Cargo Cults and Discursive Madness

Abstract

ABSTRACTUnderstood as mimetic portrayals of the image of unlimited good projected by European colonial culture, Melanesian ‘cargo cults’ are therefore viewed as ‘irrational’ within indigenous understandings. Consequently, Western anthropological discourse has sought to functionally normalize and nativize ‘cargo cult’ behaviors at the expense of denying their non‐rational character. The result has been a lexical and semantic uncertainty and explanatory instability in ‘cargo cult’ discourse that can be analyzed as a type of discursive ‘madness.’ A strategy of reading the ‘madness’ of ‘cargo cult’ discourse is outlined and applied to key anthropological texts, in particular Peter Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound.