Messianic Movements

The Significance of Modern Cults in Melanesian Development, 1950

Cargo Cults from Encyclopaedia Britannica 1959

When I was District Officer in Gela, Solomon Islands, I had vaguely heard of cult-like movements in the past, and I had early run into anti-governmental traffic running between Guadalcanal and Malaita, via the northern tip of the Gela islands.  At that time it appeared to my administrative mind as a political thing stirred up by U.S. forces - many of whose members did indeed encourage it.

Later I was transferred to Makira (San Cristobal). By some tweak of administrative decision, the island of Ulawa, close to Malaita, was part of the Makira District. I had already decided to leave the colonial service to pursue my Ph.D. in London, butr prior to my departure left on a routine tour of Ulawa, accompanied by a small police group, my wife, and a Roman Catholic priest who took the opportunity of a lift.

There I ran full tilt into the first post-war confrontation between a Messianic movement and the administration (i.e. me). This incident will be part of other postings in this section, when I lay my hands on the documents.

Naturally I wondered about the phenomenon, and my Ph.D. research provided me with more comparative details. After graduation, my path to Papua was interrupted by a waterfront strike in Sydney.  With time and uncertainty on my hands I delved into the Mitchell Library's considerable Oceanic collection.

The result was the attached article, possibly the first to attempt a comparative explanation, published in a now hard to find journal.  It dealt only with Melanesia, since at that time I had yet to discover that cargo style messianic movements in Melanesia are but a sub-set of world wide messianic and indeed movements of social protest.  That last realization came about slowly, stimulated by two of my eminent senior professors at the Australian National University with whom I had been working on an "official" Papua New Guinea study - the economist Trevor Swan and the geographer O H K Spate. The latter read Portuguese and to my shame both had read Revolt in the Backlands, the classic history of a messianic defence-to-the-death in Brasil, a work that I had never heard of.  That led me to    Norman Cohn's work on peasant revolts, and a fascinating inter-disciplinary and globally informed workshop on messianic movements led by the Chicago historian Sylvia Thrupp, editor of Millennial Dreams in Action, 1962.

I felt then that my theory for Melanesia was extendable to hold universally, and even to provide a rare example of prediction in anthropology. I made such an empirical prediction in my book The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  Like many empirical predictions, it turned out to be wrong, for I neglected significant factual variables.

Meanwhile the study of such movements proceeded apace, with the appearance of Peter Worsley's     and the field studies of Kenelm Burridge in New Guinea,  and of course many anthropological and historical studies for Africa, the Americas, China, and the rest of the world, including the history of Europe.  Most such studies did not agree with or use the model to which I was attached.  A notable exception was a philosophical-methodological examination of anthropological theory contained first in I.C. Jarvie "Theories of Cargo Cult: A Critical Analysis" Oceania 1964 and then, less enthusiastically, in The Revolution in Anthropology, 1964

The first entry in this section is of the original article, The Significance of Messianic Cults in Melanesian Development, first appeared as here.  It was later printed in several editions of William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt A Reader in Comparative ReligionL an anthropological approach (1958 and subsequently).

I will add bits and pieces to this archive as they come to light.