Ghosts and ancestral spirits as witnesses of World War Two in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

My thesis explores relationships with the ‘ghosts of war’ – foreign war dead from Australia, Japan, and the United States – in former battlefield sites in Papua New Guinea. I focus on two sites prominent in PNGs World War Two history: the Wide Bay area 100 km south of Rabaul on New Britain island, site of the infamous Tol Plantation Massacre of 160 Australian POWs by Japanese Forces in February 1942; and the Gorari area of Oro Province, where Japanese forces suffered defeat in early November 1942. Both sites hold many unrecovered war dead, with local people experiencing complex relationships with the legacy of WWII and the ghosts of war.

The former combatant nations are actively searching for their dead in their old theaters of war. Additionally, thanatourism and war tourism have increased in popularity for the people of these countries. For people in former battlefield sites I work in, their relationships to the bones of the foreign war dead, and ghosts of war, become important ways through which they extend historical connections and pursue present relations with foreign others who go to their places.

I analyse local idioms through which people remember, interpret, and reinterpret their war histories. In the accounts, some people become aligned to a side during the war, but their rationale are framed according to their own cultural modes and ways of thinking. Many of my interlocutors have postulated that WWII was a foreign war and that they, or their parents and grandparents, were simply caught in between. On the other hand, a politico-religious group in one of my fieldsites have their own cosmological framing of WWII that entirely disregards the ideological orientations of the former combatant nations. Their worldview re-evaluates notions of ‘origin’ and ‘foreign’ and flips the narrative of WWII being a foreign war in PNG.