often focuses on witchcraft as the localization of evil , especially in our two regions of Melanesia and Africa, and its therapeutic cleansing operates through the investigation, examination, and healing of the individual as a site for the penetration of evil. The concepts of “deliverance” or “discernment” seem now to be used in both African and Melanesian contexts, in ways that bypass former Christian usages. They emphasize equally a need to investigate the body, the house, the street, markets, stores, or the nation, as sites for various forms of transgression. As such, Pentecostal movements are action-oriented in the search for remedies for transgression. Thus, Pentecostalism’s project is a universalizing one—and its lively rituals, its “prophetic time” (Robbins 2004) , its preoccupation with creating a better future for its followers by detaching from the past (Meyer 1998) , and its general theological and governmental content are remarkably uniform across the globe (see Marshall 2009, 2014). Our point here is not that Pentecostalism becomes a universal reality or a unitary phenomenon across the world, but that its ideology is universalist and that its technique for proceeding into local environments is to replace local vocabularies and local explanations with universalist concepts.

The crux of Pentecostal universalism seems to lie in its handling of witchcraft or demons. Spiritual warfare is the Christian version of taking a stand against invisible evil forces (see Beam 1998; Murphy 2003). The foundation for this ideology is the belief that evil spirits intervene in human affairs, and this is as relevant to the movement in the context of the USA or Scandinavia as it is in Africa or Melanesia. However, Pentecostal universalism has taken inspiration from experiences in non-Western settings. One of the pioneers in the field of spiritual warfare is C.P. Wagner , who served as a missionary in Bolivia before he became a professor at California’s Fuller Theological Seminary in the School of World Mission. Many of the theologians who have worked on spiritual warfare seem to have brought back from other world regions to the USA a recognition that demons and evil spirits constitute a major challenge to Christian practice. This was a development of the 1980s, and Wagner (2012, p. 12) comments that when a congress on world evangelization was held in Manila in 1989, with thousands of participants from across the world, the three most attended workshops were on the Holy Spirit and spiritual warfare. Another member of this group, Ed Murphy , a former missionary in Latin America, explains their general attitude as follows:

We are at war. As to the origin of this war, all we know is what the Bible tells us. It began in the cosmic realm, evidently before the creation of man, in an angelic rebellion against the Lordship of God.

The experienced deliverance minister can compel evil spirits to tell the truth. I do so all the time. We obtain from them the information we need to proceed with the deliverance and then expel them to the place where Jesus wishes to send them.

We need to condition ourselves, so to speak, to put on our spiritual warfare eyeglasses to correctly view present reality. (Murphy 2012, pp. 54–55)

Such evangelism proceeds by building universal examples from situations in parts of the world where witchcraft and forces of the invisible dominate people’s daily lives. The examples are fed into in a systematic global struggle against the demonic. The demonic, as well as the warfare against it, is presented as an ontological starting point, where Pentecostal energy is dedicated to discerning the presence of Satan in social life anywhere. This always takes place as a war with competing ontological regimes—of science, reason, and the state. Murphy claims:

By demonization I mean that Satan, through his evil spirits , exercises direct partial control over one or more areas of the life of a human being.

When dealing with the potentially demonized, the typical Western, analytical, reasoned approach towards evangelism will be ineffective. Only a gospel of power will set them free. (Murphy 2012, p. 59)

These globetrotters of so-called third wave Pentecostalism list successful struggles against demons and witchcraft from across the planet, from Thailand to Greece to the Bermuda Triangle (see Wagner 2012, pp. 75–93). In one of the many books edited by Wagner, there are texts by people who have served as missionaries around the world and who have helped people against the demonic hold of traditions and shamanism (see Pennoyer 2012). John Louwerse, professor at Life Bible College in Los Angeles, reports from his stay in West Papua among the Yali in Pass Valley:

It is a wonderful, humbling experience to be used by God to reach a hidden, Neolithic tribe in the jungles of Irian Jaya and to see in a multi-individual Christward movement approximately 98 percent of a tribe of 3,500 members change allegiance, acknowledging the lordship of Christ over their lives. We have seen multiple thousands healed and freed from demonic forces that had sway over their lives. The Lord chose to use human vessels in the ministry of healing and deliverance to bring honor to His name and to leave a deep impact upon our lives. We witnessed how the results of power evangelism drastically changed the core of their worldview and subsequently every subsystem of their culture. (Louwerse 2012, p. 272)

Similarly, Donald Jacobs, executive director of the Mennonite Christian Leadership Foundation in Landisville, Pennsylvania, who served in Tanzania and Kenya and participated in the East African Revival—an independent Pentecostalist movement going back some 60 years—stated,

[a] mong East African believers, it matters little whether the spirit is a demon, a nature spirit, or an ancestral spirit. Each and all must go when ordered by Jesus Christ to leave … As I reflect on my learnings as a missionary in East Africa, I recall that the demon cults and the ancestral spirit cults put phenomenal energies into cataloging the demons. They had elaborate ways of finding out the precise name, nature, and power of each demon. They were identified by means of color, smell, area of origin, and fine tastes, such as whether the demon prefers Lifebouy soap over Lux or cotton clothes over synthetics. In that culture, when a person becomes demonized the experts can, within minutes, describe the demon in great detail. Perhaps by so doing, they increase their power over these forces. It struck me strangely at first that when people in that culture become believers in Jesus Christ they abandon the need to classify spirits in this way. All evil spirits, they know, are subservient to Christ. (Jacobs 2012, p. 281)

Here lies the considerable social power of Pentecostalist movements: they offer intelligible techniques for confrontation. At the same time, they lift invisible powers out of their local heterogeneous framings and thereby counteract all claims to local specificity or relativism (see Stroeken, this volume). In other words, they fully embrace the invisible world and take control of it. They describe the different forms of life and creatures that exist in it; they offer techniques for taming them and making the invisible visible. They do not make the mistake that politicians, development agencies, or NGOs make by closing off the invisible or ignoring it; instead, they fully realize the potential for government that lies in the invisible realm itself. In addition, they import the idiom of warfare—so powerfully evocative and potent in the contemporary world—into the realm of the private, into the family, and into the self. As is often pointed out in Pentecostal healing, demonic control is always personal. It never comes from the cultural system, from the state, or from globalization . It always concerns the micro-relations of the family, the church congregation, or the village—and demons seek out the inner self as their dwelling place.

