Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Spirits

Animism

Felix Stein — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 13:42:52 +0000

King's College London

Initially published 25 Jun 2019

Abstract:

Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment, or even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Through ethnographic examples drawn from animistic societies worldwide, this entry examines key themes in the study of animism, from principles of animation to attributing sentience to animal spirits and animistic places. Since early and contemporary anthropological approaches to animism are often grounded in the principles, philosophies, and conclusions of modern science, anthropologists use a variety of concepts such as immanence, transcendence, or disenchantment to understand animistic sensibilities. By contrast, animistic persons do not rely upon the concepts of scholars to understand their own worlds. Recently, anthropologists have approached animism as a particular ‘ontology’ in the world, bringing it into conversation with related ontologies such as totemism, analogism, naturalism, and a newly proposed homologism. These and other terms are briefly explained while humour and reflexive awareness are explored as themes that push anthropologists to re-envision the effects of imagination and creativity in a variety of animistic worlds.

Introduction

Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world. The person or social group with an ‘animistic’ sensibility attributes sentience – or the quality of being ‘animated’ – to a wide range of beings in the world, such as the environment, other persons, animals, plants, spirits, and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun, or moon. Some animistic persons or social groups furthermore attribute sentience to things like stones, metals, and minerals or items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Principles of animation and questions of being are thus key to animism. That said, animism is best understood not only in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not. At first glance, animism seems to conjure up a coherent and deliberate ideology of sorts, as it ends in an ‘ism’. But animism is really more a sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it. It is not a form of materialism, which posits that only matter, materials, and movement exist. Nor is animism a form of monotheism, which posits a single god in the universe. And, it is not a form of polytheism that posits many gods.

Instead, to an animistic person or social group, sentience is often envisioned as a vital force, life force, or animated property that is ‘immanent’, accessible, and ‘ready to hand’ in the everyday world, even if this property is usually latent and not perceivable. There is often an important contrast between the ‘immanence’ of animistic sensibilities and the ‘transcendent’ qualities attributed to a monotheistic god or polytheistic gods, which are related to as beings that exist apart from the everyday lives of human beings.

Just what it is that animates any particular being or thing can vary between different animistic persons and societies. Urban shamans in Stockholm tend to approach the world with an animistic sensibility that is rather different to that of Lutheran Swedes, when they consider that ‘everything is alive and permeated with “Spirit”’ in a world comprised of both the “ordinary”, physical reality we live in [… and] another, “alternative” reality, inhabited by living forms or energies sometimes seen as “Spirits”’ (Lindquist 1997: 13). Yet another kind of animistic sensibility is found among the indigenous Siberian hunters known as Yukaghir, who ‘differentiate between conscious and unconscious beings’ (Willerslev 2007: 73). As the anthropologist Rane Willerslev observes, ‘[a]n elderly Yukaghir hunter, Vasili Shalugin, told me that animals, trees, and rivers are “people like us” (Rus. lyudi kak my) because they move, grow, and breathe, but they are distinct from inanimate objects such as stones, skis, and food products, which, he claimed, are alive but immovable’ (2007: 73). Some Yukaghir further consider that static things are not people because they only have one soul (known as the ‘shadow-ayibii’), while active things are considered to be people since they have additional souls, which make them move and grow (the ‘heart-ayibii’) as well as breathe (the ‘head-ayibii’) for example (Willerslev 2007: 73).

These two ethnographic studies point to seminal themes in the study of animism. One theme is the existence of various kinds of ‘spirits’ and ‘souls’. Spirits are understood in a broad sense that encompasses the spirits of beings or things, deities, and energies. Souls are often the spirits of beings and things, depending on the social context. There is no set definition for animism, just as there is no set definition for spirits or souls. Yet a general feel for how the terms animism, spirits, and souls are understood can be gleaned from the ways that scholars (and, in some cases, animistic persons) apply them to social contexts. Urban Swedish shamans and Siberian Yukaghirs, for example, hold in common the animistic logic of immanence. Animistic sensibilities may appear at any moment and thus pervade the societies of Swedish urban shamans and Yukaghirs alike.

A second theme in the study of animism revolves around the attribution of personhood. For the Yukaghir, active things like animals, trees, and rivers are ‘people like us’ because, like human beings, they possess certain kinds of souls. It is these shared souls that imbue animals, trees, and rivers with a sentience that enables them like humans to move, grow, and breathe. By contrast, static things like stones, skis, and food products are ‘not persons’ because they only share one soul in common with humans and lack the kind of sentience that would enable them to move and show signs of animated life, consciousness, and motivation. Not all beings or things have the same animistic sensibilities in the Yukaghir ‘life-world’, which is quite literally a world that is largely alive to sentience. Yet – and this might perhaps go against the reader’s expectations – we find a more comprehensive case of animistic immanence in the life-world of urban Swedish shamans, who relate to ‘everything’ like a living person who is filled with Spirit.

Given this difference in animistic sensibilities, the following questions arise: Is there an archetypal form of animism in which spirits or souls animate all beings, as is the case among urban Swedish shamans? If so, could this form have undergone a process of ‘diminution’ or ‘disenchantment’ in some societies, which caused certain of their animistic sensibilities to become less important or widespread? Would disenchantment explain why Yukaghir view their stones, skis, or food products as being ‘not people’? Conversely, have Swedish urban shamans sought to inhabit a ‘re-enchanted’ world, where everything has Spirit?

Note that while these terms and questions need to be explained by scholars of animism, they do not need to be explained to animistic persons who already relate to the world with animistic sensibilities. Yukaghirs would not need to use scholarly terms such as immanence, life-world, disenchantment, or diminution in order to understand how an animistic sensibility works. They already inhabit a life-world in which there are clear relationships between souls, beings and things – relationships that separate ‘people like us’ from those that are ‘not people’.

Anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnographers, folklorists, religious studies experts, and popular experts alike have grappled with the aforementioned specialist terms when reflecting upon the multitude of animistic societies, both in the contemporary world and historically. It is thus important to note the sometimes subtle but key difference between the persons who live animistic lives and those who study animistic persons but are not necessarily animistic themselves. Revealing discrepancies often arise between the animistic sensibilities of the persons of study and the sensibilities of scholars. This is particularly obvious among anthropologists, who have been leading figures in the study of animism. Both early and contemporary anthropologists often approach animism in an ‘as-if’ manner that suggests they themselves do not relate to the world in an animistic way. Nonetheless, many current anthropological works on animism are subsumed under what Graham Harvey, in a neo-pagan and eco-friendly vein, dubs the ‘new animism’ (2017 [2005]: xvii-xviii). With this term, Harvey describes the approach of anthropologists who are aware that their concepts contrast with the assumptions of early anthropologists. But this does not mean that scholars of the new animism always refute modern beliefs that nothing exists beyond the natural world, which is grounded in the philosophies, principles, methods, and conclusions of the sciences.

Animal spirits and animistic places

Studies of animism often point out the importance of animal spirits and places that are sacred or charged with animistic potentialities. Animal spirits refer to the spirits or souls attributed to animals that may be considered the seat of an animal’s consciousness and motivation. These studies show how animistic potentialities go beyond the human subject.

