Culture
'As a means of appreciating in modern European imagery just how different the times must have seemed to New Guineans, let us suppose the earth today has been invaded by a race of men from outer space: men 10,000 years ahead of us in technical achievement and, because of that, ultimately invincible. Within a few months, the invaders usurp all major functions of government, decree total and universal disarmament, and by a few exemplary demonstrations convince us that they give us machines fabricated of an unknown element and driven by power which renders all conventional fuels obsolete. They inform us firmly and kindly that we must prepare to abandon all our religious beliefs and practices as a first step towards emulating their superior philosophies and skills.
'If such an event is within compass of our imagination, we can perhaps comprehend something of the impact made by the first European civilization on the Stone Age tribes of New Guinea.'
Osmar White
Parliament of a Thousand Tribes
Cargo Cults
This is a general name for a large number of religious cults peculiar and indigenous to New Guinea and the rest of Melanesia. By a cult religion is meant one that is intense, short-lived, and relatively small-scale. Cargo cults can also be described as millennial and messianic. Many religions promise some sort of reward or perfect life to come. Millenarian religions predict that the perfect state of affairs will arrive on earth after a definite, and usually short, lapse of time, perhaps even imminently. Messianism indicates that the religion was founded and/or is is run by a messiah, a prophet. These New Guinea cults have been called 'cargo' cults because they all have the peculiar feature of including the arrival of cargo as the signal and substance of the millennium. The Pidgin word kago
is close in meaning to 'ships cargo', and is used to refer to any sorts of goods that are found in a trading store, and to jeeps, aeroplanes, telephones, ships - in short Western treasure. It has struck scholars as intriguing that cargo has become an integral part of a religious cult. Westerners are apt to separate the spiritual domain of religion from that of material concerns. Not so the Melanesians.
Cargo cults usually begin with a Melanesian assuming the role of a prophet. He indicates that the present time of troubles will come to and end and be followed by the millennium. The ancestors will return to join the living, bringing with them in ships or aeroplanes abundant cargo so that material well-being will be enjoyed by all. Present wrongs will at last be righted; for example, skin colours will change, or the white man will be expelled. Usually the prophet desires to separate his faithful sheep from the faithless goats. He does this by judging faith by works. He commands the making of adequate preparations for the millennium: sometimes social reorganisation, sometimes economic reorganisation, new religious rites, the construction of jetties or airstrips to receive the dead and the cargo, the construction of new planned villages including accommodation for the prophet and the returning spirits, the disposal of produce and wealth to show faith. The faithful must adhere to the regimen or otherwise they will
not be saved, perhaps, even, the millennium will not come.
The unique and even spectacular features of the cults (e.g. the large-scale construction of jetties or airstrips to receive cargo) have gained them world-wide publicity. The regimen imposed, the destruction of pigs and crops, or the resettlement, sometimes wreaked a certain amount of havoc in the areas where they occurred. This is perhaps the main reason why the official attitude towards them has always been one of disapproval.
History
One of the first manifestations now regarded as a cargo cult is the Tuka movement of Fiji, which became in 1885, disappeared for a time, and recurred after World War 11. Other principal cults are the Milne Bay Prophet Movement (1893); the Baigona Movement (1912); and the Taro Cult of Fiji (1914). After World War 1 there was the Vailala Madness (1919) and then a series of cults too numerous to list. When the Japanese swept across the Pacific a wave of cargo activity preceded them and continued for some time after their arrival. Typical of these was the Mansren Myth in the west of what is now West Irian. Traceable back to 1867, prophecy and cult activity seem to have gone on intermittently in this area until in 1942 in a flurry of activity a prophet organised whole villages in imitation of an army with officers and dummy equipment. Despite a
massacre by the Japanese the Mansren cultists continued to be active. Since World War 11 the principal cults have been the Naked Cult of Espiritu Santo; the John Frum Movement of Tanna; Masinga (or Marching) Rule of Malaita, Solomon Islands; and a movement in Manus, Admiralty Islands.
