Content area
Full text
CARGO CULT: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. By Lamont Lindstrom. Honolulu (Hawaii): University of Hawaii Press. 1993. xiv, 246 pp. (Photos.) $14.95, paper. ISBN 0-8248-1563-7.
ANOTHER BOOK ON CARGO CULTS? In Lindstrom's case, the answer is no because he is not so much concerned with the cults themselves as with the western discourse on them. Neither a grim-faced interrogation nor a tabloid-style expose, Cargo Cult is a playfully reflective reading of several different genres of cargo writing.
Lindstrom looks at everything from scholarly accounts to steamy novels and is at his best when playing one voice off against the other. When he juxtaposes missionary and administrative accounts of cargo cults, we see how they afforded an arena for accusation and exculpation. Missionaries hinted at failures of colonial policy, often stressing poor political and economic conditions, while administrators emphasized proselytization's disruptions and Christianity's unrealistic millennial hopes. These attempts to place the blame for cargo "outbreaks" revealed as much about...