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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Pa [162], (1 Lines: 0 ——— 13.0pt ——— Normal * PgEnds: [162], (1 7. the evolution of revitalization movements among the yangoru boiken, papua new guinea Paul B. Roscoe In his lively and engaging book on Melanesian “cargo cults,” Lindstrom (1993) queries why these movements so fascinate the West.1 With their themes of longing for cargo, he concludes, they perhaps echo “our own diffuse but powerful discourses of desire and love, particularly the melancholy of unrequited love” (1993:184). This is an intriguing idea, and it enshrines an important cautionary note: cargo cults are Western cultural constructions, emerging from a matrix of colonial discourse (e.g., McDowell 1988). This does not mean, of course, that cargo cults— or, at least, something corresponding to what we mean by this term— do not exist. All knowledge of the world—of the physical world as well as the social world—is a discursive construct (Rorty 1982:199; Roscoe 1995b:494–497). Yet this eventuality has hardly torpedoed the success of inquiry in the physical sciences, and there is no a priori reason to suppose it should undermine investigation in the social sciences. Cargo cults may have been constructed in a matrix of colonial discourse, but this does not mean that the concept therefore lacks any defensible referent, that it does not capture some regularity among humanity’s social worlds and processes. It was just such a regularity that Anthony F. C. Wallace sought to discern in his classic article on revitalization movements. In Wallace’s view (1956c:267), Melanesian “cargo cults” furnished the classic instance of one of three forms of revitalization movement: a type that emphasized the importation of alien values, customs, and material goods as a means of recapturing satisfaction in a culture stressed by contact with other societies. The particular virtue of Wallace’s article is its holistic attempt to identify an underlying commonality among cultural differences, and it is surely a mark of his success that, half a century later, his portrayal evolution of revitalization movements 163 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [163], (2) Lines: 16 to 2 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [163], (2) of these movements is still very much representative of mainstream anthropological thinking on the subject. It is no discredit to Wallace’s work, however, that more recent research highlights a need to reformulate and extend his depiction of the cargo cult and, by extension perhaps, of the revitalization movement. In this chapter I use an extended analysis of the postcontact history of the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea to review the concept of the revitalization movement. The Yangoru Boiken are especially valuable to this purpose because their postcontact history is constituted by some 80 years of ongoing engagement in millenarian (cargo) activity (Gesch 1985; Roscoe 1988, 1993). In addition, the record of these involvements can be tracked in significant detail. Yangoru contact with the West was recent, so it was still possible in the 1980s to collect ethnohistorical data from people who had witnessed events in the later part of the contact period (ca. 1905–30) and who remembered the reminiscences of their parents and grandparents about the earlier part. Complementing these memories is a comparatively rich historical record that includes a published account of the first European contact with Yangoru (Limbrock 1912–13), a partial historical record of the period from about 1930 to the end of World War II and a rich documentary record of the postwar years. In this chapter I use these data to try to reformulate several aspects of our understanding of revitalization movements. My hope is that the findings prove suggestive for analyzing these movements in less well documented places and times. My main purpose is to demonstrate that Wallace’s revitalization concept is too static. In Wallace’s (1956c:268– 275) model, revitalization movements represent a transitional phase between two functionally organized “steady states.” A social group in a steady state encounters some kind of stressor—in the case of cargo cults, another culture. It...

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