As the example of the Kwakiutl indicates, conditions appropriate for the development of competitive feasting and redistribution sometimes also occurred among nonagricultural populations. Among the coastal peoples of the Pacific Northwest, annual runs of salmon, other migratory fish, and sea mammals provided the ecological analogue of agricultural harvests. The salmon or candlefish ran in such vast numbers that if people worked harder they could always catch more fish. Moreover, as long as they fished with the aboriginal dip net, they could never catch enough fish to influence the spawning runs and deplete next year’s supply.
Stepping away for the moment from our examination of reciprocal and redistributive prestige systems, we can surmise that every major type of political and economic system uses prestige in a distinctive manner. For example, with the appearance of capitalism in Western Europe, competitive acquisition of wealth once more became the fundamental criterion for big-man status. Only in this case, the big men tried to take away each other’s wealth, and highest prestige and power went to the individual who managed to accumulate and hold onto the greatest fortune. During the early years of capitalism, highest prestige went to those who were richest but lived most frugally. After their fortunes had become more secure, the capitalist upper class resorted to grand-scale conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste in order to impress their rivals. They built great mansions, dressed in exclusive finery, adorned themselves with huge jewels, and spoke contemptuously of the impoverished masses. Meanwhile, the middle and lower classes continued to award highest prestige to those who worked hardest, spent least, and soberly resisted all forms of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste. But as the growth of industrial capacity began to saturate the consumer market, the middle and lower classes had to be weaned away from their frugal habits. Advertising and mass media joined forces to induce the middle and lower classes to stop saving and to buy, consume, waste, destroy, or otherwise get rid of ever-larger quantities of goods and services. And so among middle-class status seekers, highest prestige now goes to the biggest and most conspicuous consumer.
But in the meantime, the rich found themselves threatened by new forms of taxation aimed at redistributing their wealth. Conspicuous consumption in the grand manner became dangerous, so highest prestige now once again goes to those who have most but show least. With the most prestigious members of the upper class no longer flaunting their wealth, some of the pressure on the middle class to engage in conspicuous consumption has also been removed. This suggests to me that the wearing of torn jeans and the rejection of overt consumerism among middle-class youth of late has more to do with aping the trends set by the upper class than with any so-called cultural revolution.
One final point. As I have shown, the replacement of reciprocity by competitive status seeking made it possible for larger human populations to survive and prosper in a given region. One might very well wish to question the sanity of the whole process by which mankind was tricked and cajoled into working harder in order to feed more people at substantially the same or even lower levels of material well-being than that enjoyed by people like the Eskimo or Bushmen. The only answer that I see to such a challenge is that many primitive societies refused to expand their productive effort and failed to increase their population density precisely because they discovered that the new “labor-saving” technologies actually meant that they would have to work harder as well as suffer a loss in living standards. But the fate of these primitive people was sealed as soon as any one of them—no matter how remotely situated—crossed the threshold to redistribution and the full-scale stratification of classes that lay beyond. Virtually all of the reciprocity-type hunters and gatherers were destroyed or forced into remote areas by bigger and more powerful societies that maximized production and population and that were organized by governing classes. At bottom, this replacement was essentially a matter of the ability of larger, denser, and better-organized societies to defeat simple hunters and gatherers in armed conflict. It was work hard or perish.
Phantom Cargo
I HAVE CHOSEN to tell you about phantom cargo at this point because it is directly related to redistributive exchange and the big-man system. You may not see the connection right away. But then nothing about phantom cargo is apparent right away.
The scene is a jungle airstrip high in the mountains of New Guinea. Nearby are thatch-roofed hangars, a radio shack, and a beacon tower made of bamboo. On the ground is an airplane made of sticks and leaves. The airstrip is manned twenty-four hours a day by a group of natives wearing nose ornaments and shell armbands. At night they keep a bonfire going to serve as a beacon. They are expecting the arrival of an important flight: cargo planes filled with canned food, clothing, portable radios, wrist watches, and motorcycles. The planes will be piloted by ancestors who have come back to life. Why the delay? A man goes inside the radio shack and gives instructions into the tin-can microphone. The message goes out over an antenna constructed of string and vines: “Do you read me? Roger and out.” From time to time they watch a jet trail crossing the sky; occasionally they hear the sound of distant motors. The ancestors are overhead! They are looking for them. But the whites in the towns below are also sending messages. The ancestors are confused. They land at the wrong airport.