A case in point here is what might be termed “migrant” or “diasporic Pentecostalism,” which stems from the proselytizing and congregational intents of migrants. This is the case, for instance, in “African churches” in Europe, which have adopted what Simon Coleman (2006, p. 2) describes as “part culture”: that is, Pentecostalism “presenting worldviews meant for export but often in tension (and therefore in strategic, parasitic articulation) with the values of any given host society.” Within this framework, new epistemologies of witchcraft and deliverance appear, addressing directly the morality of a Western lifestyle and its effects on a “Pentecostal ethos.” This, for instance, is what Rijk van Dijk (1997, 2004) describes in relation to the Ghanaian Pentecostal diaspora in the Netherlands, what Maïté Maskens (2013) refers to in her study of African ministries and evangelisms in Brussels, and that Kristine Krause (2008) points out in her study of healing tactics among Ghanaians in London. In these cases, processes include the re-signification of witchcraft and sources of evil, as well as new spiritual mappings and deliverance strategies. This is what Hermione Harris (2006, p. 83), in her study of the Yoruba Christian diaspora in the UK, calls “dynamic metaphors of spiritual power.” However, as Emmanuel Akyeampong (2000) observes, this is not a one-way route, but rather a common determination of the “Pentecostal enclave” (Brodwin 2003), and an adaptation of the Pentecostal universal spiritual struggle across migrant diasporic trajectories and homelands. Van Dijk (1997) exemplifies this in his description of the emergence of prayer camps in Accra that specialize in European deliverance , addressing the vulnerabilities, crises, and dangers to which the African migrant is exposed. Clearly, there is a seamless transition at work here, in terms of crossing over issues of culture, tradition, and belonging, making Pentecostalism an intercultural and international movement.

In its approach to witchcraft, Pentecostalism also problematizes relativism and translation. Pentecostals regularly cure people of ailments caused by “demons,” “poison,” “dirt,” and “evil,” which are invisible inflictions caused by relationships that are troublesome. It is rare to hear that these universalized terms and new techniques of healing may be ineffective against local or territorial spirits or witches. As will be seen in the following chapters, such universalization is in part what neutralizes the affliction, since it draws out and cancels the problematic specificity of the illness. Along with “new life” and “breaking with the past,” the illness also becomes new: it is brought into the universalist ontology, where “evil,” “Satan,” and “demons” feature with full force as part of an invisible reality. Those people that we observe in our respective field locations, be it in PNG or Ghana, have often already dealt with and resolved the issue of translation, and they have replaced local terms with a universal demonic vocabulary. Both the contents of the occult space and the methodology for controlling it have been made formally universal, so to speak, and in the process, they have bypassed other local experts such as oracles and diviners . But, as noted in chapters by Stroeken and Myhre in this volume, in the same moment they have also created a problematic new field, with new creatures and new logics of operation, and new forms of violence needed to deal with them. The term “Pentecostal witchcraft” was therefore coined by Sasha Newell (2007) in an effort to describe how Pentecostal churches in Ivory Coast , in their attempt to combat witchcraft, were instead drawn into the witchcraft world. He argues (Newell 2007, p. 462) that Pentecostal Christianity and witchcraft are equally totalizing discourses, with “competing imaginations of power, wealth and illness,” and in their effort to engage with the world of spirits, demons, and witches, “Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse” (2007, p. 461). This observation has spurred important reflections throughout the present collection.

Regional Comparisons in a Universalizing Movement

Two ethnographic regions have been chosen as the field sites for the present endeavor—Africa and Melanesia. Both regions have figured prominently in the anthropology of witchcraft and sorcery. To both regions, the colonial era brought Christian missionaries , and they are tied together historically through British, French, and German colonialist personnel and evangelic organizations. The two regions are also closely connected in that charismatic movements have built strongholds through “breakaway churches”—that is, through indigenous churches with charismatic leaders who are believed to be in direct contact with the Holy Spirit . These are movements associated with independence and liberation, and in Melanesia and Africa their emergence and popularity took off during a time of national independence movements—in the 1960s and 1970s. Before this, church strategies for dealing with dark forces had been wide-ranging and mixed. Most early missionaries, in both Africa and Melanesia, tended to simply forbid belief in and talk about local concepts in the hope that they would become obsolete when replaced by a Christian discourse. Often this backfired so that witchcraft fears, sorcery practices, and healing became more or less clandestine spheres outside and separate from the church. The great leap made by Pentecostal churches during the independence movements was to conform to witchcraft beliefs through what Meyer calls “diabolisation” (Meyer 1999; West 2005; Macdonald 2015) ; that is, they brought the occult and evil within reach of church practices, which is when Pentecostal movements gained in popularity across the two regions.

The chapters that follow demonstrate the pervasive nature of the Pentecostal influence on all aspects of life in these regions. To some extent, a third region in these global connections is the USA, since American evangelists have been prominent, both in person and on television broadcasts, in the spread of charismatic Christianity in recent decades in both Africa and Melanesia; as such, this region should perhaps have been included. However, we have chosen here to focus on the effects of their charismatic presence in our two regions, and on the localization of their ideas and visions.

