Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults (review)

Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults, by Andrew Lattas. New Directions in Anthropological Writing: History, Poetics, Cultural Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. ISBN 0-299-15800-4, cloth; 0-299-15804-7, paper; xliv + 360 pages, maps, glossary, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, US$59.95; paper, US$24.95.

Over the last decade, Andrew Lattas has published a series of articles that have established him as one of the foremost students of race and of the colonial and postcolonial dynamics of power in Melanesia. Original and provocative, these articles often overflowed with novel insights and suggestive asides that had to be left undeveloped or unsupported as Lattas pursued his main arguments. Because these pieces were stuffed full in this way, they gave the impression that Lattas's thinking was unduly constrained by the article form. This book has thus been long awaited as a forum in which Lattas's writing could find its natural gait and his ideas could receive the full development they warranted. Even in the face of such high expectations, Cultures of SecrecY does not disappoint; compared to the articles, the ethnography is richer here, the arguments more completely worked through, and the authorial voice, while still powerful, more relaxed and carefully modulated. These qualities combine to make the book, among other things, the most important full-scale study of a regional tradition of cargo cults to have appeared in many years.

At the heart of the book is the important claim that in order for people to contemplate change they must find a space outside their everyday lives from which they can view those lives critically and creatively. For the Bush Kaliai of West New Britain, the stimulus to change has been the coming of the colonial order. Yet that colonial order was too punishing and in some ways too distant to become itself a place from which the change it stimulated could be effected. Instead, for Bush Kaliai men the necessary spaces of creative distance (or "alterity" in Lattas's terms) were provided by the underground world of the ancestors and by the social territory occupied by women. Not only were the ancestors and women distant enough to allow these male leaders a new vantage from which to view their lives, but they were also in traditional Kaliai thinking the font of all creativity. By engaging them in the cargo cults--through dialogues with dead women, with live women, and with female deities such as the female Jesus --the Bush Kaliai hoped to give birth to "a new order of existence" that would redress the racial and economic disparities of the colonial and postcolonial world.

The primary tool Bush Kaliai cargo cultists put to use in their dealings with the dead and with women was the mimesis of the colonial civilizing process. Cargo cult leaders, particularly the leader named Censure who receives the most attention here, designed rituals based on western educational practices that they used to train both the dead and their living female followers in new laws and new languages. Although the Kaliai use of mimesis resembled the way the colonial powers themselves put mimetic practices to work in the contexts of education and military drill, it also transformed those colonial uses by filtering them through traditional magical notions in which mimesis gives those who practice it the power of what they imitate. The promise of these rituals, then, was that they would give leaders and their followers the power of western education and would on that basis deliver the cargo to them.

Another way this simulacrum of the civilizing process worked to overcome the injustices of the colonial and postcolonial order was by bringing the dead closer to the living and women closer to men. Lattas argues convincingly that beneath their mimetic operations, a further, perhaps less conscious level on which cargo cults operated was by equating the distances separating...