It is Christ or corruption in Papua New Guinea: Bring in the Witness!

Anthony Pickles, Priscila Santos da Costa

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5 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

Endemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of discerning people’s intentions. Established ethnographic and linguistic data from PNG meanwhile document witnesses as imagined to be embodied, interested, lacking a privileged relationship to truth, and thus susceptible to coercion. Recasting the PNG corruption issue in terms of witnessing foregrounds a perceived cultural conflict between inclusion and duty; it also reveals how and why the Christian God was invoked—using debt and obligation rhetoric—to end corruption at the national scale.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)349-366
Number of pages18
JournalOceania
Volume91
Issue number3
Early online date12 Oct 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021

Keywords

  • corruption
  • Christianity
  • politics
  • Papua New Guinea
  • witnessing
  • social change

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