Family WeecJy I March 2i, 1963
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On the Admiralty Islands,
huts once were built on the
sea (far left). Borrowing
GI know-how and imitating
Army-camp style, natives
built homes faster on land.
The same islanders quickly
adopted Western customs.
They dressed for dinner
but often ate with their
fingers. Cult leader Paliau
(right) bids for support.
Where Americans Are Gods:
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IN the interior jungles of New
Guinea, a native who never has seen
the sea or built a structure more than
30 feet high looks upward. In the sky
he sees a strange bird.
The bird circles. It is immense and makes a
roaring noise. It lands in the valley, and from
it steps a man a man with white skin. He
brings with him miracles: boxes that speak,
sticks that fire deadly pellets, tools that do in
hours the work that used to take months.
The simple primitive is understandably as
tounded. But, in turn, his reaction to this air
plane, its pilot, and his riches is astounding to
the civilized man. For from this beginning
sometimes arises a so-called "cargo cult" based
on Pacific people's admiration of the material
things we in the Western world take as part
of everyday life.
The phenomenon is not new. Ever since men
traveled great distances over the sea, there
have been abrupt and unexpected encounters
with isolated savages. In old days, great vessels
with huge white sails would come, bringing
bearded men, beasts called horses, and clothes
of woven cloth. Today they come by air, bring
ing bulldozers and tractors, seemingly inanimate
things that spring to life at the push of a button.
Samoans called the strangers "sky bursters."
The aborigines of Australia, seeing their light
skins, took them for ghosts of their ancestors.
But the strange people not only brought in
credible possessions. Missionaries also came and
spoke of heaven, God, and angels. The natives
coveted the strangers' tools and weapons, and
the missionaries promised them a beautiful new
life. Heaven and cargo merged in their minds.
An islander would dream that his ancestors,
spirits of the dead, were about to return (some
times under the direct command of Christ) to
turn things upside down. The spirits would
drive the Europeans away (but not their posses
sions) or would make them fill the shower baths,
cook the food, do the manual labor. The natives,
free of the necessity of scratching for a living,
would feast on inexhaustible supplies of things
that came from the sailing ships or great birds. '
So, one after another, cargo cults were born.
Before World War II, the cults' ideas were
much simpler. The cargo would consist of cloth,
kerosene, lanterns, soap, and unlimited cans of
corned beef. Then came World War II and the
Americans, hundreds of thousands of Americans
with great ships, planes, machines; hospitals
full of gleaming machinery and brilliant lights
under which concerned doctors worked over in
dividual sick men; airstrips built almost over-
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family Weekly, March 14, 1H3
IllUSTIATION
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Cargo Cults
night by giant bulldozers; whole camps con
structed out of wood cut and finished in saw
mills set up in the bush; mechanized laundries
to wash thousands of shirts and trousers.
The Americans pouring into the Pacific were
intent on defeating the Japanese and getting
home again, they had no time to stop and ex
plain. But what surprised the islanders was
that they had not come to exploit. They had
come neither to set up plantations, recruit labor,
nor hunt for oil or gold.
Other things about the Americans also ap
pealed to them. In the American army, they saw
men with dark skin like their own, who were
dressed in full uniform, spoke English, and
ran the big machines. They felt that the Ameri
cans had made the "men of Africa all right."
The Bountiful Americans
And the Americans were lavish. They gave
away Uncle Sam's property with a generosity
which appealed mightily to a people who in the
past had quarreled for days because a small clay
pot had been broken.
And there were so many Americans. The island
tribes were numbered in the hundreds; the
Europeans they had seen were only a handful.
In contrast, the Americans seemed innumerable
so many kind, generous people, all alike, with
such magnificent cargoes! The American service
men, in turn, enjoyed and indulged the islanders.
They let them come up to the bridges of ships and
down the ladders into the engine rooms.
Then the Americans went away. Camps were
pulled down, airfields stripped. Great ships
carried the Americans back to a heavenly land
from which the islanders were forever barred.
But in the wake of the Americans' departure
came renewed fantastic hope for more cargo
all the heart could desire. Inevitably, a new rash
of cargo cults erupted.
On the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides,
a cult sprang up around the name of John Frum,
who at first was just a spirit who appeared at
night to a local prophet and promised to take
control over the people's lives. He was said to
command a fleet of planes. He would pay the
salaries of local officials, his school would replace
the local mission school, and by his power he
would flatten out the mountainous volcanic island
and join it to neighboring islands. As the cult
grew, another islander claimed that he was John
Frum, "King of America and Tanna."
