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comings of current millenarian theory and to draw attention both to the process by which

movements are constructed and the limiting contingencies through which they are shaped.

Finally, to indicate the general validity of my thesis, I try to account for the commonly noted

but less frequently explained inverse correlation between millenarian activi ty and the degree

of contact wi th Western influence.

the history of millenarianism in Yangoru

From what can be inferred of the recent prehistoric past, a large number of Sepik societies

have been dominated culturally by two Ndu-speaking groups, the Abelam and the latmul

(Forge 1973:174-175; Gewertz 1983). With European contact and the rise of mil lenarianism,

however, the balanceof this cultural hegemony has begun to change, and this i s nowhere more

apparent than on the eastern borders of the Abelam, where postcontact history has seen the

Yangoru Boiken transformed from importersof Abelam and latmul art and ritual into the Sepik's

major producers and exporters of millenarian culture.

The Yangoru Boiken comprise some 13,000 people who speak the dialect of Boiken found

around Yangoru Government Station in the southern foothills of the coastal Prince Alexander

Range (see Figure 1). Their subsistence is based on yam and taro, supplemented with pigs,

banana, a variety of bush and trade-store foods, and a feast-or-famine dependence on sago.

The nuclei of their social l ife are patrilineages of relatively shallow depth united into quasi-clan

units, and polit ical relations swir l around the activities of their Big Men, whose prestige derives

primarily from performance in ceremonial pig exchanges (see Gesch 1985 and Roscoe 1983

for ethnographic overviews).

My reconstruction of the mil lenarian history of this Melanesian society rests upon both oral

and historical material. Oral sources include the testimonies of older Yangoru men and women

from Sima village, the Ambukanja-Neigrie area (Gesch 1980, 1985), and villages farther afield.These data are complemented by interviews with several expatriate residents of Yangoru, pre-

World War II publications of Catholic missionaries, and a near-complete record of Yangoru

patrol office reports for the period 1949 to 1980. These sources exhibit substantial agreement

on the broad outlines of Yangoru millenarian history; this i s not to deny that discrepancies

occur, as I shall note, but they do not vitiate the conclusions to be drawn.

The results of this reconstruction reveal a rich millenarian vein in Yangoru Boiken history

that can be divided into three strata, reflecting the centers of the movements occurring in each.

The first spans the period from init ial contact to the end of the Second World War and is char-

acterized by the millenarian leadership of Ambukanja, a village located in the high foothills

above Yangoru. Historical and modern ethnohistorical accounts indicate millenarian expec-tations were already coalescing around Ambukanja when Father Eberhard Limbrock and Father

Francis Kirschbaum, the first Westerners to enter the area, descended from the Prince Alex-

ander Mountains on 4 October, 1912.

By this time, Westerners were f irmly established on the far side of the mountains. Following

sporadic exploration of the coast and neighboring islands, the Wewak area had fallen into the

German Neu Guinea Compagnie's sphere of operations in the latter part of the 19th century,

and by 1900 the Compagnie had acquired extensive land holdings along the coast and had

begun recruiting local males as laborers. In the ensuing decade, the German government set

about pacifying the region, and in 1908 the Society of the Divine Word established the area's

first permanent Western presence, at the costal village of Boiken.' News of these events movedquickly along trade routes into the hinterland so that when Limbrock and Kirschbaum entered

the Yangoru area, its villagers already knew of Westerners, their goods, and their power.

By Limbrock's account (1912113:127, 142), the two priests were greeted by throngs of

'friendly, delighted villagers who eagerly pressed them for their blessings. This unexpectedly

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warm reception was welcome evidence that the mission's teachings had spread to a receptive

audience in the hinterlands. "One sees it," Limbrock wrote of the occasion (1 91 211 3:126),"the word 'missionary' really has a good sound here." According to today's villagers, though,

their elders saw things from somewhat different perspectives. Although there was considerable

confusion about the nature of these white-skinned beings, most villagers held them to be

kamba, spirits of the dead, who had returned to visit their liv ing relatives. On Limbrock's first

Melanesian millenarian movements 517

I



visit, in fact, an elderly woman in the Soli area had cried out on seeing him, "Father! Father."'

