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In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil.

This research investigates a commonly held view in certain peri-urban areas around Chimoio, Mozambique, that German Pentecostal pastors and missionaries, as well as German communists, have been operating as witches from the 1990s until the present time. Drawing on ethnographic material (1999–2016), the chapter explores the popular perception that these ‘Germans’ () were promulgating an egalitarian value of sameness and an ethos of purity: gradually, however, they came to be regarded as witches, engaged in nocturnal bloodsucking and undertaking savage hunts for children who were subsequently kidnapped or devoured. Drawing on colonial era cases and comparing the material with other African as well as Melanesian cases, the chapter also relates these ideas about the violence of German witches to long-standing experiences of enslavement, domination and violence, which involve dynamics of memorialization common across both Africa and Melanesia.

In the Papua New Guinea highlands, witches see inside persons (their victims) but conceal themselves from sight. Evangelical and Pentecostal sermons often focus on these dynamics of in/visibility: they may, for example, linger on ways in which Christian piety is evinced as a shine on the body that deflects the covetous and hungry gaze of witches. Members of these congregations are said to be covered by the blood of Christ, and only those who attend church will enjoy the protection that Christ’s grace affords. If witches exhibit supernatural powers of sight, they themselves are hard to see. The invisibility of witches makes possible a supernatural realm existing in parallel to everyday life, on its other “side,” endangering vitality and growth of people, and putting relationships at risk. Sermons elicit fears of this “curse” of witches, and offer a solution: the Pentecostal Christian congregation alone will redeem the community.

In this text I propose to discuss local conceptions of spiritual power in the city of Luanda, Angola. More specifically, I explore how the spiritual field in this city is configured through the markers of a plural ethnicity and Christian practice. In this framework, sorcery () has become the practical element that connects Christian and traditional spirituality politics within the same discursive regime, addressing problems of urban life and social change. I suggest that both Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity and traditionalists engage in competing, correlated and mutually defined ideas of invisible agency, associated with the image of financial market activity—the prediction, explanation, and fabrication of causality in social life. From this perspective, appears as an index of religious activity in urban Angola, much in the same style as the Dow Jones does for global financial markets.

Based on an exploration of how Branhamist Christians in Kinshasa represent and live with (sorcery/witchcraft), this article attempts to bring science and technology in the debate about witchcraft. The Branhamist Christian community is divided among groups who jettison information and communication technologies (ICT) outright, while others formulate a pedagogy of responsibility and awareness of the potentially immoral nature of ICT. The ethnographic material leads me to call for more attention to connectivity, or the accessibility to social and spiritual others, as an important mode in emic theories of witchcraft. Finally, in order to do justice to the heterogeneity of objects that can trigger —such as ancestral objects but also ICT goods—I propose the notion of “the witchcraft complex.”

The village of Sinaketa, in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, has long had a reputation for the power of its witches, but today this village is also one of the strongholds of the newly arrived Christian RevivalChurch (CRC), a Pentecostal denomination. Some women in Sinaketa confess that they are witches, something formerly unthinkable, as this could never be publicly acknowledged, but claim that as born again Christians they have to pray away the evil that resides within them and would otherwise compel them to behave immorally. In this paper, I examine what this means in terms of ideas about belief, power, the body, and relationality wherein Jesus (goodness/modernity/individual responsibility) is seen to replace witchcraft (evil/past/relational responsibility) in a physical as well as metaphysical sense. I examine the contrasts here between gendered and embodied forms of power and the nature of Pentecostal Christian belief as a sort of antidote for the dark and materially unsatisfactory “old ways” and its implications for the relational forms of personhood and exchange that underpin traditional Trobriand sociality.

A spate of albino murders that occurred in Tanzania in 2008 serves as a starting point for investigating two events and stories regarding witchcraft among the Chagga-speaking people of Rombo District, Kilimanjaro Region. Departing from the popular and predominant concept of ‘occult economies’, these incidents and accounts are revealed to revolve around the concept of ‘life-force’ (), whose transfers and transformations afford human, animal, and vegetative being, and constitute ‘dwelling’ () and ‘life’ () in this setting. On this basis, it is argued that witchcraft pertains to modes of being and not-being that unfold from dwelling and life, as transformational processes. Moreover, the accounts are shown to encompass Catholic and Pentecostal Christianity, which unfold from each other as different attempts to deal with witchcraft. The result is a set of folding movements and moments that pertain to modes of being and not-being, which depart from representational approaches in anthropology.

In accounts of “traditional Melanesia,” we learned that witchcraft was an underlying structural condition of relations between men and women and an ever-present potential of social relations themselves. In many ways, traditional sorcery practices were considered legitimate and morally “good” However, there are reasons for thinking that recent upscaling of beating, burning, or killing of witches in Melanesia can be related to the Pentecostal beliefs that align witchcraft with evil and individual morality. In Vanuatu today, especially in urban areas, there is hectic activity aimed at sorting out the problem of sorcery and witchcraft in the new Pentecostal churches, and these churches are designed for exactly the purpose of healing and exorcism. They move into suburbs with what they call “spiritual warfare” and cleanse whole neighborhoods for signs of hidden evil. Whereas the locus of the divination practices in Pre-Christian Melanesia was a realm of forces beyond human control, the modern equivalent ritual is directly attacking the moral person and making that into both an instrument of divination and a sacrificial body.

Sorcery and Christianity have been in an intimate and seemingly opposing relationship on the small Ahamb Island in Vanuatu for more than a century. While sorcery is seen as the most potent threat to the good life as it brings suffering and death, Christianity appears as the main tool to address this and other problems of cosmological and social character. During a turbulent time on the island in 2014, a Christian charismatic revival, largely led by children, became the subject of hope for change on Ahamb. A main event within the revival was a dramatic spiritual war that confronted the island community with the plain and unvarnished realities of good and evil, of God and sorcery, while revealing secrets that literally became a question of life and death.

This chapter examines how witchcraft and sorcery beliefs are reproduced among the educated working and middle classes in Papua New Guinea. In a context where tertiary schooling is accessible only to a tiny segment of the population, many educated people in PNG feel anxious about their social position and worry that their upward mobility will provoke envy and resentment in the less fortunate. This anxiety is projected most strongly onto the “” or rural population, who are thought to maintain many traditional practices, including witchcraft and sorcery. Drawing on ethnographic research among nursing students in the Eastern Highlands, I examine the ways that class identity and Pentecostal social forms coalesce, giving students resources for narrating, understanding, and resisting the dangers they face as social outsiders and (future) employees of a neglectful state. Looking specifically at events during a nursing practicum in rural Eastern Highlands Province, I describe how students and their teachers collapsed different forms of invisible violence—both traditional and contemporary—into a generic evil to be discerned and resisted.