Sorcery and Colonialism: Illness, Dreams and Death as Political Languages in West New...

Human experience is mediated through narrative, which is not to say it is nothing but narrative. Through narrative, sickness and death are incorporated into a vision of life. This article explores the destructive realities which sorcery narratives reveal to the bush Kaliai of West New Britain. Those narratives teach people how to see colonialism and the power of Whites, for they often reveal Whites as Eating away at the bodies of black people. These narratives of black people being secretly cannibalised by Whites provide alternative placements of white power; they reveal the secret worlds that whites inhabit where the dead feed off the living. These alternative worlds of meaning, which are created by the travels and revelations of dreams, open up a terrain of doubled identities where the doubles of Europeans and the Kaliai can meet to re-enact the struggles of the colonial encounter.

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Man. – 1993. – Vol. 28. – P. 51–77.