In animistic societies, animals frequently show their sentience, awareness, and motivation to act through their relationships to human beings. Diverse ways of relating to animal sentience are revealed by the ways that hunters and shamans in particular treat animal spirits. Siberian Eveny, for example, consider that the spirits of the animals they hunt in the harsh Arctic climate are master-parents to all humans. As parents, animal spirits may take pity on their children – which include Eveny persons – by offering themselves up as food to eat. A hunted animal does not make this sacrifice lightly, but ‘will “give itself up” only when the relation between hunter and prey is hierarchical’ – that is, when the human being needs to eat meat to survive (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55). But like parents, animal spirits are manipulated by Eveny, who trick them into giving themselves up to justify their acts of killing. To this end, hunters seek to establish ‘social contact’ with prey animals in a way that makes them appear vulnerable and child-like (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 53). This is no easy task, since Eveny hunters acquire a ‘closed body’ with age that protects against attacks from the spirits of game animals. Hunters therefore must ‘re-open’ their bodies to mimic a child or use a child as ‘bait’ to attract a game animal that will pity the hungry child (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55). The child’s first hunt is organised around this tactic, in which the animal is attracted into close range by the child so the adult hunter can kill it. Then the hunter tasks the child with carrying the prey home on the back of a guardian reindeer, which wards off revenge from the animal’s spirit. While the animal’s spirit will pity the child and its guardian reindeer, both of which it considers to be its children, it may take revenge on the adult hunter for tricking it into giving itself up. Thus, the Eveny hunter implores the animal’s spirit after the kill that, ‘“you came to me out of your own free will, please have pity on us and do not harm us”’ (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55).

Conversely, among the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador, revenge killings can be carried out on shamans who purportedly use animal spirits to conduct witchcraft (High 2012: 130). Waorani fear these killings, which can set in motion a dangerous cycle of deaths that may continue even after the errant shaman has died. Here, the logic of animal consciousness and motivation is different to that found among the Eveny. Since the shaman’s body ‘is inhabited by his adopted jaguar-spirit (meñi)’ at night, when it may attack and kill any named persons, Waorani warn each other against speaking with shamans during this dangerous time. Note that, unlike Eveny who trick animal spirits and plead with them not to take revenge, Waorani jaguar-spirits must be avoided at all costs. Their danger is compounded by the fact that Waorani shamans relate to jaguar-spirits like adopted children who will reciprocate care to their masters. Thus, when Waorani carry out revenge killings, they may find that the shaman’s ‘orphaned jaguar-spirit continues to live and kill people out of sadness and anger for its adopted father’ (High 2012: 130).

Consciousness and motivation in animistic societies is attributed not just to animals, but also to certain places. For example, Yup’ik residents of the Bering Sea coast consider that the ocean has eyes, sees everything, and does not like it when persons fail to follow the traditional abstinence practice of avoiding the waterfront after a birth, death, illness, miscarriage, or first menstruation (Fienup-Riordan & Carmack 2011: 269). Since the ocean brings disasters on people when it is upset, Yup’ik consider that it is best to wait until early spring before visiting it after one of these events. Spring is the season when grebes arrive and defecate in the water; it is also when ringed seals come and their blood soaks the ocean as predators attack. According to Yup’ik hunters, these events make ‘the makuat [ocean’s eyes] close and become blind’ so that the hunters can safely approach the waterfront again (Fienup-Riordan & Carmack 2011: 270).

Similarly, consciousness and motivation can be found in the fires of sacred hearths, which must be treated with respect as spirits reside in and around them. Among the Nenets tundra dwellers of the Siberian Yamal peninsula, women of reproductive age do not cross through the sacred space by the fireplace or hang clothes to dry above it that would be worn on the lower part of their bodies (Skvirskaja 2012: 151). Nenets men, however, store their possessions in this sacred space that serves as the place for hosting respected visitors. The Nenets fireplace reveals ‘the capacity of “things” to objectify some forms of gender relations at the expense of others’ (Skvirskaja 2012: 152).

Moreover, in animistic societies, places may be imbued with memory. Certain burial sites for Daur Mongolian shamans in northeast China have been covered by stone cairns known as ovoo, where Buddhist rituals now attract ‘all manner of princes, dignitaries and foreigners’, while drawing upon the memories and powers of both the shamanic spirits and Buddhist deities that were imbued in these locales (Humphrey with Onon 1996: 133). In a related light, the Western Apache of North America consider that certain locations contain memories and the wisdom to help people to make the right decisions. To Western Apache, a ‘visually unique’ place is like ‘a watertight vessel’ that holds ‘wisdom, [which] like water, is basic to survival’ (Basso 1996: 76). Since ‘wisdom sits in places’, they learn to memorise wisdom-filled stories about wisdom-filled places that can help them to address problems in a measured way (Basso 1996: 67).

Animism in early anthropology

Building upon the findings of historians, folklorists, travellers, traders, missionaries, and expedition members about the religious lives of peoples around the globe, Edward B. Tylor introduced the study of animism within anthropology. Although the term ‘animism’ can be traced to the Latin anima for breath, life, or spirit, Tylor borrowed it from George Ernst Stahl, an eighteenth-century chemist and physician, who proposed that the spirits or souls of living beings or things control physical processes in the body. Like Stahl, Tylor wanted to discuss the relationship between the soul and all forms of life. However, Tylor set out to shift the meaning of animism to encompass what he called ‘the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion’ (1977 [1871]: 426). According to Tylor, animism is a form of religion in which the spirits and souls of humans and other beings are considered necessary for life. As Tylor was interested in the origins of religious views and how they develop over time, he hypothesised that persons adopt an animistic sensibility when reflecting on ‘the differences between a living body and a dead one’ as well as on ‘those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions’ (1977 [1871]: 428). He illustrates how human spirits appear in dreams or visions through numerous examples, like this one of the Zulu in Southern Africa:

the Zulu may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in a dream to visit his distant people, and see that they are in trouble; as for the man who is passing into the morbid condition of the professional seer, phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his sleep, till he becomes, as the expressive native phrase is, “a house of dreams” (Tylor 1977 [1871]: 443).

According to Tylor, experiences such as these suggest that human beings have a soul that can appear to them. Through his extensive catalogue of dreamt phenomena, Tylor showed that persons dream of animal souls (1977 [1871]: 467-74), plant souls (1977 [1871]: 474-6), and even the souls of objects (1977 [1871]: 477, see also 478-80). On this basis, he suggested that persons who attribute souls to human beings, animals, plants, or objects gradually consider that the soul is not only a vital force to specific beings but is pervasive throughout the cosmos and imbued in all beings. Thus, he argued that the souls of humans, animals, plants, and objects survive death and bodily decay in an animistic cosmos, while inhabiting a world that is populated with spirits and deities (Tylor 1977 [1871]: 426).

Tylor championed the social evolutionary approach in anthropology that suggested that people progress from a ‘primitive’ stage of social life, in which they try to control the world around them with magical or religious practices, towards a so-called ‘modern’ life based on the philosophies, principles, and conclusions of science (1977 [1871]: 26-35). The influence of social evolutionism waned in anthropology in the early twentieth century, as anthropologists started to undertake their own fieldwork and obtained findings that cast serious doubt on the idea that societies represent levels of linear human progress. Despite extensive criticisms of it, social evolutionism never entirely disappeared from anthropology or from popular understandings in Euro-American societies about human cultures. Moreover, since Tylor presented his study of animism as evidence for the social evolutionary approach, the two became synonymous for some time. However, it is possible to study animism without the comparative evolutionary angle. Contemporary anthropological approaches show that modern technologies and science are also incorporated into animistic worlds.