, Another version of the cult centered around
the three sons of John Frum Isaac, Jacob, and
Last One, who were said to have arrived from
America. The people were promised a new coin
age, so they threw away whatever old money
they had. They returned to their pagan dances
By MARGARET MEAD
Associate Curator of Ethnology, American Museum of Natural History;
Author of "Coming of Age in Samoa," "New Lives for Old," and "Male and Female"
and ceremonies. They abandoned the modern
villages and moved back into the bush. The new
things from America were to bring back their
old way of life.
In one village people saw a vision of Jack
Navy (perhaps taken from a cigarette advertise
ment), who told them that a great fleet of ships
belonging to John Frum and coming from the
land of the dead was submerged at the bottom
of the sea and soon would rise to the surface.
Scouts, stationed on the hilltops to watch for
the ships, reported lights at sea. But the ships
never came.
On island after island, the story repeated it
self, mixing together names and songs from
America, tag-end accounts of American life,
and dreams and visions of wonderful American
machinery. In the Admiralty Islands, people
marched and sang to the tune "John Brown's
Body" and "King Bera" (a corruption of the
name of the Australian capital, Canberra).
Everywhere people threw away what they had
to make way for the future. They wanted to
make a clean sweep of the past so that the won
derful new possessions could come in.
Wondrous tales spread up into the mountains
of New Guinea, far from the sea; people who
never had seen a white man or his cargo set up
"radio towers" to communicate with the spirits.
And on faraway islands, people decided to be
come like the wonderful strangers: they spread
sheets on the tables, set vases of flowers on them,
and sat down to "read," holding papers which
might and might not be right-side up.
Life in a Never-Never Land
Everywhere people were caught up in the
same kind of excitement. The old, slow, hard
working past would disappear; all the posses
sions the Americans had brought with them
and had taken away again would come back in
ships and planes which would arrive suddenly,
miraculously.
People organized new villages, modeled on
army camps and filled with marching men, and
sometimes set up "customs" and "passports."
They got into trouble with the local authorities,
too. The new prophets were jailed or deported.
On one island the prophet was killed when peo
ple had grown hungrier and hungrier waiting
for the cargo which never appeared.
At first sight, all this looks amusing and bi
zarre, a little like a comic opera, in which pathe
tic savages, thousands of years behind us in
civilization, played at getting all the material
blessings of America overnight But there was
more to it than that. Side by side with these
naive views of an earthly paradise came a vision
of a world in which the islanders, who so re
cently (or even then) were clad only in G
strings or nothing at all, would begin to share,
not by magic but by hard work.
New villages were set up which resembled
American army camps. Miniature governmental
systems were established. But where the proph
ets of the cargo cults promised that all the won
ders of the modern world would come overnight
.by supernatural means, the new leaders were
more sober. American things could come, they
said, only by work, education, persistence.
The most successful of these movements de
veloped in the Admiralty Islands and was led
by a man named Paliau. Here the cult had lasted
only a few months. The money that had been
thrown into the sea at the height of the excite
ment was rescued; the energy that had been
aroused by the dream of the cargo was channeled
into building new villages on land. Formerly
these people had lived in houses built on stilts
out in the sea. With this way of life, they had
managed to construct only two or three houses
a year. But in one new land village they con
structed 60 new houses in three months.
How to Succeed by Trying
The leader said, "We would like to have the
things Americans have the houses, clothes,
food, machines, schools, and hospitals. We would
like our babies to live, and we would like to save
our grown people from dying in middle age. We
think Americans have all these things because
they live under law, without endless quarrels.
So we must first set up a new society."
In this way there grew up in a few places,
side by side with the irrational dream of an
overnight paradise, an understanding that the
islanders are the same kind of people Americans
are. That what Americans have done, they also
can do. In the Admiralty Islands, people were
able to skip centuries and go directly from the
world of the canoe and the handmade pot to the
world of respect for medicine and law and the
ability to think in modern terms.
The cargo cults are a kind of caricature of
our own irrational hopes and dreams of some
perpetual Santa Claus or our ship that never
comes in. But out of the same situation also
comes a realization of how important it is to
have new ways of life, new forms 6f organiza
tion, new methods of bringing up children.
Out of the same situation has come the reali
zation that the cargo will not come in phantom
boats manned by phantom ancestors that its
coming depends on hard work. Here we can see
that no matter how remote or backward a people
may be, under the right conditions they can
skip centuries and join the on-going procession
of men in the modern world.
Family Weekly, March 24, I96J
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