Cultures
of Secrecy
Reinventing
Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults
Andrew
Lattas
New
Directions in Anthropological Writing
"Pushes
anthropology into the edgy places it needs to go to reexamine
its constructions of race, bodies, belief and power."—Steven Feld,
New York University
After driving the Japanese out of Papua New Guinea during World
War II, the U.S. military left their gear—and the makings
of a cargo cult—to the native Kaliai. Cultures of Secrecy offers a close look at how, for fifty years, the bush Kaliai
in Melanesia have worked these tailings of the western world
into their indigenous culture. Andrew Lattas shows how cargo
cults in general bring together past, present, and future in
their curious blending of traditional myths, imported folklore,
borrowed state practices and ideologies, and reworked Christian
stories. The result is a richly interdisciplinary work that uses
ethnography to explore questions of racial experience, gender
relations, space, time, death, and the politics of human relations.
"A wonderful book: an original and
compelling argument, a wealth of empirical detail analysed with
great political sensitivity, and a break-through in understanding
what cargo means to those people whom anthropologists have used
cargo to define."
—Michael Jackson, Victoria University–Wellington
Andrew Lattas is
fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University
in New South Wales, Australia. He has been editor of two special
editions of the journal
Oceania.
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June 1998
406 pp. 6 x 9 20 b/w photos
The 1998 cloth edition,
ISBN 978-0-299-15800-4, is out of print.
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