Contemporary approaches and the ‘new animism’

In the shamanic journeys of the Chewong hunter, gatherer, and shifting cultivators of the Malaysian rainforest, new items of technology and ‘some species previously not thought of as people, may reveal themselves as such’ (Howell 2016: 63). Technological items can become people in the Chewong world through the assistance of shamans, who use the same word to refer to their spirit-guides and their consciousness. Thus, shamans ‘who have established a permanent relationship with a spirit-guide (ruwai) can send their consciousness (ruwai) on a journey into space [… where] any being or object may appear as a conscious being’ (Howell 2016: 63). Japanese airplanes, for example, became recognised as new spirit-guides that have consciousness after they flew over Chewong forests during World War II. A Chewong shaman’s song, still sung today, ‘refers to the ruwai of Japanese airplanes’ (Howell 2016: 63). In a not dissimilar way, several American pilots who crashed into the Liangshan mountains of Southwest China and were rescued by the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman pastoral and agricultural group, have been incorporated into their animistic creation epic known as the ‘Book of origins’. As folklorist Mark Bender and Nuosu poet Aku Wuwu explain, these WWII pilots and the early twentieth century French, English, and American explorers who visited the Liangshan highlands appear to have been lumped together in this Nuosu animistic myth, which contains recent additions on the ‘Foreigners’ lineage’ and ‘Migrations of foreigners’ (2019).

Recent works on animism, such as these, suggest that a broad understanding of different life-worlds and relationships is needed when we reflect upon what is substantively ‘real’ in an animistic world. It is in this spirit that Kathleen Richardson (2016) has introduced the concept of ‘technological animism’, which describes cases where the boundaries between literature and technoscience are crossed in the production and reception of robots. Like many other robots, the famous ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) was made by Honda in Japan to resemble children so that its human creators and owners would engage with it as a cute, non-threatening, and childlike being. This marketing strategy was particularly important for roboticists in Euro-America ‘to counteract popular notions that robots are threatening to humanity and hyper-sophisticated’ (Richardson 2016: 115). Revealingly, the appeal of childlike robots to their Euro-American or Japanese owners resonates with the appeal of the childlike ‘open bodies’ that Eveny hunters present to the spirits of game animals so that they will pity them and give themselves up.

Relating to other beings as though they were kin is, then, a pervasive theme in current studies of animism (Bird-David 1999, 2018). While some relationships may be conceptualised in a parent-child form or ‘in an idiom of siblingship’, as among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo (Sillander 2016: 171), it is not uncommon to find that kinship terms are extended to other-than-human beings or things in animistic societies, which may also share a common point of origin with humans (Brightman, Grotti & Ulturgasheva 2012: 8). But to stand the test of time, animistic relationships to other beings or things often need to be maintained. Thus, among the Bidayuhs of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, young Christians who wanted to move away from the animistic sensibilities of their parents have chosen to forget (or never properly learn) how to relate to animistic spirits, which ‘were deemed more forgiving of plain ignorance of the rules than of absent-minded transgressions’ (Chua 2009: 338).

What these studies suggest is the importance not only of thinking about different animisms in the plural, but of recognising – as Morten Pedersen suggests for peoples across North Asia, from Siberia to Mongolia – that animistic sensibilities often only come into focus in the right circumstances, contexts, and moments (2001: 415-20). A person may need certain faculties, such as an imaginative ‘openness’ to the world, to perceive the animistic sensibilities of other beings and things (Ingold 2006: 11-2, see also 18-9; 2013: 739, see also 741-2). Religious specialists, such as shamans, are often attributed with ‘inspired’ qualities that enable them to perceive animistic sensibilities that remain imperceptible to ordinary persons (Humphrey with Onon 1996). ‘Astonishment’ (Ingold 2006, 2013) or ‘wonder’ (Scott 2014) have thus become leitmotifs among scholars who seek to show how persons perceive and relate to animistic beings, things, forces, and experiences.

Much of the expansive thinking in the new animism is traceable to Alfred Irving Hallowell’s 1930s fieldwork among the Berens River Ojibwe of North America, which was punctuated by lively vignettes about the supernatural Thunder Birds, called pinési, which are giant birds that create thunder by clapping their wings. In his 1960 study of ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view’, Hallowell invites anthropologists to rethink their life-worlds and those of animistic societies on the basis of his Ojibwe research. Hallowell ‘deeply identified’ with the animistic sensibilities of the Ojibwe and advocated that anthropologists routinely identify with their interlocutors as a way of enriching their anthropology and lives in general (Strong 2017: 468). His study shows that Ojibwe do not attribute animistic qualities to all beings or things at all times, but that they are open to finding that some beings or things may have animistic qualities in certain moments. Thus, Hallowell observes that while some Ojibwe have seen certain stones move in ceremonies, stones usually do not move and many people do not see them move. Similarly, he gives the story of an Ojibwe boy who claimed to have seen a Thunder Bird during a heavy storm – a story that was at first received sceptically by his parents because seeing ‘other-than-human persons’ is not a common Ojibwe experience. Ultimately, this sighting of the Thunder Bird was accepted when ‘a man who had dreamed of pinési verified the boy’s description’ (Hallowell 1960: 32; cited also in Strong 2017: 470). Revealingly, the boy’s parents were persuaded not by the fact that the Thunder Bird was identified by two different persons, but by the fact that the dreamer had perceived the same qualities in pinési as their son had seen during the thunderstorm. Ojibwe consider that people are especially open to perceiving animistic beings in dreams, where they routinely encounter them. Thus, the astonishing similarity between the inspired visions of a Thunder Bird seen by the boy during the storm, and later in another man’s dream, is what convinced his parents.

Animism as an ontology

As Pauline Turner Strong observes, Hallowell’s Ojibwe study presaged ‘an ontological return’ in contemporary anthropology, which brought a renewed focus to principles of animation and questions of being (2017: 468). While animism (and Tylor’s approach to it) fell out of fashion in anthropology after the 1920s, the interest in animistic sensibilities remained vibrant, as Hallowell’s 1930s fieldwork attests. Ethnographic studies documented animistic ways of being and continued to fill the shelves of anthropology and other disciplines, albeit often without using the term ‘animism’ again until the 1990s, when it regained popularity. This does not mean that ethnography always took the lead in anthropological studies on ontologies, some of which have instead been built upon philosophical or theoretical considerations inspired by ethnography (compare to Scott 2013).

Philippe Descola’s ‘fourfold schema of ontologies’ – comprised of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism – provides a vocabulary for discussing the kinds of worlds that anthropologists envision philosophically, theoretically, and in the light of ethnographic fieldwork (2014: 275; see also 2013). In Descola’s terms, the quintessential animistic ontology is a world characterised by ‘a continuity of souls and a discontinuity of bodies’ between humans and nonhumans (2014: 275). Each animistic being has a shared interior quality, such as a soul or vital life force. But Descola suggests that there are different kinds of bodies in any given animist world, such as the human body or the body of specific animals, plants, objects, and even spirits whose ‘bodies’ may be composed of an airy, wraith-like, or translucent substance. This difference in bodies makes for different kinds of animist beings, each of which has a soul and ‘possess[es] social characteristics: they live in villages, abide by kinship rules and ethical codes, they engage in ritual activity and barter goods’ (Descola 2014: 275).

According to Descola, there are important differences between animistic, totemic, analogic, and naturalistic ontologies. Totemic ontologies are common in Oceania, where persons and nonhuman beings share the same interior quality, such as a soul, and the same bodily substance, such as a physicality inherited through kinship to other-than-human totemic ancestors. By contrast, Descola suggests that analogic ontologies are common south of Siberia, in parts of Asia where persons and nonhuman beings do not share the same interior quality or the same bodily substance. Animal domestication is a hallmark of analogic ontologies because the use and consumption of animals lends itself to the view that the interior and bodily qualities of humans and nonhumans are different. Finally, naturalistic ontologies are common across Euro-America, where persons and nonhuman beings do not share the same interior quality, such as a soul, but do share the same bodily substance, namely a physicality traceable to taxonomies of species and evolutionary lines of descent.

