In the Kaluli community of Southern Highland Province, Papua New Guinea, the two main responsibilities of local psychics are:
- cure people
- and finding the villager’s lost pig
What is the connection between these two things? In the local culture, a person is sick because of his inner pig, lost…
Séances maybe called for a variety of reasons, including entertainment, but most commonly are called to cure illness and to find lost pigs. One of the principlec auses of illness, from the Kaluli point of view, is that a person’s invisible wild pig (or cassowary) aspect may be tr apped or injured by hunters of the spirit world, resulting in pain and disability for the visible person. If the animal is taken from the trap and eaten by the spirits before it can be rescued, the person will die. An even more serious cause of illness (which may or may not be involved with the trapping of the wild pig aspect) results from an invisible attack on the victim’s body by a witch…
Schieffelin, EL, 1985. Performance and the cultural construction of reality. American Ethnologist , 12 (4), pp.707-724.
In the view of the Kaluli people, one of the main causes of disease is that a person’s invisible boar (or cannibal) may be trapped or injured by hunters in the spirit world, causing visible pain and disability to the person. If the trapped animal is captured and eaten by the spirits before being rescued in time, the person will die. A more serious cause of the disease is the victim’s body, attacked invisible by the sorcerer…
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