Cargo Cults as Mimetic Altermodernity

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Revitalization movements, as they are termed by Anthony F. C. Wallace (1956), are characterized as a singular process of intentional culture change (Wallace 1956: 264). Melanesia, the area of the Pacific comprised of islands from Papua New Guinea to the Solomon islands to Fiji, is best known as the area of “cargo cults” a particular type of revitalization movement.

This post will explore Melanesian cargo cults from the perspective of Wallace’s theory and see if Wallace knew what he was talking about as well as examine the unique ideological political, religious, and ethical ideals of the movements, European colonial reactions to the movements, and the internal and external politics of various cargo cult movements throughout Melanesia.

Anthony Wallace subscribed to a very common theoretical attitude in anthropology that claimed culture was a conservative force and culture change happened slowly through the processes of “evolution, drift, diffusion, historical change, acculturation (Wallace 1956: 265). All of these processes are slow, unintentional and largely incapable of being influenced by individuals or even masses of people. This is why revitalization movements fascinated Wallace. He defined the revitalization movement as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture (Wallace 1956:265).”

Wallace saw healthy societies as a sort “social organism” which should “preserve its own integrity by maintaining a minimally fluctuating, life-supporting matrix for its individual members, and will, under stress, take emergency measures to preserve the constancy of this matrix (Wallace 1956: 265).

Wallace’s theoretical background of viewing culture as a social organism and a system seeking homeostasis is very old in anthropology and not without a great deal of more contemporary criticism. To keep such criticisms short, yet make their point relevantly, Michael Taussig makes a wonderful introduction to, well, nearly everything important in contemporary anthropology in his book Mimesis and Alterity (1993) in his questioning of the theoretical doctrine of

“a social construction.” It seems to me that the question of the mimetic faculty tickles the heels of this upright posture and makes it interesting once again. With good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice yet, so it seems to me, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending – thanks to the mimetic faculty – that we live facts, not fictions… [I]n construction’s place – what? No more invention, or more invention? And if the latter, as is assuredly the case, why don’t we start inventing? Is it because at this the point the critic fumbles the pass and the “literary turn” in the social sciences and historical studies yields naught else but more meta-commentary in place of poesis, little by way of making new? (Taussig 1993: xv-xvii).

Cargo cults are nothing if they are not the mimetic performance of ritualized behavior – on the part of the colonized in reaction to the colonizer. Yet we can see that culture may not follow the steady states and homeostasis that Wallace wished it did and still account for the great creativity – ritually, ideologically, and politically that cargo cults have represented in Melanesia.

Let’s get on with Wallace for some more background. What the postmodernly inclined anthropologist would call normative cultural performance, Wallace sees as “a mental image of the society and its culture…. its behavioral regularities… This mental image I have called “the Mazeway” (Wallace 1956:266). This mazeway was exactly “what ‘revitalization movements’ revitalize” (Wallace 1956:266). Wallace is very concerned with the psychology of the revitalization movement, and we will see that so was the European colonial reaction as well. The point of a revitalization movement was to “make changes in the ‘real’ system in order to bring mazeway and ‘reality’ into congruence” (Wallace 1956:267). From here on Wallace has a neat little “Processual Structure” of movements that is sufficient for our purposes to describe as

1. Steady State; 2. Period of Individual Stress; 3. Period of Cultural Distortion; 4. Period of Revitalization (in which occur the functions of mazeway reformulation, communication, organization, adaptation, cultural transformation, and routinization), and finally, 5. New Steady State (Wallace 1956:268).

Wallace considered everything from the Vailala Madness to Buddhism to Bolshevism as indicative of this scheme. While there are huge differences between a religious movement and a political revolution, they share characteristics and often accompany one another. Perhaps Wallace’s fivefold scheme can be made less repetitive and more inclusive if looked at in contrast to the Russian anarchist revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin’s three conditions for popular revolution: “sheer hatred for the conditions in which the masses find themselves. The belief that change is a possible alternative, a clear vision of the society that has to be made to bring about human emancipation” (Bakunin 2007:4). In any case, any attempt to alter the social relations of any given society that is intentional will be “revolutionary.” Therefore, in a very broad sense, Wallace can account for the great diversity of social movements throughout time and space as of one processual structure. However, Wallace is too broad, vague, and relies on too old and outdated theoretical conception of the nature of culture to do justice to the particulars of Melanesian cargo cults.

