Witchcraft and Patriarchy

Directed from the subclan’s “parliament,” its men’s house, postcolonial antiwitchcraft “operations” in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea deploy gender segregation and the separation (in time and space) of exemplary, interrogatory, and punitive torture to realize and enforce patriarchal order. I understand the witch hunt as a neoinitiation: a new ritual affirmation of patriarchal sovereignty that emerged following the colonial destruction of rituals that once exalted agnatic strength and unity and the simultaneous colonial introduction of justice procedures founded on oral testimony. On the basis of this historical and ethnographic analysis, I argue for a postcolonial feminist epistemology in the anthropology of witchcraft that attends, first, to women’s experience as victims of torture during witch hunts and, second, to the ritual innovations that arise in the encounter between local and colonial patriarchal sovereignties, transfiguring, and perhaps exacerbating, the gendered violence that differently positioned women and men must negotiate.