One interesting connection between Africa and Melanesia is outlined in speculation about whether the term for witchcraft— sanguma —in PNG’s national language (Tok Pisin) was adopted from German missionaries who had visited South Africa , where the concept of sangoma encompassed oracles and healers. Such connections remain potent. During a recent outburst of occult forces in the capital of Vanuatu , a news report on national television claimed that a self-proclaimed vampire-sorcerer in one of the neighborhoods had imported his sorcerous remedies from East Africa (see Rio 2011). An underlying current in these types of discussion in Melanesia is that witchcraft and sorcery are the burden of the “black man,” belonging to a dark time before the coming of Christian light, and that Melanesia is also in this primordial sense bound together with the African continent. However, the purpose of this volume is not to support or extend either the anthropological or the popular discourses that have tended to essentialize these two regions by combining their witchcraft with their original blackness. The purpose, rather, is to add to an understanding of this discourse as deeply rooted in a global Christian worldview—the most recent manifestations being found in developments in Pentecostal movements. These popular and energetic movements have often, like anthropologists, embraced sorcery and witchcraft as a social arena for understanding societies in these regions and, therefore, they are also perceived to be the means by which to change them. The domain of “the occult” has become the primary target for governance in the Pentecostal search for a “new life,” a redeemed past, and a healthy future.

In terms of the anthropology of the two regions, they are asymmetric with respect to the connection between Pentecostalism and witchcraft or sorcery. In relation to Ghana, Mozambique , South Africa , Congo, Angola , and Tanzania there are large numbers of monographs and articles written over many decades that describe the interventions of Church movements into the spiritual terrains of healers, oracles, sorcerers, and witches. How modernity , capital, power, and prosperity interrelate with this spiritual and dangerous terrain has been a central topic in African anthropology. On Melanesia, however, there are few publications on the connection between the Church and witchcraft (however, see Barker 1990; Lattas 1993; Eves 2000, 2010; Jorgensen 2005), seemingly reflecting a different ethnographic reality. However, it is safe to say that the arrival of a wave of Pentecostal Christianity over recent decades has also changed the landscape of witchcraft and sorcery in this region (Newland 2004; Eriksen 2009a; Rio 2014; Macdonald 2015). There are reports that a new form of aggressive opposition is taking hold between church movements and witchcraft, and in the last decade, the issue of witch killing and torture in Melanesia has caught the attention of both the media and anthropologists. Scholars have understood this in relation to increased pressures on land and resources, an absence of state involvement, and increasing violence toward women (Gibbs 2012), as well as rising rates of HIV (Haley 2010). In June 2013, a conference was organized at the Australian National University, titled Sorcery and witchcraft-related killings in Melanesia: Culture, law and human rights perspectives, marking a widespread acknowledgment that new forms of torture and aggression toward witches were generally on the rise in the region (Forsyth and Eves 2015). The focus was on what to do with witch killings through law and governance, and the conference volume provides direct advice on matters of state policy. What is missing from this Melanesian literature, in our view, is a perspective on the underlying dimensions of religious change and worldviews in these new forms of violence , although Dan Jorgensen’s (2005, 2014) accounts of “spiritual warfare” in the Mountain Ok area of PNG, serves as an exception. His work highlights the cultural ruptures that have taken place in PNG over the last 20 years (see also Robbins 2004). In 1992, a well-orchestrated upsurge of third wave evangelism and apocalyptic thinking took off in the Mountain Ok area, which had a considerable influence on people’s lives and thinking. Jorgensen (2005) specifically addresses a local movement called “Operation Joshua” and the centrality of “spiritual warfare” within it. The focus of this movement was to attack directly invisible evil forces such as witchcraft and sorcery through “spiritual mapping,” “healing,” and “crusades.” Through this confrontational, aggressive, and effective form of evangelism numerous charismatic movements and campaigns found their way into PNG, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu . 3

The Telefolmin of PNG have now experienced the third wave Pentecostal evangelism for 20 years, and Jorgensen refers to a new tendency that he has observed: young boys with little status—but armed with guns and intoxicated with alcohol and/or drugs—carry out witch torture and interrogations. Jorgensen asks what motivates the mobs of boys to carry out torture and kill their fellow villagers. Here, it should be recalled, the period when the boys were growing up was marked by an intense Pentecostal activity, in a nationwide Manichean epoch in which evil was targeted through individualized searches for moral ruptures. The torture they carry out is obscene and staged as public drama (Jorgensen 2014, p. 278). Jorgensen relates this to a “traveling package”—an undefined epidemiology of fears and concepts that travels long distances. Concretely, for PNG it is an “anti-witch package,” which sets into motion the detection and labeling of witchcraft and evil, as well as the accordingly prescribed reaction and punishment. Jorgensen argues that this package “is a template for the use of torture and violence against suspected witches—rather than a set of ideas about witchcraft per se” (2014, p. 277). For Jorgensen, this is an alien, foreign template that the boys have willingly adopted because they are without other means of power or influence in their society. They have been left behind by the mining economy, by state programs, and by their families, and they live in a society that is increasingly violent. Jorgensen adds, in discussion with those concerned with the suffering brought about by vigilante groups, “[w]itchcraft was not the topic: violence was” (2014, p. 282). He recommends that we focus on what it means to be “useless” in this context and how the boys’ situation may have led them to violence.

