482. Mead, Margaret and Theodore Schwartz. "The Cult as Condensed Social Process." In Group Processes: Transactions of the Fifth Conference edited by B. Schaffner. New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1960: 85-187.
A transcription of conference proceedings, containing an extraordinarily rich discussion of aspects of the interactions between Paliau's highly rational and eventually highly successful secular political reform movement with two occurrences of cargo cult excitements. This work is valuable if only because it appears to be the only extant record of the actual beginnings of a movement recorded by disinterested observers. In fact, that is the least of its strengths.
Mead offers a striking definition of the beginning of prophetic calling: "someone dies, and returns from the dead with a special message" (p. 87). [The near-death experience known in our culture should be examined in the light of this observation. Ring (1988a: item 574) offers a fairly trivial discussion of this phenomenon, but the authors cited by him should be scanned for answers to, or at least discussions of, the questions, do these people embark on prophetic careers? If not, why not? It appears that most are reluctant to discuss their experiences in any public way; presumably, they expect radical delegitimization. But there are plenty of New Age believers and seekers who are ready to lend support and admiration to such reports. Is this apparent lack of movement activity a result of my ignorance or some other circumstances?]
Among other astute observations about this group and others, we might note the following: ambivalent followers will in a sense force their commitment to equal or exceed the prophet's own, by a destruction of property leaving them absolutely destitute; this is "forcing the hand of God" (p. 94) so that He must respond in the desired way. It also dramatizes the discontinuity between the evil old life and the utopian new.
Paliau's plan was drawn up in advance. He reinterpreted Christianity: it had been encrypted by the missionaries to keep its full force from the Manus. Since they couldn't understand it, they were denied access to its full power, which the whites, by virtue of their superior technology, obviously had. [See Guiart, 1962a: item 308, for the widespread Melanesian belief that the missionaries had torn out the first page of the Bible, thereby concealing the true secret of Christianity; Paliau's idea was not entirely original].
John Brown, a black man, had been specifically designated to bring the truth to black men, but whites had killed him to protect the secret. [See Rotberg, 1970: item 586, for another appearance of John Brown as a savior of blacks in a quite different context.] [Note that this is "paranoid" ideation (or "paranoidoid" in Mead's formulation, p. 171); but it is not necessary to invoke paranoia to account for the clear problem of theodicy that colonialism invokes]. Paliau also revived public confession from the old practice, one that the Manus had scrupulously avoided in their choice of sect to convert to.
A few months after Paliau embarked on his mission, one Wapi had his vision and the Noise began. Wapi was an adolescent, a thorough nonentity, before this experience, which foretold the coming of cargo within a week. Paliau was wrong; his program was not necessary. Jesus would return, bringing the cargo, and all that was necessary was to destroy all property (except houses) and pray.
Before this prophecy could have any effect, it had to be substantiated, and this occurred when a quite different dream came true: a canoe was destroyed, thus validating, not only a vague dream that the sago party who were using the canoe should return home, but Wapi's as well. Wapi went into seizures the day he related his dream, and in the cult, there was a pattern of mass seizure, a sort of "getting in step" (p. 120) with one another. This, like marching, seems to have been a somewhat extreme means of uniting a previously fragmented group, in a non-teleological, "functionalist" way.
Telling the dream is a performance of prophecy, and "symptomatology" is an appropriate validating element of the performance. Wapi was transformed, according to type; revelation transforms the prophet; he becomes a leader, usually having been a nonentity before. [His own experience publicly performs and validates the world-renewing ideology of the revelation]. In this case, the whole village group was regarded as inferior.
As the cult progressed, Wapi's behavior became increasingly inappropriate and aggressive [cf. Lofland, 1977: item 439, on the generality of this point--inappropriate and irrational behavior becomes a sign of charisma]. Followers had hallucinations about the coming of the cargo, and the cult spread very quickly to some thirty-three villages.
When the cargo didn't come, Wapi asked his brothers to kill him, so he could go find out what caused the delay; they obliged. [This also seems to reflect a fairly wide-spread Melanesian pattern: see Burton-Bradley, item 145.]
[There is an attempt to explain the movement in terms of Paliau's obviously extraordinary abilities, an attempt that Mead carries further in her New Lives for Old (1956). It seems to me that, while his unusual personality is obviously relevant here, attention should also be paid to Paliau's unusual social position as a possible source of his influence in a phenomenon that is, above all, social. He was from, but not of, the culture he affected so strongly. He came from a group the Manus saw as frivolous, so his organizational ability in itself represented something of an inversion of the usual order. He possessed extraordinary charisma (a social, not a personal attribute) but not in familiar terms. He dreamed no dreams; instead, he went away and learned to be a white man. He held the most prestigious job a native could command and retained it through two occupations of New Guinea by warring imperialist forces: the Australians and the Japanese. He had thoroughly learned the alien notion of cooperation to the extent that he could set up organizations among the "particularist" natives and make them work. In other words, he had carried out a program that other natives only imagined: to assume a new life in a new society. (The Manus had converted for precisely that reason.) He was carrying out the culture's own program. Mead and Schwartz don't mention this fact, but the culture had thoroughly prepared itself for someone just like him.
One reflects also on the fact that he had been sent away to school "too young" and that the Manus typically sent away their most marginal members. Paliau's extraordinary intelligence seems not to have been noticed until he became a police boy. Thus Paliau was a stranger everywhere he went. Being attached to no home, he could, perhaps more clearly than most, understand all the cultures he was exposed to. His career perfectly parallels that of the prophet; he was literally a nobody to his own people during his long absences. His position was clearly and at the very least ambiguous.]
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