Cargo Cult as Theater - by Dorothy K Billings (Paperback)

About the Book

Dorothy K. Billings' unique ethnography is based on thirty-five years of anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Cargo Cult as Theater offers anthropologists, and anyone interested in the Johnson cult, careful insight into this unlikely cultural phenomenon.

Book Synopsis

Dorothy K. Billings' unique ethnography is based on thirty-five years of anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Cargo Cult as Theater offers anthropologists, and anyone interested in the Johnson cult, careful insight into this unlikely cultural phenomenon.

Review Quotes

. . . a solid and thoughtful study.

A book that is not afraid to be old fashioned by going back and reworking the grid and group axes of Mary Douglas and radical Marxist analyses of culture, colonialism, hegemony and aesthetics. . . . Billings is onto something. . . . This is a complex book that, in the end, I enjoyed and learnt a great deal from.

Anthropologists have long been intrigued by 'cargo cults, ' Melanesian religious revitalization movements that sometimes hold that Western goods are produced by supernatural forces. In a movement often called the 'Johnson cult, ' half of the Lavongai people of New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea voted in 1964 for U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to represent them in their newly formed parliament. The present volume analyzes this movement as political performance. . . . The result is a splendid monograph with stimulating analysis.

Overviews of Melanesian cargo cults have commonly featured the Johnson cult, but this is the first comprehensive description of the movement. . . . Alongside the trials and tribulations of anthropological fieldwork, this blow-by-blow chronicle offers insight into colonial culture and the often eccentric administrative and mission personalities who inhabited the Papua New Guinea hinterlands in the final decade of Australian rule.

This is a concise and highly readable description of the origins and development of the so-called Johnson Cult based on nearly forty years of field research in New Hanover and New Ireland, Papua New Guinea....the book stands as a work of authority on the Johnson Cult and should be read by anyone who is interested in political and religious movements in the Pacific, or in the history and ethnography of Papua New Guinea.

About the Author

Dorothy K. Billings is Professor of Anthropology at Wichita State University.