Cargo Cults, Cultural Creativity, and Autonomous Imagination

Cargo Cults, Cultural Creativity, and Autonomous Imagination Author(s): Michele Stephen Source: Ethos, Vol. 25, No.
3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 333-358 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640669 . Accessed: 06/06/2013 20:40
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Cultural Cargo Cults, Creativity, Autonomous Imagination and

MICHELE STEPHEN
ABSTRACTThis article draws attention to the ways in which Western psychiatric models of psychopathology applied to the so-called "Cargo cults" of Melanesia have served to endorse colonial and cultural discourses of power. It argues that while the ethnographic evidence indicates the positive and creative potential of such movements, Western assumptions concerning irrationality and the unconscious mind obscure this potential. The concept of autonomous imagination is proposed as a way of understanding these movements without pathologizing them. n February 1941 an outbreak of the "Vailala Madness" occurred in the Mekeo region of the Kairuku subdistrict of the then-Australian colonial possession of Papua. A teenage girl in the East Mekeo village of Inawaia was instructed by God in dreams that her people had been deceived by the white colonial officials and missionaries, and that the dead ancestors were about to return to drive them out. God also ordered her to preach his message that villagers must bring out of hiding the relics of the dead and other highly dangerous objects used in sorcery and destructive magic and place them on open altars in villages to negate their lethal power. Once these dream revelations were made public, many people began to follow Philo's lead in setting up altars, exposing on them the objects used in destructive rituals (in normal circumstances such were believed to cause sickness and death merely by indirect contact). Cultists refused to go to their garden to work and spent their time in cult rituals, especially dancing continually around the open altars. In retrospective accounts, villagers who had witnessed but not participated in these events explained that Philo had been accidentally affected by coming into contact with some ritual paraphernalia, and that this had caused her "madness," whereupon she had publicly exposed others to these items, thus causing MICHELE STEPHEN issenior ofSociology, and La Trobe lecturer, Politics, Department Anthropology, University, ? 1997, Ethos American Association. 25(3):333-358. Copyright Anthropological
Australia. Bundoora, Victoria,
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them to be driven mad. In this state, several powerful ritual experts voluntarily exposed publicly on the altars the most dangerous ritual objects in their possession, thus affecting the whole community. (Various accounts of the cult are given by Belshaw 1951; Fergie 1977; Stephen 1974, 1977; Worsley 1970:121-3.) As more and more people began to join the cultists, violence eventubroke out against the Catholic Mission Station at Inawaia, with an asally sault on the European parish priest followed by an all-night siege of the mission. This was brought to an end by the arrival early the next morning of the Resident Magistrate,W. H. H. Thompson, with his police (Thompson 1941a). Rumors of impending miracles persisted, however, and Thompson decided to jail the girl prophetess for a few months, his action effectively putting an end to the cult. Before Philo was jailed, an epidemic of influenza swept the region, severely affecting the three villages-Inawaia, Eboa, and Jesubaibua-that had been the center of activities (Thompson 194 Ib). In their retrospective accounts, villagers who had not participated in the cults interpreted these deaths as the inevitable consequence of exposing the community to the fatal influence of the sorcery objects. They also commented that after the event the cultists could not recall what they had done during their madness.1 European eye-witnesses, including the parish priest who was struck over the head but survived the ordeal, observed that the former cultists spoke later as if they had no memory of their actions.2 Within a few months the movement died down (Kairuku Patrol Reports 1941) and the former cultists resumed their lives just as if their defiance of the established secular and sacred world order had never taken place. When I first wrote of this cult (Stephen 1974, 1977), I was struck by the impression that some special kind of process was operating that, despite European observers' denunciations of "madness" and "hysteria," had some very positive aspects for the individual participants and the group. Cultists were acting in an unusual way, one that certainly seemed to overthrow all usual order, reason, and sense. Nor was the perception of "madness" in European eyes only because the villagers who described the events of the cult to me considered that the participants were mad, driven crazy by their deliberate exposure to the powerful sorcery objects. Yet it was apparent that the "madness" had enabled the cultists to achieve two remarkable things: first, to overcome the intense fear (dread is not too strong a word) inspired by the traditional repositories of sacred power (this seems even more remarkable to me now that I have been more closely associated with this belief system in action [Stephen 1987, 1995]); and second, when the cult proved not viable, those who had apparently totally rejected their former beliefs in the traditional cosmological order were able to reinvest it with total conviction. Such a capacity for abrupt
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and total psychological change seemed to me not only remarkable but very positive in facilitating individual and group adaptation to environmental, social, and cultural change. On these grounds I put forward the argument that far from being a pathological symptom of a disturbed or damaged culture, the so-called hysteria experienced by cultists might be better understood as a kind of ecstatic experience that frees participants from the sanctions upholding the old order, while providing a psychological safeguard if the movement misfires. In other words, an unusual, by Western standards, psychological process was in evidence, but one that was by no means entirely negative or maladaptive. In subsequent work (Stephen 1979, 1981) I began to examine more closely the significance of dreams, trance, spirit mediumship, and spirit possession in Melanesian belief systems. Again, my conclusions pointed to the positive and creative use of these special states as the source of cultural innovations and as the means of investing established beliefs with new vitality and enthusiasm. At this point I was content merely to demonstrate the cultural uses and processes at work, the way in which such states were consciously worked over to create culturally valued knowledge: what Foucault (1980) refers to as "effected truths." Recent reassessments (Clark 1992; Hermann 1992; Kempf 1992; Lattas 1992a, 1992b; Lindstrom 1990a, 1990b) of the cargo cult literature have focused on exposing the Western cultural assumptions that have distorted our observations and understanding of the ethnographic phenomena-or perhaps have created a phenomenon where no such one exists. Lattas (1992a) has revealed how deeply anthropological discourse has been colored by metaphors of madness, pathology, and irrationality, tropes that have sustained the interests of colonial regimes and provided the rhetorical justification for intervention and suppression on humanitarian grounds. Identifying cargo cults with madness and the unhealthy products of the irrational unconscious mind has no doubt well served the prevailing discourses of colonial and Western power. Cargo cults are among the most exotic form of exotic beliefs-the most other, the most orientalized (Said 1978), and the furthest removed from "us." The apparently bizarre or gruesome in exotic belief systems, such sorcery and witchcraft, cannibalism and human sacrifice, can be approached in cultural terms and explicated as the outcome of complexly interwoven social, political, and environmental pressures interacting over time. But Melanesian cargo cults, and the many strange cults resembling them found worldwide, seem bafflingly inexplicable in their iconoclastic rejection of tradition and time-honored beliefs and in their wild invocations of ersatz deities and rituals. Perhaps in no other situation does the purely invented nature of religious belief and ritual stand out with such naked and disturbing force to offend the rational gaze of the Western observer.
