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THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1995

Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of DesireFrom Melanesia and Beyond, byLamont Lindstrom. South Sea Books.Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,1993. ISBN 0-8248-1526-2,xiv + 246 pages, illustrations, notes,bibliography, index. Cloth, US$36.00;paper, US$14.95.

rior affair. The links and parallelssurely merit reflection.

But such are minor grievanceswith regard to a book that offers animmense wealth of information, arefreshingly intelligent, lively, andmeasured view of the postwar Frenchpresence in the islands. I commend itto anyone with an interest in thecontemporary Pacific.

ERIC WADDELLUniversite Laval

This is a brilliant study of how certainnonwestern places came to be under­stood by certain constructs that takeon a life of their own, and in so doing,show much more about the west thanabout the others to whom they weremeant to refer. In anthropology, forexample, it has been difficult to thinkof India except in terms of caste, Medi­terranean societies except in terms ofhonor, and Middle Eastern tribesexcept in terms of segmentary lineagesystems. The recent spate of studiesthat have treated such constructs dom­inating ethnographic areas of classicand continuing anthropological inter­est as representations rather than asrealities has opened these areas to newquestions and foci of attention, as wellas provided the bases for strong cul-

(304). Elsewhere, the discussion ofpopulation in Chapter 7 relies exclu­sively on English sources, therebyoverlooking the important work ofBaudchon and of Rallu.

On a more substantive level, Aldrichoccasionally glosses over his igno­rance of certain key personalities andcrucial events by referring to "twoMelanesians," "another Union Cale­donienne member," "another Euro­pean settler" and so on. Generallyinsignificant in the context of thewealth of detailed information pro­vided by the author, such lapsesbecome crucial in the context of hisdiscussion of the assassination ofJean-Marie Tjibaou and Yeiwene Yei­wene in May 1989. Here the reader isinformed that"A Melanesian shot thetwo leaders dead.... The assassin, ayoung FLNKS member, ... was arrestedand convicted of the murders" (255).The assassin was, of course, DjubellyWea, who was shot dead on the spotby Tjibaou's bodyguards and who, atforty-four years of age, was hardly ayoung man.

I have perhaps one more importantcomplaint. Aldrich draws surpris­ingly few parallels with the AmericanPacific, and yet they are numerous andpertinent. The United States, too, hasits "noncontiguous territories," itsstrategic interests in the Pacific. It, too,has sought more or less successfully inthe postwar years to draw its depen­dent territories closer to itself. Franceand the United States have conspicu­ously converging interests in thePacific. There was certainly somedegree of cooperation with respect tonuclear testing in Moruroa and, per­haps, complicity in the Rainbow War-

* * >,

BOOK REVIEWS 385

tural critiques of Euro-American dis­courses.

Here, the representation in questionis cargo cults, first appearing in a 1945issue of the colonial newsmagazinePacific Islands Monthly to labelMelanesian social movements, forwhich Lindstrom provides a genealogythat is at once the product of thoroughscholarship and critical writing full ofsatirical wit and delightful ironies-avery rare combination indeed. Lind­strom traces the intricate history andfeatures of local colonial discourses onMelanesia, involving the enterprises ofmissionaries, planters, anthropologists,and administrators, in which cargocults emerge repeatedly as the framefor discussing natives. Lindstrom'slengthy treatment of the John Frumstories in Vanuatu, where he hasworked, is the centerpiece of sustainedanalysis in this volume. He then movesbeyond these local tales to show thedissemination of the cargo cult con­struct, not only among contemporaryMelanesians themselves, who haveattempted to remake it as their own,but also among all sorts of westernwriters-journalists, policy analysts,and popular novelists-for whomcargo cults represent the essence of theexotic, as well as underdevelopment,validated by the science of anthropol­ogy. Most poignant and painful in thisaccount is the bind of contemporaryethnographers of Melanesia who try toescape from the legacy of a construct,now understood as overly simplisticand stereotypic, only to find this legacyreproduced as simple fact in editionafter edition of the most popular intro­ductory texts of their discipline.Anthropology continues to make this

construct part of the deep culturalcapital of its own culture quite in spiteof the intentions of its most sophisti­cated practitioners.

Appropriately, Lindstrom entitleshis last chapter, "Cargo Cults Every­where," and prepares the way for astriking and passionately articulatedconclusion: "The term now hasboomeranged back into the hand thatonce pitched it. We are the cargocultists. And we? We are the lonelynatives here in the jungle who havenever had the miracle" (182). We?Cargo cultists? In the last section ofthe last chapter, Lindstrom, inspiredby poststructuralist psychoanalysis,expounds a universal essence for thecargo cult phenomenon in unrequitedlove and unfulfilled desire:

Perhaps cargo cultists are just unre­quited lovers, and the cargo story is anallegory of love gone wrong. As a nativecargo cultist myself, I believe I now canpermit myself to reveal cargo's truesecret. There is a metadiscourse ofdesire itself within Western culture thatpowerfully informs how we think andfeel about our yearnings. This script,or master trope, structures both lovestories and cargo stories so that eachmay be read in terms of the other.The story of the cargo cult is justanother avatar of the prosaic Westernromance. (198)

Fascinating, but an odd way to endthe sort of analysis that preceded thisclimax-an ending, the form of whichis worth some extended discussionin concluding this review, because Ibelieve it suggests a more generalproblem in critical projects of this sort,which have been undeniably importantin recent years in renewing anthro-

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THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1995

pology. Now the genre in which Lind­strom has so skillfully been writingworks by exploring certain historicand ethnographic realities through thecontexts of the production of represen­tations, and not by attending to thereferents themselves of such represen­tations. Treating representations them­selves as social facts through theirmeticulous readings and tracings iswhat gives this genre its empiricalgroundings, its critical edge, and itsinterpretive complexity.

