Wrathful Ancestors, Corporate Sorcerers: Rituals gone Rogue in Merauke, West Papua

Abstract

AbstractAnthropological studies of ritual ‘failure’ challenge the assumed efficacy of ritual in affirming the social order. Drawing from fieldwork in West Papua, I examine the ‘failure’ and ‘success’ of two rain‐making ceremonies – one hosted by an indigenous Marind expert, the other by an Indonesian oil palm corporation. Participants conceived the failure of the first ritual as a punishment meted by ancestral spirits against Marind who support agribusiness expansion. Meanwhile, the success of the corporate ceremony confirmed rumours that corporations wield foreign and powerful forms of sorcery. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's notion of the double bind, I suggest that the ritual outcomes dramatize the irreconcilable demands placed on Marind by custom and capitalism. Attempts to endorse agribusiness incur ancestral punishment, while efforts to oppose it are thwarted by the superior power of corporate sorcerers. In this context, I argue, the moral implications of the corporate ritual's unexpected ‘success’ prove just as problematic as those of the customary ritual's dramatic ‘failure’. Co‐opted yet efficacious, corporate rituals point to a new social order in which both Marind and their ancestral spirits find themselves subjected to foreign sources of supernatural control.