Two of the best -documented cults, which can serve as illustrations, are the Vailale Madness of Papua, and the cults among the Garia of the Madang District. As to the former: in 1919 it came t6o the attention of the Australian authorities that among the people living in the Gulf Division of Paua there were 'reports' . . . that their ancestors were about to return in the guise of white men, by steamer, or, according to one version, by aeroplane, and would bring with them a large cargo of European goods of every kind. these goods, it was said, were actually the property of the natives, but were being withheld form them by the whites. the latter, however, would soon be driven out of the country. The leaders of the movement, who claimed to have received messages to this effect from the spirits, ordered the people to suspend all work and prepare feasts of welcome. Platforms were built and loaded with presents of food. the leaders, and some of their followers, imitated European manners and customs in various ways, some ludicrous or pathetic. The leaders drilled their own 'police boys.' At a certain time each day they would sit, dressed in their best clothes, at the tables, decorated, European fashion, with flowers in bottles, which had been set up to entertain the returning spirits .
'A feature of the Vailala movement was a violent reaction against the native religion. The leaders ordered their followers to abandon all traditional ceremonies and destroy the ritual objects associated with them, and they met with an enthusiastic response' (Mair).
'The anthropologist on the Papuan government staff {F.E. Williams} referred to the mass hysteria with which the movement was accompanied:
'Great numbers were affected by a kind of giddiness; they lost or abandoned control of the limbs and reeled about the villages, one man following another until almost the whole population of a village might be affected at the same moment. While they indulged in their antics the 'Djaman', or 'German', a language composed mostly of nonsense syllables, and pidgin-English which was almost wholly unintelligible' (Hogbin).
Summing up the position in 1947, L.P. Mair writes 'By now the 'cargo cult' has appeared in every administrative district of the mandated territory, and even in the highlands which have only known the white man for fifteen years . . . The common characteristic is the insistence on the cargo of European goods to be sent by the ancestors, and the disappearance of the white man and his rule. Underlying the cargo myth is the idea that all trade goods have been manufactured in the spirit world by the ancestors as gifts for their descendants, and are misappropriated by white men. The prophet of one of these movements, who was named Batari, scored a strong point on one occasion when a crate marked 'battery'
was unloaded from a ship - but not delivered to him. In every case, the leaders order native economic activities to be suspended. No gardens need be made, since the ancestors will provide all the food required - but only to those who have shown their faith by not growing any for themselves. For the same reason all the pigs are killed and eaten. The people spend their time preparing to welcome the ancestors; sometimes this involves special songs and dances. In the highlands, where it would be both unrealistic and beyond the scope of the people's imagination to expect a ship, they make airstrips and decorate the borders . . . On Karkar Island the root-conception of the natives' entry into the kingdom from which the whites have debarred them was expressed in the belief that the whole island would be turned upside down, and those who survived would have white skins.
'Usually there was some attempt to set up a rival 'government.' the leader of the movement would often be a village official. but if he was not he would disregard the luluai's authority. He drilled his own 'police boys,' sometimes with dummy rifles made of wood, and on some occasions set up an 'office,' where he sat in imitation of the government official, pathetically surrounded by the paraphernalia of writing'.
Sociology
Originally these cults were explained as a kind of bizarre aberration, a kind of temporary delusion - hence Vailala 'Madness'. This view is clearly behind William's remarks, for he elsewhere indicates that his ire was raised by the people's foolish behaviour. It seemed hard to reconcile these movements with the rational behaviour of everyday life. There can be few scholars who take this explanation seriously today, which is not to say that it is not held by anyone. However, as the cults were appearing in similar form all over the Western Pacific islands it became less and less plausible to talk of delusion and irrationality; too many societies were involved.