Waiting for ships or planes to bring dead ancestors and cargo began a long time ago. In the earliest cults the coastal people watched for a big canoe. Later, they watched for sails. In 1919 cult leaders searched the horizon for traces of smoke from steamships. After World War II, ancestors were expected in LST’s, troop carriers, and Liberator bombers. Now they’re coming in “flying houses” that rise higher than airplanes.
The cargo itself has also undergone modernization. In the earliest days, matches, steel tools, and bolts of calico accounted for most of the phantom cargo. Later, it was sacks of rice, shoes, canned meat and sardines, rifles, knives, ammunition, and tobacco. Recently, phantom fleets have been carrying automobiles, radios, and motorcycles. Some West Irian cargo prophets are predicting steamships that will disgorge whole factories and steel mills.
A precise inventory of cargo would be misleading. The natives are waiting for a total upgrading of their lives. The phantom ships and planes will bring the beginning of a whole new epoch. The dead and living will be reunited, the white man thrown out or subordinated, drudgery abolished; there will be no shortages of anything. The arrival of the cargo, in other words, will mark the beginning of heaven on earth. This vision differs from Western descriptions of the millennium only because of the bizarre prominence of industrial products. Jet planes and ancestors; motorcycles and miracles; radios and ghosts. Our own traditions prepare us for salvation, resurrection, immortality—but with airplanes, cars, and radios? No phantom ships for us. We know where such things come from. Or do we?
Missionaries and government administrators tell the natives that hard work and machines make the cornucopias of industrialism release their rivers of wealth. But the prophets of cargo hold to other theories. They insist that the material wealth of the industrial age is really created in some distant place not by human but by supernatural means. Missionaries, traders, and government officials know how to get consignments of this wealth sent to them by plane or ship—they possess the “secret of cargo.” Native cargo prophets rise or fall on their ability to penetrate this secret and to deliver cargo into the hands of their followers.
Native theories about cargo evolve in response to continually changing conditions. Before World War II, ancestors had white skins; later they were said to look like Japanese; but when black American troops drove out the Japanese, ancestors were pictured as having black skins.
After World War II, cargo theory often centered on the Americans. In the New Hebrides, the people decided that a G.I. named John Frum was King of America. His prophets built an airport at which American Liberator bombers would land with a cargo of milk and ice cream. Relics left over on Pacific island battlefields show that John Frum was there. One group bel
ieves that a U.S. Army field jacket with sergeant’s stripes and the red cross of the medical corps on the sleeves was worn by John Frum when he made his promise to return with cargo. Small medical corps red crosses, each surrounded by a neat fence, have been erected all over the island of Tanna. A John Frum village chieftain interviewed in 1970 noted that “people have waited nearly 2,000 years for Christ to return, so we can wait a while longer for John Frum.”
During 1968, a prophet on the island of New Hanover in the Bismarck Archipelago announced that the secret of cargo was known only to the President of the United States. Refusing to pay local taxes, the cult members saved $75,000 to “buy” Lyndon Johnson and to make him King of New Hanover if he would tell the secret.
In 1962 the United States Air Force placed a large concrete survey marker on the top of Mt. Turn near Wewak, New Guinea. The prophet, Yaliwan Mathias, became convinced that the Americans were ancestors and that the cargo lay underneath the marker. In May 1971, after a night of prayer to the accompaniment of pop music on their transistor radio, he and his followers dug up the marker. No cargo was found. Yaliwan explained that the authorities had taken it away. His followers, who had contributed $21,500, did not lose faith.