Not everyone agrees with Descola’s approach. There have been famous debates, for example, between Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on animism and perspectivism (Latour 2009; Turner 2009: 27). Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004) introduced ‘perspectivism’ as a term that puts a new spin onto what Descola calls animism. Drawing upon ethnographies of Amerindian peoples in Amazonia, Viveiros de Castro suggests that all beings in a perspectival ontology can adopt a human perspective, albeit under certain circumstances that are conducive for them doing so. Whereas Descola considers that animism (and its variant, perspectivism) is one kind of ontology that scholars can analyse and classify from an ‘objective’ and naturalist viewpoint, Viveiros de Castro proposes that perspectivism is a ‘bomb’ that shakes the foundations of the naturalism on which Descola’s scheme is based. Seen in this light, perspectivism is a kind of philosophy that makes possible an entirely different anthropology shaped by indigenous concepts. Thus, Viveiros de Castro argues against Descola’s naturalist view that animism (or perspectivism) only involves humans perceiving animals to have human and social qualities. He suggests instead that ‘animism is not a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto animals’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 477). Since Amazonians consider that animistic beings, such as animals, perceive themselves to be human, Viveiros de Castro holds that any animistic being that puts itself ‘in the position of subject, sees itself as a member of the human species’ (1998: 477).

Although Viveiros de Castro has critiqued Descola for generalising animism in a way that does not account for ethnographies of perspectivism, other anthropologists of Amazonia observe that Viveiros de Castro’s theory of perspectivism is not always ethnographically apt among Amerindian peoples. If we return to a discussion of the Waorani, we see that they do not neatly fit the profile of a perspectival ontology that tends ‘to describe the “predator” perspective as denoting a universally human perspective, [because] in everyday life Waorani people often identify themselves as “prey” to outside aggressors – whether in the form of jaguars, spirits, or human enemies’ (High 2012: 132). Unlike the perspectival groups discussed by Viveiros de Castro, Waorani consider that being a predator ‘is antithetical to proper human sociality’ (High 2012: 138). Casey High suggests that the Waorani view may reflect a new morality, brought on by missionary settlement, in which men are no longer ‘said to be actively trained as killers’ and where ‘openly engaging with jaguar-spirits poses too great a threat to the present ideal of “community” (comunidad)’ (2012: 140). People’s worlds can change over time in response to missionary conversion, social change, and a reflexive questioning of the parameters of one’s morality, which throws doubt on the prospect of viewing entire geographic regions as home to just one ontology, such as perspectivism.

Notwithstanding this, the oeuvres of Descola and Viveiros de Castro have been field-setting with good reason. They have provided new platforms for the comparative study of animism, while opening up vibrant conceptual fora for discussing the resonances between animism, perspectivism, and in some cases also totemism (Pedersen 2001; Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012; Århem 2016). Viveiros de Castro’s work on perspectivism has inspired a volume dedicated to exploring perspectival ontologies across Inner Asia (Pedersen, Empson & Humphrey 2007). Similarly, Descola’s study has led to the recent proposal of the altogether new ontological schema of ‘homologism’, based on Chinese divination, the I Ching, and a Daoist philosophy in which persons and nonhuman beings share the same interior quality and the same bodily substance. In homologism, interior quality and bodily substance are distilled into ‘a single energy-substance, qi, […] knowable via the observation of natural patterns and phenomena’ (Matthews 2017: 266). While this criteria of shared interior quality and bodily substance aligns with Descola’s criteria for totemism, William Matthews proposes that the term homologism better suits the profile of the Chinese ontology, and indeed, of any world that is predicated upon ‘shared intrinsic characteristics rather than analogies’ (2017: 265). Thus, he suggests that homologism ‘logically displaces Totemism as the structural counterpoint to Analogism’ in Descola’s schema (Matthews 2017: 265).

Animistic blending, blurring, and contradictions

Recent work on ontology has stimulated a re-envisioning of the kinds of beings that might populate any animist cosmos. ‘Hybridity’ is a recurrent theme among contemporary anthropologists, whose approaches to ‘chaos’ (Scott 2005) or the ‘fuzzy boundaries’ (Pedersen & Willerslev 2012) between the body and the soul evoke landmark studies on the agency and life force of technological items in transnational science (Latour 1993; Latour & Franke 2010). Bruno Latour (1993) showed that technological items may at first appear to be machines without the agency or life force of human beings. But on closer inspection, machines may take on the qualities of nonhuman hybrids with agency, vitality, a life force, and personhood. Examples of hybrids that an anthropologist might envision in animistic terms range from the part-human, part-machine beings known as ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway 1991 [1985]) to the ‘cosmic theatre’ of ‘outer space’ that hosted the joint travels of US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts (Battaglia 2012: S76). However, Richardson’s study of technological animism, where robots are treated like children, suggests pushing past ‘the emphasis on hybridity and relationalities between persons and things [which] diminishes human subjectivity in these processes [… since] while humans may interact with things like robots that trigger thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, their interactions are mediated through human socialities’ (2016: 122).

What makes these concepts of hybridity, chaos, or fuzzy boundaries useful, then, is that they give a vocabulary for the ways in which animistic and other ontologies blend and blur in real life, thus leading to contradictions or giving rise to contexts in which more than one ontology may be operative. It is instructive in this regard to see that Eveny hunters live in a world where both totemism and animism are operative. The Eveny concept of an open body is actually totemic, as it is based on the principle that animals and persons with open bodies share the same bodily substances and interior qualities (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 54). Eveny manipulate this totemic sensibility during the hunt by using children as bait, who lure prey into close range for a kill. But rather than reciprocating this totemic sensibility, hunters relate to prey with an animistic sensibility, that is, as animals with a different bodily substance that is edible. Acknowledging the fuzzy boundaries between ‘concepts’ such as totemism and animism, then, gives pause for thought on how they might become formative to fresh ways of envisioning anthropology and the world at large (Corsín Jiménez & Willerslev 2007).

The serious and humorous sides of animism

Some key anthropological approaches suggest that animism is not always taken seriously. As Willerslev observes, it is possible that ‘underlying animistic cosmologies is a force of laughter, an ironic distance, a making fun of the spirits, which suggests that indigenous animism is not to be taken very seriously at all’ (2013: 42). Yukaghir hunters are not averse to joking about the careful post-hunt handling of their prey to prevent an animal’s spirit from retaliating. Thus, an elderly hunter who, according to the post-hunt custom, crowed like a raven while removing a dead bear’s eyes with his knife was only momentarily shocked to hear a fellow hunter call to the bear, ‘Grandfather, don’t be fooled, it’s a man, Vasili Afanasivich, who killed you and is now blinding you!’ (Willerslev 2013: 51). Moments later, the elderly hunter burst out laughing and completed the work mirthfully with his hunting partner. On yet another occasion, Yukaghir hunters bought a plastic doll and treated it as an idol, feeding it fat and blood while bowing to it and calling out, ‘Khoziain [Russian, “spirit-master”] needs feeding’ (Willerslev 2013: 51). Later, they explained this parody with the quip, ‘[w]e are just having fun’ or the concession that ‘[w]e make jokes about Khoziain because without laughter, there will be no luck. Laughing is compulsory to the game of hunting’ (Willerslev 2013: 51). Humour, after all, appears vital to Yukaghir hunting luck and success.

