ENCOUNTERS WITH EVIL: CHRISTIANITY AND THE RESPONSE TO SORCERY AMONG THE MAISIN OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Abstract

Scholars writing about Melanesian societies often assume that sorcery and Christianity are incompatible. When I began my research among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea, who have long been Christians, I was a little surprised that they accepted sorcery as a reality. I was most surprised, however, that many Maisin thought Europeans shared their commonsense notions about sorcery. As proof, I was told of how European doctors at town hospitals could recognize 'village sickness' and send those inflicted with it back to be cared for by local healers (Barker 1989). Village elders also said that in the past the missionaries had taught them ways to control sorcery and the discord in the village that gave rise to it. My contention in this paper is that Maisin have good reason to think Europeans know something about sorcery, for Europeans, especially missionaries, played a major if indirect role in forming present-day attitudes towards sorcery in Maisin society. During the high period of missionary activity, between 1901 and 1950, Anglican missionaries and the Maisin collaborated against sorcerers on several occasions. Despite their agreement that sorcerers represented evil, the two parties arrived with very different notions of evil and its treatment, and so these dramatic occasions did not lead to sustained cooperation. But there was an important exception to this. In 1932, a man called Maikin travelled to the village of Wanigela, the seat of the district mission station, to detect and expose sorcerers. Maikin claimed that his amazing ability was a gift of the Christian God, although he had not been baptized. The missionary likened him to an apostle of Christ. The elder Maisin today remember him as a mixture of saviour and sorcerer. Maikin has come to epitomize for Maisin the ambiguous nature of sorcery in a Christian age. This paper examines these encounters, especially those involving Maikin. It studies how through such encounters Maisin and their missionaries gradually reshaped the Maisin's understanding of sorcery and, beyond that, the nature and justification of evil (cf . Burridge 1985; Parkin 1985). I begin by examining sorcery ideology in Maisin society at the time of my fieldwork in the early 1980s, and the stories that surrounded Maikin some fifty years after his mission to Wanigela. I then turn to the historical record to show how these memories developed as a mutual construction of the Maisin and missionaries as they, separately and together, battled the evil of sorcery. The essay concludes with some observations on the relation between the experience of sorcery and Christianity in Maisin society.