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As Lindstrom (1990b) very aptly points out, the anthropological and scholarly debate concerning cargo cults has served to create a discourse that is not so much about controlling the colonized as controlling us, that is to say, about shaping and determining Western values. Thus Melanesian cargo cults are frequently linked to Western fringe cults, with the result that the "madness" evident in these Western movements is demonstrated rhetorically, and deplored, by being likened to "primitive" Melanesian practice. By equating aspects of Western culture with tribal culture, the analyst demonstrates his or her perspicacity in reading deeper than surface appearances to identify a common thread of the primitive and pathological in Western belief. There can be no doubt of the direction of this identification: it serves to exoticize and to disown as other what is seen in our own culture to be peripheral or to challenge the existing value system.3 Some scholars have attempted to move in the other direction, identifying "cargo cults" as new religious movements (e.g., Gesh 1990; Strelan 1978). The colonial government of course did not want to recognize them in this light, for to do so would put the cults outside their area of control on moral grounds-hence the pointedness of Lattas's (1992a) arguments concerning the medical metaphors of madness and hysteria, which provided just the right categorization to allow intervention and control in the guise of protection and therapy. Although colonial powers have available to them other more direct measures to impose domination, they do require rhetoric to justify their actions. Much the same might be said of national governments; from the viewpoint of the status quo, cargo cults are always likely to be seen as an attack on established authority and are thus undesirable, if not pernicious. So pervasive is this discourse that Papua New Guineans themselves have come to resent, and reject, this construction of otherness in the very term cargo cult. Elfriede Hermann (1992) shows how the popular and colonial understandings of cargo cults have led the people of Sor village (home of the Madang prophet, Yali, who is the subject of Lawrence's now famous study) to deny that they ever participated in cargo cults. They divide Yali's career into two parts in order to assert that during the first stage he recommended work and development, and that only later, when he was a disappointed and broken man, did he engage in cult-like activities. Hermann's point that cargo cult has so many pejorative connotations that its use should be dropped in the anthropological literature is no doubt a valid one, yet the term has such wide currency that this seems unlikely. Recent studies by Clark (1992), Gesh (1990), Hermann (1992), Kempf (1992), Lattas (1992a, 1992b), Lindstrom (1990a, 1990b), and others persuasively show that cargo cults draw upon positive and creative imaginative processes involving people's efforts to take charge of their lives and futures, and that they should be understood as a means of shaping
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and reformulating self-identity and respect. As my previous publications clearly indicate (Stephen 1977, 1979, 1981), I agree with them. But I have found that anyone who pursues this line of enquiry inevitably comes up against a stumbling block well stated by Lanternari:
If it is true, then, that culture reflects the creative quality in man as a rational member of a given society, we must not forget that a considerable amount of this creative activity is deeply rooted in the irrational unconscious. [1973:234]
Colonialism did not create the metaphors of madness and pathology but rather merely drew upon existing ideas concerning the nature of rationality, irrationality, conscious and unconscious, ego and id, and civilized thought and primitive drive already present in Western culture. Even when we strip away the vested interests of a "colonial" anthropology, there still remains a deeply ingrained association of the unconscious-and all that stems from it-with pathological, primitive, and inferior aspects of the self. Our ethnographic evidence concerning cargo cults, and the recent understandings drawn from it that emphasize the positive and creative aspects of the movements, fit very uncomfortably with Western theories of the unconscious mind and its products in the form of dreams, visions, and possessed states. Either we can argue that such products are carefully and extensively reworked in consciousness and then submitted to extensive cultural modifications, so that in the end their lowly origins in the unconscious are completely transcended (Obeyesekere 1980), or we must come to terms with our own negative (or, alternatively, excessively positive)4 views of the unconscious mind. Undoubtedly, as Burridge (1960), Lanternari (1973), Obeyesekere (1980), and others have shown, the cult prophets' inspirations and revelations are extensively worked over and revised by the group. Yet in our efforts to rationalize and sanitize, I think we are in danger of losing an important insight into the special nature of the imaginative processes drawn upon by both the cult leaders and participants. I have elsewhere identified this special imaginative mode as "autonomous imagination" (Stephen 1989a, 1989b, 1995; Stephen and Herdt 1989). The concept takes my earlier arguments concerning cargo cults (Stephen 1977, 1979, 1981) a step further: dreams, trance, and possession not merely effected truths but also the source of a genuine creativity emerging from a distinctive mode of imaginary thought. Since the concept has been described at length in previous publications, I will summarize briefly. I propose that there exists a continuous stream-of-imagery thought taking place in the mind outside conscious awareness. At regular intervals, however, it spontaneously enters consciousness in the form of sleep dreams; and, under certain conditions, such as in dreams that are associated with high cortical arousal combined
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with low sensory input, it may result in waking visions and other hallucinations.5 Dreams and hallucinations are usually experienced as taking place independently of a person's conscious invention or will. But with special training, it becomes possible for one to deliberately access the continuous stream-of-imagery thought, bring it into consciousness, and even direct its unfolding as we find occurring in the controlled trances of shamanism and meditative practices, in Western hypnosis, Jungian "active imagination," and many other Western imagery-based psychotherapies.6 This special imaginative mode possesses certain important qualities that not only distinguish it from thought and imagination controlled by ego consciousness, but also suggest capacities beyond those normally available to consciousness. Autonomous imagination is characterized by (1) being more freely and richly inventive than ordinary thought, (2) emerging into conscious awareness in the form of vivid hallucinatory imagery that is experienced as an external reality, (3) possessing a more extensive access to memory, (4) exhibiting a special sensitivity to external cues and direction that enables communication to and from deeper levels of the mind while bypassing conscious awareness, and (5) possessing a capacity to influence somatic and intrapsychic processes usually beyond conscious control.7 Although this formulation of autonomous imagination partly overlaps with the Freudian concept of primary-process thinking, it also differs in important respects. Primary-process thinking is defined as regressive, maladaptive, and functioning to discharge unconscious drives through hallucinatory, usually disguised, wish-fulfillment (Freud 1969:25-26; Rycroft 1972). Subsequent modifications of the theory that propose that the primary process is not inherently maladaptive (e.g., Noy 1969, 1979) nevertheless retain an essentially negative emphasis. Autonomous imagination, in contrast, is identified as a stream of imagery thought that is part of the normal information-processing functions of the brain. It usually operates outside ego awareness and ego control yet does, in certain circumstances (associated with high cortical arousal and low sensory input), enter consciousness, where its images are experienced as an autonomous reality. Far from being an inferior or maladaptive mode of thought, it possesses characteristics that lend it a special flexibility and creativity and thus a highly positive potential. To illustrate the different conclusions to which psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and of primary-process thinking lead, compared with the perspective provided by autonomous imagination, I will focus discussion on the Mekeo cult of 1941 with which I began. It is not too bold, I think, to claim that the points to be outlined can be recognized as recurring features in many other cults described in the ethnographic literature, and not only in Melanesia. Indeed, I have selected these features precisely
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for their representativeness and because they appear to provide a common thread running through the literature on millenarian cults in general. They are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. the prophet's source of inspiration in dreams and altered states, the possession states experienced by the cult followers, the cult followers' amnesia concerning their actions, demonstrations of the prophet's powers in the form of healing, precognition, and other "miraculous" feats, the appeal to a new spiritual authority transcending the traditional and the colonial world order, the bold combination of indigenous and introduced symbolic elements to create a radically new vision of society, the overthrowing of indigenous power structures, and the prophet directed behind the scenes by secular leaders.
KEY OF THE ELEMENTS 1941MEKEO CULT

Each of the aspects of the Mekeo cult to be examined might be interpreted as evidence to support the Western colonial and anthropological views that hysteria and acute mental disturbance are clearly evidenced in the cultists' behavior-a view that is yet further underlined by psychoanalytic theory. On the other hand, the same features, from a different perspective, can be interpreted as the effects of a unique and creative imaginative process at work.
TheProphet's of Inspiration-Dreams Sources andAltered States

The 1941 Mekeo cult had its origins in the dreams of the girl prophetess, Philo. Revelations of a new social and spiritual order in the form of dreams, trance, or possession are, as I have argued (Stephen 1979), a dominant feature of such movements in Melanesia, and as many studies have demonstrated of similar movements to be found worldwide (Galanter 1989; La Barre 1972; Lanternari 1973; Lewis 1986; Wallace 1972). Diverse prophets seek inspiration not only in dreams but also from intoxicants and drugs, and in the case of some Western spiritualistic movements, automatic writing or mediumistic trance may reveal the new order.8 These avowed origins in dreams, drunkenness, or drugs, or spontaneously occurring altered states of consciousness, serve, of course, to confirm the observer's impression that the community has been taken over by some kind of temporary insanity, otherwise why would people take seriously such patently false and foolish sources of information while rejecting rational programs for economic and social improvement offered by the white authorities?
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The arguments put forward by Burridge (1960), Lawrence (1967), Lindstrom (1990a), Stephen (1977, 1979), and others that such sources of inspiration produce valid knowledge in terms of Melanesian epistemology helps us to understand why cultists are prepared to accept the revelations. Yet, although we can show that people are acting reasonably within the terms of their cultural belief system, the belief system itself still appears maladaptive. In short, Melanesians might believe that valid knowledge can be sought in dreams-we do not, or at least not the sort of knowledge that leads to positive social or cultural change. At this point some argue (e.g., Oram 1990 describing the Tommy Kabu movement) that dreams and similar states are appealed to as a means of legitimating in terms of traditional belief an innovation based in fact on rational, pragmatic considerations. This argument likewise assumes that nothing creative can in fact emerge from irrational states such as dreaming or waking visions. Psychoanalytic theory has been highly influential in demonstrating that dreams should be regarded as complex repositories of important information and thus has justified serious scientific interest and investigation of dreams. Nevertheless, it asserts that the kind of information held by dreams is by nature hidden from the dreamer and relates to his or her unconscious desires, and that persons who act upon their dreams are, at best, indulging the wishes of an inferior, infantile part of the self. Furthermore, without the insight provided by psychoanalytic interpretation and intervention, the "knowledge" contained in dreams is self-delusion. Although this is not to deny a satisfaction to be found in dreams, visions, or drug-induced states, the pleasure is derived from the regressed nature of primary-process thinking, wherein conscious reality testing is suspended and unconscious desires hold sway. From this vantage point the seductiveness of this mode of thought is easy to explain as stemming from its inherently inferior nature and its function as the servant of the id's thwarted desires. Thus the psychoanalytic position serves to channel and harden into scientifically established "fact" the commonsense Western conviction that dreams and the like are but fantasy.9 In developing the concept of autonomous imagination, I have attempted to bring together a number of streams in contemporary anthropological and psychological theory that argue for the creative potential in dream thought and other so-called alternate states of consciousness. Certainly this is an area that needs to be explored carefully, and "New Age" enthusiasm for the occult will hardly help to advance our understandings. In fact, in arguing for the creative potential of dreaming, one is as likely to find oneself struggling against a naive but currently burgeoning overevaluation in popular culture, as with the more entrenched but increasingly old-fashioned distrust of the irrational. Even so, there is a growing body of evidence from many sources with at least as firm, if not a firmer, basis in
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scientific method than psychoanalysis that supports my case (Clark and Wright 1988). The basic pattern of recurring dream mentation in REMsleep and the fact that animals dream, or at least mammals experience clearly identifiable REMsleep, prove virtually beyond a doubt that dreaming is not determined by psychological stress but is a basic physiological process of the mammalian brain (Cartwright 1978; Cohen 1979; Jones 1976). Some neurophysiological studies have sought to deny cognitive content to dreams, or rather have interpreted dreaming as a means of clearing the "system" of unwanted data, for example the activation/synthesis theory (Hobson 1988), which strongly opposes hermeneutical attempts to understand dreams as semantics (e.g., Ricoeur 1970). Overall, however, cognitive theories prevail, especially those linking dreaming to memory and the formation of self-schema. Evidence from experimental studies of animals and humans indicates that dreaming plays an important role in memory processing and storage. Emotionally loaded or stressed learning is clearly associated with increased dream time (Greenberg 1981:126; Hartmann 1981:118; Winson 1990). On this basis, sleep researcher Cartwright (1981:245) proposes that dreaming and waking represent different means of dealing with the affectual problems encountered in daily life.10 Along similar lines, Greenberg argues:
In summary, dreams consist of images that include memories of experiences connected with important feelings of the dreamer. These images are both a way of representing the feelings and experiences with which they are connected, and a way of organizing them so that they can be meaningfully integrated by the dreamer. This integrative process is usually more or less successful but when it is not, the dream may be only a representation of the problem without any integration or solution. The classical psychoanalytic view of dreams is not really contradicted by this approach except for the idea of drive discharge. [1981:131]
Eagle draws attention to the difference in memory processing of semantic versus episodic memory (i.e., that which relates to self schemas). In some memory disorders patients cannot recall information relating to self,
As has been long recognised .. the above kinds of phenomena provide strong evidence that the processing, storage and utilization of information and the autobiographical linking of such information to one's self organisation are separable-clearly physiologically based-mental functions. [1988:94-96]
From this perspective, dreaming might be understood as contributing significantly to the continuously occurring construction of episodic memory. Numerous other studies in different fields have drawn attention to the role of dreams in relation to memory, to problem solving, as a source of creativity, and as linked to artistic and literary inspiration (Cartwright 1978; Cohen 1979; French and Fromm 1964; Greenberg 1970; Hadfield
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1974:113-116; Hartmann 1970; Jones 1976:164-171; Krippner and Hughes 1970; Pearlman 1970; Rothenberg 1979:35-40; Ullman and Zimmerman 1979) Cross-cultural studies of dreaming have further served to underline this more positive approach (Ewing 1990; Herdt 1987; Herdt and Stephen 1989; Kilbourne 1981; Kracke 1981, 1987; O'Nell 1976; Price-Williams 1987; Stephen 1995; Tedlock 1987a, 1987b). None of these theories are conclusive, yet all point to dreaming as a potentially creative, distinctively different thought process, related to memory, learning, and other cognitive tasks, and especially linked to emotion and cognition (Stephen 1989b). It is this mode of thought that I identify with autonomous imagination. This richer and freer form of imagery thinking that operates in dreams and other related states is, I argue, widely drawn upon in all human cultures by artists, poets, writers, mystics, and prophets. The dreams of particular individuals provide a creative synthesis of inner desires and outer dilemmas that resonates with the desires and aspirations of the group for a new vision of themselves and their place within a changing world order. Told and retold, shaped and embellished in the group's consciousness, the prophet's dream vision provides the basis for a new symbolic blueprint of a revisioned (Hillman 1975) cultural "reality"-or, to use an alternate metaphor, the basis for a new kind of symbolic discourse concerning self and other (Stephen 1989a; Lattas 1992a, 1992b). We have now moved a considerable distance from the view that the cult prophet achieves only delusional refuge in maladaptive and regressive satisfaction of id drives.
Statesof Consciousness TheAltered Participants byCult Experienced