It is easy to dismiss cargo beliefs as the ravings of primitive minds: Prophet leaders are either consummate rogues preying upon the greed, ignorance, and gullibility of their-brethren, or if sincere, they are psychopaths who spread their mad ideas about cargo through autohypnosis and mass hysteria. This would be a cogent theory if there were nothing mysterious about how industrial wealth gets manufactured and distributed. But in point of fact, it is not easy to explain why some countries are poor and others rich, nor is it easy to say why there are such sharp differences in the distribution of wealth within modern nations. What I’m suggesting is that there really is a cargo mystery, and that the natives are justified in trying to solve it
To penetrate the secret of cargo, we need to concentrate on a particular case. I have chosen the cults of the Madang area of the north coast of Australian New Guinea, which have been described by Peter Lawrence in his book Road Belong Cargo.
One of the first Europeans to visit the Madang coast was a nineteenth-century Russian explorer named Miklouho-Maclay. As soon as the boat landed, his men began to dispense steel axes, bolts of cloth, and other valuables as gifts. The natives decided that the white men were ancestors. The Europeans deliberately cultivated this image by never letting the natives witness the death of a white man—they would secretly dispose of the bodies at sea and explain that the missing men had gone back to heaven.
In 1884 Germany set up the first colonial government in Madang. Lutheran missionaries followed shortly, but they were unsuccessful in attracting converts. One mission went thirteen years without baptizing a single native. Converts had to be bribed with steel tools and food. And now you can see why I said that the concept of the big man is relevant. Like the native big men described in the last chapter, the big men from overseas remained credible and legitimate only to the extent that they held repeated giveaways. It made no difference whether they were returned ancestors or gods, except that godlike big men ought to give away more than ordinary big men. Hymn singing and the promise of future salvation were not enough to keep the natives interested. They wanted and expected cargo—everything the missionaries and their friends received by ship from the lands across the sea.
Big men, as we have seen, must redistribute their wealth. The natives believe that there is nothing worse than a stingy big man. The missionaries were clearly holding back—keeping the “meat and fat” for themselves and giving away the “bones and stale cakes.” At the mission stations, on the road gangs, and on the plantation the natives worked hard, anticipating a great feast. Why didn’t it come? In 1904 the natives plotted to kill all the stingy big men, but the authorities learned of the plot and executed the ringleaders. Martial law followed.
After this defeat, native intellectuals began to develop new theories about the orgin of cargo. Native ancestors, not Europeans, made cargo. But the Europeans were preventing the natives from getting their share. A second armed revolt was plotted in 1912. Then came the outbreak of World War I. The German big men fled and Australian big men took over.
The natives now held meetings at which they agreed that further armed resistance was impractical. Obviously the missionaries knew the secret of cargo. So the only thing to do was to learn it from them. The natives flocked to the churches and mission schools and became cooperative and enthusiastic Christians. They listened attentively to the following story: In the beginning God, called Anus in native mythology, created Heaven and Earth. Anus gave Adam and Eve a paradise full of cargo: all the canned meats, steel tools, rice in bags, and matches they could use. When Adam and Eve discovered sex, Anus took the cargo away from them and sent the flood. Anus showed Noah how to build a huge wooden steamship and made him its captain. Shem and Japheth obeyed Noah, their father. But Ham was stupid and disobeyed him. Noah took the cargo away from Ham and sent him to New Guinea. After they had lived for years in ignorance and darkness, Anus took pity on the children of Ham and sent the missionaries to undo Ham’s mistake, saying: “You must win over his descendants to my ways again. When they follow me again, I shall send them cargo in the same way as I send it to you white men now.”