We draw on this example here because this situation, now widespread across Melanesia, is suggestive of what is at stake across pentecostalized areas. We need to fully realize what Pentecostal Christianity does when it engages in spiritual warfare—in the long run and across regions and cultural distinctions. It works with a universalist template, but this template is attractive to followers, we would argue, contra Jorgensen, because it is about witchcraft per se—because it specifically addresses and attacks their witchcraft. What has become clear from many African cases and the Pentecostal literature itself is that the Pentecostal movement, in its many forms and expressions, produces and invigorates a space for invisible powers, and it is into this space that Pentecostalism directs its attention and energy. The boys in Telefolmin, growing up in an intense period of Pentecostal spiritual warfare , were raised within this universalist spiritual politics. If we see this in light of recent events in Vanuatu and PNG (see chapters by Bratrud and Strong, this volume), the role of youth in determining evil is not necessarily tainted by a notion of local youth marginality; rather, it may be tied to a larger global theme of youth being connected to hope, truth, and futurity. With this volume we wish to emphasize that there is no way we can remove either Pentecostalism or witchcraft from these analyses, since they provide people with hard-wired cosmological and moral parameters and horizons; neither can we remove global and historical connections, since the Pentecostal movement is a well-organized, synchronized, and unitary movement in terms of its demonology, its diabolization, and its techniques of governance.

It is to be hoped that the concept of Pentecostal witchcraft in Melanesia will benefit from the present exposure to African materials, but also that the African materials will benefit from exposure to the Melanesian cases. This book presents fresh ethnographic materials in order to highlight and interrogate the nature of ongoing religious globalization around these issues of the person, of good and evil, equality and hierarchy, and power and agency.

The context for this volume is a long history of implicit and explicit comparisons between ethnography from Africa and ethnography from Melanesia—two classic anthropological regions. In the early days of such comparisons, models were drawn from the African materials, which were then applied wholesale in an attempt to make sense of, for example, group integration and kinship among recently explored anthropological regions such as the PNG Highlands in the 1960s (Lambek and Strathern 1998, p. 3). We hope here to reopen comparisons between the regions. The understanding of spiritual warfare and reprisals for alleged occult activity across Melanesia can not only benefit from a long-standing anthropological literature on similar themes in Africa, but perhaps add something new to the discussion that can inform further analysis of the African material (see also Myhre et al. 2013).

Peter Geschiere recently summarized previous studies comparing witchcraft in Africa and Melanesia (2013, pp. 166–172). He starts with Max Marwick’s 1964 work on the different “social directions,” as he terms it, taken by witchcraft and sorcery in Africa and Melanesia. He asserts that “in Africa these belief systems seem to reflect tensions within a community, whereas in Oceania they more commonly express tensions between communities” (Marwick [1964]1970, p. 281). His contrastive generalizations are based on the closer examination of the African ethnographic material, and he bemoans the relative lack of in-depth case studies on which to draw in the Melanesian literature. A studied response was a long time in coming, but Michele Stephen , in her conclusion to Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia (1987), argued against the distortion of the “Africanist guidelines” imposed on the interpretation of occult aggression in Melanesian studies. Yet here, too, clear distinctions were advanced, wherein the Melanesian sorcerer would always be social while the witch would be entirely asocial, with cases not fitting the distinction chalked up to “social change.” In any case, whatever the shortcomings of her analysis, this comparison made clear, as Geschiere notes, “the spuriousness of trying to oppose the region to Africa as more or less homogeneous blocks” (2013, p. 167).

Current theoretical debates about the nature of different ontologies is germane to this project of comparison , which, in contrast to the comparison of wholesale analytic models has instead turned to “partial connections” à la Strathern (1991), or the “controlled equivocations,” of Viveiros de Castro (2004), where the focus is on essential differences between cultural areas and the irreducibility of cultural practices and concepts. With respect to Pentecostalism and witchcraft, we agree with Geschiere (2013, p. 171), who argues that “assuming ontological differences can easily lead to a fetishisation of difference and a neglect of the continuous borrowing and hybridization that shape cultural responses to similar issues.” This point is particularly pertinent in our case, since one of the major concerns of Pentecostalism is to cancel out relativist distinctions in its approach to evil demons as one unified universal presence. On the other hand, we also find that Englund and Leach’s (2000, p. 230) warning against “meta-narratives of modernity” is pertinent, as the narratives themselves often tend to blur and suppress regional or ideological variations. The case of Pentecostal movements is particularly interesting in this respect, since they root their meta-narratives of modernity in local environments (see Blanes, this volume). It is important here to keep in mind that the Pentecostalist movements generally do not feature as alien, foreign, or as having introduced particular beliefs; rather, they uphold indigenous motivations. Thus, we do not propose a new unified model of the modern world, but rather describe and compare the way in which one such universalist and globalizing “meta-narrative of modernity,” the narrative of Pentecostalist demonology, tends to operate in these two regions.

Africa and Melanesia: A Comparison

In this final section of our introduction, we aim to indicate some relevant lines for comparison of pentecostalization in the two regions explored by the contributors to this book. We hope to convey that Pentecostalist values and practices create certain patterns that are of social importance across the regions. If we downplay en bloc regional comparisons, since they often lead to generalizations and regional essentialisms, we may instead focus on specific themes in our various cases across the two regions. As indicated above, one key theme is the idea of equality and the equal distribution of wealth; another is the importance of spiritual politics and spiritual warfare , and thus an emphasis on government and control. Below, we discuss these two themes in relation to the existing literature and the chapters that follow.

Pentecostal movements are egalitarian, communitarian, and even nation-like, with a focus on unity , close integration of members and, in ideological terms, at least, egalitarian structures of leadership. On Malawi, Harri Englund (2003, p. 91) observes:

The expectation among Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo is that the radical equality of human beings before God translates into an equal distribution of wealth among the brothers and sisters in Christ.

