Abstract
ABSTRACTEndemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of discerning people's intentions. Established ethnographic and linguistic data from PNG meanwhile document witnesses as imagined to be embodied, interested, lacking a privileged relationship to truth, and thus susceptible to coercion. Recasting the PNG corruption issue in terms of witnessing foregrounds a perceived cultural conflict between inclusion and duty; it also reveals how and why the Christian God was invoked—using debt and obligation rhetoric—to end corruption at the national scale.
Highlights
Endemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse
Anthropological observations on the marked need to mollify witnesses to transactions prove helpful in explaining rampant corruption accusations, but we identify a productive inversion of the witness role in corruption discourse
Robbins (2001, 2004) observed that Christian prayer offers a radical departure from the commonplace separation of intent and speech that we identified as limiting the credibility of corruption witnesses among Papua New Guineans
Summary
Our framing begins with witnessing in John Leroy’s ethnography of pig killing festivals among the Kewa of Southern Highlands Province in 1970–1972 (1979). A successful display affected the spectator’s inner state of being and if they expressed those emotions the dancers had to compensate them for having been drawn in (Strathern 2013:78) Both Melpa and Kewa attempted to fold in potentially critical and dangerous witnesses during moments of vulnerability.. Action (of which public transaction is an axiomatic example) is given primacy in conveying relational transformation and this is the mirror reflection of the fact that speech is not trusted or even associated with sincerity (see Pickles 2013; Robbins and Rumsey 2008) This New Guinea language ideology is firmly at odds with the European Enlightenment ideals of honest communication, impartial adjudication and laws of perspective that Thomas Nadel (1986) dubbed ‘the view from nowhere’ and that are necessary components in legitimizing the adjudicators of corruption claims. We see the embodied witness that is invoked at such times as a central antagonist in the modernist discourse surrounding corruption in PNG, in critiques of wantok-ism, even if the more harm is caused by those who embezzle or otherwise abscond from both kinship and official obligations
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