The mass trance or possession states experienced by cult followers have always attracted the attention of European observers and analysts and are presented by them as clear indication of temporary insanity or pathology of some kind. In their "madness" or "hysteria," the cultists are evidently not responsible for their actions, refuse even, as did the Mekeo cultists in 1941, to provide for their basic subsistence needs. Philo's followers killed their domestic animals and neglected their gardens in the expectation of imminent "cargo." Wildly cavorting around their bizarre altars, they dared even to defy the dread powers of the traditional controllers of ancestral and spirit forces. These are people who, in the view of the reporting colonial government officials, have taken leave of their senses and must be protected against themselves (Thompson 1941a, 1941b). The disorientation even with regard to traditional cultural sanctions and beliefs, and the florid acting out of defiance against both white and traditional authority, indicates from a psychoanalytic view the "lack of reality testing" characteristic of primary-process thinking that predominates
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in dream thought and neurotic symptoms. These are deluded people whose ego controls have broken down and whose unconscious fantasies have taken over. The forbidden desires of the dream, the neurosis of the normal (Freud 1971:83), are now being acted out in waking reality and have become a full-blown neurosis, if not psychosis. Psychoanalytic theory thus firmly underlines the "common sense" of the European colonial authorities' perception of madness. There are, however, other ways to interpret the mental states experienced by cult participants. In my first article describing the 1941 cult (Stephen 1977), I suggested that trance and possession might be experienced by the participants as highly positive events, even as apotheoses. I argued this primarily on comparative grounds since the Melanesian literature did not then provide much information to inform my argument. Subsequent studies by Lattas (1992b), Lindstrom (1990a, 1990b), Clark (1990), and others have now provided rich data on this score. From the perspective of autonomous imagination, possession and trance can be understood as culturally shaped means of accessing a distinctive imaginative mode and bringing it into consciousness. I have compared this access to Western techniques of hypnosis (Stephen 1989a, 1989b, 1995), drawing attention to recent research that establishes that hypnosis is not a regressed state, but one in which a distinctive kind of imagination operates-one in which special tasks ordinarily impossible in consciousness can be achieved, such as anaesthesia of severe pain, alteration of memory, and removal of phobias. The Mekeo cultists' obliviousness to fear and danger in dealing with highly potent ancestral relics and the repositories of lethal sorcery powers draws upon some similar capacity. Suryani and Jensen's (1993) recent reassessment of Balinese trance and possession identifies dissociation as the basic process (presumably a neurophysiological process, since it can be observed in animals) underlying hypnosis in the West, and trance and possession in nonwestern cultures. It involves, in their view, an involuntary, or controlled,
split or switch out of a conscious state into a state of thinking, behaviour, and feeling that is quite different, more comfortable or enjoyable, and/or protective. The switch into dissociation wards off conflict, anxiety, or terror and/or provides an outlet for behavior or emotions that are not acceptable to or permitted in the usual state of consciousness. [1993:179]
This description of Balinese possession states seems to fit precisely the behavior of the Mekeo cultists. Suryani and Jensen (1993) have also identified clinical criteria by which to distinguish pathological from normal states of dissociation and trance/possession among Balinese. They especially emphasize the role of cultural expectations and belief in shaping and channelling the experience of possession. For Balinese in
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general, possession is a normal, valued, and positive experience, although it can take negative forms in disturbed people.11
Amnesia TheCultists' aftertheEvent

The Mekeo cultists' inability to remember their actions, particularly their violence against the missionaries and their defiance of the traditional sanctions of sorcery, was the feature of the cult that first drew my attention. From the viewpoint of the colonial authorities, of course, this "amnesia" was yet further indication of the hysteria and mental disorientation suffered by the cultists-a view that psychoanalytic theories of repression of desires and memories unacceptable to consciousness clearly underlines. Studies of hypnosis and altered states of consciousness offer a theory of "state dependent memory" wherein a different access to memory operates in different states of consciousness (Hilgard 1977; Sheehan and McConkey 1982). The amnesia that follows trance, possession, or hypnosis (and dreams) is thus not a result of repression, a disowning of formerly conscious desires or thoughts. Rather, the trance or hypnotic state represents a thought process operating independently of consciousness and that normally does not connect with it. On the grounds that there is nothing infantile about the mode of thought and experience involved, Suryani and Jensen reject the idea of "regression in the service of the ego (1993:206)," while demonstrating that amnesia is common following positive experiences of trance for Balinese. Along the lines I have argued for the Mekeo cultists of 1941, Kempf (1992) and Clark (1992) have drawn attention to the positive effects of Melanesian cultists' "amnesia" as the consequence of an aborted or failed movement. Clark draws the conclusion that in Pangia, "Transcending the body's limitations through trance was a way of empowering the body, a way of transcending its colonial confinement" (1992:24).
of the Prophet's Demonstrations Miraculous Power,Especially Healing

Remarkable demonstrations of the prophet's powers, including healing, precognition, the finding of lost objects, speaking in tongues, and like wonders are the usual concomitants of cargo and related cults. My evidence for the Mekeo cult is largely lacking on this score, although it is widely known that the girl prophetess, Philo, was in later, adult life a respected healer (feuapi). Nevertheless the persistent and pervasive association of cults with healing and other "miracles" spares me embarrassment on this point. Reports of such phenomena are easily explicable in psychoanalytic terms. They, in common with the other features of the cults so far discussed,
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are delusions: the florid productions of unconscious dependency wishes and infantile projections of parental power. They are in keeping with the regressed, infantile mode of thought operating in trance and serve the same functions of drive discharge. Such interpretations, of course, serve to confirm colonial unease in the face of evidently impossible claims for the prophet's wondrous powers. Yet perhaps the reported "miracles" are not really so miraculous. Such phenomena might be interpreted as demonstrations of the prophet's talent to access the special capacities of autonomous imagination previously described. The effects of suggestion in hypnosis and other forms of psychotherapy powerfully demonstrate the capacity of what I refer to as autonomous imagination to reach to levels of mind and body outside conscious control. Pain reduction, total anaesthesia, and the healing of psychological and somatic disorders are well established as the effects of hypnotic therapy and other imagery-based therapeutic techniques in Western culture (Bowers 1976:21-41, 140-152; Hilgard 1977:44-46, 58-59; Orne 1965; Sarbin and Slagle 1979; Singer and Pope 1978). Similar effects are reported for many other cultures in the ethnographic literature (Bourguignon 1973, 1976; Eliade 1972; Kiev 1964; Moerman 1979; Noll 1985; Obeyesekere 1981; Peters and Price-Williams 1980, 1983; Stephen 1979). For example, psychiatrists Suryani and Jensen (1993:112, 212) point to extraordinary feats produced during dissociation by Balinese healers and priests (who also claim to intuit the problems of clients and find lost objects). The capacity of autonomous imagination to influence mental and bodily processes outside conscious control, and thus bring about healing, is clearly evident, even if we cannot explain how it achieves its effects.
TheAppeal to a New Spiritual Authority