What Englund calls a “radical promise of equality” among Pentecostals is inseparable from their enthusiastic search for signs of inequality , despite vast discrepancies in opportunity and situations of unchanging poverty. It has also been noted in African contexts that Pentecostalism directly addresses and attacks material inequality by moralizing upwards against excessive consumption and accumulation (Meyer 1998; Smith 2001; Parish 2003; Newell 2007; Haynes 2012) . Indeed, such issues of wealth, sharing, equality , and prosperity are crucial aspects for comparison of the meta-narrative of Pentecostalism. It is striking that envy , as the coveting of others’ consumer items, has become a key moral issue associated with witchcraft and sorcery. Private and individualist rights of ownership have become the naturalized moral state that is being attacked by grudging, ugly, or occult agents of envy and desire for wealth. As noted by Smith (2001, p. 588) on Nigeria, the growth of Pentecostalism “is (paradoxically) associated both with popular discontent over poverty and inequality and with people’s aspirations to achieve wealth and prosperity.”

This picture also involves a particularly intense focus on the dynamics of integration and the exclusion of foreignness, as well as on domestication and a suspicion of signs of differentiation. For Pentecostals, the witch signals a threat to the egalitarian body in two ways: both by being a concealed, intangible, and non-transparent form of presence in the person, and by coveting others’ possessions. Given that the witch creature has been added to the normal person, inside the body or by remote control, the witch is both “other” and “same,” and within the focus on equality this becomes problematic. By its greed and envy , the witch also entails a form of accumulation that resists the transparent distribution of wealth and the egalitarian ethos of the congregation. It might be expected that this would lead to different issues of conflict in different localized settings. We could argue through the various contributions in this volume that envy articulates the claim to equality that is fundamental both to consumerism and to the relationship between men and God.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen in Chap. 2 presents an interesting case in point from Mozambique. Here, witchcraft—in the form of the abduction of and feasting on local village children—concerns a group of German Pentecostals who came to live in the area some 20 years ago. According to people’s stories today, they kidnapped and consumed the children, who are now missing. Bertelsen speculates that this relates to the notion that the German Pentecostals constantly emphasized sharing, brotherhood, and sameness. In a sense, they produced a form of intimacy so intense that it became consumptive. Here, the witch is an “other,” or an outside threat that has become intimate and internal. Witchcraft in this sense is a reflection of intimacy as enforced, or as its double (see Geschiere 2013). Bertelsen asks if perhaps the egalitarian ethos of independence, sameness, and togetherness also attracts the notion of the “other same” as demonic?

This question is also raised in Thomas Strong’s account in Chap. 3 from the Eastern Highlands of PNG. Contrary to the popular discourse in Melanesia that witches are backwards and ugly, witchcraft here constitutes a spiritual world where everything is highly ordered, ostentatious, and modern. The domain of witches, which exists in parallel with the village society, is a modern city with offices, stores, buses, discos, a parliament, schools, and a university—where the lowest of men lead parallel existences as salaried employees, where a poor elderly woman is an air hostess, and big talkers are lawyers. Witches are already the people that these Papua New Guineans would like to become. If they are feared and condemned, they also, in this discourse, represent what people desire. Against a background of rotting grass houses and unruly youth, witches inhabit a wealthy and ordered modernity . When describing witches, people are describing things they want or positions they believe are desired by co-villagers. The kind of acquisitive and individualistic subjectivity that the witch symbolizes appeals to people, while also scaring them to death, so they persecute witches and torture them into giving up their doubles and demons. The narrative of the sacrifice of Jesus and his blood given up for human kind is used to break off the connection between the two worlds, and for calling witches back from the modern city world to take part in village issues. There is a striking parallel in these cases from Mozambique and PNG, as the common denominator seems to be the importance of a Pentecostalist ethos of modernity, a foreignness of the same, and the horrific terror of both too much sharing or a lack of sharing.

Still, with Strong’s comments on an imagined and desired parallel consumer society in mind, a culture of consumerism is clearly outlined for certain African societies in ways that we have not yet seen in Melanesia (see Ferguson 1999; Roitman 2005; Weiss 2009). In places like urban Cote d’Ivoire consumer objects and brands form entire symbolic systems—so that, for example, Timberland shoes versus Sebago shoes, in Newell’s (2007, p. 473) example, becomes an existentially meaningful contrast. We get a sense that this is very different from the signification that consumer objects take in Melanesian societies. However, despite these contrasts, it is perhaps interesting to think more broadly about the way consumerism and witchcraft have become part of larger modes of moral signification. Indeed, this is the angle that Ruy Blanes takes in Chap. 4, when he describes sorcery in urban Angola . He goes one step further with an “occult economy” analysis in showing how sorcery is becoming a paramount index of value in urban Angola. Like the Dow Jones index that daily sets a standard for the universal stock exchange, ndoki sorcery is a similar index for measuring spiritual value in pentecostalized neighborhoods of Luanda . It orders and measures the moral parameters of social life and becomes a tool in the spiritual mapping of the city and in the ongoing processes of rumors, scapegoating, and accusations. There are also converging points between this value index and the value index of consumerism—since money and goods that are withheld or redistributed are also valued or devalued by the ndoki index.

Whereas in most traditional Melanesian examples the value index of witchcraft is negative, in the sense that it prohibits and destroys work and productivity, the ndoki index is a positive scale that sets the value of consumption independently of any production. This has many similarities to what Katrien Pype in Chap. 5 calls “a witchcraft complex,” by which she means a total institution that harbors references, connectivity, and contradictions along many planes. As we move from Luanda in Angola to Kinshasa in Congo, Pype finds processes very similar to those described by Blanes. Her point is that the very terms of Pentecostal witchcraft are changing. The prevalent idea among Pentecostals in Kinshasa is no longer that witchcraft is about “a break with the past”—that is, a break with the rural, with kinship obligations, with traditions of fetishes, or with the older generation—as described in Birgit Meyer’s work two decades ago (Meyer 1998). Now, the Pentecostals formulate “a break with the future” and with technologies of connectivity. ICT goods and modern technologies such as mobile telephones, the internet, and television play a key role in debates about kindoki witchcraft; these technologies are now targeted as objects of an electronic modernity that helps mediate the power of the devil . Pentecostal reflections on communication technologies force us to perceive the ways in which contact with social and spiritual Others can be initiated, mediated, or broken off, in a worldview in which a person is under attack from foreign influences and in need of protection. Here, it would seem that the Pentecostals articulate a global template that is about fear of abusive connectivity and fear that invisible evil forces are inclined to follow lines of communication opened up by new technologies. In Kinshasa’s Pentecostal discourse, the SIM card, for instance, has become a reference to the soul, and “to unlock a SIM card” means to deliver someone from witchcraft. The technologies are merely shells for hidden occult forces, and the Christian mobilization against this form of connectivity is now just as global as the multinational companies that develop the technologies.

