they asked the pilot if the windows opened. When the pilot said yes, they asked whether they could go up again and fly the same route. Delighted that he was making progress, the pilot agreed. Once they were aloft, however, and flying over the neighboring village with the window open and the air blowing by, the men took out rocks they had brought with them and began throwing them down. The two natives might have reserved judgment on whether humans or ancestors produced airplanes, but they immediately grasped their military potential.
At first blush Yali and other cargo believers looked like consumers, but they lacked (or were blessed not to have) the critical parts. Traditional tribal culture had no concept of growth; the people saw no connection between expending effort and improving their material well-being. Indeed, in most tribes families didnât have to work any harder than the lazy Europeans, since an hour and a halfâs work a day was sufficient to secure a living (which makes one wonder about the putative lure of cargo cults being the release from toil).
Cargo ingeniously offered the Stone Age mentality a type of immunity to the most disorienting aspects of encounters with modernity. To a small degree, it allowed tribal peoples to eat their cake and have it also, since they didnât have to sacrifice their worldview to get access to some portion of Western goods. Indeed, the widespread notion that whites had tricked natives out of cargo that was rightfully theirs offered a perfect justification for stealing (not that most tribes needed any justification for stealing from someone who was not a one-talk). Consequently, crime was and is rampant in New Guinea. Port Moresbyâs murder rate is twenty-three times that of London, and in 2004 the Economist âs Intelligence Unit rated Port Moresby the most dangerous city on the planetâquite a feat when you consider that it was up against places like Baghdad.
The special flavor of Port Moresby became obvious when I first arrived in 1976. I found lodging with an Australian/Canadian expatriate couple. Over dinner they told me horror stories of the hazards of the city, including the experience of their previous guests, two travel-hardened women backpackers. The pair had declined an offer of a guest room and gone to camp instead on the beach. Both were raped within three hours of pitching their tent. Then and now, only the intrepid venture out at night, and the expatriate community was rife with cautionary tales of rapes, robberies and assaults.
The perpetrators of most of these acts were abandoned children and adolescents who had migrated to the cities. Many of them adroitly adapted to a life of crime, redirecting hunting and stalking skills they had learned in the mountains. (One expatriate told me of waking up one night to discover a young Papuan crouched silently on the nightstand next to his bed.) Dubbed ârascals,â a deceptively endearing tag, gangs of these marauding outcasts and rebels-without-a-cause spread terror through Port Moresby. As one Papuan put it to me, âThe influx of young into the cities is a sure indication that the elders are losing control over their sons and daughters.â
Since World War II modernity has been coming at Papuans from all angles. Mining companies spread money around and hire the educated young, unintentionally creating a rift between young managers who have cash and their elders who control the land. In the 1960s colonial governors tended to be appointed from previous postings in Africa, where the conventional wisdom was to discourage tribalism in order to encourage national identity. Missionaries have a mixed record. Some of the fundamentalist Protestant sects have been the most assiduous demonizers of traditional practices and beliefs, but others, notably Catholics from the Divine Word order, have recognized the importance of cultural traditions to individual and village identity and have worked to
At first blush Yali and other cargo believers looked like consumers, but they lacked (or were blessed not to have) the critical parts. Traditional tribal culture had no concept of growth; the people saw no connection between expending effort and improving their material well-being. Indeed, in most tribes families didnât have to work any harder than the lazy Europeans, since an hour and a halfâs work a day was sufficient to secure a living (which makes one wonder about the putative lure of cargo cults being the release from toil).
Cargo ingeniously offered the Stone Age mentality a type of immunity to the most disorienting aspects of encounters with modernity. To a small degree, it allowed tribal peoples to eat their cake and have it also, since they didnât have to sacrifice their worldview to get access to some portion of Western goods. Indeed, the widespread notion that whites had tricked natives out of cargo that was rightfully theirs offered a perfect justification for stealing (not that most tribes needed any justification for stealing from someone who was not a one-talk). Consequently, crime was and is rampant in New Guinea. Port Moresbyâs murder rate is twenty-three times that of London, and in 2004 the Economist âs Intelligence Unit rated Port Moresby the most dangerous city on the planetâquite a feat when you consider that it was up against places like Baghdad.
The special flavor of Port Moresby became obvious when I first arrived in 1976. I found lodging with an Australian/Canadian expatriate couple. Over dinner they told me horror stories of the hazards of the city, including the experience of their previous guests, two travel-hardened women backpackers. The pair had declined an offer of a guest room and gone to camp instead on the beach. Both were raped within three hours of pitching their tent. Then and now, only the intrepid venture out at night, and the expatriate community was rife with cautionary tales of rapes, robberies and assaults.
The perpetrators of most of these acts were abandoned children and adolescents who had migrated to the cities. Many of them adroitly adapted to a life of crime, redirecting hunting and stalking skills they had learned in the mountains. (One expatriate told me of waking up one night to discover a young Papuan crouched silently on the nightstand next to his bed.) Dubbed ârascals,â a deceptively endearing tag, gangs of these marauding outcasts and rebels-without-a-cause spread terror through Port Moresby. As one Papuan put it to me, âThe influx of young into the cities is a sure indication that the elders are losing control over their sons and daughters.â
Since World War II modernity has been coming at Papuans from all angles. Mining companies spread money around and hire the educated young, unintentionally creating a rift between young managers who have cash and their elders who control the land. In the 1960s colonial governors tended to be appointed from previous postings in Africa, where the conventional wisdom was to discourage tribalism in order to encourage national identity. Missionaries have a mixed record. Some of the fundamentalist Protestant sects have been the most assiduous demonizers of traditional practices and beliefs, but others, notably Catholics from the Divine Word order, have recognized the importance of cultural traditions to individual and village identity and have worked to
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