Some other villagers suspected the pair were not themselves kamba but nevertheless possessed

knowledge of how to contact these spirits (Gesch 1985:116). Yet others suspected the priests

might be wala, spirits constituted from a mystical union of kamba.

Over the next few years, Limbrock and his coastal catechists made a series of return visits to

Ambukanja, the mission presence assuming tangible form in 1914 with the purchase of a plot

of land in the hamlet of Hwerenimpo and the erection of a priest's house, a church, and a small

school (Gesch 1985:116). On some of these visits, the catechists came alone, preaching of the

new order; on other occasions, they accompanied Limbrock, acting as his interpreters in both

secular and sacred contexts. From oral accounts, it seems certain these catechists contributed

a significant millenarian hue to Limbrock's message. In any case, within about three years the

mission's efforts had been transformed into a movement in which people attended the church

and prayed in expectation that "God, the Father" would come down, the spirits of the dead

would return, and villagers would become like the whiteskins.

This initial millenarian movement spread little beyond the five all ied villages constituting the

war confederacy of which Ambukanja was part. In 1912, Limbrock (191 211 3:142) had noted

that news of government punitive expeditions on the coast was already quieting hinterlandwarfare, but fighting continued to make interconfederacy relations a risky proposition for quite

a few years longer. As the threat of physical harm abated, though, more and more people began

to journey to Ambukanja to hear the preaching of coastal catechists or visi ting priests. A period

of simmering cultic activity seems to have ensued, with movements occasionally boi ling over

from Ambukanja into neighboring villages. In the late 1920s or early 1930s, for example, a

movement spread through the northern villages advocating the abandonment of warfare, sor-

cery, and initiation ritual in the belief that villagers would thereby find God (in a literal sense),

become whiteskins, and so gain unfettered access to the Western goods now fi ltering through

the region.

By this time, Yangoru had fallen within the orbit of Australian administration patrols from

Subdistrict Headquarters at Wewak, and by the late 1930s the area was sufficiently under gov-

ernment control for Mt. Hurun, the prominent peak above Ambukanja village, to be included

among several Wewak area mountain tops set ablaze one night with bonfires. In 1930, the

Wewak administration had honored the birth of Princess Margaret with similar beacons on

prominent points along the coast from Wewak to Aitape (Fleetwood 1986:32), and it seems

probable this later event was a celebration of King George Vl's coronation in May, 1937. If this

was so, though, the occasion escaped the people of Yangoru. For them, the village of Ambu-

kanja had secured Western assistance in an event thatwould bring about the mil lennium. Gov-

ernment-appointed luluais and tultuls3 rom throughout Yangoru converged on the Ambukanja

hamlet of Kularawo to witness the firing of the summit. For the remainder of the night, they

participated in a lumohlia-a festival of song and dance in honor of the dead and celebration

of the political triumphs of the living-and at dawn they returned to their villages i n expectation

that now "the good times would come."

Not long afterward, Ambukanja's millenarian involvements finally came to the attention of

the colonial administration. About 1939, a man called Helo, from the vic inity of the Catholic

mission at Boiken, began a coastal movement that may have been an offshoot of one of the

early Madang cults. To begin with, Helo had a direct influence on hinterland Yangoru; people

carried pigs and food out to his longhouses on the coast, where they then supposedly contacted

the spirits of their dead ancestors through various ritual means. Shortly afterward, however,Helo "gave his thinking" to an Ambukanja relative, Hombinei, and the movement came to

Yangoru. Hombinei set about teaching people how to gain access to ancestral spirits through

an intoxicating potion made from bush herbs and scrapings from the bones of their deceased

relatives (see also Gesch 1985:118). In short order, the administration had jailed the pair in




50:8). Soon, however, home-grown movements were starting to challenge Ambukanja's mi l-

lenarian supremacy. Around 1949 or 1950, the Patrol Office felt it necessary to move against

graveyard-related activities in the grassland village of Haripmor (Gesch 1985:319). Despite

Paulus Hawina's claims to have started the rice-growing movement that fol lowed shortly there-

after (Curtain 1980:233), rice-growing i s widely acknowledged to have originated in southern

Yangoru, sponsored by a Ninduwi man, Wundawabie. Moreover, in late 1952, some months

before Hawina had launched his Yangoru Rural Progress Society, ten villages in west Yangoru

had formed the Nindepolye Rural Progress Society to manage their own rice-growing move-

ment (YPR 3-52153; 3-55156:4).