The Inawaia cult of 1941 envisioned a new world order sanctioned by a new spiritual authority more compelling than that of the traditional cultural order and beyond that of the intrusive colonial powers. Little wonder the colonial authorities and the missionaries alike were nonplussed by what they encountered. This headlong plunge into apparent chaos could be countenanced by neither tradition nor progress. The language of neurosis and psychosis, delusions of grandeur, infantile gullibility, would hardly be too strong to characterize the extent to which people had taken leave of their senses. On the other hand, we might perceive from the participants' viewpoint the experiential reality of access to a more powerful mode of knowing lying beyond inner and outer realities-a "sacred other" revealing unknown vistas of desire (Stephen 1989a). Is this delusion, or the capacity to imagine a more meaningful future?
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If cargo cults rarely achieve material benefits, they do create selfrespect, identity, and meaning in a hard world that offers little hope. Recent culturally sensitive studies such as those of Clark (1992), Gesh (1990), Kempf (1992), Lattas (1992a) and others have explored this original insight of Lawrence's (1967) to powerful effect. Writing of the Peli cult, a movement that had attracted much unfavorable comment from government authorities and Western observers, Gesh (1990) does not attempt to play down its apparently bizarre features and transformations over time but carefully uncovers deeper aspirations and significance. He shows that despite little material gains, and despite repeated failures of prophecies, leaders, and followers continue to look to dreams and inner revelations of truth. In his view the reason is that the movement has been highly successful in bringing "a new sense of unity amongst the peoples. Peli was greatly satisfying in providing a liberal feeling of brotherhood" (1990:233). Gesh gives a very human insight into the aims and hopes of Peli cultists. He admits the frustration of a European working in the region who is expected to reveal the secret of cargo. It is painful to him that he can do nothing to satisfy people's expectations, or to assist them in achieving the abundance they desire, but he respects the necessity of their ongoing efforts to realize their own goals. Faith's (1990) study of the Rastafarians in Jamaica makes similar points. While admitting the lack of achievement in terms of concrete improvement in material existence, she draws attention to the strong sense of identity combined with the creation in a virtual vacuum of an "authentic sense of Jamaican culture" achieved by the Rastafarians. Such studies powerfully demonstrate that cargo cults are attempts by Melanesians and others to take control of their lives and their futures, and thus are vehicles serving to articulate self-identity and its problems in the distorting stresses of colonial domination. But how is this new self and new dispensation created? Can it simply be invented in consciousness?
Order ina New Cultural Elements andOld of New The Together Weaving
The new vision, like that of the Mekeo cultists, who imaged a world where sorcery was abolished and God spoke directly to his people, is invariably a combination of introduced ideas and existing desires. Often it has the character, to European eyes, of a kind of wild bricolage where "radio antennae" are erected and "airstrips" cleared to receive the spirits of the dead, or the cult prophet secludes himself in a darkened building with the nubile girls of the community on the pretense of "making money." The new beliefs often seem so patently ludicrous in their extraordinary combinations of imagery that European observers dismiss them as willful concoctions devised by conniving leaders to deceive naive followers. Both deception and madness are evident from the cultural perspective of the
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colonial official. And the mode of thought underlying these bizarre beliefs is easily identified with the psychoanalytic primary-process thinking, characterized by displacement, condensation, and symbolization.12 Yet is this how the cultists take charge of their future and envisage a new cultural order? I would point instead to the special creativity afforded by autonomous imagination, a process especially fitted to combine both inner and outer truths. This intuitive mode of imagery thought is not bound by ordinary conventions of waking thought and has access to information not available to consciousness. It is thus capable of innovations impossible to, that is to say unthinkable, in consciousness. It is just such a source of knowing and "truth"-a "sacred other"-that comes to the fore in situations requiring swift, radical reformulations of the worldview. As I have written of an Ilahita Arapesh prophet:
This fusing of inner and outer events is precisely the task of autonomous imagination. It is a process whereby inner states are woven into a third realm-a world imagined, yet one that appears to exist as independently of self as the external, cultural world. It is this capacity that seems to provide the innovative prophet with his vision of a sacred order. As Samuel's case reveals, he is attempting to deal with the conflict of old and new.... His autonomous imagining will seek to create some harmony out of the external cultural influence and his inner needs and desires; and the more acute his own inner conflicts, the greater will be this necessity. As an individual who has the special ability to bring his subliminal stream of imagery thought into consciousness, he is able ... to communicate to others the new "world as imagined" that he finds there... this recombination of external, cultural "realities" and internal needs then provides the basis for a new, shared religious symbolism. [1989b:223]
In essence, the cult prophet is neither crazy nor a charlatan; rather, she or he possesses a special capacity to access the unique creative potential of autonomous imagination. A capacity, I argue, that is better regarded as a talent than an affliction, although it may of course also be used to negative and destructive, as well as positive, ends.
TheRadical of theStatus Quo Rejection