The indigenous ideological aspects of cargo cults are difficult to summarize. Fieldwork amongst revitalization movements, especially ones that tend to be belligerent toward colonial authority, and whites in general, with cargo cults at the fore, is difficult to say the least of not outright dangerous if a white found themselves in the midst of the movement. Cargo cults and other related movements come about primarily because of power inequalities during cultural contact. In the face of this inevitably violent process the colonized, Indigenous peoples of Melanesia did not simply have their culture destroyed. Rather, as Long argues “one must seek the particular basis for the receptivity of the Western culture within the cultures in question” (Long 1974:406). Long argues that the return of ancestors or the deity, that is found in nearly every religion is “only intensified… [as an] original notion of return and renewal… the renewal was localized within the tribal unit and was interpreted in cosmic rather than historical terms” (1974: 406). Yet this return and renewal that the arrival of the Europeans makes possible is not unproblematic. For the Europeans come bearing the cargo of the other world, but the Melanesian does not know that while the Europeans’ ability to command the fleets of cargo is not supernatural, it is an act of magic – the magic of the creation of “a money economy and a work ethic” taking “the place of trade and barter. The intimacy of relationships embodied in the cultural tradition is undercut by the necessity for productivity” (Long 1974:406). This is Marx’s commodity fetishism, the replacement of social relationships with money, the commodity as a stand in for the production process. But what the Melanesian expects to be produced and the European expects to be produced are radically divergent – the Melanesian seeks a social relation of general equality to the white, the white seeks another worker, a wider market, another thing to sell. So here is the magic of the Europeans – not supernatural power, but productive power, dominating power. A nationalist state society expanding into economic empire: “Like money, the state is thick with soulstuff” (Taussig 1997: 137).

If Europeans have the magic of the commodity, surely it is self evident that the concomitant power of the Melanesians’ will be cargo. Melanesians’ must “undertake the mythicization of history… [as] the old myth has been ruptured by the new power. The cultists now undertake the creation of a new cultural myth that will enable them to make sense of the mythic past and the historical present in mythical terms” (Long 1974: 407).

Stephen argues this is done through the “special imaginative mode as ‘autonomous imagination’… [knowledge from] dreams, trance, and possession not merely effected truths but also the source of genuine creativity emerging from a distinctive mode of imaginary thought” (Stephen 1997:337). So when the “Vailala Madness” occurred in Papua New Guinea in 1941 after

A teenage girl in East Mekeo village of Inawaia was instructed by God in dreams that her people had been deceived by the white colonials officials and missionaries, and that the dead ancestors were about to return to drive them out. God also ordered her to preach his message that villagers must bring out of hiding the relics of the dead and other highly dangerous objects used in sorcery and destructive magic and place them on open altars in villages to negate their lethal power. Once these dream revelations were made public, many people began to follow… (Stephen 1997: 333).

While that international bestselling book of fiction and fantasy known as the Bible is full of such bizarre incidences, and a European will swear all their loyalties upon such a book, such behavior, literally enacted must be a “madness.” Perhaps this is because to the European

Cargo cults are among the most exotic form of exotic beliefs…Perhaps in no other situation does the purely invented nature of religious belief and ritual stand out with such naked and disturbing force to offend the rational gaze of the Western observer (Stephen 1997: 335).

This colonial refusal to see the mimetic nature of the movements most likely arose from Western psychoanalytic discourses in which

Colonialism did not create the metaphors of madness and pathology but rather merely drew upon existing ideas concerning the nature of rationality, irrationality, conscious and unconscious, ego and id, and civilized thought and primitive drive already present in Western culture (Stephens 1997: 337).

Such attitude blinded Westerners, anthropologists included, from seeing the “total psychological change” of cult practitioners as “positive in facilitating individual and group adaptation to environmental, social and cultural change” (Stephens 1997: 335). The altered states of consciousness that the inspiration so many cargo cult leaders claim is revealed from are pathologized by Europeans.

What the colonizing Europeans could not understand was the desire “Melanesians feel that only if their society is transformed so that they are as wealthy in material goods as Europeans are will Europeans treat them as moral equals” (Errington 1974: 255). I believe this drive toward equality (to borrow another psychoanalytic term) is perhaps the most important in human nature. Very few things can be said about innate human biological nature: social in the extreme, innate ability to create and learn language, high degree of androgyny as opposed to extreme sexual dimorphism in many related species, this perhaps sums up what can be truly scientifically be verified about human beings. Yet the engine of history is the conflicts of the dominating versus the dominated. Everywhere humans suffer some inequality, whether it be economic, political, gendered, racial, or status based, at least an important minority will attempt to first free themselves through escape, and if that proves impossible, through revolt. It matters not that a minority is usually the vanguard, for freedom has never been dependent on the numbers who desire it, but on the desires of a number who fight for it. Cargo cults and the various revitalization movements and the more secular and modernly organized social movements of the 21^st Century attest to the endurance of the ideal of the radical equality of the family of humanity.

Well then, enough moralizing. The next important piece of information in my research found disparities between community autonomy, unity, and division as the result of the various types of organization and leadership assorted cargo cults have had in particular places at particular times.

