Belief in sorcery and witchcraft remains widespread across Papua New Guinea, deeply enough embedded that researchers describe it as touching nearly every aspect of daily life, from how illness is explained to how communities respond to death. Understanding why these beliefs have persisted despite rapid modernization requires looking past simple explanations toward a genuinely complex mix of history, psychology, social structure, and unmet basic needs. Here’s what research on the topic actually shows.
They Provide an Explanation for Otherwise Unexplained Misfortune
At the core of sorcery and witchcraft belief is a basic human need: making sense of suffering that has no obvious cause. Researchers studying the phenomenon note that when someone falls seriously ill or dies, the prevailing cultural framework in many communities doesn’t default to a natural explanation — it points instead to sorcery, prompting a search for the specific person believed responsible. This isn’t unique to PNG; anthropologists have documented similar explanatory patterns for misfortune across many societies historically. What keeps it especially persistent in PNG is the combination of this explanatory framework with limited access to alternative explanations — namely, modern healthcare and scientific literacy about disease.
Limited Health Care Access Reinforces the Belief System
This connection to health care isn’t incidental — it’s one of the most consistently documented drivers of ongoing sorcery belief. Researchers working directly with health extension officers in PNG have found that inadequate access to clinics and medical explanations for illness and death creates a vacuum that sorcery belief fills. In some remote areas, a population of tens of thousands of people may have no local clinic at all, meaning sickness and death go unexplained by modern medicine, leaving sorcery as the most immediately available framework for understanding what happened. Health workers have specifically identified the need for better communication strategies around causes of death and illness as a way to reduce inadvertently triggering sorcery accusations during medical crises.
Rapid Social Change Hasn’t Displaced Older Belief Systems
Papua New Guinea has undergone enormous transformation since European contact — shifting from tribal societies toward a modern capitalist economy, with significant political, infrastructural, and economic development. But researchers studying this transition note that modernization hasn’t uniformly displaced older belief systems; instead, sorcery and witchcraft beliefs have often persisted alongside modern institutions rather than being replaced by them. Some scholars argue this reflects a broader pattern: people tend to hold onto traditional customs and beliefs more tightly, not less, during periods of social and economic difficulty or uncertainty — and PNG’s uneven, rapid modernization has created exactly that kind of ongoing disruption in many communities.
The Country’s Cultural Diversity Complicates Any Single Explanation
Part of what makes sorcery belief in PNG so persistent and hard to address uniformly is the country’s extraordinary cultural fragmentation. PNG is home to hundreds of distinct tribal and linguistic groups, many with limited interconnection to one another, and provinces often maintain distinct cultural identities and customs. This means sorcery and witchcraft beliefs aren’t a single, uniform phenomenon across the country — practices, specific terminology (sanguma, posin, and other local terms are used interchangeably with “sorcery” and “witchcraft” in different regions), and the severity of associated violence vary significantly by region and community, making any single nationwide intervention or explanation incomplete on its own.
Legal and Colonial History Left an Ambiguous Framework
PNG’s legal relationship with sorcery has its own complicated history. During the colonial period, the introduced legal system in the Australian-administered territories dealt with sorcery accusations and resulting violence in ways that researchers have compared to how English common law and other parts of the British Empire, including colonial Kenya, handled similar beliefs. PNG’s own Sorcery Act, in place for decades, formally recognized sorcery as a mitigating factor in violence committed against accused sorcerers before being repealed in 2013 — a repeal accompanied by an expansion of the death penalty specifically for sorcery-related killings, reflecting the government’s own struggle to address the violence these beliefs can produce.
The Violence Connected to These Beliefs Is a Serious, Documented Problem
It’s important to be direct about the real-world consequences: accusations of sorcery in PNG have, in numerous documented cases, led to severe violence against accused individuals, including public attacks and killings, disproportionately affecting women and sometimes children — particularly where belief holds that sorcery abilities pass through a bloodline. Researchers and organizations working on this issue in PNG treat it as a genuine public health and human rights concern, not merely a cultural curiosity, and have specifically called for community-based prevention strategies alongside legal and health-sector reforms.
Scholars Continue to Debate the Right Framework for Understanding It
It’s worth noting that researchers studying this topic don’t fully agree on terminology or framing — there’s ongoing academic debate about whether “sorcery” and “witchcraft” represent genuinely distinct belief categories, with some scholars arguing witchcraft implies less intentional harm than sorcery, and disagreement over how much weight to give competing anthropological versus development-focused explanations for why these beliefs endure. This isn’t a settled academic question, and researchers actively working with PNG communities continue to refine their understanding of both the beliefs themselves and the most effective, culturally respectful ways to reduce the violence connected to them.
Join The Discussion
If you have firsthand knowledge of Papua New Guinea, whether through research, cultural background, humanitarian work, or personal connection, what has your experience taught you about how these beliefs function in daily life? Share what you’ve observed about efforts to address the violence connected to sorcery accusations, or questions you have about the anthropological research behind this topic. This is a sensitive and complex subject, and multiple informed perspectives are genuinely welcome here.