Although cargo cults were usually regarded by the colonial regime primarily as challenges to its own authority, such movements most often also involve overthrowing or radically changing indigenous power structures. The Inawaia cultists were as much concerned to defy the traditional authorities as they were ready to receive the guns and ammunition that the spirits of the dead were bringing to help drive out the whites. This iconoclasm is readily interpreted as a pathological and irrational desire to destroy the existing social order, clear evidence of the malaise and disruption brought about by external influence. Because cults occur in situations of change, they are easily perceived as symptoms rather than as positive attempts to gain control over the situation. The view that I share with many others is that the cults aim to provide
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an alternative to a now discredited or devalued symbolic order. Since a cultural order is a set of linked symbols, which are expressions of meaning, the new dispensation must be of the same nature. It must express emotional truths as well as provide a plan for action. In other words, the cult is the source of a new symbolic order, not a rational, pragmatic plan for economic or social development. Attempts to separate "rational" from "irrational" elements of movements fail to recognize this. Furthermore, concentrating on the "rational" elements of the movements is another form of control, since this emphasizes Western values, and, more important, if successful, serves to cut the cult of from its true wellspring of creativity. Cargo cults offer visions of a new symbolic order that need to be read rather as dream narratives, something that Lattas (1992b) in his study of West New Britain cults does with exceptional insight. The new order revealed to the prophet is at the same time a negotiated vision, subjected to telling, re-telling, and re-visioning by cults' participants. When we understand that cult prophets are able to draw upon a real source of creativity, one that weaves together inner and outer "truths," then the appeal to the authority of dreams, visions, and possession loses it bizarre character. Culture, like art, is a creation emerging from that hidden discourse between the psyche, the "soul" (Stephen 1989b:226-229), and other inner forces outside conscious control and understanding. No established cultural system can provide
all the necessary vehicles for understanding and representing one's inner world. The cultural actor is in a constant struggle to communicate because of this: our experiences are in many ways opaque even to us. How then are we to relate them to others? It is this gap between cultural representation, and subjective necessity and desire, that we find the impetus for creativity and innovation. Where culture fails to provide the categories for the communication of subjective experience and fails to satisfy deeply felt personal desires, then new categories and new avenues for expression will be sought, and eventually found in the dreams and visions of prophets, old and new. [Stephen and Herdt 1989:10-11]
Studies with greater time-depth than has been possible to achieve in New Guinea, such as Van Veltzen and Wettering's (1991) intensive study of Surinamese cults, which reaches well back into the 19th century, clearly reveal the extent to which the-human psyche is ever ready to create spontaneously such imaginings. In studies of this historical depth, the lack of a simple correlation between fantasy and external circumstances emerges more clearly than in studies of a single movement or episode within one. Van Veltzen observes:
The psyche's propensity to produce imaginations is the primary fact: economic and political changes provide instigators or catalysts for this mental labor. Once a collective fantasy has gained acceptance, it may continue to flourish under quite different economic circumstances or political regimes. [n.d.:9]
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theScenesby behind Is Controlled TheInspired Prophet Secular Organizers

