Talking it Through: Responses to Sorcery and Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia

Women, mobile phones, and M16s: Contemporary New Guinea highlands warfare

“…Highlands warfare, and violence more generally, has been partially disembedded from its historical cultural moorings, and has not been contained but rather enabled and exacerbated by the emerging socio‐cultural context (cf. Forsyth and Eves ). The question now falls to the PNG government of how to manage this emergence of new forms of violence as they seek to gradually position the country alongside other regional powers as a developed, democratic, and orderly society.…”

Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia

“…Scholars have understood this in relation to increased pressures on land and resources, an absence of state involvement, and increasing violence toward women (Gibbs 2012), as well as rising rates of HIV (Haley 2010). In June 2013, a conference was organized at the Australian National University, titled Sorcery and witchcraft-related killings in Melanesia: Culture, law and human rights perspectives, marking a widespread acknowledgment that new forms of torture and aggression toward witches were generally on the rise in the region (Forsyth and Eves 2015). The focus was on what to do with witch killings through law and governance, and the conference volume provides direct advice on matters of state policy.…”

Dystopian realities and archival dreams in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

“…In the wake of the disruptions of the region's traditional ritual economy by the Kabu Movement and Christianity, knowledge of sorcery is understood to have proliferated as the sanctions around the teaching have eroded, and as other ethnic groups' practices have been learned and/or bought. Now all deaths, and illnesses, among the I'ai are generally understood through this lens of intensive competition (see Forsyth and Eves ).…”