Six years later, and despite Paulus Hawina's attempts to suppress it, a cargo cult involving

the burial o f Western goods in vil lage graveyards erupted in the Wilaru area of west Yangoru

(Weinstock 1972:38, cited in Gesch 1980:66).Then, in 1959, a movement sprang up around

Neigrie mission station focused on a recruitment drive by the local Catholic priest and his vil-

lage catechist. A series of festivals celebrating the opening of village churches drew thousands

of followers from throughout Yangoru to the task of symbolically renouncing sorcery and ac-

tually renouncing polygyny. Although the Catholic mission apparently interpreted these events

from a Christian perspective, the catechist and Yangoru's villagers imbued them with great es-

chatological significance, expecting "God-Jesus" to return and usher in an eternal bliss in

which food, housing, and money would appear spontaneously (s@e lso Gesch 1985:122-

1261.' Around this same time, the Kuvari area was the focus of a flight to the bush, after an

impending lunar eclipse was interpreted as the end of the world (Gesch 1985:319;Weinstock

1972:38, cited in Gesch 1985:l 19).Then, from 1963 to 1965, people around the grassland

villages of Witupe, south of Yangoru, were caught up in another movement, variously called

the Angoram Ex-Serviceman's Club and the Angoram Sports Club, that attracted a wide mem-

bership from southern Yangoru to the delights of burying "money boxes" and to the construc-

tion of an "airfield" (Gesch 1985:1 19-1 20; YPR 3-64165:2).

Almost certainly, these movements did not exhaust the challenges mounted to Ambukanja'smillenarian supremacy during this period. According to Weinstock (1972:38, cited in Gesch

1985:119),for example, patrol officers took action in 1950 against a movement that claimed

whites were diverting cargo sent by the ancestors; and, in 1958, a child was supposedly sac-

rificed in connection with another cult. Unfortunately, the centers of these movements-if in-

deed they existed-are not known.

The third phase of Yangoru's mil lenarian history extends from the late 1960s to the present

and is marked by Ambukanja's dramatic recapture of the millenarian scene in concert wi th the

neighboring village of Marambanja. Matius Yaliwan, the spiritual leader of this resurgence, is

the Marambanja grandson of the earlier millenarian leader Hombinei and holds hereditary

rights to the Ambukanja hamlet of Hwerenimpo, where he frequently resides (see also Gesch1985:39-40). The organizational bril liance was provided by Daniel Hawina, son of Paulus and

therefore classificatory grandson of Hombinei (Curtain 1980:232).An astute poli tician wi th a

flair for rhetoric and a commanding physical presence, Daniel Hawina epitomizes the com-

monly observed "secular 'organizer' at the side of the sacred-charismatic prophet-leader" (La

Barre 1971 :20). In 1969, he garnered millenarian followers from as far afield as Lumi, 150

kilometers to the west, for an attempt at removing cement trigonometric markers buried in the

summit of Mt. Hurun (Gesch 1985:30-37). In the spectacular, better known Peli Movement of

1971, he again toured widely under Yaliwan's spiritual colors, attracting a membership esti-

mated at between 50,000 and 200,000 to a second attempt on Hurun's cement markers. Amid

newspaper headlines warning of human sacrifice, some 300 men removed the blocks and car-ried them down to the Yangoru Patrol Office, where they were deposited before a waiting

crowd of about 6000. Within a year, the Movement had gone on to elect Yaliwan to the Na-

tional House of Assembly, but then its momentum began to falter as the millennium failed to

materialize (Gesch 1985:27-95; Hwekmarin et al. 1971;May 1975).By 1980,however, Haw-




ina and the Peli Movement were again using Yaliwan's name to attract a Sepik-wide millen-

arian following, this time under the badge of the New Apostolic Church based in Kitchener,

