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The problem here is pride and selfishness. Pride and selfishness have always been the downfall of great nations. People get prideful and think that they should somehow be lifted up above people they feel are less than themselves. When people do this, they totally discard any usefulness “the lesser classes” might contribute. When a nation or society humble themselves and recognize the worth of each person, they are able to work together to the overall benefit of that nation or society. Even smartest or wealthiest of people need the assistance of others in some way. Everyone contributes and everyone has what they need.

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In response to his first, we think that cargo is as cargo does. Certainly both Marshall Sahlins and Nick Thomas — as much as they might disagree about lot of issues — recognize that “things” offered as commodites can be accepted either as gifts or as commodities. Marshall, for example, writes of galoshes and how various PNGuineans recongigured them within what he calls “develop-man” rather than “develoment” systems. (This is to say, systems of mutual entailment rather than systems of individualistic enhancement.) Nick writes about the ways in which the objects given by colonizers (pieces of black glass, even guns) were not necessarily the same in significance/use as the objects received by local Pacific peoples. In addition, the fact of colonial domination has, we think, to be understood as resting — not in the acceptance of “cargo” per se — but in the presence of what was, at least in the Pacific, overwhelming military force. Throughout the Pacific, local populations which did try to resist European control found themselves dealing with entities both inspired by (we would argue — and will argue in posts to follow) particular, historically rooted, expansionist agendas, and able to mobilize vast numbers of men and resources for prolonged periods of time. That being said, it is true that — at least in PNG — many local peoples, especially women, did see benefits to a European-imposed peace.

Concerning the disruption of colonial regimes of work, it’s not so easy. Many “cargo cults” involved people in marching like soliders marched; in following rigid time schedules like Europeans followed. It must not be forgotten that colonists were also sometimes missionaries and that local people often obeyed mission injunctions, including the need to labor on mission plantations, so as to please a European God in whose eyes all men were supposedly created equal.

And, yes, yes, yes, there was little talk/interest of returning to a pre-contact state — certainly not by Yali. We hope no one thought that we were saying as much. But, a post-contact state might have remained for some time one committed to “develop-man” rather than “development.” This is to say that — at least in retrospect — many PNG people were sometimes/often willing to accept the benefits of European pacification and administration, but would have wanted it to come about it ways that enhanced rather than diminshed their sense of worth in the world.

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What’s always struck me about the cargo cults is the way they intersected with and interfered with colonial work regimes, and what that said about local understandings of the working of capitalism. Though my understanding is somewhat minimal, I’ve always thought it interesting that many cargo cult movements involved the forbidding of “work” — that the cargo would only come when the spirirts/gods/whatever saw the people’s absolute faith in the cargo’s arrival. The evidence for this was fairly plain — the colonialists, who got all the cargo, didn’t work (at least in a way that would be obvious to those whose labor on the plantations enriched the colonialists). In this perspective, work –> impoversihment, non-work –> cargo wealth.

Finally, though clearly there is a magical/ritual component to cargo cult movements, it bears noting that they were often coupled with revolutionary/anti-colonial military movements. This suggests either an awareness that the colonialists were appropriating cargo that rightfully belonged to the locals, and that once removed the cargo would be distributed to its rightful owners, or that at least some of the locals understood at least some of the terms of colonial domination and modernist nationalism. That is, these movements were not about returning to some pre-contact state but were about seizing control of the apparatus of the modern colonial state — creating a “cargo nation” without the colonial domination.

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What naivete. We’re all cargo cultists.

Yeesh.

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This paragraph is weak. The fact that colonial relationships have been forcefully imposed does not negate the possibility that the local people may become agents of their own domination in the way in which they react to the arrival of colonial powers.

The presence of the stick does not negate the existance of the carrot.

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Were the cargo cultists not interested at all in “cargo” for its usefulness to them? (i.e. a steel axe would be useful to almost anyone.)

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Yali wasn’t merely asking why the Europeans had so much stuff, per se. It mattered little that the stuff being talked about was cargo, it could have been anything. There was no intrinsic value to the PNGuineans of the cargo. It was important to them because it was important to the Europeans. The unequal possession of cargo represented an unequal attitude of respect between Europeans and PNGuineans.

Is this a fair restatement?

I think it still doesnt detract from the main theme of GG&S that much, or the answers he comes up with. It just means Diamond didn’t really answer Yali’s question. Or maybe he did to some extent.

Diamond sees cargo as something with intrinsic value, and Im sure the colonizers did as well. The PNGuineans had little “cargo”, and to the Europeans little to respect.

Perhaps Diamond was being inadvertantly ethnocentric in his own right, which lead him to answer not Yali’s question, but a question that Yali’s question triggered in his own mind.

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