The Trumpet Shall Sound: A study of “cargo cults in Melanesia by Peter Worsley

Published in 1957, this book stands as a broad synthesis into the numerous millenarian movements in Melanesia that have been categorized under the term “cargo cult”.  The problem with the term is not just the “cult” part.  Most peoples impression of cargo cults are constructed out of common usage of the term that equates the logic of cargo cults as methodology totally unconnected with the rational cause.  It is used in a judgmental pejorative sense in the same way that voodoo as a legitimate religious practice is defamed by terms such as “voodoo economics” or “voodoo science”.  The other exposure most people have had to cargo cults comes from the scene of the 1962 film Mondo Cane.  That film is not a place to get ethnographic impressions, though it might be honest in representation but mischaracterized by its framing.

The book is comparative in scope.  The analyses are geographic and linear, following movements in particular regions through their historic formations, reactions of the colonial administrations, and eventual dissolution or transformations into something else.  Worsley combs the historical sources, and in many ways this book is partly a review of the available sources.

Worsley also frames these millenarian movements in their political aspects.  In this sense the book does have a strong Marxist constructive current through it, framing the religious revitalizations that are described in their revolutionary characteristics in resistance to missionary and plantations.  As such, Worsley constructs the various movements (from the John Frum cult to the Paliau movement and the Vailala Madness) as various forms of community activism organized around a fascinating variety of Melanesian philosophical debates on Christian theology.  Alas, missionaries don’t want to debate theology with the natives…and that is to the missionary’s detriment.

Worsley’s book is an excellent presentation of the cultural history of Melanesian millenarian movements.  It is broad in context, including several primary historical sources and stands as a necessary piece of foundational scholarship in this area.

The University of Cambridge has an interesting 3 hour interview with Worsley here:  http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1139306.

Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study among the Arapesh of New Guinea by Donald Tuzin

This is a case study of a group of Arapesh speakers in northwestern New Guinea, called the Ilahita Arapesh.  The thing that makes this ethnography important is that the Ilahita Arapesh lived at the time of Tuzin’s study in a large village community of about 1500 people, when 300 is the maximum size for New Guinea settlements before fission occurs (outside of governmental settlements or areas where industrial bases are present).  As such it provides an interesting model to test ideas of evolutionary formations of social structure against particularist ideas against such views of social formation.

Tuzin presents the mechanism that preserved such a large settlement size as not an ecological or material environmental explanation, nor a result of historical factors  owing to a particularist formation of this isolated circumstance, but instead presents a structural-functional (at least as I interpret it) reason in the practice of the Tambaran.  This is an all-male secret society that is organized into moities within moities, that entail a highly complex series of circumstances that require constant ritual exchanges, endogamy, adoption, and an ever-present maintenance of the social organization through ritual competitions of yam growing, ceremonial feasting and other performances that creates the necessary interdependence that allows for conflict resolution to be a social constant that doesn’t so much lead to social harmony as it does a passive aggressive social mode of non-violent conflict for internal disagreements, including (but not limited to) the focus of this aggression towards outsiders.

This system of ritually complex organization appears to be part of the “cargo cult” phenomenon, a poorly termed historical effect that resulted in a wide variety of social and ritual reorganizations that occurred in the New Guinea territory as a result of colonization, the fluctuations of global commodity prices effecting plantation employment and wages, cash crop prices, government taxation, and contact with the local missionaries.  Contact with missionaries was an especially interesting and variated part of the cargo cult complex in that while some indigenous groups would openly call Christianity a lie others thought the missionaries liars and postulated ideations of Christianity that were their own formulations.  Most of the emergent cargo cult philosophies had a strong dislike of whites and outsiders.

The Tambaran system was effectively destroyed in 1984, when the ceremonial paraphernalia was destroyed and all the male guarded secrets were revealed to the women.  The research that resulted in this book mostly comes from the early 1970s.  Evangelical missionary interference seems to be the main reason for the cults destruction.

