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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how ancestral spirits and corporate sorcerers shape the form and outcomes of ritual among indigenous Marind in West Papua. These conflicting supernatural forces speak to broader transformations in Marind cosmology arising from ecological destruction and capitalist incursion.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in West Papua, this paper examines the 'failure' and 'success' of two rain-making ceremonies - one hosted by an indigenous Marind expert, the other by an Indonesian oil palm corporation. Participants conceived the failure of the first ritual as a punishment meted by ancestral spirits against Marind who support agribusiness expansion. Meanwhile, the success of the corporate ceremony confirmed rumors that corporations wield foreign and powerful forms of sorcery. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's notion of the double bind, I suggest that the ritual outcomes dramatize the irreconcilable demands placed on Marind by custom and capitalism. Attempts to endorse agribusiness incurs ancestral punishment, while efforts to oppose it are thwarted by the superior power of corporate sorcerers. In this context, I argue, the moral implications of the corporate ritual's unexpected 'success' prove just as problematic as those of the customary ritual's dramatic 'failure'. At the same time, the ritual outcomes described in this article add another level of meaning to Bateson's double bind by pointing to an asymmetry in power between the two figures of authority from whom Marind receive contradictory injunctions. On the one hand, ancestral spirits affirmed their power by thwarting Marinds' attempts to end the drought. But these same ancestral spirits proved incapable of preventing corporate sorcerers from bringing the rains. Co-opted yet efficacious, corporate rituals point to a new social order in which both Marind and their ancestral spirits find themselves subjected to foreign sources of supernatural control.