This playful sense of humour underpins a good deal of New Age animistic practices in Euro-American contexts (Lindquist 1997: 15-6, see also 180-2; Houseman 2016). As the urban Swedish shaman, ‘Marie Ericsson, an artist and a long-time neo-shamanic practitioner once expressed it, “if the sacred does not bear being humoured, it is not sacred enough for me”’ (Lindquist 1997: 180). Reflecting on her interlocutor’s comment, Galina Lindquist adds that ‘the sense of wonderment, and the magical freedom of play, together with the communitas, and with the flow experienced by the performers and the audience, is what makes neo-shamanic practices at their peak moments so fulfilling’ (1997: 181).

If humour, wonder, and play lie at the heart of animistic practices, then it is well-worth considering the effects that the imagination and creativity have in a variety of animistic worlds. Imaginative thinking underpins what I and Mireille Mazard call an ‘animism beyond the soul’, which throws light on the ‘hyper-reflexive’ relationships between anthropologists, their interlocutors, and the animistic beings or forces in their cosmos (Swancutt & Mazard 2016: 2-5). Seen in this light, anthropological thinking may be shaped by interlocutors who have become anthropologically-savvy through formal study or by informally ‘apprenticing’ off of the anthropologists they know. Key concepts in our disciplinary history, including animism, can be playfully cycled through a ‘reflexive feedback loop’ in which interlocutors offer anthropologically-inspired reflections upon their worlds to anthropologists, whose thinking in turn is informed by the conceptual work done by their interlocutors (Swancutt & Mazard 2016: 3, see also 6-7 and 10-1). When this happens, the ludic side to animism (Swancutt 2016: 80, see also 86-9) may inform not only ethnographic analysis, but also the imaginative collaborations between anthropologists and their interlocutors that have been the hallmark of anthropology (Chua 2015; Chua & Mathur 2018).

Conclusion

Ethnographies around the world show that animism is a way of relating and attributing sentience to other beings, forces of nature, things, and even technological items. This entry has explored anthropological approaches to animism, from envisioning it as a philosophy of religion to building upon distinct philosophical, theoretical, and ethnographic sources that suggest animism may be more than a distinct sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world. It may be an ontology in its own right.

Animism is approached from numerous directions in anthropology. It is considered to be an immanent rather than transcendent form of sentience. It is a way of revealing and sometimes manipulating the consciousness, motivation, memories, and powers of animal spirits, animistic places, and items of technology. As an ontology, animism may blend and blur with other ontologies, opening it up to contradictions, humour, creativity, imagination, inspiration, and reflexive awareness. Due to the diverse forms of animism worldwide, anthropologists have asked whether certain animistic groups may have undergone a history of diminution or disenchantment, which made them only attribute certain beings with an animistic sensibility. They also relate to animism in distinct ways, as scholars who are not animists, as scholars who advocate identifying with animists, or as scholars who are animists themselves.

Cutting across these varied approaches are competing visions of how animistic life-worlds unfold through human, other-than-human, and beyond human sensibilities. These distinct visions raise important questions about how we might relate to animism as a particular sensibility that can be studied ethnographically, debated about as a philosophical and theoretical possibility, deeply identified with as a way of enriching one’s scholarship and life, or (possibly) taken up as a sensibility of one’s own. What these big questions do is shine a reflexive mirror onto our own humanity, pressing us to articulate what sentience is in the first place and why we relate to others in the ways that we do.

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Note on contributor

Katherine Swancutt is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King’s College London. She is the author of Fortune and the cursed: the sliding scale of time in Mongolian divination (2012, Berghahn) and co-editor of Animism beyond the soul: ontology, reflexivity, and the making of anthropological knowledge (2016, special issue of Social Analysis and 2018, Berghahn). She has written numerous articles on animistic and shamanic religion. www.swancutt.com

Dr Katherine Swancutt, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6LE, United Kingdom. katherine.swancutt@kcl.ac.uk

Cargo cults

Felix Stein — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:51:14 +0000

Lamont Lindstrom

University of Tulsa

Initially published 29 Mar 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18cargo

Abstract:

Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention during the colonial era (which began in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century) as well as post-war movements that captured ethnographic attention. A southwest Pacific example of messianic or millenarian movements once common throughout the colonial world, the modal cargo cult was an agitation or organised social movement of Melanesian villagers in pursuit of ‘cargo’ by means of renewed or invented ritual action that they hoped would induce ancestral spirits or other powerful beings to provide. Typically, an inspired prophet with messages from those spirits persuaded a community that social harmony and engagement in improvised ritual (dancing, marching, flag-raising) or revived cultural traditions would, for believers, bring them cargo. Ethnographers suggested that ‘cargo’ was often Western commercial goods and money, but it could also signify moral salvation, existential respect, or proto-nationalistic, anti-colonial desire for political autonomy. Although some one-time cargo cults have been institutionalised as indigenous churches or local political organizations and remain active, few new movements of the classic cargo sort emerged after most of the Melanesian colonies achieved national independence in the 1970s. Cargo cult stories, however, today continue to circulate widely beyond Melanesia, serving as useful metaphors of contemporary unrequitable desire, both ordinary and peculiar.

Introduction

Anthropologists have invented or cultivated a number of important keywords, including ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘worldview’, ‘socialization’, ‘ethnography’, and ‘rite of passage’. Among these terms is ‘cargo cult’ which, although more particular in scope, has enjoyed surprising popularity both inside the discipline and beyond. Peter Worsley, who compiled an early overview of cargo cults in The trumpet shall sound (1957), offered what had already become the standard definition. Cargo cults are:

strange religious movements in the South Pacific [that appeared] during the last few decades. In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss (1957: 11).

In the Melanesian islands of the southwest Pacific, ‘cargo cult’ provided a handy label which could encompass a variety of forms of social unrest that ethnographers elsewhere tagged millenarian, messianic, nativistic, vitalistic, revivalistic, or culture-contact or adjustment movements. After the Second World War, anthropological attention (including Worsley’s) had shifted from functionalist accounts of simpler social systems to issues of social change, and how to describe and explain that change. The label presumed that these Melanesian movements typically focused on the acquisition of ‘cargo’ or kago (supplies, goods) in the Pidgin Englishes of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides). Anthropologists offered a variety of explanations for cargo cult outbreaks, within the broader context of global social transformations that the War had caused. Simple greed and cupidity, fundamental Melanesian cultural and religious belief systems, or colonial inequality and oppression variously accounted for cult outbreaks. The term fell out of anthropological favor by the 1970s when Melanesian colonies obtained national independence (Fiji in 1970; Papua New Guinea in 1975; Solomon Islands in 1978; and Vanuatu in 1980). Active social movements continue, however, in colonised West Papua, the western half of New Guinea that Indonesia annexed in 1962. Some have tagged these anti-Indonesian liberation movements as cargoistic (e.g., Giay & Godschalk 1993; Timmer 2000), but caution is warranted insofar as the label undercuts the political gravity and legitimacy of organised liberation efforts. Although most anthropologists have abandoned ‘cargo cult’ as misleading, and even embarrassing (although, see Otto 2009 and Tabani 2013, who defend the label’s merits), the term enjoys a post-ethnographic afterlife and continues to pop up frequently in popular commentary and critique.

Cargo cult erupts

Anthropologists briskly adopted, but did not invent, the term ‘cargo cult’. The label first appeared in print, as a calumny, in the November 1945 issue of the colonial news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (Bird 1945). Norris Mervyn Bird, an ‘old Territories resident’, wrote to express worries that wartime upheavals, a more liberal postwar colonial regime, and ill-digested Christian teaching would unsettle local people and spark cargo culting. Bird introduced the term as an alternative to an earlier cultic label, ‘Vailala Madness’:

Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use. . . By his very nature the New Guinea native is peculiarly susceptible to these ‘cults’ (1945: 69-70).