Canada (see also Gesch 1985:106-114).

the management of Melanesian millenarian movements

Several decades of anthropological fascination wi th cargo cults have generated a wide va-

riety of explanations linking cultural, psychological, and historical factors to cult emergence,

content, and spatiotemporal occurrence. Melanesia's unusual vulnerability to these move-

ments and their varying attractiveness wi th in the region have been attributed to several different

characteristics of indigenous culture and/or psychology: the intensity of a paranoid ethos, a

close cosmological association between spiritual and material power, the presense of mythical-

ritual beliefs in the annual return of the dead, the importance of competi tive exchange in po-

litical relations, and the limited effectiveness of indigenous sociopolitical institutions in re-

sponding to external invasion and domination (Brunton 1971; Eliade 1962; Lawrence and

Meggitt 1965; Sackett 1974; Schwartz 1973; Valentine 1963). Depending on the presence or

absence of such enabling conditions, to use Stanner's terms (1958:5), the circumstances of

European contact may then precipitate a cult, which is commonly interpreted as the response

to a contact experience that generates relational separation, cognitive inconsistency or disso-

nance, or relative deprivation of an economic, political, and/or status nature (for example,

Aberle 1962; Burridge 1960, 1971;Cochrane 1970; Festinger et al. 1964; Guiart 1962; Knauft

1978; Lanternari 1963; Lawrence 1964; Wallace 1956; Worsley 1957; for reviews of the lit-

erature see especially Jarvie 1963; Knauft 1978).

Although these arguments might help account for Yangoru's greater predilection for millen-

arianism compared to neighboring groups such as the Abelam (Hwekmarin et al. 1971 : lo;

Scaglion 1983:481), they do little to explain northern Yangoru's initial and later millenariandominance and the temporary instabili ty of its tenure between the late 1940s and mid-1 960s.

On the one hand, there is no evidence of any significant, correlating spatial or temporal differ-

ences in Yangoru cosmology, psychology, or poli ty. On the other, the circumstances of contact

were not such as to generate correlating spatial or temporal asymmetries in Yangoru's experi-

ence of the Western world. Although ini tia l contact was wi th northern Yangoru, by 1930 mis-

sionaries, labor recruiters, and administration patrol officers had begun to tour extensively

through the region, evangelizing, recruiting, and pacifying the inhabitants. Coupled with the

efficiency of information and trading networks pervading Yangoru, knowledge and experience

of Westerners, and of their wealth, their values, and their relations with indigenes would have

rapidly and homogeneously diffused through the area at an early time.The difficulties in fitting current theories of cargo cults to the Yangoru data stem, I suggest,

from the importance these theories assign to understanding the circumstances generating mil-

lenarian contexts of belief, attitude, and value, and their comparative neglect of the process

whereby movements are created from these millenarian milieus. Where this latter question i s

addressed at all, it is usually answered with reference to the unusual personal qualities of

"prophets" who act as "triggers" or "catalysts" o i movements by giving form to the thoughts,

aspirations, and emotions that psychocultural and historical conditions have provoked in the

populations to whom they speak (for example, Burridge 1971 153-1 64; Lawrence 1964:249-

256; Stanner 1953:ch. 5; 1958:22).

In an important recent contribution on this topic, Lindstrom (1984) has suggested that whati s at issue i s unequal access to semantic creativity. In ideological organizations l ike cargo cults,

"Those men who command attractive explanatory systems gather followers or, according to

the stereotypic Melanesian model, exchange partners who become indebted in a commerce of

ideas" (Lindstrom 1984:294). Anyone, though, can generate explanatory schemes. Thus, Lind-




strom continues, where knowledge becomes a dominant dimension of political inequality,

leaders must necessarily control it not at the point of its generation but at the point of its social

consumption. They must seek to validate and legitimate their own interpretative schemes whi le

contriving to undermine the validity and legitimacy of others'.