Yet even if we are prepared to attribute some real creativity to the prophet or prophetess, there remains the circumstance found in so many cults that secular leaders either control behind the scenes, or soon take over from the religious leader. This was the case in the Mekeo Inawaia cult, where the inspired leader was a teenage girl who was, evidently, to some extent directed in her actions by her senior male patri-kin (Belshaw 1951). These circumstances again fit psychoanalytic interpretations: the prophet is evidently an immature or fanciful hysteric, while the regressed, infantile state of the followers is deftly played upon by unscrupulous manipulators. But some Western observers want to eat their cake and have it too-on the one hand they argue that people are gullible and easily fooled, and on the other they assume clever fakers and confidence men behind the scenes manipulating the system (see Lattas 1992a). This is not to say that in some cases deliberate confidence tricks do not take place; but consider Levi-Strauss's (1972) reluctant shaman who ultimately finds himself convinced of the efficacy of procedures he knew to be based on sleight of hand. Such arguments takes us back to the old-fashioned controversy concerning the shaman who, it was once asserted, must be either a madman or a faker (Peters and Price-Williams 1980). Moreover, the emergence of secular leaders who seek to manage or systematize the teachings and programs of the prophet need not be reduced to a sinister Svengalilike operation. This might equally be understood as the early stage of the process Weber (1983) long ago identified as the routinization of charisma, a process he believed common to the development of all new religions. The prominence of women and girl leaders is also evident in many cults, and this in cultures where females have little say in public affairs. How are we to understand this? It is evident that those who have least vested interests in the status quo are more ready to seek and embrace new visions. The interesting thing is that such sources of inspiration are accepted by others. It suggests, in the first place, that we are not dealing with deliberate inventions and manipulations of others' gullibility, but rather that sources of inspiration separate from the established power holders succeed in capturing group support. It also demonstrates women's creativity via autonomous imagining and their participation in generating new cultural orders. An ability to access autonomous imagination is a talent not available to all, and those that possess such a talent, such as artists in western culture, are valued for it. From this perspective, the prominence of female leadership in cults is not simply related to female marginality (Lewis 1971) but relates equally to female talent to tap autonomous imagination. Spirit mediums, prophets, healers, and diviners-that is, roles
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that draw upon autonomous imagination-are roles frequently occupied by women.13 Such an argument, of course, not only recognizes women's contribution to creating culture, but also acknowledges their joint responsibility for it and its shortcomings.
CONCLUSION
Psychoanalytic theory serves to underline and harden Western commonsense views that hysteria and madness are clearly demonstrated in the several recurring features of cargo cults I have identified here. That is to say, psychoanalysis is confirmation, from the position of the revered authority of "science," of persisting Western cultural assumptions. My argument is not that psychoanalytic theory cannot provide a cogent explanation of these features of the cults, far from it. Indeed, it provides explanations that most satisfyingly and rigorously endorse the colonial discourses of power. Yet the point we started from was that the ethnographic evidence clearly reveals the positive role played by the unusual modes of thought and psychological processes operating in the cults. I believe that underlying the colonial discourse, Western cultural metaphors of pathology, madness, reason versus emotion, and the fear of the irrational still persist, and that they continue to cloud our perceptions of the special form of imagination shaping religious and cultural innovation. While I follow Freud's lead in trying to understand the irrational in rational terms, this does not, in my view, require the assumption that the nonrational is inherently inferior and that only conscious, waking thought can be creative.14 Rather, my aim is to show how Western culturally constructed assumptions about, and fears of, what lies outside ordinary waking consciousness make persuasive a particular theory of the unconscious mind. Disentangling the threads that constitute established "knowledge" is no easy task, but becoming more discriminating as to the cultural biases underlying our scientific theories and constructs is surely both unavoidable and desirable in the prevailing postmodern intellectual climate. The broadly based evidence from outside psychoanalysis discussed in attributes a much more positive role to dreams, waking visions, article this and trance, possession in the lives of both individuals and cultures than current psychoanalytic theory would allow. I have proposed that phenomena such as dreams, trance, and possession can be understood as products of a special kind of creative imagination operating outside conscious awareness. Whether or not my formulation of this process is accurate, anthropology is clearly in need of theoretical approaches that can account for the creativity of modes of thought long deemed by Western culture to be inferior and maladaptive.
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Some scholars see millenarian notions as a basic idea, a kind of archetype, of the human psyche; others seem to view cargoism as a root metaphor along similar lines; yet others see underlying similarities in all new religious movements (Turner 1990). My view is that what lends to these movements worldwide an underlying generic similarity, despite the enormous variation in the specific cultural beliefs, rituals, and practices that they spawn, is their drawing upon autonomous imagination.