A slightly better theory emphasised the role of the white man and of native-white relations in the cult ideology, and suggested they were some kind of reaction to contact with the white man. In such a vague formulation this hypothesis led nowhere. It did not explain why the cults came about long after contact had begun, or how it happened that they occurred in areas where the white man had never been seen. However, as a general line of inquiry it has been persisted with, and most subsequent theories are specifications within this framework. Yet it was not sufficient to explain the cults by indicating how the natives admired the white man's power and material goods but abhorred his selfishness, racism, and boss attitudes. For besides spreading widely, the cults displayed considerable similarity across vast distances. It would be incredible that widely scattered native societies should react to the intrusion of the white man in such similar ways as starting a cult with a particular set of beliefs built into it. Certainly no one would suggest that native experience of the white man has been homogeneous throughout Melanesia; yet native reaction in its cult expression has been strikingly homogeneous.
To a certain extent progress on the theory of the cults was hindered by the difficulty of getting to see one happening. Mostly anthropologists and government officials heard of them only when they had been going on for some time or were already over. This made it very difficult to test those hypotheses which attempted to specify in great detail the mechanisms behind the cult. Indeed. only three anthropologists seem to have been around while there was still cult activity to follow and investigate. These are Jean Guiart, K.O.L. Burridge, and P. Lawrence. To them we are indebted for much of the progress that has been made towards a satisfactory explanation.
However, these authors' explanations vary greatly in quality. Guiart sees the beginnings of a Melanesian nationalism in the cults. He stresses the way their ideology promotes unity among the natives against the whites; and how missionaries, businessmen, and government officials are all seen as 'them'. Burridge explains the cults largely in terms of myth and aspirations. He indicates that certain myths dealing with the origin of man and society have become fused with aspirations for the power and wealth of the white man. He thinks the history of the formation of this 'myth-dream' is the prehistory of the cargo cult. And that the role of the prophets is to translate this myth into concrete action. This is a hazardous process and one attempt follows another; trying to implement the same myth, but each in its own way. Failure of one prophet leaves intact the myth-dream itself; only the implementation has failed.
It is perhaps only with the work of Lawrence, published as recently as 1965, that a fully developed and fleshed-out model of what goes on in a cargo cult has been presented. He not only dispels the idea that they are in any way bizarre behaviour, he goes so far as to indicate that cargo cults are perhaps even typical Melanesian religions, special mainly in their specific syncretic formula and in the paraphernalia of their ritual. His analysis has to be placed alongside that of Cohn on mediaeval millenarianism, which tends to show that cargo cults are pretty typical of millenarian religions too. Thus the initial sense that they were bizarre is dispelled as our experience broadens. There remains the specific sociological and historical questions of why the cargo cults came when they did and spread as they did.
Following the general line of other thinkers, Lawrence accepts that they are a product of Western contact and clash. The Melanesians live in materially poor societies with a very great deal of reciprocity and mutual exchange. While property is not unknown, monopoly of any goods or means is unknown. Then cam the white man; powerful, a bit arrogant, extremely wealthy, with many desirable goods and a seemingly miraculous means of getting ever more. Yet he kept himself very much to himself and shared none of his wealth or his secrets with the people. Such wages as he paid were meagre and not enough to induct the employees into the white man's social or economic world. However, one gift the white man did extend, and that was his religion. Missionaries, either before or after the trade ship, spread all over the Pacific trying to sell Christianity. Of course, that being their tradition, they attempted to be persuasive: but here and there the resort to bribes - housing, jobs, medicine, and even direct money payments - helped along the work of God. This is sensible enough since the natives were intrigued by Christianity - they noted all the white men going to the churches - as a possible clue to the white man's secrets.