In Lindstrom's view, this process occurs at the ideological level. Leaders may attempt val i-

dation by, for example, claiming exclusive access to a particular supernatural contact, or they

can attempt to construe as false the schemes of their opponents. The problem is that these "val-

idations" and "falsifications" are also interpretations, which leads Lindstrom to argue that im-

portant answers to the question of leadership in ideological organizations such as cargo cults

must lie in the question of why people believe what they do. This question he purposely does

not answer, beyond suggesting that leads must be sought in the explanatory fit of a leader's

interpretations wi th total social context (1984:304-305).

To return to Yangoru, however, this suggestion leads to the same rather unpalatable conclu-

sion as any that attributes the creation of a millenarian movement to the personal qualities of

its leaders-namely, that for much of its postcontact history the denizens and relatives of Am-

bukanja village must consistently have sired Yangoru's most bril liant ideological smithies or

most gifted ideological manipulators. Without denigrating the obvious abilities of their chil-

dren, this seems an improbable situation in an area of some 50 villages, with a population

ranging over the years from 6000 to 13,000.

What is innovative in Lindstrom's formulation i s its expl icit attention to the dynamics of mil -

lenarian movement genesis, and the location of this process in the context of traditional Me-

lanesian political competition. His argument i s also important for stressing that, to create a

movement, millenarian leaders must be concerned not only with producing particularly attrac-

tive explanatory schemes but also wi th presenting themselves as part icular ly privileged ideo-

logical source^.^ What it seems to overlook, however, is that this validation and legitimation

wi ll not be simply the product of superior ideological flair or manipulative ability, but also wil l

be configured by nonideological circumstances, which usually wi ll be only partly under a

would-be leader's control. Historical accident and geocultural circumstance very often will

lend some entrepreneurs a fortuitous edge in convincing others of their privileged access to

mil lennially significant resources. This appears to have been the case in Yangoru, where these

circumstances included the place of Ambukanja in the area's contact history and, later, its con-

trol of ancestral rights over Mt . Hurun, the principal focus of Yangoru Boiken ancestral power.

the far side of Hurun

In contrast to some parts of Melanesia (Lindstrom 1984), Yangoru political followings tradi-tional ly were created through the production and manipulation of tangible commodities, such

as pigs and shell wealth, rather than by control of publicly valued knowledge. An understand-

ing of art, ritual, and powerful magic conferred influence and prestige, but not to a degree that

preeminent Big Men typical ly bothered themselves with the arduous periods of apprenticeship

and proscription necessary to become accomplished in these arts. Correspondingly, channels

such as dreaming and intoxication, by which some other societies generate publicly valued

knowledge, were either neglected or limited to producing information of private rather than

public import-the diagnosis of personal or close kin's illness, for example, or divination of

whether one should expect game or shell wealth in the near future.

Knowledge of Westerners and the source of their wealth, though, was of a different order forYangoru politics because it bore direct ly on beings of extraordinary power, who commanded

objects that became intensely desirable almost as soon as they appeared. Thus, a millenarian

vision promising village access to this power and wealth offered the opportunity for creating a

following far greater than any based on the production and manipulation of material goods.




through Parina village (Limbrock 191211 3:142). Even wi th in Ambukanja, according to modern

ethnohistorical accounts, there was a struggle for control of this valuable millenarian resource.

A man called Saramiemba, who could already speak some pidgin, attempted to persuade Lim-

brock to locate with him, but instead the priest chose the hamlet of Hwerenimpo, possibly

because the catechist accompanying him was related to its owner, Wamazaira. Whatever the

decisive factor in the decision, Wamazaira proceeded to claim Limbrock was his deceased

father, come especially from Aitape in search of his ancestral home and descendants. During

this and Limbrock's subsequent visits, Wamazaira i s said to have spent long hours at night clos-

eted wi th the priest and his catechist, leading others in the village to wonder to what secrets he

was becoming privy.