F. E. Williams, Government Anthropologist employed by the Australian Territory of Papua, had investigated curious incidents around Vailala in 1922 (Williams 1923). Predictions circulated about the return of ancestral spirits on ghost steam ships carrying desirable cargo. Enthusiasts abandoned the traditional male initiation ceremony and destroyed ritual artifacts, mimed Australian tea parties at flower-bedecked tables, and took up marching, drilling, and ecstatic dancing. By the time Williams arrived to investigate, colonial officials and others had tagged all this as ‘Vailala Madness’, and Williams adopted the label as ‘the most distinctive and suitable’ of various alternatives (Williams 1923: 2).

‘Cargo cult’ bested ‘Vailala Madness’ as a movement cover term as it was not tied to a particular locale, elevated madness to cult, and featured catchy alliteration. Australia-based anthropologists including Lucy Mair and H. Ian Hogbin, who then lectured at the Australian Army School of Civil Affairs in Canberra and had served as anthropological consultants during the War, embraced the label, importing this into anthropological circles (see Mair 1948; Hogbin 1951). ‘Cargo cult’ quickly spread through Australian academia and beyond as anthropologists and journalists borrowed the term to label almost any sort of organised, village-based social movement with religious and political aspirations—movements that were increasingly on the colonialist and academic radar throughout Melanesia, as elsewhere. Anthropologists retrospectively applied the new term to pre-1945 Pacific movements, including Vailala Madness itself.

Although anthropologists had occasionally grappled with social change (e.g. Malinowski 1945), post-War transformations focused ethnographic attention on disorder and disruption, including social movements. Several important analyses of historical movements appeared in the 1950s, including Norman Cohn’s The pursuit of the millennium (1957) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive rebels (1959). The Melanesian cargo cult expanded the catalogue of notable global movements, old and new, including Handsome Lake’s (Wallace 1956) and the Ghost Dance in North America, China’s Boxer Rebellion, Kenya’s Mau Mau, and more (see Lanternari 1963). By 1952, seven years after Pacific Islands Monthly introduced the versatile label, South Pacific Commission librarian Ida Leeson found enough ethnographic and administrative material on cargo cults to produce a robust bibliography. Peter Worsley’s comparative compendium, The trumpet shall sound: a study of ‘cargo’ cults in Melanesia, which tracked 60-some movements across the southwest Pacific from Fiji to New Guinea (including West Papua), followed in 1957.

Celebrated cultists

Melanesian social movements before and after the 1950s were each distinct and particular, but similar enough to come under the cargo cult label. Steinbauer (1979) tallied 185 of these. The new term disposed observers to find common elements and themes, including: desire for cargo (however imagined); expectation of spiritual assistance, whether from the ancestral dead or Christian figures, as locally reimagined; mimetic ritual reflecting European colonial or wartime practices (flags and flagpoles; marching and drilling); the washing and other manipulation of money; and ecstatic dancing and other forms of paroxysm. Cargo prophecy varied from movement to movement, although a common assertion was that ancestral spirits (who governed natural forces and fertility) were equally implicated in the production of manufactured goods. A technologically wise ancestor, perhaps, had sailed off to America, or Europe, or Australia and there was taught the secrets of cargo. Or, wily Europeans were filching cargo that ancestral spirits were beneficently shipping to their descendants.

The period between 1956 and 1964 was cargo cult research’s golden age. During these years, five important cargo ethnographies were published: Jean Guiart (1956) on Tanna’s (New Hebrides) John Frum Movement; Margaret Mead (1956) and Theodore Schwartz (1962) on the Paliau Movement, Admiralty Islands; Kenelm Burridge (1960) on movements in Madang Province; and, not too far away, Peter Lawrence (1964) on the Yali Movement. One might also include here Robert Maher’s (1961) New men of Papua: a study in culture change about the Tommy Kabu Movement of the Purari River delta area, except that Maher did not use cargo cult idiom to frame his analysis. The term only appears as a bit of an afterthought on the book’s final page, where Maher warns that Purari people, although pragmatic, might turn to cargo culting should their desire for social change be thwarted. Malaita’s Maasina (Marching) Rule also was labeled a post-war cargo cult, although Keesing (1978; see Akin 2013) and others argued that it was rather a nationalist movement with only minor spiritual rudiments.

On the island of Tanna, the shadowy figure who people called John Frum (or Jon Frumm, or John Broom) appeared in the late 1930s and instructed new devotees to return to original lands, resume kava drinking and dancing, and in general maintain island tradition, or kastom (Guiart 1956). Presbyterian missionaries had attempted to prohibit kava (Piper methysticum) drinking as men, when under its mild psychoactive influence, communed with their ancestral spirits, with local kava-drinking grounds serving also as burial grounds. John Frum foretold reversals of land and sea; mountains and plains; and black and white. He also predicted American material assistance that, indeed, eventuated in 1942 when US forces landed to establish military bases in the archipelago. A series of mostly male leaders (in spiritual contact with John Frum) originated movement rituals shaped by both Christian liturgy and wartime experience. As did Vailala adherents and cultists elsewhere in Melanesia, movement rituals included marching and drilling, flags and poles, and flowers. Followers gathered weekly, each Friday evening, to dance through the night. On 15 February 1957, leaders raised two red flags hoarded from American ammunition dumps, and this day remains the main annual movement holiday. Over the years, John Frum talk of cargo has shifted from new money and goods, to local autonomy, to economic development projects (Lindstrom 1993).

On Manus and neighboring Admirality Islands, the Pacific War likewise stimulated and shaped the Paliau Movement (known subsequently as The Noise, Makasol, or Wind Nation). Paliau Maloat, a mature man returning home from conscript service with the Japanese military, and drawing on Christian teaching, proposed a ‘New Way’ wherein people could better pursue economic development through cooperation. He proposed that people from different communities join to share garden and sea resources, working together to advance economically. Younger followers, claiming spiritual contact with Jesus, predicted Christ’s imminent return alongside the ancestral dead. Expecting impending arrival of cargo planes, ships, bulldozers, sheet metal, money, and tinned food, followers destroyed property, danced ecstatically, shared ancestral inspirations, and waited (Schwartz 1962: 227, 268). Over the years, the movement morphed into a political bloc (Makasol) and independent church (Wind Nation) (Otto 1992). Paliau was elected to Papua New Guinea’s pre-independence Parliament in 1968 and then to the Provincial Council in 1979. Wind Nation and Makasol continue to enjoy some support on Manus.

In Madang, Peter Lawrence (1964) followed the history of regional social movements through five phases, between 1871 and 1950. Road belong cargo’s opening chapter on the ‘native cosmic order’ is a magisterial summary of the cultural context of these disturbances, culminating in the poignant story of Yali, Madang’s most recent and celebrated prophet.

Yali Singina from Sor village on Papua New Guinea’s Rai (Madang Province) coast, like Paliau, was caught up in the Pacific War, working with Australian forces including coast-watchers (during the Pacific War, Australian and American servicemen, with Indigenous support, manned a chain of remote outposts, reporting on Japanese military movements.) At war’s end, also like Paliau, Yali returned home to push economic development through cooperation, attracting followers across Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast. Weekly on Tuesdays (the movement’s holy day), ‘flower girls’ decorated ritual tables:

At the core of this cult was ritual sexual intercourse between Yali and these women, following which the sexual fluids were collected in a bottle decorated with specific flowers (codiaeum variegatum). The bottle was placed on a table in the hope that the ancestors worshipped would offer their help by producing money at the bottom of the bottle (Hermann 1992: 58).

Yali also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the colonial House of Assembly. His son James Yali, however, was elected several times to Papua New Guinea’s national Parliament.

