Comments on: Mob burns sorcerer to death

By: Marjo Aho

Marjo Aho — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:22:00 +0000

This was a very tragic incident in PNG, however it irks me about the comments where people are making about “ignorance and stupidity”. People believe in sorcery because they have not had the privilege of learning “other explanations” for the events in their lives. For example, If YOU had never been taught how illnesses are caused by bacteria and viruses (which for all intents and purposes are “invisible” to us), how would you be able to explain people becoming sick?I have been lucky to have the opportunity to travel around PNG, one of the most amazing and culturally rich countries in the world. People in PNG are incredibly resourceful, although in much of the country people live not much differently than hundreds, even thousand of years ago, in and as part of nature, without modern inventions such as electricity, never mind ether media or internet access. Many don’t have a way of knowing or explaining events by other means than “sorcery”. For example, I once visited a village where all the babies had died for years. The villagers had come to believe that their women were cursed and the women were sent away from teh cillage to give birth “in the bush” to try keep the bad mojo away from the village. Giving birth of course involves blood which attracts mosquitoes. The newborn babies all got malaria, but for the villagers there was absolutely no way to know that mosquitoes had anything to do with the babies dying. Then one year a young missionary couple came to the village and brought mosquito nets and explained the connection between the mossies and the deaths. The villagers were willing to accept this connection and newborns stated to survive. We met both the first survining “mozzie-net baby” (now a young man) and also the missionary couple, who had left the village years ago but happened to come back to visit the village. At this point they had given up their Christian religion, and turned their life mission into documenting the culture and language of this fashnating area. So… unless you personally made scientific discoveries, saying that people are “stupid and ignorant” because they dont know what you have had the privilege to learn something in school from someone else (like you did) just shows your own ignorance of the world. Yes, the events that happened are sad and tragic, but you have to put them in a cultural context. We are all trying to make sense of this world, but our frameworks of reference and our availability to knowledge and materials are often very different.

By: Robert Holmén

Robert Holmén — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 22:48:00 +0000

Are you unaware that European colonial powers were run by hypocrites?

By: SporkFishGod

SporkFishGod — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Well you’re quite wrong there.

By: deepthroatb

deepthroatb — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:33:00 +0000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8381652.stm
Northern Ireland.
1971

By: deepthroatb

deepthroatb — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:32:00 +0000

“These people.”
Ah. Them and us.
Makes it so much easier to believe ‘it couldn’t happen here’.

By: deepthroatb

deepthroatb — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:28:00 +0000

I bow to your nation’s more creative use of torture definitions.
Here we call a hanging ‘a hanging’, a burning ‘a burning’. Makes programme notes so much easier.

By: IamInnocent

IamInnocent — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:17:00 +0000

Well English people ask other English people if they are speaking English all the time.

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:09:00 +0000

For all that magic doesn’t exist, it’s still capable of killing people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_death

And, of course, you can use it to steal people’s genitals.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/04/22/oukoe-uk-congo-democratic-witchcraft-idUKL2290323220080422
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_%28medicine%29

Funny/scary how the brain works.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 06:33:00 +0000

Are you unaware that Europe was doing the same things, in much larger numbers?

By: Daniel Sobol

Daniel Sobol — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 06:11:00 +0000

Primitive and fearful.

By: Robert Holmén

Robert Holmén — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 05:41:00 +0000

Events like this (certainly not a new thing) are what allowed European imperial powers to seriously believe they were doing these people a favor by ruling over them.

By: Aeron

Aeron — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 05:09:00 +0000

The newspaper has changed the image link to a story about primary school funding.

By: cub

cub — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 03:21:00 +0000

OH BLOODY HELL!

By: nachoproblem

nachoproblem — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:54:00 +0000

I pity those who “need” quotation marks to make inferences.

By: nachoproblem

nachoproblem — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:52:00 +0000

>>But it sure doesn’t sound like Scotland.<<

Yeah right. "No True Scotsman."

Just kidding. We can see from the link it's Papua New Guinea, but I can't fault our fellow Boingers saying the header could use A TAD MORE CLARIFICATION.

By: glaborous_immolate

glaborous_immolate — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:39:00 +0000

There are people who believe they have magic powers. Probably way more people believe they have magic powers than people who claim to have the powers.

By: aaronmhill

aaronmhill — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:14:00 +0000

Wouldn’t it be “sorceress”? I thought “sorcerer” was the male-gendered form.

By: cellocgw

cellocgw — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:03:00 +0000

“Sorcerers do not exist” — that’s what they WANT you to think. – What, too soon? SRSLY, you fools, would it have been ok to murder a non-innocent woman?

By: Víctor Jiménez Merino

Víctor Jiménez Merino — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:35:00 +0000

Not the beeeeees!!!!

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:23:00 +0000

Lynching doesn’t necessarily refer to hanging. Many lynching in the US were burnings.

By: deepthroatb

deepthroatb — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:48:00 +0000

Was there a ‘lynching’?
That would suggest a person was dead, or at least unconscious, before having the flesh, muscle and sinew slowly incinerated from their bones.
According to the article this woman was burned alive.
While children recorded it on their cellphones.

By: timquinn

timquinn — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:16:00 +0000

I think you posted on the wrong article. Your post goes with the one about the Tea Party.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:09:00 +0000

The perp goes by Mary I.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:05:00 +0000

This type of mob-inspired murder on the grounds of alleged witchcraft is much less rare than you’d think. Chiefly, in Africa.

Then, there’s also the murders committed by “sorcerers” (or suppliers to same) who want to use witchcraft, by harvesting body parts of people with albinism, people who are still alive.

This is not a sane world we live in.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:58:00 +0000

It happened in “Mount Hagen City suburb in Western Highlands Province” in Papua New Guinea. The victim was from the “Enga Province,” also in Papua New Guinea.

By: Sekino

Sekino — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:44:00 +0000

Jungle justice and the mob mentality is more the problem — not belief in sorcery. Steal a cell phone and the mob could be just as likely to burn you

The mob mentality is the cause of the lynching but the religious beliefs are the cause for the accusation in the first place. They’re both equally dangerous ingredients.

By: Min Smith

Min Smith — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:31:00 +0000

Mass ignorance is DANGEROUS, and don’t you ever forget it.

By: Rob Beschizza

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:19:00 +0000

It happened in Scotland.

By: Ipo

Ipo — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:09:00 +0000

Do you speak Georgian or another Kartvelian language?

By: kroeghe

kroeghe — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:52:00 +0000

Paste “Mount Hagen City” into Wikipedia and receive an article whose first sentence reads:

“Mount Hagen (German: Hagensberg) is third largest city in Papua New Guinea.”

Wikipedia and Google search are miracles, and should have their own holidays.