The image used to describe the pol itical strategies deployed by Wamazaira and other mi l-

lenarian entrepreneurs is one of "surrounding" or "enclosing" (ki; pidgin: banisim), an image

denoting not only imprisonment but also the exclusion of outside agents, be they pigs from a

yam garden, rain and wind from a house, or other Big Men from a Westerner. Thus, Wamazaira

"surrounded" Limbrock; Ambukanja "enclosed" the "work" of firing the summit of Hurun;

and Hombinei "enclosed" first He lo and his work on the coast-by virtue of kinship-and later

high-ranking Japanese officials, persuading them to locate i n Ambukanja.The end of the Second World War, however, saw a change in Ambukanja's abilities to "en-

close" Westerners, as the village's regular and favored access to Western spheres began to

collapse in the face of postwar change. O n the one hand, prolonged bombing had wrought a

devastation on Wewak that provided large-scale labor opportunities within striking distance of

Yangoru (Fleetwood 1986:46). Almost immediately, a small flood of young Yangoru men

poured into Wewak, giv ing rise to a widespread network of contacts between Yangoru villages

and this major Western center. At the same time, the termination of hostili ties saw the intrusion

of a permanent European presence into Yangoru itself. In late 1945 or early 1946, ANGAU

officials took up residence on what is now Yangoru Government Station, eventually ceding

control of the area to a patrol office in 1948. By then, a permanent Catholic mission presence

had also been established, located initially in Ambukanja, but moving soon after to Neigrie.

The 1950s then saw the Western presence expand with the arrival of teachers, a medical officer,

an agricultural officer, and more missionaries (Roscoe 1983:ch. 5).

These newcomers began seriously to erode Ambukanja's privileged access to Westerners,

and in short order rival millenarian centers based on access to these new presences sprang up

elsewhere to challenge Ambukanja's position. Wundawabie, for example, credited with intro-

ducing rice, had managed to "enclose" the first agricultural extension officers to visit the Yan-

goru patrol office. A catechist from Parina village simi larly "surrounded" the Catholic priest at

Neigrie. And the (unnamed) leader of the movement at Wilaru presumably owed his success

to the presence of a small Catholic mission station there.

At the same time, though, changes in the nature of millenarian leadership began to emerge.

As the diff icult ies of monopol izing physical access to Westerners increased, leaders now ap-

peared who could claim privileged contacts by virtue of incorporation into the Western world.

Godfrey Wehuiemungu validated his leadership of the 1959, Catholic-based movement, for

example, by claiming privileged access to Western knowledge as both a catechist and one of

the first in the area to receive a Western education. To bolster his claims, he showed paintings

of Christ and a small hand-cranked moving film of the Crucifixion, presenting them as actual

photographs and footage of the scenes. The leader of the Angoram Ex-Serviceman's Club could

similarly claim privileged knowledge as an ex-police sergeant (Gesch 1985:120), as couldYauiga, the leader of the "New Times" movement, and Beibi, his representative in East Yan-

goru. Yauiga and Beibi, moreover, had spent time in Australia, where Yauiga may have been

further served by the blue Australian eye he received to replace his own, destroyed on active

duty (Fleetwood 1986:36-37; WPR 10-49150: attached note).




munities half-way between the old and the new way of living" (Belshaw 1965:521; see also

Cochrane 1970:154, 161; Knauft 1978:191; Worsley 1957:197-198). This would seem to run

counter to the expectation of much prevail ing theory, for it is in the urban centers that Melane-

sians could be expected to confront cognitive inconsistency, cognit ive dissonance, or relative

deprivation in their starkest forms.

For Brookfield and Belshaw, the explanation lies in economics. In contrast to hinterlanders,

Belshaw argues (1965:521), town dwellers have secular means available to realize the higher

standard of l iving represented by European life. For Brookfield (with Hart 1971 365), the cash-

generating opportunities available to town dwellers are more diversified than those available

in the less contacted, rural areas, so in their search for wealth townsfolk are less likely to ex-

perience the disillusionment from which cargo cults spring. But these arguments fail to explain

why cults do not occur among the urban unemployed who, in the early 1970s for example,

accounted for some 20-25 percent of urban adult males (Curtain 1980:276-277).

