What price, then, in all this, both of structural-functional analysis,
Jarvie’s charges against it, and of his alternative of methodological indivi-
dualism? Structural-functional models assumed that systems maintained
themselves in states of relative stability. However, by the same token, if
changes were to occur in one part of the system, changes would auto-
matically be expected in other parts. This is exactly what stimulated the
wind work practices, which responded to multiple changes that had hap-
pened and sought to deal with these by rituals that aimed to speed up a
rectification of inequalities of wealth that the cultists had observed and
experienced. So these cults do not demonstrate that structural-functional
models are powerless to explain change. However, Jarvie’s own concept of
‘the logic of the situation’glosses over, in its supposition of rationality, the
complex effects of cultural imagination which we have seen crucially at
play in wind work. Wind work was a kind of cultural bricolage, and as
much based in collective fervor and what Pierre Bourdieu would have
called‘misrecognition’as on any individual rationality. The collective
situation of the Yelipi group was the effective seed bed for the emergence
of wind work. So, to understand it, we need a complex, multi-layered
method of setting out a historical analysis, founded neither on a strict
structural-functional model nor on a sole reliance of the analysis on
methodological individualism. Recognition of this point entails that we
also realize the dangers of total system models and the need to pay
attention to agency and imagination of individuals and groups in compli-
cated historical processes.
Such a realization does not entail that we abandon all attempts at the
applications of general ideas or theory to ethnographic materials. It does
mean that theory should be kept in its place and not allowed to smother all
alternative viewpoints on the data. For example, methodological indivi-
dualism can be useful in so far as it draws our attention to the importance
of individuals in social processes, but not in so far as it would incline the
analyst to overprivilege individuals as autonomous actors vis-à-vis wider
social processes of interaction. A useful guard against excesses of this kind
can be set up by maintaining a comparative perspective, preferably among
cases that show sufficient resemblances to be easily compared and con-
trasted in terms of their patterns.
The‘cargo cult’literature reviewed above illustrates these points. In his
discussion, Jarvie focused on the significance of prophets as leadingfigures.
This could well apply to coastal cases that he examined. We have seen that it
applies less well to the Hagen red box cult movement. Also, prophets are
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