Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co-constitutive.