Senior Research Seminar 7th November with Dr. Chloe Nahum-Claudel (University of Manchester)

Senior Research Seminar 7th November with Dr. Chloe Nahum-Claudel (University of Manchester)

 

The witch hunter as big man in post-colonial Papua New Guinea

 

This paper focuses on the management work that precedes and follows a witch hunt in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. The argument is that, just as the influence of highland big men resides in the management of wealth and people and the coordination of events with complex temporalities, witch hunts become a new post-colonial arena in which ambitious rural men achieve aggrandizement by strategically managing relationships and resources. Each phase of a witch hunt – preparation, evidence gathering, foiling police raids, getting younger henchmen out of jail, orchestrating compensation ceremonies – offers an arena for the exercise of big man quality. In making this argument I take inspiration from Marie Reay’s analysis of the micro-politics of Kuma witch hunting which took up - but also cast irony upon - previous functionalist analysis of witchcraft accusation and the dynamics of conflict. If there is no self-evident ‘clan interest’ in polities that lack stable hierarchies, the successful leader is a man who organises events in the name of a larger collective, using his oratory, strategy, and relational networks to bring it off, and succeeding insofar as he aligns the interests of his group with his own. In Reay’s terms, the witch hunt is a power ploy conceived to reorganise the subclan as a power base for its mastermind. As a feminist taking a male leader centred perspective on the witch hunt, I shed light on why witch hunts happen or why they don’t pan out; why they proceed as they do; why the police often fail to prevent them or imprison perpetrators though they are sometimes involved from the start; and why women and to a lesser extent men, can be harmed with impunity despite every witch hunts’ contestation. The masculinist politics I describe is both recognizably highland Papua New Guinean and also redolent with contemporary global geopolitics, shaped by re-militarization and the power play of authoritarian strong men who are decried by many but celebrated as dauntless and venturesome by more.

 

Chloe Nahum-Claudel is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She conducts fieldwork in Brazilian Amazonia and in Highland Papua New Guinea. She is currently finishing up a book entitled Witch-hunting, Feminism, and Anthropology.