This text is written in clear and concise language that is easy for a student to digest.  He even references Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel in a few places.  Nice for introductory classes who are confused by the algebraic acrobatics found in kinship systems and equally muddled by the more esoteric hermetical work of Clifford Geertz.  I am not saying that “hard” anthropology should not be given to a student as a challenge, but that the first book of anthropology you lay on a student (beyond the corporate mandated vocabulary words in bold type illustrated by numerous pictures that is called a textbook) should not be Writing Culture or a heavy piece of philosophical post-modernism.  There is plenty of time to destroy a budding anthropologists interests with those things in graduate school.  Let those young anthro maj0rs enjoy their young love with the discipline by reading more books like this.  This book is not one that will feature in the process of educational aversion therapy by promoting excessive drudgery.

Tuzin acknowledges Freeman as important to his resource opportunities, yet quotes Mead’s work with the Mountain Arapesh and even recounts a friendly visit by her during his fieldwork.  Kudos for Tuzin for staying out of that mess.

The Australian National University has an excellent website/e-book about Tuzin’s work with the Tambaran if you are interested in these things:  http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Echoes+of+the+Tambaran%3A+Masculinity%2C+history+and+the+subject+in+the+work+of+Donald+F.+Tuzin/6861/Text/intro.html.

Michael Taussig 2010 Seminar at European Graduate School

Seminar talks at the European Graduate School.  Good stuff.

There are several more videos on youtube as well.  Rip the audio and listen to them on the bus.

Review – Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World edited by Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene

My review at Anthropology Review Database:

http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=4335

Review: Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice by Herbert G. Reid and Betsy Taylor

New review up at the Anthropology Review Database:  http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=4195

Punk and Metal in Bali, late 1990s…

I just found this video on youtube.  It appears to be produced for Indonesian television (from the blank screen at the end where titles would go over the musical sequence) and synchs up with Emma Baulch’s book Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali, which I published a review for some years ago at the Anthropology Resource Database.

It is a pretty good piece, though my Indonesian is even worse than my crappy Spanish, but better than my crappy German.  Still it is worth a look if you have read that book, especially for the footage of Balinese black metal performance.

Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women

Released in 1999 by Media Educational Foundation, this is a film of a presentation by Jean Kilbourne about how media advertising has portrayed women in sexualized, objectified, submissive and negative ways.  This is not a knee jerk reactionary feminist esoteric reading of print and television ads, but a prima facie matter of simple deconstruction.  Her readings are straight forward, and she supports these readings with a recognition of the purpose of advertising as well as some quotes from the inside from professional marketers and trade publications.

She utilizes several different domains of advertising for her discussion.  She also presents how the depiction of the female has changed in advertising since the late 1960s until now.  Of particular note is how she approached female sexuality through the form of various food and “homemaking” ads.  She also approaches the topic of women in alcohol ads with a scathing sarcasm that underpins the futile oxymoron of using sex to sell alcohol, a substance which increased usage of decreases your ability to perform the other.

Kilbourne approaches the topics with occasional humor, and though her jokes are occasionally the groan worthy the practiced quips of a college professor’s stale lecture.  Not all of the jokes are that way, some of them are genuinely funny…just not all of them.  It is a good presentation and should be eye opening to people who have not been exposed to such criticism of the marketing machine.  There is the unfortunate truth that this video was produced in the late 1990s, and as sophisticated as marketing was then we have the added dimension of the internet, social media and the increasingly difficult to read method of using ironic posture and self-depreciating truths to develop a virtual authenticity that can sometimes be more powerful than a direct sell of a products attributes (such as the turn that smoking advertisements took in the late 1990s).

You can watch the whole thing on Google video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1993368502337678412

All in This Tea by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht

New review up at Anthropology Review Database:

http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3571

The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia by Bronisław Malinowski

Published in 1929 and a bestseller (maybe because of the word “sex” in the title) this is one of the foundational anthropological texts dealing with procreation, sexuality, kinship and marriage in an indigenous society.  Coming from that long segment of World War I fieldwork that produced Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski had some time to gather the data that made this book.