In Melanesia, there are many references to the inherent moral perils in new technologies, but it is perhaps not the technologies themselves or the companies behind them that are demonized to the same degree. This may be because there is a less developed culture of consumerism. Brands are very limited—many are Chinese or Australian products—and their importance in consumer desire is mostly limited to fulfilling kinship network obligations rather than individual consumption. Even in urban places like Port Vila , Honiara, or Port Moresby , the standard tins of beer, cartons of cigarettes, bags of rice, or shorts and t-shirts figure as currencies that certainly have an exchange value, but they do not come with the phantasmagorical promise of individual pleasure, future happiness, or self-fulfillment that has become normal in consumerist worlds. In Michelle MacCarthy’s Chap. 6, we realize that the angle toward consumerism is quite different from Blanes’ and Pype’s urban African examples. In the Trobriand Islands, technology and material possessions may be a source of envy , with Trobriand witches perhaps representing the moral perils of individual consumption, but the main issue with witches is that they hinder productivity. Indeed, the notion that the witches are so “hungry” that they feed on corpses indicates the danger of becoming “greedy” and refusing to share freely and meet all reciprocal exchange obligations. When women are born again as Pentecostals and renounce their evil powers of witchcraft, they shun the antisocial capacities they have carried within them since early childhood, transforming their physical bodies as well as their social space as worship opens up new avenues for women’s sociality. This includes prayer groups, open-air preaching, and a focus on productive responsibilities to the nuclear family, and the church community. For witches, it is taboo to touch a broom or coconut husks (used for cleaning saucepans or making fires for cooking), thus indicating that they are immune to the normal work that women do. Tidiness, productivity, order, and female beauty are central qualities in the Pentecostal church and qualities that are resisted by witches. Witches in the Trobriands used to be anonymous and had hidden relational capacities. Now, women may suddenly start confessing inside Pentecostal churches—admitting that they are hiding witchcraft capacities inside their body. By confessing and clearing the place taken up by the witch creature, they leave this space to Jesus. In addition to confession, the means for doing this is also to convert to a life of righteous, “clean,” production. This also involves commerce, as work with the banana leaf bundles that used to constitute the most important women’s wealth (a classic ethnographic case of gendered exchange) shifts into making new products for the tourist market (MacCarthy, n.d.). This in many ways converges with Newell’s (2007) point about Cote d’Ivoire: that the focus of Pentecostals with regard to witchcraft is on material success and money , which thus intertwines with moral issues raised around capitalism. The attention, then, is on the convergence of faith and financial success (Newell 2007, p. 479).

The relationship between sorcery and the economy is also the concern of Knut Myhre in Chap. 7. He describes how Chagga-speaking people in Tanzania understand the phenomenon of the albino murders that have become a national concern in recent years. According to news reports albinos are targeted for their body parts, which are used in witchcraft to bring people good luck. Body parts, and especially albino body parts, have become part of an informal economy, portrayed in the media as a perverted trade. Myhre’s argument goes in a different direction to the occult economy argument proposed by Comaroff and Comaroff (1999). The latter proposed that discourses about witchcraft, cannibalism, blood-sucking, and organ-snatching in Africa are metaphoric ways of addressing and critiquing the “real” economy of capitalism. Myhre’s important point here is that the circulation of body parts is not necessarily about the economy, but may instead be something equally as “real” as the economy: that is, it is about life itself and modes of being, since, for the Chagga, “witchcraft and life fold out of and into each other.” (Myhre, this volume 168). A severed arm found outside a church is discussed as a case in point, and Myhre demonstrates that the arm features in church discourse not as a commodity but in the transformed capacity of a body part that is central in the circuity of the life force. In witchcraft the arm is turned against the circuity of life. Witchcraft is not a reaction to an external imposition or phenomenon, but an internal generation of the form of life in this particular place: “where witchcraft unfolds from dwelling and life, Christianity enfolds witchcraft to afford dwelling and life” (Myhre, this volume 178). The difference between Catholics and Pentecostals in this area lies in their respective ways of tapping into this circuity of dwelling and life. Whereas Catholics envelop witchcraft and turn it around through their ceremonies, Pentecostals, as well as politicians and the state, wish to detach witchcraft from life-processes altogether because it is regarded as an evil interference.

The second theme of this book, although related to these issues of equality , envy, consumption, and corruption, is more tied to forms of governance and what we have termed spiritual politics . Rijk van Dijk (2001) writes from Ghana that the rise of “independent Christianity,” particularly in the form of the prophetic healing churches, initially implied a syncretization of religious discourse and practice. Many of the churches initially incorporated important elements of local cosmologies, healing practices, and styles of leadership (2001, p. 101), but more recent Pentecostal churches have taken a step further. They cleared out the traditional healing practices and recreated the occult realm as a clean slate to be filled with new creatures and healing technologies (2001, p. 101). No longer syncretic, no longer apologetic for African traditions, they redefined both Christianity’s agenda and the spiritual world into a universalist place where “[n]o one doubted the reality of witchcraft” (2001, p. 107). This also demonstrates what Birgit Meyer (1999, p. xvii) maintains—that breaking with the forces of the past may also re-invigorate them:

I came to understand in the course of my stay, demonization by no means implies that the former gods and spirits will disappear out of people’s lives. As servants of Satan they are still regarded as real powers that have to be dealt with in a concrete way … Put differently, the image of Satan offers a discourse with which to approach these powers as “Christian” demons .

