Abstract
For people living in coastal Madang, Papua New Guinea (PNG), daily life is full of uncertainty and ambiguity. The words and actions of other people are often opaque, the world is animated by invisible spirits, and the material environment shifts from day to day—water sources dry up, animals destroy garden crops, roads wash out, and vehicles break down. But Papua New Guinean people’s experiences of such things are shaped by their model of knowledge, which readily accommodates ambiguity and uncertainty, and which provides people with a range of tools for managing their relationships and addressing social problems.
Drawing on ethnographic examples from twelve months of fieldwork in coastal Madang Province from March 2023-April 2024, I show how uncertainty and ambiguity rather than certainty and clarity is the privileged or normative state. People move back and forth from a state of uncertainty and confusion to temporary bursts of certainty and then back to a state of uncertainty. I illustrate how uncertainty and ambiguity enable productive forms of social action and allows people to maintain peaceful, if tension-filled, relationships. When people remain in a state of uncertainty about how someone died and who was responsible, for example, they can successfully plan and execute their family member’s funerals because they are able to work together and not get derailed by sorcery accusations. Certainty about how someone died and who was responsible, by contrast, risks escalating conflicts by spurring sorcery accusations and driving people to engage in retaliatory violence. The cultural model I describe here suggests that European epistemologies that privilege certainty and progress towards the truth are not universal. It also helps explain why Papua New Guineans so readily tolerate legal failures, bureaucratic incompetence, and community meetings that go nowhere.
I then show how Papua New Guinean people do not just accept doubt and uncertainty, but strategically generate it in themselves and others, a category of activity I call “doubt-casting.” I explore a range of doubt-casting techniques: suppressing or reiteratively interpreting evidence to conceal how someone died, rapidly shifting between explanatory narratives rather than settling on an authoritative version of the truth, distributing blame across many possible sorcery suspects, encouraging young couples not to exchange brideprice so that their clan status remains ambiguous, and using the legal system to keep their families from resolving conflicts and disputes through exchange.
Finally, I show how these doubt-casting techniques based on the cultural model of uncertainty I describe provides people with creative ways of addressing social problems. Gender-based violence and sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) are pressing contemporary social issues throughout PNG. According to Human Rights Watch (2023), PNG is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman or girl. Over the past two decades, rates of violence against those accused of practicing sorcery have also risen. Though the government has responded with legal changes that are supposed to open avenues to address and prosecute violence such as repealing the Sorcery Act and implementing the Family Protection Act (2013), state social services are limited and can be difficult or impossible for people to access. This means that, in practice, addressing the problem of violence falls largely on impacted persons, communities, and local leaders. I illustrate how people in one coastal Madang community use doubt-casting to diffuse a sorcery-accusation and prevent further conflict and violence. I also show how women experiencing domestic violence utilize doubt-casting techniques to prevent further violence and find a way out of their abusive relationships.
Enlightenment thinkers framed modernity as a unilinear progression towards truth. But, in the U.S. and elsewhere, our sense of security in this notion of the truth is falling apart. The model I present in the dissertation is relevant to scholars working on misinformation, the loss of trust in scientific experts, and the “post-truth” environment here in the United States. We need new frameworks for understanding our contemporary post-truth era and the PNG perspective I present in the dissertation can help us better understand these pressing social problems.
