Sorcery and the Moral Economy of Agency: An Ethnographic Account

Abstract

An ethnographic account of sorcery accusation, violence, and subsequent community discussion provides a basis to explore the 'moral economy of agency' that shapes expressions and interpretations of personhood in Vanuatu. Mediated historically by transforming social, political, and economic circumstances, agency is demonstrated to be patterned according to culturally specific ontological and moral schemes. Key local categories of embodied personhood -including man ples (man place), man wan (man one), and jelus (jealousy) -are examined to elucidate two relationally entwined analytic categories, referred to as 'distributive' and 'possessive' agency. Such categories, it is argued, fundamentally shape expressions and interpretations of moral being and doing, including by providing a basis for identifying morally abject expressions of personhood. Taking seriously the important role of spiritual agency within such moral economies, this paper provides new ethnographically grounded insights into the ways in which communities and individuals negotiate moral being within transforming contexts of economic and sacred power.

New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures

“…It is most clearly manifest in the Mota liturgy; the power of God and the Holy Spirit is its core, which is concentrated in the clergy and celibate priests and transmitted through the transubstantiation of communion to the congregation. But, as Codrington suggested, mana is amoral, in the sense that it can be used for positive or destructive ends (see also Taylor 2015Taylor , 2016. Although mana can be witnessed in the efficacy of penicillin, the abundance of money or the closely guarded secrets of the tamate secret society, its predominant use is in contexts reconfigured by Anglican theology.…”

Jesus Lives in Me: Pentecostal Conversions, Witchcraft Confessions, and Gendered Power in the Trobriand Islands

“…Indeed, the primary reason given why a witch would cause trouble and bring illness or death to someone is always considered to be that she is, for one reason or another, jealous, envious, or covetous. The relationship between jelas and witchcraft and/or sorcery is well established in this contemporary Melanesian context (Bratrud, this volume; Rio 2010; Eves and Forsyth 2015;Taylor 2015). Related to this is the point that envy is an idiom of egalitarianism.…”

Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives

“…Also, even though they appreciated the strong 4 Approximately US$10. 5 To fully appreciate how exceptional this is, one needs to take into account how sorcery elsewhere in Vanuatu shaped the traditional sociocultural landscape (see for instance Hess 2009;Rio 2007;Eriksen 2008;Rio and Eriksen 2013), and the recent hike in sorcery accusations and extension of the phantasmagoric repertoire in urban contexts characterised by increasing social inequalities (Rio 2011(Rio , 2014Mitchell 2011;Taylor 2015;Rousseau 2015). Cases that resemble the Mota situation can be found in south-east Ambrym (Tonkinson 1981) and Akhamb (Bratrud 2011).…”