Modern ethnographies avoid the authoritative voice that was the norm in Malinowski’s time.  The objective depiction of Trobriand culture are detailed in this work, paying particular attention to the sexual practices of the men and women of that culture.  This material may have been very eye opening in the 1920s when this book was published, but Malinowski pointed out in the introduction that this book is not pornographic nor of any excitable nature what-so-over.  While such frank discussion of coupling behavior would be shocking at the time, today it would be in bad taste to discuss sexual behavior of indigenous groups with such clarity for a different reason of the informant’s privacy.  Our research limitations, based on respect, would guide the questions away from such pointed matters.  Sure, sex lives are still matters of investigations but the questioning is much more difficult these days.

Reading this book also brought forward an interesting point about anthropology.  Discussions of a book like this, among colleagues in a professional university setting could be considered as a form of sexual harassment to an outside observer.  Academic studies in human sexuality makes for that exception, but in a teaching environment this material can be challenged (wrongly, but challenged none-the-less).  That is not to say that we are too strict in our keeping of sexual comments out of the work place.  I do not mean to say that.  What I am more concerned with is our inhibition to discuss the sexual as a frank reality of cultural variation for fear of offense.  If anthropologists are to address the descriptive ethnography of a culture than sexual practices are a part of that, the part that it is most difficult to get information on unless the culture is not shy or ashamed about discussing it.  Malinowski got lucky in this respect by studying a culture that offered information about sex.  In converted groups that is a difficult area to approach, as well as in some cultures where sexual matters are more guarded a subject.

Usually sexual practices are a chapter at most in an ethnographic monograph.  As dated as Malinowski’s ethnography may be, as subject to criticism as it may be, he devoted an entire book to the matter…showing that anthropologists should approach the subject with a frank depiction in opposition to Victorian morality and prudery.  Combined with Coming of Age in Samoa and the Kinsey Report this book paved the way for the loosening of morals and the eventual sexual revolution.

Life in Riverfront: A Middle Western Town Seen through Japanese Eyes by Mariko Fujita Sano and Toshiyuki Sano

This ethnography is based on field work conducted by two Japanese anthropologists in a small (population roughly 10,000) town in central Wisconsin.  The town has a large Polish-American population, but has also had several other ethnic groupings reflecting various waves of immigration.

This book is of particular interest because it addresses the United States experience of small town workers.  It also deals with aging.  One of the main research locations was the local senior center.  One of the researchers (they were a husband and wife pair) became pregnant and had a baby during their field work.  This opened to door to a whole set of observations about differing approaches to child raising in the form of advice that was given to the anthropologist parents.

Cultural observations are self-consciously constructed in comparison to Japanese culture.  The fact that ethnographies are often comparative studies, with the anthropologist’s own culture as the comparative model and the anthropologist being either a Western European of North American, means that the reader is usually in sympathy with the anthropologist.  Here a reverse is occurring, the reader (in cases of the normative North American) is of the same culture as the informants.

This provides an interesting ethnography for students.  I grew up in a town of comparable size in Kansas, so I was able to identify and recognize some of the themes of this town from my own experience.  Some readers might be turned off by the statistical data from local census records, but students should not be afraid of these things.  The fact that the field work took place in the mid-1980s begs the question of how the economic restructuring of the United States has affected the town that they studied.  A loss of industry has had a major impact on most smaller communities, but the authors only mention some brief observations about 15 years later, circa 1999.

As far as books to get the beginning student to read this is a definite mission accomplished.  Sure, the “exotic” lands of Amazonia, New Guinea or North Africa might capture the imagination, but this book captures the common experience of the United States citizen and tells it in a way that makes the anthropological observations become a matter of structured analysis and not anecdotal autobiographical observation.