Third Wave pentecostalist theology envisages a global struggle against satanic forces as 'spiritual warfare.' Here I examine an instance of spiritual warfare that targeted the village of Telefolip as part of a national campaign. Embracing evangelical doctrines of the dependence of 'physical development' on 'spiritual development,' villagers burned ancestral relics and purport to have found 'uranium gas' on the site of a former spirit house. This discovery is held to be full of promise for the future: as a valuable (if imaginary) resource in Israel's struggles, uranium gas offers villagers wealth and a means of asserting local centrality in global terms. I conclude by arguing that an understanding of the conjunction of spiritual warfare's aims with villagers' hopes for a place in the world beyond the village is crucial to analyzing the dynamics of pentecostalist world-breaking and world-making.
Papua New Guinea's position on a global resource frontier has been one of the country's defining features since independence in 1975. Mining, logging, and the petroleum industry account for most of the country's income, with mining providing the lion's share. State finances depend on revenues generated by resource projects, and policy governing such matters has become a key focus of national political debate. The fact that national planning relies on resource projects has lent a particular urgency to the state's relation to rural people in resource-rich regions, and the status of "landowner" signals a position of power from which citizens can confront a state and developers anxious to bring projects into production (Filer 1997a, 162-165).The history of the state's relation to landowners in the vicinity of mining projects has been fraught with contention. The nation's single most traumatic political crisis burst on the scene at the close of the 1980s, when landowners on Bougainville transformed a dispute about their relation to the Panguna mine into a full-scale secessionist rebellion. The fighting lasted longer than the Second World War, and the details of peace arrangements and restoration of services are still being worked out to this day.When landowners began dynamiting mine facilities on Bougainville, national revenues suffered a severe shock (see Filer 1990Filer , 1998May and Spriggs 1990). Yet despite this catastrophic loss, the PNG economy rebounded quickly as other projects came on stream, and by the early 1990s the country was in the middle of a resource boom. The gross 233
Recent attacks on suspected witches in Telefomin led to several deaths and the flight of families in fear of their lives. This violence has much in common with similar events elsewhere in PNG, but there are important differences as well: accusations do not have a misogynist cast (all the targets were men), and the witchcraft is attributed to non-indigenous sources. As in many PNG instances, the police failed to prosecute homicides arising from witchcraft accusations, a fact that has led to widespread local concern. In this paper I present the Telefol cases with a focus on the relation of perpetrators to their victims and to the community at large. I argue that certain aspects of the regional economy combined with a generic witchcraft discourse and the ineffectiveness of the state have fostered a lethal crisis in the relation between villagers and male youth.
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