The government and the missions were encouraged by the upturn in church attendance and the respectful sobriety of the new converts. Few whites comprehended the extent to which the native interpretation of Christianity deviated from their own. Sermons were conducted in Pidgin, a composite of German, English, and aboriginal languages. The missionaries knew that the natives took the phrase “and God blessed Noah,” to mean “and God gave Noah cargo.” And they knew that when they sermonized from Matthew “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” the natives understood the passage to mean “Good Christians will be rewarded with cargo.” But they also knew that if the rewards for Christian obedience were presented in a wholly spiritual and otherworldly sense, the natives would either disbelieve them or lose interest and move on to someone else’s church. To the intelligent native, the message was loud and clear: Jesus and the ancestors were going to give cargo to the faithful; pagans would not only get no cargo, but they would burn in Hell. So during the twenties the native leaders patiently attended to their Christian duties—sang hymns, worked for a few cents an hour, paid their head tax, gave up their extra wives, and showed respect to the white bosses. But by the thirties their patience had begun to wear thin. If hard work brought cargo, they should already have gotten it. They had unloaded countless ships and planes for their white masters, but no native had ever received a single package from overseas.
The catechists and mission assistants were especially annoyed. They observed at first hand the substantial differences in wealth between themselves and the European big men. And they observed the patent failure of these differences to diminish as a result of all the effort expended on getting more converts and being good Christians. A prominent Lutheran minister, Rolland Hanselmann, entered his church one Sunday morning in 1933 and found all his native helpers standing behind a rope they had strung across the aisle. They read him a petition: “Why do we not learn the secret of the cargo? Christianity does not help us black-fellows in a practical way. The white men are hiding the cargo secret.” There were additional accusations: the Bible was not translated properly by accident or design—it was being censored; the first page was missing; the true name of God was being withheld.
The natives boycotted the missions and put forward a new solution to the cargo mystery. Jesus Christ gave cargo to the Europeans. Now he wanted to give it to the natives. But the Jews and the missionaries had conspired to keep cargo for themselves. The Jews had captured Jesus and were holding him prisoner in or above Sydney, Australia. But soon Jesus would get free and cargo would start coming. The poorest would get the most (“the meek shall inherit”
). The people stopped work, slaughtered their pigs, burned their gardens, and massed in the cemeteries.
These events coincided with the outbreak of World War II. At first, the natives had no trouble in understanding this new war. The Australians had driven out the Germans and now the Germans were going to drive out the Australians. Only this time the Germans would be ancestors disguised as German soldiers. The government jailed the cult leaders for spreading German propaganda. But despite a news blackout, the natives soon began to realize that their Australian administration was in danger of being driven out of New Guinea, not by the Germans, but by the Japanese.
The cargo prophets struggled to make sense out of this startling new development. A cult leader named Tagarab announced that the missionaries had been tricking them all along. Jesus was an unimportant god. The real God—the cargo god—was a native deity known as Kilibob. The missionaries had made the natives pray to Anus. But Anus was an ordinary human being who happened to be the father of Kilibob, who in turn was the father of Jesus. Kilibob was about to punish the whites for their perfidy. He and the ancestors were on their way with a shipload of guns, ammunition, and other military equipment. When they landed they would look like Japanese soldiers. The Australians would be driven out and everyone would get cargo. To get ready, everyone must cease ordinary work, slaughter pigs and chickens, and start building storehouses for the cargo.
When the Japanese finally invaded Madang in December 1942, the natives greeted them as liberators. Even though the Japanese had not brought cargo, the prophets interpreted their arrival as at least a partial fulfillment of cargo prophecies. The Japanese did not attempt to disabuse them. They gave the natives the impression that cargo had been temporarily delayed because the fighting was still going on. They said that after the war was over, Madang was going to be part of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Everyone would share in the good life to come. In the meantime there was work to be done; the natives were needed to help defeat the Australians and their American allies. The natives rushed to help unload the ships and planes; they acted as bearers, and brought gifts of fresh vegetables. Downed American pilots were unpleasantly surprised by the hostility displayed to them in the bush. No sooner did they touch ground than they were surrounded by painted tribesmen who tied their hands and feet, slung them on poles, and trotted off with them to the nearest Japanese officer. The Japanese rewarded the cargo prophets by presenting them with Samurai swords and making them officers in the local police force.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 11