Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea holds more than eight hundred languages, which is the highest linguistic density on earth, and a comparable density of distinct religious traditions. It is also almost entirely Christian by affiliation, mostly Catholic, Lutheran, United Church, Anglican, Seventh day Adventist and, increasingly, Pentecostal. Both statements are true at once, and understanding the country requires holding them together rather than treating the second as having replaced the first.

Church membership is near universal and ancestor and spirit practice continues under and alongside it. Ground is owned by clans and carries obligations to the dead who are in it; illness and death are commonly attributed to a cause rather than to chance; and the ritual cycles attached to initiation, exchange and mortuary obligation continue in many places with church participation rather than in opposition to it.

The Sepik river region produced one of the best documented ritual complexes in Melanesia. The haus tambaran, the spirit house, is a large ceremonial building holding carved figures, flutes and masks associated with clan spirits, and initiation cycles conducted in and around it were long and physically demanding. Much of the carving that reached Western museums came out of these buildings, in circumstances that ranged from purchase to removal.

The wider region gave anthropology two of its central categories: the big man, whose authority is built through the redistribution of wealth rather than inherited, and the cargo movement, in which ritual is directed at obtaining the manufactured goods that arrived with outsiders.

A constitutional amendment passed in 2024 declares Papua New Guinea a Christian country.

Violence following accusations of sorcery is a serious and continuing problem in Papua New Guinea, and it is treated here as a matter of documented harm rather than as an item of exotic interest.

The underlying premise is widespread: that death and grave illness have causes, and that a person may be responsible. Where that premise meets a sudden death, a grieving family and no other explanation, an accusation can follow, and the accused, disproportionately women and often those without male relatives to defend them, may be tortured or killed by a crowd. The phenomenon is usually abbreviated in Papua New Guinean policy documents as sorcery accusation related violence.

The law made this worse before it made it better. The Sorcery Act of 1971 criminalised the practice of sorcery, which had the effect of treating the accusation as potentially well founded, and a belief that the deceased had been killed by sorcery could be raised in mitigation on a murder charge. Whatever the intention, the effect was that the legal system partially underwrote the logic of the killings.

The Sorcery Act was repealed in 2013, and the death penalty was extended to killings arising from sorcery accusations in the same period. Prosecution remains difficult, because attacks are often committed by crowds in remote areas and witnesses are neighbours.

Churches, Papua New Guinean human rights organisations and the government have worked on the problem together through a national action plan, and some of the most effective interveners have been church workers who can address the belief system from inside rather than dismissing it from outside. Reported incidence has not clearly fallen.