The Mambu Movement, which developed in the Bogia region on the western side of Madang Province in the 1930s, was still active in the 1950s when Kenelm Burridge (1960) arrived to undertake investigative cargo fieldwork. Mambu, a former plantation worker and Catholic convert from Apingam village, near Bogia, had disappeared during the Pacific War, but his prophesies continued to echo around the region. These foretold that ancestral spirits living inside Manam Island’s volcano were preparing cargo for shipment to the faithful, and that followers would no longer need to pay colonial head taxes. Waiting for tinned food, axes and bush knives, soap, cloth, and the like, people built cargo sheds near cemeteries and cult temples adorned with red flags, abandoned mission churches, gave up minding their crops and drying coconut for the market, underwent cultic rebaptism in water, enjoyed promiscuous if ritualised sexual intercourse, and adopted European clothing. Colonial authorities jailed Mambu for six months, as they would Yali and also John Frum leaders on Tanna, to little avail, as upstart prophets and new movement leaders carried the message over several decades.

Following Lawrence, anthropologists have suggested several aspects of Melanesian cultures that shaped these renowned cargo movements, along with many others. These cultural elements include the traditional importance of wealth, presumptions of necessary spiritual contribution to economic production, a disjunctive temporality, and village polities wherein big-man leadership facilitated that of cult prophets.

New cultic orders

Many movement leaders and prophets, where these existed, were typically concerned with social harmony and order, insisting on new orders for cargo to arrive, and blaming disorder when it failed to do so. Worsley argued that cargo cults functioned to ‘weld previously hostile and separate groups together into a new unity’ (1957: 228); and that ‘by projecting his message on to the supernatural plane’, a cargo cult leader demonstrates that his authority ‘transcends the narrow province of local gods and spirits associated with particular clans, tribes or villages’ (1957: 237).

Ethnographers have repeatedly documented Melanesian dreams of unity alongside attendant fears of social disintegration—the difficult political balance between ideals of social harmony and competitive status games. People’s ongoing pursuit of status and power subverts the sociability they strive to achieve. Social movements cultivated new orders, new ways, and new men that might transcend Melanesia’s fissiparous social systems. The prophet of the Kekesi Rites—an early twentieth century Papuan movement – commanded: ‘the people are to observe the moral code of the tribe’ (Chinnery 1917: 453). Within the cult, totalitarian social orders could be imagined as a new ‘Law’ (lo in Pidgin) or social regime (Lindstrom 2011). Burridge called such totality ‘rigorism’, noting that ‘every millenarist believes he has grasped the secret and is driven to enforce it on others’ (1969: 127, 135; see also Guiart 1962: 133). Worsley, too, documented the new orders’ new moralities:

All prophets, therefore, stress moral renewal: the love of one’s cult-brethren; new forms of sexual relationship; abandonment of stealing, lying, cheating, theft; devotion to the interests of the community and not merely of the self (1968: 251; see Burridge 1969: 165).

Marching and drilling, and communal dancing, embodied these new social unities and orders that cults, at least for a time, made possible.

Cult luminaries frequently instituted regularising, and sometimes repressive, mechanisms to protect a new Law’s totality. Some leaders commissioned guards, police, and courts to enforce this (Guiart 1956: 173). Sex and sorcery were particular worries, given their capacity to roil social order. In some movements, sexual morality was relaxed, and customary restrictions of exogamy and incest ignored (see, e.g., Worsley 1957: 251; Kolig 1987: 189). During Espiritu Santo’s Naked Cult, for example,

the sexual act was to take place in public, since there was no shame in it; even irregular liaisons should be open affairs. Husbands should show no jealousy, for this would disturb the state of harmony which the cult was trying to establish (Worsley 1957: 151).

In other places, cultists concluded that the best way to deal with sexual conflict is not to have any sex at all. New Laws and orders also often promised to vanquish sorcerers and the disruptions they caused.

Money, too, which people found alien and difficult to acquire or comprehend, was often targeted as a threat to unity. Burridge (1969) argued that money, as this became a new measure of personal value and prestige, created Melanesian moral crises and sparked cargo cults. Leaders of many movements, including John Frum bosses on Tanna, urged followers to rid themselves of old money by hurriedly spending it all or dumping it at sea (Guiart 1956: 155; Worsley 1957: 154-55). Prophets instead promised new money that would replace colonial coinage. When every believer acquired money and other desired cargo, people would be free at last from the onerous personal debts and economic obligations that the region’s complex reciprocal exchange systems engendered.

Cargo cult explanation

Beyond describing cargo movements, anthropologists also ventured to explain them. Cargo theorists argued whether cults spontaneously combusted in many communities given a shared, volatile Melanesian culture, or whether cultic elements originated in fewer places and then diffused across the region. They also compared the roles of charismatic prophets; whether cults were nativistic (concerned with reviving waning traditions) or iconoclastic (focused on replacing local culture with modern [Western] substitutes); who, exactly, was charged with bringing home the cargo (returning ancestral spirits; the American military); why cults broke out in certain areas but not others; and also what ‘cargo’ meant. Was this simple cash or tinned foods? Did cargo stand for proto-nationalist desire for autonomy, the removal of colonial authority, even independence? Or did cargo represent existential concerns with respect and spiritual salvation?

Explanation hinged particularly on what, exactly, cargo signified. What was the object of Melanesian desire? Some in early days took cargo literally, as did Lucy Mair: ‘the motive force of cargo cult is a feeling of hopeless envy of the European with his immensely higher material standards’ (1948: 67). Seemingly cupidinous Melanesians of course desired European commodities including tinned foods, cloth, tools, money, and (perhaps curiously) refrigerators (Lindstrom 1993: 139-42). Simple education could thus ‘cure’ cargo culting when Melanesians learned the value of hard work and the intricacies of modern manufacture (e.g., Burridge 1960: 228).

Anthropologists, however, soon complicated cargo explanation, rooting cargo cults within essential elements of Melanesian culture itself (e.g., Lawrence’s [1964]), or colonial oppression and disruption of local communities, or both. Those who argued that fundamental Melanesian culture led to culting focused on key elements thereof. These included concepts of economic production that presumed the necessity of both human and spiritual effort; the significance of various forms of wealth for personal prestige; belief in spiritual inspiration rather than individual creativity to account for novel ideas; notions of episodic time with expectation of sudden jumps from one period to another, rather than of constant temporal progress (McDowell 1988); and big-man leadership systems that easily incorporate charismatic prophets as big-manlike leaders. Some, because of these cultural elements, argued that Melanesians are inherent cargo cultists, inexorably imbued with ‘cargoism’, ‘cargo thinking’, or ‘cargo sentiment’ (Harding 1967). Or, reverting to earlier Vailala Madness themes, even a cargo psychology, whereby pervasive, underlying anxiety or schizophrenia (Burton-Bradley 1973; Lidz, Lidz, & Burton-Bradley 1973), paranoia (Schwartz 1973), or other mental disorders induced cargo culting. Following this train of thought, a few suggested that cargo culting is an antique Melanesian phenomenon, antedating the arrival of European colonialists (Berndt 1954: 269; Salisbury 1958: 75; cf. Iteanu 2017).

Others, while acknowledging that aspects of Melanesian culture facilitated cargo cults, pointed instead to the existential and political effects of colonial domination. The desired cargo, here, was emancipation of spirit and body. Burridge (1960: 215) was exquisitely sensitive to the painful condition of Papua New Guineans, distressed by European colonialism and racism. They desired to be New Men because Australians mostly treated them as animals or children. Drawing on substrate culture, they thus spun out cargoist ‘myth-dreams’ to self-medicate: ‘The most significant theme in the Cargo seems to be moral regeneration: the creation of a new man, the creation of new unities, the creation of a new society’ (1960: 246-47).

