Andrew Lattas

Capitalizing on Complicity: Cargo Cults and the Spirit of Modernity on Bali Island (West New Britain)

Using the cargo cult movement of Dakoa on Bali Island (West New Britain), this article explores the relationship between history and the other forms of human time articulated in cult practices, beliefs, and myths of origins. This relationship often entails the collapsing of historical time into biographical time. It involves Dakoas cult taking up Western notions of kingship and the Christian figures of God, Jesus, and Moses-all of whom are merged with the heroic structure of traditional myths. New mythological figures have emerged who encompass multiple identities and who resurface at key historical moments so as to give a mythic-magical quality to the transformative processes of government, mission, and commerce. Many of the cults new important spirit beings are extensions of the cult leader Dakoa, whose personhood embodies a history and provides a model for a new, pacified Melanesian self capable of reincorporating the globalizing processes of modernity.

Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity: A Review Article

This review article is a critical evaluation of recent ethnographic contributions and theoretical debates concerning cargo cults. It examines how Foucaults genealogical and discursive methodologies can be used in a way that undercuts their valuable insights. The recent self‐reflexive turn, where anthropology focuses on the moral politics of its own discourses, can lead to a silencing of the moral political discourses of others. Moreover self‐reflexivity can become an authorising strategy for academics keen to downplay race and resistance in millenarian movements where these are important features.

Neither cargo nor cult

Neither cargo nor cult: Ritual politics and the colonial imagination in Fiji, by Martha Kaplan. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1995. ISBN 0–8223–1593–9.