There appears to be tremendous potential in this change, to make religious values all-encompassing of social life. When church and spiritual traditions are no longer separate, and when the realm of the otherworldly flows into the streets and neighborhoods and into people’s daily lives, Pentecostals come to see the whole of society as their responsibility and as a site for transformation. This touches on a key issue concerning the importance of the Pentecostalist transformation, which overcomes regional distinctions between Africa and Melanesia. As noted above, sorcery and witchcraft form their own language of power and governance, and Pentecostalist confrontations of this power follow the universalist assumption that this form of governance is unified as evil. This is in a sense the invention that Pentecostal Christianity brings to the field: its Manichaeism and its confrontational line of action. What we see playing out is an experiment with the notion that an alternative politics is necessary: that is, a spiritual politics that not only measures wealth and material development, but that is constantly maintaining and reinforcing a spiritual order through ritual activity. We have seen how Pentecostals in Guatemala City target the main sites of political corruption and gang violence (O’Neill 2010), and this also comes through clearly in Hackman’s account of Cape Town (2015), where the city is a field for competing modes of governance in a politics of space. Hackman observes:

Detailed spiritual maps were essential. Christians needed to know what specific types of demons were present in an area and where they were located because prayers had to be “strategic” and “targeted” to have the most impact. (2015, p. 110)

She goes further, to note,

they used spiritual mapping to police ambiguous boundaries and “protect” the city’s moral health and future. (2015, p. 113)

The same occurs in the most remote corners of Melanesia. Jorgensen mentions a spiritual mapping exercise called “Night vision goggles” among the Telefolmin of PNG (2005, p. 447) that was explicitly about the Pentecostal technology of spotting and mapping spiritual and moral deficiencies. In another campaign in 1999 called Prea Banis (prayer fence), the whole PNG nation was purified of evil spirits by an airplane and a navy patrol boat that circumnavigated the country’s boundaries (2005, p. 449). A successor of this was Operation Joshua, which took place in Telefolmin using a template for a spiritualized geographical space, a cartographic imagery, and a view of a military-like operation of spiritual cleansing (2005, p. 451), wherein the Telefolmin spirit house, as an ancient center for Ok ritual activities, along with its ancestral relics, became a selected strategic target and was burnt down. The movement also practiced the activity of “discernment” —“like watching television” (2005, p. 454)—to reveal sorcerers as well as hidden spiritual or satanic substances. Jorgensen draws on the work of Meyer (1999) and Robbins (2004 ) to state that Pentecostal Christianity is alternating between world-breaking and world-making . By choosing the Telefolmin ancestral house as a site for spiritual warfare, Operation Joshua restored the centrality of Telefolmin ritual knowledge, but by destroying the home of the ancestral cult. In this way, Telefolmin could recapture their centrality in the universe—placing it back on the spiritual map, so to speak.

Thus, it is not necessarily the past that is at issue, but rather the main regimes of social control. When society is governed by ritual forms, shamans, oracles, or kinship-based leadership, this is targeted as demonic by the Pentecostals. In different settings modern technologies, capitalist companies, or government policies may be the new targets (see Pype, this volume). A case in point here is Eriksen’s (2009b, p. 192) example from Vanuatu , where a Pentecostal women’s group targeted the electricity company as a source of evil and a threat to the Christian nation. Across Melanesia, recent years have seen the demonization of museums and ancestral cultural heritage, but also demonization of foreign missionaries and state agencies. During the presidential election in Vanuatu in 2009, Pentecostal pastors joined hands to protect the city of Port Vila from malign forces. Their spiritual campaign consisted of sending out “spiritual warriors” to selected places that marked the outer boundaries of the city, where they prayed day and night during the last days of the election so that the nation should not suffer under these malign forces. In Chap. 8 of the present volume, Eriksen and Rio outline the contours of a Melanesian city that has become thoroughly Pentecostalized in the sense that everyday life follows certain routines—attending church meetings on an almost daily basis, for example—but also because there is a routine awareness of how workplaces, the city’s roads and markets, the spaces of leisure, and people’s homes are being challenged by moral ruptures. The outcome of this at the household level is that they are now physically fenced in and protected from foreign malevolent influences, symbolizing the constant spiritual struggle that goes on inside. Not only do congregations go on spiritual warfare crusades, but people also frequently meet with Pentecostal healers and set up spiritual protection against the “demons” that they perceive to be looking in on them. In such a situation where the person, the household, and the nation are sites of invasive forces, spiritual mapping and detailed modes of governance are potent. This is world-breaking, in the sense that such activities cut social life into manageable and compartmental domains, with clear boundaries between person and person, between yards and houses, and between communities.

This form of urban spiritual campaign is also closely linked to the spiritual cleansing that Tom Bratrud in Chap. 9 describes on one of the outer islands of Vanuatu . During an intensive period in 2014, the entire Christian congregation of the small island of Ahamb in Vanuatu came out of their church building and besieged every corner of their island in order to drive out demons and evil spirits . It culminated in a witch hunt, where people of the congregation ganged up on accused witches, and in the end killed them by hanging them in the community hall. All this activity relates to Joel Robbins’s (2009) point that Pentecostalism is marked by an intense preoccupation with ritual—to the degree that ritual cleansing overflows church boundaries and becomes concerned with all social life. It approaches social life out in the streets, in people’s homes, in the market place, in forests and meadows, in parliament and, especially, in sites of nocturnal enjoyment such as nightclubs and bars. For places like Port Vila or Telefolmin, Kinshasa or Luanda , this means that Pentecostalism is omnipresent: its activities are about cleaning, dividing, dissecting, observing, and healing. It performs pervasive rituals for transforming and separating good from evil, clean from unclean, and seeks to create people who are protected from bad spiritual influences. Spiritual warfare is a form of ritual practice wherein the person, the neighborhood, or even the nation is continually defended and protected against alien invasion. This also means that Pentecostalism tends to overflow the boundaries between different forms of Christianity and between religion and everyday practice and forms of life (see Eriksen et al., n.d.).

