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Cargo Cult as Theater: Political Performance in the Pacific, by Dorothy K Billings. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002. ISBN 0-7391-0238-9; x + 267 pages, maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$90.00.
One Melanesian cargo cult hit primetime news in 1964. The 22 June issue of Newsweek breathlessly asked, "What Price LBJ?" The article went on to report that people on New Hanover, in Papua New Guinea's Bismarck Archipelago, had raised money to "'buy' President [Lyndon Baines] Johnson, who would then rule the island-bringing with him, of course, cargoes of Hershey bars, cigarettes, and other luxuries. Before long, followers had given . . . $987 to make an early purchase of LBJ." This was, of course, four months before the November 1964 elections in which Johnson would wallop Barry Goldwater, the choice, not the echo. One senses underneath the cute story of befuddled Islanders trying first to vote for, and then to "buy" LBJ an early, oblique critique of Johnson's "Great Society" that would treat poverty with welfare subsidies. Some years later, the Johnson cult also made it onto the cover of a trashier publication, The Weekly World News, its headline: "wacky tribe thinks that former prez LBJ" is their "big-eared god."
Anthropologists, too, interested themselves in cargo cult. Dorothy Billings arrived in 1965 to check out the scene. But Australian administrators headquartered in Kavieng, New Ireland, refused to let her onto New Hanover. She set up shop instead in administratively approved Mangai village, about thirty miles down the road from Kavieng. Billings eventually received permission to go to New Hanover...