not merely individuals. They gather into themselves all manner of collective
concerns, mythological themes, responses to class relations and historical
exploitation. As individuals they make sense only as bricoleurs of the
collective, otherwise they would not have followers. There is, further, a
comparative contrast between Highlands and northern coastal cases, which
can be explained in terms of different colonial histories and different
economic circumstances. A feature of the discussion on coastal cases (as
we have seen) was that cult movements tended to reappear after fading
away, in other words they acquired a chronic or repetitive character. This
did not happen in Hagen. Why? First, coastal areas were exposed to outside
influence much earlier. While forms of Christianity came earlier, cash
cropping did not come until later and was preceded by long-term labor
migration to expatriate owned plantations where inequality was obvious
and pervasive. The Highlands were exposed to colonial change much later
and not long after this were introduced to self-governing local councils and
cash cropping with coffee, including the demise of expatriate ownership of
plantations.
The transitional period of the late 1960s and the 1970s when the wind
work phenomenon came up was a time of stress when the people realized
the difficulties of gaining significant wealth through growing coffee and
became aware of the power of transactional forces as well as of the
significance of banks and the processes of manufacturing money. These
circumstances provided a unique context for the money cult to arise. As an
experiment, it had a kind of pragmatic risk factor built in, because the
boxes were to be opened and inspected; and, as with any investment
scheme that carries risks, there was a danger of it failing, which it promptly
did. Such a clear cutoff made it much more unlikely that anyone would try
that experiment again. The cultists could have claimed that next time they
would get the rituals right, but the investors would have needed heavy
persuasion to put money and pigs in again, especially because there was
in fact no‘logic of the situation’based in traditional practice that would
have encouraged them. The ethos of the movement was rather expressed
by one participant as an ideology of hope:kol rop etep mep pamona
pamona kopa etimba(“we can pretend and pretend about it and then it
will come true”).
So much, then, for the immediate discussion of the cargo cult problem.
In his attack on structural-functionalist anthropology Jarvie added another
element. The revolution, he said, had produced a paradigm for writing
specific ethnographies of local systems, but the works in these forms had
18 BREAKING THE FRAMES