NOTES
1. My information comes from another village, 30 years after the event. Nevertheless, people gave clear accounts of the cult and consistent interpretations of it as a defiance of the established orders (Stephen 1977:3-4). 2. I discussed the cult in person on several occasions with the parish priest concerned, the Reverend Father Coltre. 3. In fact, Lindstrom's observation could well be applied to some of the other contributions in the same collection on cargo cults and millenarianism (Trompf 1990), especially Trompf on the Sunburst movement and Brookes on Timor Atoni cults. 4. Any discussion of the topic seems inevitably to elicit two opposite and extreme reactions: the currently burgeoning uncritical popular enthusiasm for all to do with the "unconscious" and altered states of consciousness is as much a hindrance to serious study as is the establishment devaluation and pathologizing of such phenomena. 5. My proposition is based upon experimental studies of sleep and dreams such as (Cartwright 1969:369-370, 1978:66; Cohen 1979; Fishbein 1981; and Hartmann 1975), studies of waking fantasy (Singer 1974:188-200; Singer and Pope 1978), and of sensory deprivation (Siegal and West 1975; Bowers and Meichenbaum 1984; see also Noll 1985). All point to the existence of a subliminal stream of imagery thought such as I identify. 6. On shamanism and meditation, see Peters and Price-Williams 1980, 1983; Kakar 1982; on hypnosis, Hilgard 1977; on "active imagination," Greenleaf 1978 and Watkins 1984; on Western imagery-based therapies, including behavioralist therapies, Singer 1974, 1976, 1977; and Singer and Pope 1978. 7. The evidence for these features of autonomous imagination is based primarily on experimental hypnosis research, summarized in Stephen 1989a:52-61; see especially Barber et al. 1974; Bowers 1976; Bowers and Bowers 1979; Fromm and Shor 1979; Hilgard 1977; Sarbin and Slagle 1979; Sheehan 1979; Sheehan and McConkey 1982; and Shor 1965. 8. For example, kava on Tanna (Lindstrom 1990a, 1990b); cannabis in the Ras Tafarian movement (Faith 1990) and the Californian Sunburst cult (Trompf 1990); automatic writing and spiritualistic mediumship in 19th-century England (Tillet 1990). 9. For a recent discussion of the scientific status of psychoanalysis, see Clark and Wright 1988. 10. "In sleep, when the external information source is almost shut down, the low arousal state of NREM sleep allows personal feeling responses to current experience to come from the back ground to the foreground of awareness. When REM occurs, this high arousal state stimulates the affective evaluative programs to process these data according to personal values and identity schemas. This matching of present experience to our personal feeling memory bank is an involuntary delayed response to the data of the day. It appears to preserve the integrity of personality" (Cartwright 1980:245). 11. Suryani and Jensen's (1993) cross-culturally sensitive approach contrasts with psychiatrist Burton Bradley's (1977) view of Melanesian cargo cults as fostering "recruitment of disturbed people, particularly in leadership and deputy roles." Suryani and Jensen's concept
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of dissociation fits well with my idea of autonomous imagination since this represents the special mode of thinking and feeling they refer to. I think, however, they underplay the creative aspects of this mode of thought and concentrate rather on the positive and adaptive emotional aspects of it-that is, release of emotion, security, safety. From my perspective, their notion of the mechanism of dissociation could be regarded as an involuntary switch to a state in which external reality is blocked out (this can have basic survival adaptiveness as in animals in terror), which leads in human beings to accessing the imagery stream of autonomous imagination. It is a switch to a kind of mental liminal-in Victor Turner's (1969) sense-state; it is not just that the participant is put outside society and then re-integrated, it is a situation where normal consciousness is put aside to enter a mental state where ordinary controls do not prevail. 12. Although various modifications have been proposed to the classic formulation of primary-process thinking (e.g. Rycroft 1968, Noy 1969, 1979) as I have discussed elsewhere (Stephen 1995), I do not consider these revisions go far enough. See also Barth 1987 and Van Veldzen n.d. for valuable anthropological discussions of the utility of the concept of primaryprocess thinking. 13. Women are prominent as mediums and shamans in Melanesian cultures (Herdt 1989; Stephen 1979; Wagner 1972) and as cult prophetesses (Burridge 1960; Lawrence 1967; Trompf 1977; Worsley 1970). This prominence has been observed in many different cultures (Bourguignon 1973; Lewis 1971). 14. In stressing the creativity of the nonrational modes of thought, it should equally be emphasized that I am not suggesting that rational planning and innovation should therefore be despised or deemed unnecessary!
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Cargo Cults, Cultural Creativity, and Autonomous Imagination Author(s): Michele Stephen Source: Ethos, Vol. 25, No.

Cultural Cargo Cults, Creativity, Autonomous Imagination and

Australia. Bundoora, Victoria,

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KEY OF THE ELEMENTS 1941MEKEO CULT

TheProphet's of Inspiration-Dreams Sources andAltered States

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Statesof Consciousness TheAltered Participants byCult Experienced

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Amnesia TheCultists' aftertheEvent

of the Prophet's Demonstrations Miraculous Power,Especially Healing

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TheAppeal to a New Spiritual Authority

Cargo Cults? 347

TheRadical of theStatus Quo Rejection

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theScenesby behind Is Controlled TheInspired Prophet Secular Organizers

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Cargo Cults ? 353

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