After driving the Japanese out of Papua New Guinea during World War
II, the U.S. military forces left their gear -- and the makings of
a cargo cult -- to the native Kaliai. CULTURES OF SECRECY offers a
close look at how, for fifty years, the bush Kaliai in Melanesia
have worked these tailings of the western world into their
indigenous culture. Lattas shows how cargo cults in general bring
together past, present, and future in their curious blending of
traditional myths, imported folklore, borrowed state practices and
ideologies, and reworked Christian stories. The result is a richly
interdisciplinary work that uses ethnography to explore questions
of racial experience, gender relations, space, time, death, and the
politics of human relations.
Never passive imitators, the Kaliai as Andrew Lattas portrays
them actively incorporate and transform western beliefs and
practices into their own narratives of life, sexuality, and death.
The consequences are new myths and histories, new relationships
with the ancestral dead -- an alternative world of power and
knowledge through which the Kaliai accommodate the dominant white
culture and its institutions. Lattas examines the racial conflict
that has riddled the recent history of the cargo cults. He also
describes the cults' demonization by the New Tribes missionaries
from the United States, who disapprove of the villagers' unorthodox
miming of European symbols and practices. His book allows us to see
behind the villagers' ambivalence toward "waitskin" (white-skins)
as they continue to reinvent their social world.
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