13 ms·

Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea

94 points by playhard 13y ago

incision 13y ago
Where/how does ritualized abuse/murder originate? This article talks about PNG, but I recall reading of similar incidents in various parts of Africa while the US has it's own fairly recent history of lynching [0]. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
- yareally 13y ago
  Probably around the start of civilization since it appears in the old testament to stone people for various crimes[1]. United States also had witch trials in the 1600s in Salem Massachusetts. Europe had theirs with the Catholic Church (sometimes even digging up heretics after they were dead to burn them[2]). Also for many years executions were public display in many European Countries as well as the earlier days of the United States. Pretty much every culture has had some sort of ritualized murder/executions (whether deemed legal by the state/tribe/official body or otherwise). [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_the_Old_Testament http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_wycliffe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_wycliffe
  - lukifer 13y ago
    Human sacrifice is far more ancient than the modern state, coinciding with primitive religion. As sick as it may be, I think its primary purpose is in-group cohesion, regardless of the religious or political narrative pretext. A cadre who have knowingly committed murder together is one whose members will have strong bonds of loyalty to one another. See also: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-politics-and-self-suppression/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-politics-and-self-sup...
    - incision 13y ago
      This is where my original question was going. To question whether there's some lower level function to this behavior. If it's developing consistently, independently I would think there's some base, primal desire being satisfied through it. It's an arresting question, I think.
- laurenia 13y ago
  You only have to look at the Salem Witch Trials to know that this has been going on for hundreds of years, and probably much longer than that. Any social group eventually develops its leaders and outcasts. Combine that with the human instinct to understand misfortune by casting blame, and you get situations like this.
- bdunbar 13y ago
  Where? Anywhere you find people, you'll find wretched crap like this. How? As a species we're real good at hurting each other.
- mynameishere 13y ago
  Huh? Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft.
  - incision 13y ago
    I said "ritualized abuse/murder" which speaks to the act, not any specific dressing the people committing it have chosen to rationalize it with.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft. The fact that the accusations were of rape or murder doesn't make the murder any less ritualized.
    - tekromancr 13y ago
      I would argue that the United States death penalty is a form of ritualized murder.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        It is highly ritualized. The last meal, final words, gathering others to watch... really the only way that you could say that it isn't ritualized murder is if you want to nitpick about "when the government does it, that means it is not murder".
        Dylan16807 13y ago
        It's not about who does it, it's about whether there is a sufficiently fair establishment of guilt. In a developed country anyone calm and reasonable enough to be part of establishing a trial is extremely likely to let the government handle the trial. But it's entirely possible to have a fair hearing without involving the government. Once you've shown guilt of a sufficiently heinous crime beyond reasonable doubt then from my point of view it's not murder to kill them. It doesn't matter who is doing that killing. There are other, simpler circumstances where you can show guilt to a reasonable degree, such as self-defense. If someone is shooting at you you can shoot back, for example. No murder.
- vy8vWJlco 13y ago
  I understand crowd frenzies (riots, lynchings, witch-hunts) as fear of becoming the focus ("better them than me") and the willingness to be a spectator while not seeing the line between watching to know and enabling an event gone horribly wrong. I'd also like to think only sociopaths are the main actors, but apathy and simple mistakes all add their weight to such events.
dylangs1030 13y ago
"She had dragged herself [...] into the clinic, her genitals burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated intrusions of red-hot irons." What? This made me very angry. But how do we combat it if even law officials are aware of it going on and don't do anything to stop it? There's so much corruption, and the government legally acknowledges sorcery and punishment for sorcery as valid. In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done.
- i386 13y ago
  The UN isn't a global police force. All it can do its organise sanctions to force the PNG government to do something about it or get nations to contribute to some sort of fund to improve education and policing domestically.
  - vy8vWJlco 13y ago
    Nor should it be a global police force. I think people/countries that don't condone this type of behavior should be more willing to offer refugee status and provide the means to leave such places and situations, but people are pretty hard-mouthed about their borders... At the end of the day, we can't tell people what to do, only offer them alternatives.
- derleth 13y ago
  > In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done. And here I thought "Cultural Imperialism" was a bad thing. This is a dangerous road down which to tread, especially when the entity doing the treading (the UN) contains members such as Iran, the PRC, and every country that rates "depicting Mohamed" as being worse than "killing Jews".
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    You make a good point; however, I'm not advocating we invade. I'm saying we need to do this as peaceably as possible, but certainly assertively. I'm not a politician, I don't know how it would be done, but would strengthening the economy even more help the situation and modernize perspective or serve to increase class divisions?
GuiA 13y ago
