Many Maring believe that the gravity and frequency of sorcery and sorcery cases have accelerated since pacification, a not uncommon result throughout Oceania (Lederman 1981:20; Lattus 1993:55). Evidently, modernity is simultaneously conducive to an increase in sorcery, insofar as it creates new forms of violence and inequality that people must deal with and explain, and antithetical to its perpetuation, insofar as modernity endorses those forms of knowledge and power (such as positive science and Western religions) that have little tolerance or use for it. This article treats the concepts and conflicts behind sorcery trials as a way to understand local notions of knowledge and truth and their relationship to the practice of justice. Sorcery trials are about the construction of cultural reality and about how Maring modernity is both a condition and consequence of a reality that is increasingly heterogeneous, contested, and uncertain. The interrelationship between knowledge and social transformation has three issues. The first is about sorcery as a form and use of knowledge and its relationship to power. How does this unfold within the framework of a sorcery trial--a practice that fuses an indigenous structure of action and experience to a foreign process? The second issue is what counts as evidence and what is the moral and epistemological basis for its evaluation? On what grounds are accounts about an agent's previous actions and intentions judged to be true? This is critical because sorcery is a crime that leaves little direct physical evidence. Assessing the truth depends on how reports about a defendant's intentions and covert actions, as extrapolated from his/her public behavior, inform the way in which the court interprets the evidence. Speech is central here because a sorcery trial is comprised of a series of linguistic representations of, and presuppositions about, cultural reality. Thus, the trial process and sorcery trials in particular are major venues for the progressive and strategic reinvention of local epistemology in light of the encompassment of the indigenous world by capitalism, internationalized Western culture, and the emerging nation-state (LiPuma in press). The third issue is the extent to which the contestation of social hierarchy (e.g., men versus women; senior versus junior clansmen) is carried out as a struggle over the character of cultural reality itself. I suggest that the Maring encounter with Europeans (like missionaries) and the appropriation of Western practice have created the social and epistemological conditions for a cultural critique on a level, and with a force, unimaginable in the past. With the founding of the Koinambe mission station (1956) came the first generation of Maring who were educated and exposed to Western practice. By the late 1970s the concepts and lifeways of a younger generation began to conflict with that of senior clansmen, and led to confrontations over the operation of tradestores, payment of bridewealth, propitiation of the ancestor spirits, and obligations of children toward parents, among other things. All this confirms Zelenietz's (1981:6) observation that underlying the different problems and approaches is a basic indigenous concern with the redistribu and redefinition of power. The imposition of a colonial authority structure, partial integration int different [capitalist] economic order, the coming of new [Western) religious creeds and doctrines, t appearance of new diseases, all modify notions of power, stability and control within and between gr SOCIAL AND LINGUISTIC CONTEXT External contact with the non-Melanesian universe, which began in 1955, has introduced panning for gold, cash cropping for coffee, and contract labor stints on coastal plantations. The younger generation now is fluent in pidgin (and in several cases English), attends the Anglican-run school, cherishes imported consumer goods, and uses the health clinic as a primary source of medical treatment (LiPuma 1989). …