Yet, after such an exemplary perfor­mance in this genre, Lindstrom offers akind of essential truth about cargocults that is antithetical to the kind ofcritical truth he develops about thisphenomenon through his treatment ofit as a representation or construct. Hefinally commits himself to a deeper orfinal meaning of cargo cults that placeshim suddenly within the field of whathe had been studying as a critical gene­alogist of the construct: he becomes yetanother interpreter of the essentialmeaning of the construct, albeit onewho has radically displaced this mean­ing from the field of the exotic otheronto his own culture by the very meansof his critical genealogy.

What's more, precisely at the pointthat he becomes yet another interpreterof the essential meaning of cargo cultsLindstrom loses firm genealogical con­trol of the term. Until then, he traceshis field of critique by dealing onlywith those writers who make explicitand extended use of cargo cult storiesfor their own diverse purposes. Butwhen he spins off on his own finalinterpretation, the psychoanalytic writ­ers who inspire him, such as JessicaBenjamin and Jacques Lacan, make no

mention at all of cargo cults. Lind­strom himself makes the associationbetween cargo cults and the analysis ofdesire, and thus he becomes just likethe other writers in the field of appro­priations of the construct.

Lindstrom's appropriation of thecargo cult for the sake of an argumentabout unfulfilled desire reminds me alot of Georges Bataille's appropriationof the potlatch to produce the idea ofthe accursed share, his own distinctivevision of excess and unfulfillable desire(and since genealogy plays such a largerole in the preceding parts of his book,we should note the strong influence ofBataille on the poststructuralists, espe­cially Lacan, who inspire Lindstrom'sultimate intepretation). In a sense,then, Lindstrom has revived, or hasimplicated himself in, a very old tradi­tion of appropriation of ethnographicmaterials for the sake of a line of Euro­pean philosophical cultural criticismthat he clearly and passionately findsappealing. The oddness and irony inhis appropriation lie in his precedingrigorous treatment of cargo cult as afield of representation rather than asa label for some essential reality, towhich he nonetheless subscribes inthe end.

While I don't believe that muchmore can be said here about this fasci­nating, quirky ending to Lindstrom'sstudy, it does suggest an interestingtension in the production of scholar­ship that treats representations as themost important social facts. A resolutecritique of established representationsis satisfying because it liberates a fieldof inquiry and creates new possibili­ties. But these older representations dohave staying power, even over their

BOOK REVIEWS

critics. One finds increasingly that crit­ical analysis of representations is notenough. Until this critical project isfully worked out as to the alternativelandscapes and practices of researchit suggests, the posing of final inter­pretations, visions really, as in thiswork, will prove irresistible in con­fronting questions, such as, What werecargo cults all about as to their refer­ents in social life, even after their co~­struction as a kind of colonialdiscourse has been explored?

GEORGE E MARCUS

Rice University

"

Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology,Travel and Government, by NicholasThomas. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994. ISBN 0-691­°3732-9, ix + 238 pages, illustrations,notes, index. Cloth, US$49.50; paper,us$16·95·

In his latest work, this prolific authormounts a detailed critique of colonialdiscourse studies. Because much of thistheory originated in South Asian his­toriography, readers of this journalmight wonder what the book has tooffer them. The answer suggested hereis that anyone caught up (like thereviewer) in "the oxymoronic contor­tion of 'an anthropology of colonial­ism'" (7) will be rewarded by the care­ful reading that Thomas's argumentdemands.

Thomas starts from the unexcep­tionable position that colonialism ishardly a monolithic phenomenon in itsexpression or effects, nor is it to becompletely understood solely in politi-

calor economic terms. But, he argues,even though there is an increasingbody of literature on the culturalaspects of colonialism, "a great deal ofwriting on 'colonial discourse' fails tograsp this field's dispersed and con­flicted character" (3). Therefore, thebook is intended to introduce thereader to "the complex range ofdebates concerning colonial represen­tation" (xi) and to suggest moreappropriate methods of analysis.

Chapter I begins examining thepolitics of colonial studies. Here one ofthe book's strengths quickly appears:Thomas never lets the reader forget thecomplexities of the situations and rep­resentations to which such studiesmust pay attention. Hence EdwardSaid's critique of "Orientalism" is itselffound to be overgeneralized, and inneed of analysis in terms of the specificcontext in which it was produced. Therepresentation of colonized peoplescan be shown to change over time, butin no simple, linear fashion noraccQrding to a single political agenda.Footnote 10 to this chapter (197-201)provides an excellent introductory bib­liography of relevant literature.

The problem of the second chapteris to show "how analysis can establishthat 'culture' and 'colonial dominance'are deeply mutually implicated with­out reducing one to the other" (41).While the contributions of suchwriters as Homi Bhabha, Abdul R Jan­Mohamed, and Gayatri ChakravortySpivak are recognized, Thomas faultsthem for their relative neglect of resis­tant forms of discourse created by thecolonized. Thus "(T)hough pre-colo­nial elements and syncretic forms arealmost invariably found to be signifi-