This is horrific. A good time to remember that if you're reading this, you are in the <0.001% of humans privileged enough to live a life without having to worry about such things on a daily basis. Compared to things like that, our preoccupations seem so trivial, and I don't know what we can do about it.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  There are several things you can do about it. Donate to http://ncse.com http://ncse.com, http://ffrf.org http://ffrf.org, http://www.au.org http://www.au.org and/or similar orgs in your own country. Everything from witch-burning to the teaching of Creationist doctrines in public schools is possible because we somehow still consider it not only socially acceptable but desirable to be superstitious in the twenty-first century. Civilization isn't a gift, and it didn't just happen. We had to build it. The people who are burning witches in New Guinea are not monsters, or aliens, or mutants. They're us, and we're them. The only differences lie in the decisions we make, as individuals and as a culture.
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    Cheers for saying it. I'd suggest it's not just superstition, it's ignorance in general, in all its forms. The cure is education.
  - mc-lovin 13y ago
    Those organzations are nothing to do with the persecution of witchcrafit in PNG. Did you even read the article. If you want to stop these horrific acts of violence, it would be better to give to the Catholic Church since it was a catholic nun who saved the woman in that article. Your prejudice against religion is as irrational as what you accuse religion as being, since you put your secularist ideology ahead of the facts when you lump completely unrelated phenomena together into the category of "superstition".
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      What word do you prefer to superstition?
nemo 13y ago
In Papua New Guinea the prion based disease, Kuru, transmitted by cannibalism was last reported in 2005. There is still cannibalism among the Korowai tribe. Papua New Guinea has many corners that are a far, far different place from the modern Western world.
- rsync 13y ago
  Go ahead and peruse wikipedia for "prion diseases" ... it's a fascinating subject with some very scary subtopics. Of particular note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia ... and the account of one patient who valiantly struggled to prolong his life in the face of this disease.
codezero 13y ago
Yes, let's go tell these backwards people their antiquated superstitions are ridiculous. Emphasis on their... our own antiquated superstitions are completely OK.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Who said that?
fiatmoney 13y ago
To be fair, the US was imprisoning witches as recently as 30 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
prawn 13y ago
Belief in a lot of ridiculous stuff persists and is very mainstream depending on your stance on general religious belief. It's hardly isolated to PNG. I read an article recently about suggestions that the Japanese PM wasn't moving into the prime ministerial home because it had a macabre history and was thought to be haunted by ghosts. The official response was a denial, but there seemed to be comments from other politicians suggesting that this was not a ridiculous position to hold.
Kekeli 13y ago
Gruesome video of witch burning in Africa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qYhmf-boE&bpctr=1369466352 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qYhmf-boE&bpctr=1369466... Warning:Content is very Graphic
- Fundlab 13y ago
  This was quite depressing to say the least. The fact that one is so helpless against the hivemind and unable to defend oneself against such mob-driven attacks makes me shrivel
Hyrum_Graff 13y ago
I lived in Papua New Guinea for over two years, teaching in a school not far from a mining town. Sorcery was just a part of daily life. I remember a kid telling me he would be off school for a week as he had to go back to his village. When I asked him why he explained that one of his wantok's had been killed by a sorcerer and he was going back to the village for payback. Payback in general was very common. A kid was run over in our town and it was all the police could do to stop the driver from being massacred by the kid's family with bush-knives. It was lucky that most of our policemen were from outside of the district so they had a disconnect from the local community. We were advised that if we were ever driving and by accident ran over a dog or a pig, we should get to the nearest police station as fast as possible, to protect ourselves from payback. What shocked me about the article was the torture that was described. I'd never heard of this kind of thing back in 2000. Payback was usually brutal but quick, whether it be retribution against a sorcerer or anyone else. I do have to wonder where the concept of torturing victims has come from, as this seems to be a fairly new development.
Muzza 13y ago
I just want to take this moment to point out to all the good little leftists of HN that we can learn so much from tribal life in Papua New Guinea: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-tribal-life-anthropology http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-...
Julianhearn 13y ago
Sounds like guantanamo bay "Two days earlier she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men. They had stripped their quarry naked, blindfolded her, berated her with accusations and slashed her with bush knives (machetes). The “dock” for her trial was a rusty length of corrugated roofing, upon which she was displayed trussed and helpless."
wildgift 13y ago
What's with that headline. The real story seems to be that they are out of control of their environment. It's been heavily invaded by modern society, which is extracting natural resources. As people are harmed by modernity, they can't figure out the reasons. There are people in the US like this, too. Look at the lunatics in the Westboro Baptist Church. Or the Tea Party for that matter.
Nux 13y ago
Take a good read, people. This is who we are. Just different manifestations of the same problems, at a more archaic level. I felt disgusted reading the article, but before pointing the finger look what's happening in OUR "modern" society: - fanatic belief in all sorts of superstitions and stuff (christianity, islam etc) - mass savage violence (war) against each other, even when above belief forbids (love your neighbour, don't kill your neighbour etc) - incredible abuse against our mothers, sisters and daughters (rape, gang rape, FGM, murder, beatings etc); not to mention abuse against children! - mass scale butchering of other species so we can be a race of fucking obese creatures That's how fucking elevated we are. Our only hope, if any, is a good education.
yannis 13y ago
I am amazed as to how similar the word "sanguma" is to the Zulu word for a traditional healer (and also an area of witch burning) "sangoma". Anyone can offer some enlightenment on the linguistics?