The Kaun movement, from the Duke of York islands, is organized along traditional lines. “The leaders of the Kaun, with few exceptions, all conform to the traditional definition of a big man” (Errington 1974: 261). Just like the traditional feasts of big men, no central authority exists, rather each Kaun endeavor is “composed of separate enterprises focused around a piece of property… Each of these enterprises has its own bank book held in the names of several big men. None of these little clusters of big men ever ask each other what the status of a particular enterprise is” (Errington 1974: 261). The Kaun movement sought to raise the status of Melanesians’ in Europeans’ eyes as “Karavarans equate business with European life: to be European is to do business” (Errington 1974: 263). The Kaun is a more secular and pragmatic movement than many cargo cults, actually pooling money and buying resources communally, even if the accountability of the organization is lousy. Yet the Kaun shares the fascination of the commodity and the secrets of cargo like all similar movements:

Karavarans have absorbed the idea that cargo comes from a factory, that business is necessary to make money for the order of cargo. But the way in which this happens is mysterious to them and they believe that there are elusive secrets involved (Errington 1974: 264).

Because of this mysterious nature of the commodity, the Karavarans perform rituals of mimesis: “Karavarans feel that Europeans behave at all times in the orderly fashion which Karavarans can only achieve briefly and infrequently during periods of ritual” (Errington 1974: 264). If only Karavarans knew the violence behind the discipline of the European economy. We see magic operating here again, but the magic is concerned with cargo. The organization of the communities involved remains the same.

A more important transformation than ritual to cargo takes place in the Madang area of Papua New Guinea. What is commonly called the “Yali cult” after the name of its founder not only performing the magic of cargo but the greater magic of new social relationships cutting across village lines, a completely new phenomenon of politics and ritual. Since the cult is practiced only amongst a minority of any village, it has led to division in each village where practitioners live (Morauta 1972: 430). Morauta argues

that the best way of explaining who does and does not join the movement is to be found in terms of the growing social differentiation in the Area. In particular, I suggest that the decision to support Yali has most frequently
been made by those of lower economic status (1972: 430).

The Yali cult movement seems to take a form more akin to class based community organization in modern nation-states as opposed to the more explicitly anti-colonial sentiments such as the “Marching Rule” movement in the Solomons (Whiteman 1975) or “Maasina Rule” (Keesing 2002: 95- 100).

Unfortunately, Wallace is unable to account for such differentiation amongst these movements as his framework is too general, although it is an interesting place to begin discussion of social movements in “primitive societies.”

To conclude, we have outlined Anthony Wallace’s processural structure of revitalization movements, of which we focused particularly on Melanesian cargo cults. Wallace placed a great deal of emphasis on culture as a sort of social organism responsible for the health of its membership. This organic analogy of culture is too reifying for my tastes, especially when we see that conflict, and not homeostasis, is the norm of any given society. What should be of special interest is not why people revolt and initiate movements for equal status, but why a static cultural environment is tolerated at all!

Melanesians’ encounter the colonial power of Europeans most importantly in the form of cargo – that is commodities being shipped to colonies for sale and consumption. Not aware of the production processes of industrial capitalism, the Melanesians transfer magical powers onto European behavior as the key to their possession of cargo, likewise, the act of ritual mimesis may reveal the secrets of cargo to the native Melanesians. Europeans interpret this behavior in the light of modernist psychoanalytic theories – as mass hysteria and madness of the primitive mind. The European does not see that their culture is just as woven throughout with the magic of commodity fetishism, which drives them to colonialism in the first place. Europeans do not see the ecstatic trances and revelatory dreams of cult leaders as instances of “autonomous imagination” and are therefore all the less themselves for it as one of the most important means of obtaining knowledge by humankind has been through altered states of consciousness.

Finally we see that although all of these social movements share in common a desire for equal status, if not complete freedom from European rule, that locally leadership may take several forms. Leadership may be based on traditional big man systems of economic redistribution or on new organizations of charismatic leaders. Which type takes place is dependent on the cultural environment the movement takes place in.

The most important lesson to be learned from the cargo cult is not the consequences of inequalities resulting from colonialism, or the violent nature of cultural contact, but the magic of the cargo and the fetish of the commodity weave Melanesian and European culture together in mirror false images of each other. And it is through this looking glass that both cultures must go to finish the humanistic projects of both anthropology and the revitalization movements.

Works Citied:

Anarchist Federation

2007 Basic Bakunin. London. www.afed.org.uk

Errington, Frederick

1974 Indigenous ideas of order, time, and transition in a New Guinea cargo movement. American Ethnologist 1(2):255-267.

Keesing, Roger

2002 ‘Elota’s Story: The Life and Times of a Solomon Islands Big Man. Belmont CA: Wadsworth/Thomson custom publishing.

Long, Charles H.

1974 Cargo Cults as Cultural Historical Phenomena. American Academy of Religion 42(3)403-414.

Morauta, Louise

1972 The Politics of Cargo Cults in the Madang Area. Man 7(3)430-446.

Stephen, Michele

1997 Cargo Cults, Cultural Creativity, and Autonomous Imagination. Ethos 25(3):333- 358.

Taussig, Michael

1997 The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge.

Taussig, Michael

1993 Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge.

Wallace, Anthony F. C.

1956 Revitalization Movements. American Anthropologist 58:264-280.

Whiteman, Darrell L.

1975 Marching Rule Reconsidered: An Ethnohistorical Evaluation. Ethnohistory 22(4): 345-366.

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