Jarvie took this crustacean-like, shell-hardened interpretation of the work
of these two‘founders’(who, tellingly, disagreed with each other on many
matters) as his starting gate, and immediately announced (Jarvie 1964 ,p.xvii)
that structural-functionalism as a theory fails because it deduces causes (func-
tions) by means of observed events; and also, perhaps more securely, because it
cannot handle social change. He went on to examine a well-known and
subsequently well-studied phenomenon of change found in PacificIsland
societies and categorizedintheliteratureas‘cargo cults’(p.xvii).Insteadof
functions Jarvie offered‘the logic of the situation’and‘unintended conse-
quences of actions’as the means of explaining events and processes.
Jarvie, however, was not content with this deconstructive/reconstructive
exercise. He also had a narrative- drama, based, tongue in cheek, on the
Freudian theme of father-killing. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were type-
cast as sons wishing to kill their father, Frazer, by means of trumpeting the
method offieldwork as opposed to armchair observations, and adding an
ethical sub-text about the importance of treating those studied as human
beings deserving of respect. Another sub-text might be like the putative
‘psychic unity of mankind’which was in fact an idea with much earlier roots
(cf. the quote from the Latin poet Terence:homo sum, humani nihil a me
alienum puto,“I am human, I do not think of anything that is human as alien
to me”).
Another starting point of Jarvie’s enquiry anticipates post-modern
concerns: he argues that“all description involves theory because all factual
statements have theoretical content”(p. 55); that is, they are constructed
from a particular problem angle. All this can be accepted, and also kept in
mind as a background to Jarvie’s examination of the cargo cult literature as
it stood in 1964.
He goes on to give an action and actor oriented version of what cargo
cults are all about. They arise out of colonial inequality, particularly in
terms of wealth and access to goods, and they are magico-religious efforts
to correct or reverse this inequality or disparity by the use of religious
doctrines and by following leaders who say they can effect the required
changes. As a side-note here we should comment that the means
employed for these corrections are all ritual in character (see Stewart and
Strathern 2014 ). From this perspective, a question we can ask is why these
attempts at redressing inequality should have taken a ritualized form, and
the answers we give will depend on what we mean by ritual here.
This, however, is not Jarvie’s focus. He wants answers in terms of
situational logic which itself implies a vision of the rationality of action,
6 BREAKING THE FRAMES