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Abstract:
In contrast to a strong tendency in recent studies of Melanesian religious and political movements that want to discard the term 'cargo cult' for reasons of analytical-and ethical-inadequacy, this article argues that the term remains useful to delineate an empirical field for comparative purposes. Further, it suggests that the central moral and existential crisis that underlies cargo cults has to do with pressure on the traditional exchange system and concomitant notions of personhood and fairness. Finally, it argues that the study of cargo cults provides a vantage point for a culture-critical approach to Western society, as it challenges the sharp distinction between religious and economic values that makes it difficult to understand contemporary moral paradoxes.
Keywords: cargo cults, culture critique, economy, exchange, Melanesia, millenarianism, religion
Cargo cults were once at the forefront of the anthropological imagination. They no longer are. Although a continual stream of books and articles are published on the subject, it no longer kindles the same intense intellectual debate as it once did. What happened to cargo cults? In this article I will discuss theoretical analyses of old and new cults, some of which suggest that the term should be abolished, or at least avoided. The history of anthropology teaches us that it is very hard, if not impossible, to obliterate an analytical term once it has been well established in the literature and, in addition, has been adopted as a popular concept. Apart from this pragmatic consideration, however, I will argue that it is unnecessary and even unproductive to discard the term because it can still provide an analytical edge for understanding and comparing certain types of religious phenomena and moral discourses about inequality, wealth, and exchange, in both Melanesia and the West.
As far as Melanesia is concerned, the cargo cult concept highlights a range of millenarian ideas, cults, and movements that originated in the wake of Western colonization and, more often than not, involved a strong concern with the acquisition of Western goods - the cargo. As expressions of millenarian zeal that anticipated and provoked radical change in society, they can be compared with millenarian movements elsewhere, for example, with millenarianism in late medieval Europe, so impressively described and analyzed by Norman Cohn ([1957] 197O).1 Cohn connects...