Anthropology Colloquium Series Series Spring Semester 2007

Dreaming of Unity and Cargo in Melanesiaa. Lamont Lindstrom, Professor,Department of Anthropology, Tulsa University. The South Pacific "cargo cult" seems today an antiquated topic of anthropological interest, having mostly evaporated in a post-colonial, post-modern Pacific. Yet, the dogged persistence of the John Frum movement on Tanna, Vanuatu continues to challenge understandings of Pacific sociability and personhood. This Pacific social movement, led by four generations of prophets, is approaching its 70th year in business. This paper attempts to locate cargo culting within current appreciations of globalization that have partly superceded previous analytics of “modernity” and its effects. Drawing on M. Strathern’s model of the Melanesian dividual, the paper explores why global cargo flows still continue to promote and to disturb island attempts to cultivate persons and communities.

Lamont Lindstrom is a professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond (University of Hawaii Press, 1993), Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society (Smithsonian, 1990), co-author of Kava: The Pacific Drug (Yale University Press, 1992), and Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War (Smithsonian, 1990), and has also published on kava, chiefs and governance, and written a dictionary and grammar of Kwamera language (Tanna, Vanuatu).

Event Sponsor
Anthropology / Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa

More Information
Denise Wandasan, 956-7153, wandasan@hawaii.edu

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