Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji

by Martha Kaplan

In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed "dangerous and disaffected natives," were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult.
Engaging Fijian oral history and texts as well as colonial records, Kaplan resituates Tuka in the flow of indigenous Fijian history-making and rereads the archives for an ethnography of British colonizing power. Proposing neither unchanging indigenous culture nor the inevitable hegemony of colonial power, she describes the dialogic relationship between plural, contesting, and changing articulations of both Fijian and colonial culture.
A remarkable enthnographic account of power and meaning, Neither Cargo nor Cult addresses compelling questions within anthropological theory. It will attract a wide audience among those interested in colonial and postcolonial societies, ritual and religious movements, hegemony and resistance, and the Pacific Islands.

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who Has the Right to Declare “This is History”?

Let me say right off that this is a very intelligent book, but it is not very clearly written.
Kaplan has some excellent ideas and proposes to explore them in the text. I believe that she does, but somewhere in there she gets lost in the tremendous amount of detail and musings that engage her but may befuddle the reader. She finds, as the title should inform you, that ritual political movements in Fiji in the 19th century (with continuing resonance into our times), disputed the nature of society and imagined the state in very different ways from the British colonizers. The colonial government suppressed these movements, eventually exiling numbers of people if not killing them as in at least one instance. They called such local belief systems “cults” and later researchers have tended to lump them together with the famous cargo cults of other Melanesian islands. Kaplan argues very persuasively (and perhaps a bit too lengthily) that neither was the case.
The British colonizers perceived Christianity as an essential first step to “civilization” or, you can say, “Westernization” in their colonies. If the local response was rather a mixture of new and old ideas, ideas that did not jibe with cooperation with colonial authorities, those authorities labeled the response “a cult”. The process of how this happened is the topic of this book as the author herself states early on. She wants to show how the colonial government of Fiji “created” a cult out of such a response, a movement that had little or nothing to do with cargo (i.e. goods) and was not a cult. Navosavakadua, a 19th century leader of a Fijian movement that claimed its own political and ideological vision, is the main protagonist in this very intricate story. What is his true story? What is the meaning of his role in Fiji history? There were several different interpretations---those of the Fijians in the mountainous hinterlands, those of coastal Fijians who accepted the British versions of Christianity and their own (Fijian) traditions, and those of the British rulers. Later, even an Indo-Fijian visionary appeared who tried to develop a syncretic model of Fijian society which would unite Indians and Fijians behind the banner of Navosavakadua. The book explores in great detail the development of these different narratives.
There is also great attention to the idea of “negative tradition”. The British created a chiefly tradition and class of chiefs. This was “positive tradition” for them. It was more similar to their own hierarchical tradition and had not existed before their arrival. Elements of Fijian society did not fit this colonial model and when Fijians who were not empowered by such a model turned to another, homegrown one which predicted the return of Fijian gods and mythological figures, the British labeled it “negative”. This alternate tradition in Fiji was called Tuka. “Tuka was a sign that the colonial administration could not completely control the prerogatives of knowledge and authority in the colonial polity.” (p.92) The British saw it as irrational and disorderly and ultimately broke up the group supporting it. Elements of Tuka still exist in Fiji, perhaps in different forms. The history of how all this happened and what it really means is the stuff of this book. Unless you are an anthropologist of Fiji/Oceania or someone thinking about the real meaning of what have been labelled “cults”, I think this book will prove too complex and long-winded for you. It is extremely difficult, loaded with considerable academic jargon and innumerable names, Fijian words, etc. It is also a work of considerable scholarship. So it’s up to you.