the leader was not an established‘big-man’, and his group was one that
had sunk in prestige in the local network of exchanges of wealth in pigs
and shells.
The cult was an attempt by the leader and his wife (who was a sister of
a powerful local politician and Member of the National House of
Assembly) to recoup the prestige ofthe group and establish themselves
as shamanistic styles of leaders in the contemporary world of change. The
important problem here is to explain why they chose ritual means to try
to realize their aims. One answer is simply that it was rooted in tradi-
tional ways. But this is insufficient because there was also a definite ritual
innovation at work. This in turn implies that tradition itself encapsulated
the results of earlier ritual experiments. That is an illuminating point
because it belies the concept of the closed unchanging, or‘primitive’
society that one might have expected Jarvie to challenge since he was
opposing structural-functional analyses that depend on the notion of the
unchanging society. In our conclusion, therefore, the solution to the
problem of explaining cargo cults thus lies both in understanding the
prevalence of ritual as a means of dealing with difficult situations and in
reckoning with the human propensity to creatively‘innovate’and, by
implication, to learn from experience.
Situational logic can indeed explain history as Jarvie claims (p. 223);
but it needs to be linked with a broad contextual understanding of what
that situation is as seen by the actors themselves and that brings us back to
culture and to interplays between structures, functions, and innovative
actions. In conclusion here, Jarvie’s intent was to break the frames of
structural-functionalism by offering an explanation of cargo cults that
depended solely on situational logic. However, it turns out that,first,
this putative logic must comprehend culture, and second that culture
must comprehend innovation, which ex definitione implies change.
Finally, the cults are all run on ritual, and therefore ritual theory is
crucial to understanding them. The frame is here broken by being replaced
by another problem-frame, the problem of ritual actions: to which, as we
have pointed out, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown made notable contri-
butions, structural-functionalist or not. Towards the end of his broader
discussion on‘the aims and methods of social anthropology’, Jarvie has a
footnote in which he characterizes Malinowski’s functionalist paradigm as
the core of an academic cargo cult that promised to deliver a science of
society. Jarvie admits that this particular cult actually delivered“an abun-
dance of goods”but, he adds, not a full-scale Science of Society (p. 184).
8 BREAKING THE FRAMES