The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden

ships arrive and disgorge unimaginable wealth with no visible connection to the endeavors of the Europeans who brought them. (Papuans rarely saw Europeans working under any circumstances.) Local Europeans would also celebrate the arrival of ships, reinforcing the suspicion that the goods had magical origins. But the ultimate proof for many natives was the fact that the bumbling, sweaty whites who couldn’t speak any native dialects just seemed too dimwitted to have produced such wonders. (This marked a decided downgrading of the original reputation of whites, many of whom were first viewed as deities, before the natives concluded that these strange newcomers did not live up to the behavior expected of a divinity.)
    So, as the natives watched in awe, some local prophet would tell his one-talks (pidgin for people from the same clan) that the arrival of the rich whites was a signal that release from toil and strife was at hand. Often the prophet would announce that he knew the rituals that the Europeans used to produce the cargo, and equally often he would insist that the cargo rightfully belonged to the natives and that the whites had stolen it through treachery. Such claims often marked the point at which these cults moved from being quaint to being dangerous.
    For me the persistence of cargo cults helped illustrate a simple but often overlooked idea: The mere desire for consumer goods does not a consumer make. In Affluence and Discontent, I tried to show that the genius of a consumer society is that it taps an endless source of power by translating religious needs into material appetites. The key to the power of a consumer society is that people are willing to organize themselves to earn the money to try to satisfy needs that can ultimately never be requited by material purchases. There’s a lot more to the argument than that—a whole book’s worth, in fact—but my basic point was and is that a consumer society is a system that integrates the production of goods and services and the consumption of goods and services. More specifically, a consumer society harnesses the very discontents it creates—in the form of disenfranchised and unrequited religious needs—to mobilize resources and extend its ambit. (For those interested, I developed this concept further in my more recent book, The Future in Plain Sight .)
    Papuans loved the consumer goods, but they were not consumers. One of the most poignant illustrations of this involved a Papuan native named Yali who rose to the rank of sergeant major in the Australian army in recognition of his invaluable assistance to the Australian administrators of New Guinea during World War II. In most respects Yali was a model soldier, and he seemed to adapt well to modernity. During a training trip to Australia, he was taken to a factory where armaments were produced. When he returned to New Guinea he told his one-talks that, yes, he had in fact seen the place where goods were made, but the sneaky Europeans never showed him the secret room from which the ancestors directed the operations.
    Talk to almost any anthropologist who has worked in New Guinea, and you will hear similar anecdotes about backfired attempts to contradict cargo beliefs. One researcher became alarmed at a nascent cargo cult near Garoka, the gateway to the highlands, and took one of the village elders to see a hydroelectric dam, hoping to enlist his help in defusing the cult. Instead, the sight of the immense structure instantly converted the elder into a full-blown believer in cargo, as he was convinced that no humans could build something that big.
    Other such attempts produced unintended and amusing results. This was the case when, as the story goes, an expatriate took two village bigmen up in a small plane to prove to them that it was nothing more than a machine. The pair were riveted by the experience and looked down with great interest as they flew over neighboring villages. After they landed