including the rationality of cargo cult actions. His approach is also based on
methodological individualism, that is, the idea that human behavior must
be explained in terms of human decisions, and he focuses on the importance
of leaders (“prophets,”p. 118) whose actions fall“within the magico-
religious framework of the culture”(p. 114). The apocalyptic character of
many of these cults he attributes to the case of a“closed society”(p. 115)
undergoing change (an idea he derives from Popper). It turns out that this
Popperian idea of the closed society is important for Jarvie, since he suggests
that people in such a closed society saw the individualistic character of the
‘white man’and wished to emulate it (p. 118).
This approach is very shaky, and is not necessary to the starting point of
structural logic that Jarvie invokes. We do not know that the Pacific Island
societies in which cargo cultsflourished were closed. There is evidence
that via trade, migration, intermarriage, and the diffusion of custom some
of them, at least, were quite open in many ways. If we abandon the idea of
the closed society but stick to situational logic, we have still to admit that
such logic is inflected by magico-ritual ideas, and by the incursion of new
ideas inflected along these lines (and accompanied by rituals, again, we
must note). Jarvie follows a somewhat intellectualist and rationalist bent in
pursuing the details of explanations along his own lines.
What is missing from his account is an appreciation of embodied
collective action and how it works. Taking as an example a movement
thatflourished briefly in the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea for
a while after Jarvie’s book was written, theRed Box Money Cult(Strathern
1979 – 1980 ; see also Stewart and Strathern2000a), the aims were to
transform pieces of metal stored in the red wooden boxes, used by labor
migrants to bring home wealth goods to their kinsfolk and so gain power
and prestige, into money.
The rituals employed to stimulate this effect were directed to the
ancestors, renamed as wind-people because they could now travel on
winds down to centers of power such as the national capital Port
Moresby far away on the southern coast of Papua. Invocations, sacrifices,
ritual songs and dances were enacted as the performative means of ensur-
ing this transformation. Rooted in older notions and in the general
significance of ritual action to obtain benefits from spirit forces, this
transformative ritual was nevertheless new, without clear precedent, a
product of imagination and ritual experimentation. When it failed,
because the boxes when opened did not contain money, the leaders
were discredited and the movement atrophied. In the local area studied,
1 FRAMING HISTORY 7