This observation is further elaborated upon in Chap. 10 of this volume, where Barbara Andersen focuses on how nursing education in PNG influences the way sorcery and witchcraft are conceived in relation to health . Andersen does not connect this to Pentecostalism as a religious doctrine but demonstrates how the Pentecostal faith and participation in it becomes an alternative space of belonging for the nurses, who live away from home in order to work in health institutions in rural areas. In their mediation between largely autonomous rural communities and an increasingly distanced state, their Pentecostal vision transcends place-boundedness: hence, they are also able to transcend local understandings of sorcery and witchcraft. Their intense talk about sorcery and witchcraft among themselves is “socially productive,” in Robbins’s sense (2009), in the way that they confine and compartmentalize the dark forces of their narration about the “local way of life” (pasin, in Tok Pisin).

Koen Stroeken in Chap. 11 describes the influence of Pentecostal indigenous African churches in the realm of health and healing in Tanzania. His research background in traditional healing brings him to perceive Pentecostalism to be particularly influential in terms of certain cosmological and social practices. Like Myhre, Stroeken deals with the logic of the break that Pentecostals make with witchcraft. Whereas Myhre located this as a break with the circuity of life forces, Stroeken points to the Pentecostal tendency to collapse what were previously multiple frames of existence and cosmology . Complementary to Myhre’s point that the “occult economy” as an anthropological concept has become detached from culturally specific frames and personal experiences, Stroeken maintains that the Pentecostal movement as a global, universal frame also had to stop shifting between experiential frames. As for the PNG nurses in Andersen’s chapter, the occult is reduced here to a unitarian form of framing—that of a “local way of life” as seen from the outside. Stroeken describes how, for instance, healer and witch are part of the same frame for Pentecostals, since they treat magic , bewitchment, divination , ritual sacrifice, and spirit possession as belonging to one domain. Therefore, they also tend so see themselves as potentially always threatened by an external peril—where the peril is one unified form of evil—since they are not inside witchcraft but outside it, if we think in terms of Myhre’s concept of dwelling. Even though peril is inherently inside the person and inside society, it is still Other and alien. This is what Stroeken calls a “nuclearization of the lifeworld”—which involves compartmentalizing, externalizing, and marginalizing what used to be integral to social life. Importantly, it also involves keeping this realm close but separate. Here, then, we have returned to Newell’s observation of “Pentecostal witchcraft” (2007) as a domain of life that is both a primary concern and a constant danger.

Concluding Comments

In the chapters that follow we observe that Pentecostalism puts in place a particular form of governance or social ordering. Whereas state forms of governance, such as policing or schooling, stop short of powers to regulate the social life of households or the inner person—except through direct attack, violence , and destruction—the often rhizomatic forms of Pentecostal spiritual campaigns gain direct access. Pentecostals are concerned with creating new moral orders in a concrete way—through reforming neighborhoods and persons and addressing a public space directly though technologies such as “spiritual warfare.”

A further hypothesis might also be suggested—that Pentecostalism, in these moral governance campaigns, runs up against other forms of governance, and that the ensuing friction creates a lot of the social energy and heat that we see in the Pentecostal churches. In direct competition with the governance of traditional leadership, market orders, ritual orders, and state orders—but above all, with what we might call “witchcraft orders”—it is demanded that these competitors submit to the Pentecostal moral order. Pentecostals understand that witchcraft represents a form of governance of its own in the way it invades people’s lives, directing them to be watchful and suspicious, ordering them to share generously with others, prohibiting them from moving freely, and in creating anxiety in society, making people see their relations in new ways, causing, for example, illness, weakness, or loss of consciousness. Pentecostals see it as a counterforce to dwelling and the circuity of life, to draw on Myhre, and they pursue witchcraft in the domain of dwelling in order to banish it, cast it out, and destroy it. Witchcraft seeks out life forces and vital substances and it strikes down relations of intimacy, to the extent that Pentecostalism sets itself up in that same realm in social life—by, in a sense, following witchcraft into its domain of intimacy and social relations. Pentecostalism thereby becomes a form of presence in social life that populates anew the space of witchcraft. In MacCarthy’s case from the Trobriand Islands (Chap. 6, this volume), they directly drive out the witch from within the woman’s body and let Jesus inhabit that potent space. This is simultaneously a way of taking hold of the person and making her into a different person: a productive versus a destructive person; an arduous and laborious person; a person aware and conscious of, and perceptive about, the future of the community and her family. Pentecostal witchcraft in this case is a new regime of witchcraft that overturns the social life of the Trobriands as we know it as a classic case in anthropology. We will let that serve here as a concluding example of the world-breaking and world-making capacities of the regime of Pentecostalism in the African and Melanesian cases outlined below.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from (Arnold 1997, p. 13).

  2. 2.

    This attack had similarities to a “chute na santa” (kicking the saint) episode that had taken place in Brazil in the 1990s, in which a Pentecostal preacher destroyed a Catholic statue on a live television broadcast (Giumbelli 2003).

  3. 3.

    See Eriksen and Andrew (2010) on Port Vila, and Maggio (2013) on Honiara.