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From the review:
Forget everything you think you know about cargo cults. (Especially forget those pictures you may have seen of “decoy” airplanes or satellite dishes made out of straw and wood: one popular airplane photo is from a Japanese straw festival, another is a Soviet wind tunnel model, and the radio telescope is just one advertisement from a British ice cream company.) Nowadays we use “cargo cult” as a lazy shorthand for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but that’s not what was happening at all. If the New Guinea natives built airstrips, it wasn’t out of a belief that airstrips attract cargo planes like planting milkweed brings Monarch butterflies — that would be seem silly but basically understandable from our frame of reference. No, it’s much weirder than that. They built airstrips for exactly the same reason anyone else does: because they thought cargo planes were coming. They just thought the planes were coming because of the dancing.
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[T]he New Guineans thought appeasing the gods was absolutely essential, because they believed that all knowledge, technology, and skill — all their agriculture, pig husbandry, seamanship, and clever manipulation of their environment — were not the products of human discovery. Rather, they had been invented by the gods who gave them to mankind. Thus it followed that the ritual knowledge — knowing how to get the gods’ favor — was vastly more important than any kind of practical or technical expertise. If your neighbor has more and healthier pigs than you do, it can’t be that he gives them better food or provides better care; probably he just knows the ritual for a better pig god.
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The first recorded cargo cult in New Guinea was just…Christianity.
You might think the missionaries would have realized something was off, but they mostly stayed at their missions; most of the “fieldwork” was done by poorly-compensated native helpers who mostly believed the cargo doctrines themselves, and were eager to convert as many people as quickly as possible to hasten the arrival of cargo in New Guinea. When the new converts did have an opportunity to talk with more orthodox believers, linguistic barriers became a serious problem: perfectly ordinary Christian phrases were understood in completely different ways.
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By the end of the 1920s, Madang was nominally almost entirely Christian, but Lawrence concludes that “relations between natives and missionaries, although on the whole extremely amicable, were nevertheless based on complete mutual misunderstanding.”
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[...] predictably, it became clear that despite the baptisms, hymns, and prayers…there was still no cargo. One school of thought held that [...] wicked crewmembers were going through the ship’s hold in transit and replacing their names with those of Europeans, but many more concluded that the missionaries were holding back some vital cargo secret to prevent God from sharing the white man’s bounty with the natives. And so, of course, cults arose claiming to teach this secret.
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Yali was an unlikely cargo messiah. [...] [L]ike many men of his generation, his truly formative experiences came during the Second World War. At a time when many of the New Guineans on the Police Force were deserting or even collaborating with the Japanese, Yali worked closely with his Australian officers in the evacuation of threatened areas and watching the coast for landings. Then in early 1943 he was promoted to Sergeant of Police and sent to Brisbane for special training in jungle warfare. And he was amazed.
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Lawrence, who spent weeks talking to him in 1956, writes that he “gave the impression of almost complete Western rationality. He genuinely liked Europeans, took pleasure in their company, and wanted nothing more than to count them among his friends.”
But the assimilation was an illusion.
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Once again, there were amicable relations based on complete mutual misunderstanding. The people of Madang and neighboring areas thought Yali was a superhuman being who had discovered the secret source of cargo and would share it with them. Yali, in turn, did his best to suppress cargo cults — not because he thought they were wicked or incorrect but because he assumed the Australians would be angry if people tried to steal their property — but kept saying things that cult leaders could spin as endorsing their doctrines. (In fact, they began to invoke Yali in their rituals.) And the authorities in Canberra and Port Moresby saw him as a fully secular, Westernized propagandist who would “prepare the people for the long, slow road to material, social, and spiritual advancement by indoctrinating them with the gospel of hard work.”
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Yali was bitterly disappointed. His entire program had been based on the assumption that the promises would be kept and that his people’s standard of living was about to increase dramatically, and now he had to go home and announce that there would be no cargo, only — eventually — some hospitals and maybe some loans to start new businesses. But then something even worse happened: he discovered the theory of evolution.
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Yali was furious. Not only had the secular administration reneged on their promises to give him cargo, now it turned out the missionaries had also lied about the origins of mankind. Clearly, they could not be trusted to reveal the cargo secret either. It now appeared that both roads to cargo — indirectly from the Australians and directly from God — were closed. And yet Yali had just been granted official powers and responsibilities, and he still wanted to use them to promote orderly and prosperous lives for his people…who were expecting him to turn up in a ship full of goods he didn’t possess.
If he didn’t want to fall into total disgrace, there was only one solution: Yali leaned into his heretofore-unintentional role as cargo messiah.
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