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Chapter 1. Indian Revolts and Cargo Cults: Ritual Violence and Revitalization in California and New Guinea
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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 Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 21 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) 1. indian revolts and cargo cults Ritual Violence and Revitalization in California and New Guinea Maria Lepowsky Resistance is a word that has been overused in recent years. But it properly describes the militantly anticolonial and sometimes violent aspects of North American prophetic movements, Pacific Island cargo cults, and revitalization movements in other parts of the world. For almost five decades, anthropologists, historians, and religious scholars have deployed Anthony F. C. Wallace’s term revitalization to categorize a diverse array of past and current movements in non-Western societies undergoing catastrophic social change, including “nativistic” political and religious movements, millenarian cults, and cultural revivals. Ritual violence—symbolic or corporeal, religiously validated by gods or spirits, old or newly recognized—is often a key element in revitalization and oppositional politico-religious movements. But it has received less analytic attention than it deserves. Anthropologists studying Pacific Island cargo cults, for example, have long been preoccupied instead by what Ralph Linton (1943) calls magical nativism: the supernatural motifs, syncretic inspirations, and ritual strategies outlined in these prophetic movements. Like members of the public in colonial and postcolonial metropoles, we have been fascinated by cargo cults’ explicit emphases on appropriation of European technologies and wealth by magical means and their prophecies of events such as return voyages of ancestor spirits to the land of the living. The most important element of cargo cults, though, is their prophecy of a utopian, millennial future in which the living and returned dead share both indigenous abundance and European power—without the Europeans. Anthropologists have often underemphasized the overtly revolutionary means and goals of cargo cults, their close connection not just to revitalization movements but to other oppositional political movements, uprisings, and revolutions, failed or otherwise. Cargoistic and other 2 lepowsky 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 [2], (2) Lines: 21 ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal PgEnds: [2], (2) prophetic movements are strategies of cultural transformation, a range of oppositional and potentially violent forms of what Marshall Sahlins calls “the indigenization of modernity” (1993:21). The classic articles by Linton (1943) on nativistic movements and Wallace (1956c) on revitalization , for example, make no explicit mention of violence against the dominant society or colonial power or of its forcible expulsion. But these were often prominent strategies—prophesied and implied if not actualized—in the Pacific, North America, and elsewhere. Colonial administrators in New Guinea made no such oversight, imprisoning and even executing cultists, whom they explicitly recognized as a danger to colonial order. Cargo cults emphasize magical violence and ritualized attack. This is no surprise, for Melanesian warfare is founded on magical potency and prayers to ancestors, place spirits, and other supernatural beings, by either warrior or ritual specialist. The cargo cult prophet assumes and then transforms preexisting cultural roles: war magician and ritual expert. Comparable traditions of prophecy and ritual violence have long existed in North America, the most famous being the Ghost Dance (Mooney 1965; see also Harkin [ch. 6]). In fact, millennial prophetic movements inspiring ritual violence have erupted around the world for several centuries among ethnic minorities and conquered peoples, as I show later. There is a continuum of what I am labeling ritual violence. It ranges from magical attack intended to subvert the will of another to rituals enjoined by prophecy to usher in the apocalypse, magical attacks that practitioner and victim think lead to death, and sorcery attacks that include the use of poison. It continues with the corporeal assaults of warfare when warrior and weapon are ritually blessed or decorated to invoke divine power and convey invulnerability. Prophecies predicting the departure of European colonials or settlers may advocate or foretell any of these forms of ritual violence; many Europeans, perceiving the world differently, acknowledge only physical attacks as forms of violence. In the Southwest Pacific, Islanders, by contrast, explicitly recognize magic, sorcery, and witchcraft as ritual attacks, the subversion of another ’s autonomous will and bodily integrity, whether by love...