In this situation, quite a number of native hypotheses came forth. One was that the white men were gods. But if they were, they weren't benevolent since they didn't pass on their wealth and benefits. The white men could be another but wealth tribe. Yet they hardly had a social system that was intelligible to other people. How did the white men get the goods? From heaven? Were they perhaps pirates intercepting goods destine for the natives? Who were the missionaries? Renegades, perhaps, intent on helping the natives? Con men, perhaps, sent to mislead and dupe the natives into abandoning their quest for shares in what the white men had. If the goods came from the gods then the gods should manipulable by the usual rituals. If this doesn't yield the goods then the rituals may be the wrong ones, and here the offerings of the missionaries may provide some clue as to which rituals are correct. How do the spirits of the dead come into all this? The return of the dead is not a new element in Melanesian religion, but something of the old blended into the new vision of the apocalypse. The expectations of the apocalypse have broadened because of contact; a whole range of new and desirable objects has been added to the inventory along with the spirits. Another new and distressing element is the occasional prediction that the skins of black men will turn white. Complete fulfillment and dignity can only come when one takes on the whole colour of one's coloniser -and he becomes his true colour, black. Here the white man's racism has been directly incorporated into the black man's world view.
The cargo cult, then, has a clear enough rationale. given a society whose religious organisation is loose and ephemeral rather than doctrinaire and institutionalised, the cargo cult is reasonable enough. The differences among the cults can be explained by different prophets and propagators, different degrees and levels of contact. The spread can be explained by the hypothesis that white-black relations were similarly structured all over Melanesia. The cult then provided a model for a solution in any area. It must have been transmitted from one area to another buy gossip, travellers, missionaries, officials, newspapers, etc. One would expect places where white-black relations have been differently structured to show different development. There remains the baffling problem of why wave after wave of cult activity should occur, in the same areas, with different prophets and slightly different doctrines. Our expectation would be that once bitten by the cult bug the natives would be twice shy of entering into such cataclysmic upheavals again. Lawrence suggests that the lack of a linear chronology, a vision of history
stretching behind them and in front of them, makes this explicable: 'The most perceptive knew, of course, that within the span of the previous three or four generations there had been five major attempts to explain and get control of the new situation and that as each attempt failed it was succeeded by another. Beyond this, however, they regarded each attempt at explanation - each cargo belief or myth - as in itself a separate and complete 'history' of the world. It bore no relation to earlier attempts at explanation, which were all in error and had been, as it were, erased.
Our appreciation of their situation is different, i.e. temporarily linear, and only by teaching them our language can we introduce them to our vision. Melanesia has a welter of unwritten languages and dialects with no body of literature and very few people speaking each tongue. It seems inevitable - even if regretted by some - that some lingua franca will have to be taught and that English is the obvious choice. People have a right to remain in their religion, but they also have a right to know why others regard their religion as damaging. Unfortunately, there seems little doubt that English education will be indoctrination in Western cosmology too; there seems little we can do about his. But it seems a price that may be worth paying for forestalling further devastation from the cults. The Westerners are the intruders; theirs is the responsibility to restore these societies to a viable mode of existence. Once having dangled the carrot of wealth and trade goods under their noses it becomes our responsibility to put it within their reach. Having jumbled up their needs and expectations, we have to find some way of giving them access to our world, should they want it.
At the time of writing, the main flush of cargo activity seems to have died down, although reports of new ones keep coming in. There were cults during the war that predicted the arrival of Roosevelt or the King of England; lately we have heard of cultists who were saving up to buy President Johnson.
There are many elements in the colonial legacy. Cargo cults help make us acutely aware of some of them. The white men brought a racism which degraded the black man and made him ashamed of himself. the white man brought a religion which said it offered the keys to the kingdom, but in the upshot the black man was excluded and deprived of what he wanted, as before. We Westerners live in a society convulsed by the 'revolution of rising expectations'. In Melanesia that took the form of the following Garia prayer:
'O Father Consel, you are sorry for us. You can help us. We have nothing - no aircraft, no ships, no jeeps, nothing at all. The Europeans steal it from us. You will be sorry for us and send us something.'
The problem is: expectations once raised cannot be scaled down again.
Source:
Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea
Peter Ryan
Melbourne University Press, 1972