Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire From Melanesia and Beyond
Lamont Lindstrom
This is a history of the cargo cults of Melanesia and an intellectual history of an idea. “There is something about cargo cult…” Lindstrom, an anthropologist at the University of Tulsa, writes. “It evokes an intellectual frisson, a faint thrill, an uneasy glee… It palpates and animates our own diffuse but powerful discourses of desire and of love, particularly the melancholy of unrequited love.” Cargo cult means different things to different people, from the romantic tourist’s notion of a bunch of Melanesians in grass skirts waiting for LBJ to come down from the mountain bearing refrigerators, to the academic’s too-easy love affair with “postmodern deconstructions.” Even the Melanesians can’t agree on what cargo means. But what really makes cargo cult resonate in Western minds, as is clear in this book, is that the Melanesians’ impressionistic yet systematic apprehension of Western cultural precepts, reflected back at us whole in caricature, is tantamount to an objective outsider’s cultural critique of our very own world view. Basically, the cultists’ response to us answers the proverbial question: If a bunch of Martians landed in Cincinnati right now and had a good look around, what would they possibly make of what they saw? “Could it be…” Lindstrom writes, “that we are entranced by cargo cults because we are, at heart, commodity fetishists?… We want cargo, but we know also, at heart, that the moral connections that the dominant capitalist rhetoric asserts between hard work and material success are fraudulent and ultimately illusory. Our commodities are equally supernaturally alienated as Melanesian cargo.” HJ
Publisher: University of Hawaii
Paperback: 246 pages
Illustrated