94 points by playhard 13y ago

Where/how does ritualized abuse/murder originate? This article talks about PNG, but I recall reading of similar incidents in various parts of Africa while the US has it's own fairly recent history of lynching [0]. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

yareally 13y ago
Probably around the start of civilization since it appears in the old testament to stone people for various crimes[1]. United States also had witch trials in the 1600s in Salem Massachusetts. Europe had theirs with the Catholic Church (sometimes even digging up heretics after they were dead to burn them[2]). Also for many years executions were public display in many European Countries as well as the earlier days of the United States. Pretty much every culture has had some sort of ritualized murder/executions (whether deemed legal by the state/tribe/official body or otherwise). [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_the_Old_Testament http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_wycliffe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_wycliffe
- lukifer 13y ago
  Human sacrifice is far more ancient than the modern state, coinciding with primitive religion. As sick as it may be, I think its primary purpose is in-group cohesion, regardless of the religious or political narrative pretext. A cadre who have knowingly committed murder together is one whose members will have strong bonds of loyalty to one another. See also: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-politics-and-self-suppression/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-politics-and-self-sup...
  - incision 13y ago
    This is where my original question was going. To question whether there's some lower level function to this behavior. If it's developing consistently, independently I would think there's some base, primal desire being satisfied through it. It's an arresting question, I think.
laurenia 13y ago
You only have to look at the Salem Witch Trials to know that this has been going on for hundreds of years, and probably much longer than that. Any social group eventually develops its leaders and outcasts. Combine that with the human instinct to understand misfortune by casting blame, and you get situations like this.
bdunbar 13y ago
Where? Anywhere you find people, you'll find wretched crap like this. How? As a species we're real good at hurting each other.
mynameishere 13y ago
Huh? Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft.
- incision 13y ago
  I said "ritualized abuse/murder" which speaks to the act, not any specific dressing the people committing it have chosen to rationalize it with.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft. The fact that the accusations were of rape or murder doesn't make the murder any less ritualized.
  - tekromancr 13y ago
    I would argue that the United States death penalty is a form of ritualized murder.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      It is highly ritualized. The last meal, final words, gathering others to watch... really the only way that you could say that it isn't ritualized murder is if you want to nitpick about "when the government does it, that means it is not murder".
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        It's not about who does it, it's about whether there is a sufficiently fair establishment of guilt. In a developed country anyone calm and reasonable enough to be part of establishing a trial is extremely likely to let the government handle the trial. But it's entirely possible to have a fair hearing without involving the government. Once you've shown guilt of a sufficiently heinous crime beyond reasonable doubt then from my point of view it's not murder to kill them. It doesn't matter who is doing that killing. There are other, simpler circumstances where you can show guilt to a reasonable degree, such as self-defense. If someone is shooting at you you can shoot back, for example. No murder.
vy8vWJlco 13y ago
I understand crowd frenzies (riots, lynchings, witch-hunts) as fear of becoming the focus ("better them than me") and the willingness to be a spectator while not seeing the line between watching to know and enabling an event gone horribly wrong. I'd also like to think only sociopaths are the main actors, but apathy and simple mistakes all add their weight to such events.