The Yangoru evidence suggests an alternative explanation. In prewar Yangoru, large move-

ments could flourish because contacts with the Western sphere were sufficiently tenuous for

Ambukanja's entrepreneurs to monopolize physical access to them and so validate and legiti-

mate their millenarian schemes over any offered from elsewhere in the region. This circum-

stance must have been repeated in the initial contact history of many parts of Melanesia, but

unfortunately the published literature on the formation of early movements, their leadership,

and the prevailing patterning of access to Western influence is too inadequate at present to

establish the case with confidence.

As permanent Western settlements began to appear in postwar Yangoru, however, entrepre-

neurs in other villages now found themselves wi th comparable physical access to whites. Am-

bukanja's monopoly collapsed in the face of a proliferation of smaller movements, and the

nature of cul t leadership began to change. Wi th privi leged physical access to Western inf luence

undermined, leaders now appeared who could claim favored access by virtue of incorporation

into the Western world. The published literature indicates the wider generality of this phenom-enon. As Burridge has noted:

the vast majority of effective prophets have had a relatively wide experience of the white man'sworld. . . . Most of them have been mission teachers, men selected on account of their character and

qualities of intellect, and then given a special training denied to others. They have usually been welltravelled men, who have rubbed shoulders with a ll sorts and sizes in the hurly-burly of the greater com-mercial community. . . . To their own communities if not to Europeans, they have been men whosegeneral acquaintance with the wider environment and larger community is evidence of the fact that theycan understand it and cope with it I1971 :156-1571.

In sum, cargo cults occur on the fringes of Western influence because it is here that condi-

tions allow a few entrepreneurs to establish what is perceived of as privileged access to mil len-

nially significant resources-privileged physical access in the early days of contact and priv i-leged social access through incorporation as the Western presence advance^.^ However, as

contact begins to envelop an area-as happens in urban centers-a situation develops in

which there i s an abundance of millenarian resources, of direct physical contacts with them,

and of Melanesians with access to Western-inspired positions. The former factor debases the

millenarian coin; the latter factors restrict the possibility of establishing a monopoly over it.

Under these circumstances, the chances for creating anything but the smallest of followings i s

removed, the effort becomes worthless, and large-scale movements cease to appear.

notes

Acknowledgmentc. This paper was originally presented at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the AmericanAnthropological Association, in the session "Millenarianism in the Sepik," organized by Deborah Gewertzand Nancy McDowell. Much of the data presented were gathered during 1979-81 and 1987 in fieldtripssponsored by the Department of Community Medic ine at the University of Papua New Guinea and fundedby the Emslie Horniman Scholarship Fund, the Ford Foundation, the University of Rochester, and the Fac-




ulty Research Committee of the University of Maine. The National Archives of Papua New Guinea grantedaccess to and permission to cite Yangoru Patrol Reports, Fred Errington and the American Ethnologist re-viewers provided helpful comments on previous drafts, and Steve Bicknell produced the mapwork. Theassistance of all these persons and insti tutions is very gratefully acknowledged as is the extraordinary kind-

ness, hospitality, and assistance of the people of Sima village.

'In 1886, the Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic order founded in 1875 in Steyl, Holland, wasentrusted with the ecclesiastical field comprising all the New Guinea mainland then under German control.The Society's pioneering party arrived in 1889, and its first Sepik-region mission was established in 1896on the island of Tumleo, near what is now Aitape. Unti l 1906, the mission's presence in the Wewak area

to the east was limited to proselytizing visits. In 1906 or 1907, however, a provisional mission station wassecured on Yuo Island, and in 1908 a permanent mission was established at the nearby coastal village of

Boiken (Anon. 1980[1908]:110; Fleetwood 19 86 :l l- 12 ; Gesch 1985:20).