Some writers, more religiously inclined, took cargo desire to symbolise human yearning for spiritual salvation. John Frum, Mambu, and the rest were indeed avatars of Jesus to their followers (Steinbauer [1979] favored the term ‘new salvation movements’). Cunning missionaries therefore might step in and redirect cargo desire to Christian ends.

Those with a more critical perspective rooted cargo cults in post-war political and economic relationships. Rather than pointing at Melanesians and Melanesian culture for cargo culting, cults erupted because of insufferable social conditions. Some, like Mr. Bird, continued to cast cargo cult blame on liberal Christian missionaries whose preachings about man’s brotherhood natives might ill-digest. But most explained cargo culting as a desperate reaction to colonial inequality and oppression. They were, as Guiart put it, ‘forerunners of Melanesian nationalism’ (1951: 81). Worsley’s observation that cults functioned to weld scattered, autonomous local and kin groups together into wider ‘new unities’ (1957: 228) echoed the contemporary political expectation that classes-in-themselves might transform into classes-for-themselves, on the road towards some sort of future political independence. Explanations by the 1980s favored the critical stance: ‘Cargo thinking was a product of the forced interaction between two economic systems, the gift economy and the capitalist economy, with their religious support structures’ (Buck 1989: 164; see Kilani 1983). When taken to be spawned by colonial inequalities, as social disruption caused by an intensifying world system, cargo cults were reframed as a Melanesian sort of ‘globalization movement’—this term replacing earlier adjustment or culture-contact movement labels.

Sackett (1974), along these lines, proposed to explain why cults occurred in some places but not others. Key factors were distance and degree of local and colonial authority. Remote communities at the fringes of administrative systems had yet to develop hostility towards them. Those located nearby colonial centers had better access to cargo, in its material form, and the knowledge of ruling regimes. But those at some middle distance who suffered colonial meddling and lacked access to cargo (goods and knowledge) were ripe for cargo culting (this essentially is a theory of relative deprivation [Aberle 1962]). Moreover, cults mostly flared up in locales with weak local authority structures. Effective leaders, where these existed, could step up to quash any upstart, troublesome cargo prophet. This might also explain the post-1970s decline in cargo culting, insofar as authority structures have strengthened and social distances shortened.

Cargo cult embarrassments

Anthropologists since the beginning have not been altogether comfortable with their adopted term. ‘Cargo’, they knew, meant more than mere manufactured goods. And ‘cult’ could be discourteous, even insulting, deprecating people’s fervent beliefs. ‘Movement’ often read better than cult. Some ethnographers refused to use the term, defaulting instead to local appellatives (e.g., Rimoldi & Rimoldi 1992), or relying on Pidgin English kago to signpost cargo’s complexity. Kaplan (1995) insisted that Fiji’s Tuka Movement was ‘neither cargo not cult’.

Others have deconstructed cargo cult as a misleading analytical artifice, an observer’s false category. It bundles together diverse and particular uprisings, disturbances, and movements that may have little in common (McDowell 1988; see Lindstrom 2004). Hermann argued that ‘“cargo cult” should be written under erasure for the good reason that it is an inadequate concept’ (2004: 44). The scare quotes that often bracketed the label when cargo cult emerged in the 1940s are back, as ethnographers distance themselves from its discomforting implications. Others, however, defend the term as ethnographically useful, even if it has been applied to ‘heterogeneous, uncertain, and confusing ethnographic reality itself that, after all, cannot be claimed to exist in the minds of Western observers alone’ (Jebens 2004: 10). Although some find cargo cult to be at least historically useful, setting the bounds for comparative analysis, few ethnographers apply the label today. This partly reflects disciplinal embarrassment but, more directly, shifting forms of organised and disorganised Melanesian desire that, today, takes the form of charismatic, ‘health-and-wealth’ Christianity, new interests in Islam or the lost tribes of Judaism, bingo and numbers games, and dubious Internet money-making scams.

Cargo cult echoes

Several Melanesian movements remain active but, whatever their ‘cargoist’ heritage, these certainly no longer are cargo cults – rather, they have institutionalised themselves as indigenous churches and/or regional political organizations. These include John Frum on Tanna, Makasol/Wind Nation in the Admiralties, the Peli Association of the eastern Sepik region, the Pomio Kivung and Kaliai movements on New Britain (Lattas 1998), Tutukuval Isukal Association of New Hanover, and the Lo-Bos Church descending from the Yali Movement in Madang. To these, some would add Vanuatu’s Nagriamel Movement and New Georgia’s Christian Fellowship Church. Some adherents, like John Frum supporters on Tanna, earn a little income by performing as cargo cultists for bemused international tourists.

Cargo culting may have died away in Melanesia but cargo cult—the term—has jumped into global popular media where it thrives, alive and well. As in Melanesia, cargo culting anywhere can be appreciated or deprecated. Cargo cult originated as invective, and it retains its sting. Any sort of woeful or forlorn desire for material goods or other coveted objective, joined with a seemingly irrational program to obtain this, can be blasted as a wrongheaded cargo cult. It is instructive to run an Internet search on the term (text and image). This turns up a wild tangle of popular cargoist discourse. One finds entire parliaments of cargo cult politicians, cargo cult computer code, cargo cult development plans, cargo cult trade policies, cargo cult science, and much, much more (Lindstrom 2013). Brexit is cargo cult (Kuper 2017). Donald Trump is a cargo prophet (Davis 2017). Melanesians themselves continue to lob the term at one another, when outraged by the ludicrous plans or claims of political rivals.

Oppositely, cargo culting and wild desire can signify personal development, creativity, and individual freedom: the noble resistance to oppression by the state, global forces, or any intrusive authority. Just as John Frum supporters on Tanna battled colonialism, so might we all defy troublesome authority. Moreover, cool cargo cult can boost market share. Far beyond Melanesia, we might enjoy cargo cult rock band music, purchase cargo cult art, or read cargo cult literature. Fervent consumers sip John Frum rum, spray John Frum perfume, or enjoy the 2015 Portuguese film John From which, of course, featured rash, unrequited love. Held in the Nevada dessert, the trendy Burning Man Festival’s 2013 theme was Cargo Cult. John Frum got torched.

If Melanesian cargo cults have faded away, why have cargo cult stories persisted and spread? Our interest in cargo cult tales reflects normative modern desire as much as it does anything actually happening in the Pacific (Lindstrom 1993). Cargo stories are desire stories. They function to remind us how modern, consumerist desire operates. This is desire—for things as for others—that is never sated. We seek perfectibility but we would be astonished should we one day actually achieve this. Self-development is a lifetime’s work. We find reassurance and desirous echoes in strange tales of people who are madly in love with what they cannot have. The marketplace, where one may never stop shopping, never fully satisfies. Even when cargo does arrive, this fails to quash desire and may even make things worse. It turns out to be not at all what one really wanted in the first place and, worse, often causes unexpected injury and suffering when it arrives. If cargo is potentially dangerous, culting and myth-dreaming are honorable, even essential human capacities. Unending desire is our human duty. Although cargo cults have vanished in the southwest Pacific, cargo cult stories of foolish, unrequited, but necessary and understandable love, remind us of our modern condition.

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Note on contributor

Lamont Lindstrom is Henry Kendall Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond (1993, University of Hawai'i Press) and various other cargo cult explorations.

Prof. Lamont Lindstrom, Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Dr, Tulsa, OK 74104, United States. lamont-lindstrom@utulsa.edu