dylangs1030 13y ago

"She had dragged herself [...] into the clinic, her genitals burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated intrusions of red-hot irons." What? This made me very angry. But how do we combat it if even law officials are aware of it going on and don't do anything to stop it? There's so much corruption, and the government legally acknowledges sorcery and punishment for sorcery as valid. In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done.

i386 13y ago
The UN isn't a global police force. All it can do its organise sanctions to force the PNG government to do something about it or get nations to contribute to some sort of fund to improve education and policing domestically.
- vy8vWJlco 13y ago
  Nor should it be a global police force. I think people/countries that don't condone this type of behavior should be more willing to offer refugee status and provide the means to leave such places and situations, but people are pretty hard-mouthed about their borders... At the end of the day, we can't tell people what to do, only offer them alternatives.
derleth 13y ago
> In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done. And here I thought "Cultural Imperialism" was a bad thing. This is a dangerous road down which to tread, especially when the entity doing the treading (the UN) contains members such as Iran, the PRC, and every country that rates "depicting Mohamed" as being worse than "killing Jews".
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  You make a good point; however, I'm not advocating we invade. I'm saying we need to do this as peaceably as possible, but certainly assertively. I'm not a politician, I don't know how it would be done, but would strengthening the economy even more help the situation and modernize perspective or serve to increase class divisions?

GuiA 13y ago

This is horrific. A good time to remember that if you're reading this, you are in the <0.001% of humans privileged enough to live a life without having to worry about such things on a daily basis. Compared to things like that, our preoccupations seem so trivial, and I don't know what we can do about it.

CamperBob2 13y ago
There are several things you can do about it. Donate to http://ncse.com http://ncse.com, http://ffrf.org http://ffrf.org, http://www.au.org http://www.au.org and/or similar orgs in your own country. Everything from witch-burning to the teaching of Creationist doctrines in public schools is possible because we somehow still consider it not only socially acceptable but desirable to be superstitious in the twenty-first century. Civilization isn't a gift, and it didn't just happen. We had to build it. The people who are burning witches in New Guinea are not monsters, or aliens, or mutants. They're us, and we're them. The only differences lie in the decisions we make, as individuals and as a culture.
- abraininavat 13y ago
  Cheers for saying it. I'd suggest it's not just superstition, it's ignorance in general, in all its forms. The cure is education.
- mc-lovin 13y ago
  Those organzations are nothing to do with the persecution of witchcrafit in PNG. Did you even read the article. If you want to stop these horrific acts of violence, it would be better to give to the Catholic Church since it was a catholic nun who saved the woman in that article. Your prejudice against religion is as irrational as what you accuse religion as being, since you put your secularist ideology ahead of the facts when you lump completely unrelated phenomena together into the category of "superstition".
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    What word do you prefer to superstition?