2As a Catholic priest, Limbrock understandably translated the woman's cry, "0Yova, 0 Yova!" as "derVater, der Vater istgekommen!" (Limbrock 191211 3: 142, emphasis added), but the utterance is better trans-lated as "Eh, Father, eh Father!". Seventy years later, the faces of Westerners visiting Yangoru are still scru-

tinized in the hope that a deceased father or mother has returned.

Sorighatingwith the German Neu Guinea Compagnie, luluais were village officials appointed to keepthe peace in their village, adjudicate minor disputes, and assist with labor recruitment. Tultuls were sup-posed to assist in interpretation, though often they assumed powers similar to those of luluais.

'Curtain (1980:237) has a fragmentary report on He lo's part i n these movements, wh il e Gesch(1985:118-119, 309, 319) furnishes details on the activities of both Helo and Hombinei . These accounts

agree in substance with my reconstruction, but fail to specify the Yangoru locus of Hombinei's later activ-ities. Suffice it to say, my informants clearly recall that Hombinei subsequently left the coast to becomeactive in the hinterlands.

'Peter Simogun (Allen 1976:432), then a member of the Wewak police force, claims to have quashed a

prewar movement headed by Hawina. The existence of this movement is denied in Yangoru. Hawina is

said to have diverted Simogun with tales of millenarian act ivity to protect a magical stone in his possession,which he believed Simogun would steal for his own aggrandizement. Were there substance to Simogun's

claim, though, it would be further evidence of an Ambukanja nexus to Yangoru's prewar millenarianism.

61n mid-1 951, a patrol through northern Yangoru noted that various "businesses" had sprung up in theAmbukanja-Waramaru area since the war, with "stockholders" purchasing "shares" in the expectation of

later "dividends" (YPR 6-50151 :2). From oral testimony, i t seems these were indigenous precursors to theYangoru Rural Progress Society, which was official ly constituted in late 1952.

'Some villagers claim Ambukanja led this movement as well . Ambukanja certainly played a prominent

role in its activities (see also Gesch 1985:125 fn.16), but the catechist at its head was based in Neigrie, partof Sausenduon village; he was originally from Parina village; and he conceived of his movement as quitedistinct from those originating in Ambukanja and Marambanja (Dewdney 1965:184; Gesch 1985:90).

8A personal anecdote illustrates this point. In May 1980, as the New Apostolic Movement was approach-ing one of its periodic crescendoes, I attended a village "Mass" in Hwerenimpo served by one of Peli'shighest officials. He kindly afforded me permission to photograph the proceedings, and I later returned the

favor with a print. Shortly thereafter, the photograph began to play a central role in his "Masses." Hold ingit up for all to see, he wou ld rhetorically inquire after its provenience. The answer, readily evident to myinformants, was the spirits of the dead-the sous entendu being that the official therefore had privilegedaccess to the ancestral world. When Iexplained the photograph's real source, there was considerable upset

and, significantly, voluble denunciations of similar incidents of chicanery.

qAlthough the focus of this paper is restricted to cargo cults, the argument is applicable to any ideology-based movement. For example, like his millenarian counterparts, Tommy Kabu-head of a Purari Deltamovement oriented to actions and goals that reflected "a relatively accurate appraisal of the contact wor ld"(Maher 1958:75)-also had to construct his fol lowing by presenting himself as a privileged ideological

source. A member of the Nat ive Constabulary, Kabu effectively became, during the war, an officer's orderlyin the Royal Australian Navy. O n his return:

He consistently emphasized his connections with the European or new way of li fe and played down hisexperience with the old. . . . He also kept u p a correspondence with his war-time employer. . . . By em-phasizing this relationship, Tommy transmitted the impression to his followers that he had connectionsin the powerful European world which were above the heads of the government officials who were closerat hand . . . it was said that Tommy was married to a daughter of the King of England and that they hadtwo children. The source of the story has never been satisfactorily identified, but Tommy remained pas-

sive in the face of the widespread acceptance it had for a time [Maher 1958:791.

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submitted 1 December 1987

accepted 29 January 1988


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