Torture and scepticism in Papua New Guinea witch hunts

For over a century, anthropologists have documented the many institutions that exist to respond to witchcraft and the uncanny that it names: oracles that attempt to produce certainty by naming the witch; moots in which grievances are aired; trials in magistrates’ courts that attempt to satisfy the community while preserving the life of the accused; Christian purification crusades that cleanse blackened souls to unify riven communities. But can the uncanny be contained by any of these institutions? Extending existing anthropological work on doubt and scepticism, I argue that the effort to know and contain witchcraft through ritual means is always premised on scepticism. It is a restless quest for conviction rather than a violent response to certainty. In the central highlands of Papua New Guinea today, self‐consciously modern witch trials involving torture have become the ultimate oracular authority for revealing and countering kumo witchcraft. Confessions made under torture seem to be uniquely satisfying, offering surer ‘proofs’ and ‘evidence’ in the place of indeterminate signs. However, alongside progressivist discourses, people denounce torture as abuse and point out the futility and hubris of seeking to know and contain witchcraft. Bringing together scholarship on witchcraft and scepticism from the anthropology of witchcraft (which has undertheorized torture) and work on torture and scepticism from history (which has extensively theorized torture), I argue that scepticism often redoubles violence in the pursuit of its resolution.