nemo 13y ago

In Papua New Guinea the prion based disease, Kuru, transmitted by cannibalism was last reported in 2005. There is still cannibalism among the Korowai tribe. Papua New Guinea has many corners that are a far, far different place from the modern Western world.

rsync 13y ago
Go ahead and peruse wikipedia for "prion diseases" ... it's a fascinating subject with some very scary subtopics. Of particular note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia ... and the account of one patient who valiantly struggled to prolong his life in the face of this disease.

codezero 13y ago

Yes, let's go tell these backwards people their antiquated superstitions are ridiculous. Emphasis on their... our own antiquated superstitions are completely OK.

jlgreco 13y ago
Who said that?

fiatmoney 13y ago

To be fair, the US was imprisoning witches as recently as 30 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

prawn 13y ago

Belief in a lot of ridiculous stuff persists and is very mainstream depending on your stance on general religious belief. It's hardly isolated to PNG. I read an article recently about suggestions that the Japanese PM wasn't moving into the prime ministerial home because it had a macabre history and was thought to be haunted by ghosts. The official response was a denial, but there seemed to be comments from other politicians suggesting that this was not a ridiculous position to hold.

Kekeli 13y ago

Gruesome video of witch burning in Africa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qYhmf-boE&bpctr=1369466352 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qYhmf-boE&bpctr=1369466... Warning:Content is very Graphic

Fundlab 13y ago
This was quite depressing to say the least. The fact that one is so helpless against the hivemind and unable to defend oneself against such mob-driven attacks makes me shrivel

Hyrum_Graff 13y ago

I lived in Papua New Guinea for over two years, teaching in a school not far from a mining town. Sorcery was just a part of daily life. I remember a kid telling me he would be off school for a week as he had to go back to his village. When I asked him why he explained that one of his wantok's had been killed by a sorcerer and he was going back to the village for payback. Payback in general was very common. A kid was run over in our town and it was all the police could do to stop the driver from being massacred by the kid's family with bush-knives. It was lucky that most of our policemen were from outside of the district so they had a disconnect from the local community. We were advised that if we were ever driving and by accident ran over a dog or a pig, we should get to the nearest police station as fast as possible, to protect ourselves from payback. What shocked me about the article was the torture that was described. I'd never heard of this kind of thing back in 2000. Payback was usually brutal but quick, whether it be retribution against a sorcerer or anyone else. I do have to wonder where the concept of torturing victims has come from, as this seems to be a fairly new development.

Muzza 13y ago

I just want to take this moment to point out to all the good little leftists of HN that we can learn so much from tribal life in Papua New Guinea: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-tribal-life-anthropology http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-...

Julianhearn 13y ago

Sounds like guantanamo bay "Two days earlier she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men. They had stripped their quarry naked, blindfolded her, berated her with accusations and slashed her with bush knives (machetes). The “dock” for her trial was a rusty length of corrugated roofing, upon which she was displayed trussed and helpless."

wildgift 13y ago

What's with that headline. The real story seems to be that they are out of control of their environment. It's been heavily invaded by modern society, which is extracting natural resources. As people are harmed by modernity, they can't figure out the reasons. There are people in the US like this, too. Look at the lunatics in the Westboro Baptist Church. Or the Tea Party for that matter.

Nux 13y ago

Take a good read, people. This is who we are. Just different manifestations of the same problems, at a more archaic level. I felt disgusted reading the article, but before pointing the finger look what's happening in OUR "modern" society: - fanatic belief in all sorts of superstitions and stuff (christianity, islam etc) - mass savage violence (war) against each other, even when above belief forbids (love your neighbour, don't kill your neighbour etc) - incredible abuse against our mothers, sisters and daughters (rape, gang rape, FGM, murder, beatings etc); not to mention abuse against children! - mass scale butchering of other species so we can be a race of fucking obese creatures That's how fucking elevated we are. Our only hope, if any, is a good education.

yannis 13y ago

I am amazed as to how similar the word "sanguma" is to the Zulu word for a traditional healer (and also an area of witch burning) "sangoma". Anyone can offer some enlightenment on the linguistics?