LIKE FIRE THE PALIAU MOVEMENT AND MILLENARIANISM IN MELANESIA LIKE FIRE THE PALIAU MOVEMENT AND MILLENARIANISM IN MELANESIA THEODORE SCHWARTZ AND MICHAEL FRENCH SMITH MONOGRAPHS IN ANTHROPOLOGY SERIES Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760464240 ISBN (online): 9781760464257 WorldCat (print): 1247150926 WorldCat (online): 1247151119 DOI: 10.22459/LF.2021 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph: A Paliau Movement Supporter, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, 2000, taken by Matt Tomlinson. This edition © 2021 ANU Press Contents List of illustrations . vii Acknowledgements . ix Preface: Why, how, and for whom . xi Spelling and pronunciation of Tok Pisin words and Manus proper names . xvii 1 . ‘The last few weeks have been strange and exciting’ . .1 2 . Taking exception . .27 3 . Indigenous life in the Admiralty Islands . .59 4 . World wars and village revolutions . .87 5 . The Paliau Movement begins . .121 6 . Big Noise from Rambutjo . .175 7 . After the Noise . .221 8 . The Cemetery Cult hides in plain sight . .247 9 . The Cemetery Cult revealed . .267 10 . Comparing the cults . 317 11 . Paliau ends the Cemetery Cult . .327 12 . Rise and fall . .361 13 . The road to Wind Nation . .383 14 . Wind Nation in 2015 . 427 15 . Probably not the last prophet . .449 Appendix A: Pathomimetic behaviour . .469 Appendix B: Kalopeu: Manus Kastam Kansol Stori . 477 Appendix C: Lists of thirty rules and twelve rules . .489 References . 493 Index . .517 Scholars cited . 537 List of illustrations Map 1: The location of contemporary Papua New Guinea in relation to its closest neighbours .......................xix Map 2: The boundaries of the provinces of modern Papua New Guinea ..................................xix Map 3: The principal places in the Admiralty Islands involved in the events in 1953–54 as discussed in the text ............ xx Figure 1.1: Schwartz films while Mead takes notes, 1953 ...........3 Figure 1.2: Schwartz and Paliau in Lorengau, late 1980s ...........9 Figure 3.1: In Pere village in 1928, houses and other structures were built on pilings over natural or artificial lagoons. People moved around the village by canoe .................62 Figure 3.2: Pere village men, photographed in 1928 ..............66 Figure 6.1: The routes of those who first conveyed from place to place news of Wapei’s prophecies and the alleged deliveries of cargo already accomplished .........................177 Figure 7.1: The Baluan United Christian Church in Lipan-Mok village, Baluan Island, 1953 ...........................226 Figure 7.2: Paliau greeting a young admirer ...................235 Figure 8.1: The procession to the old Bunai cemetery that Tjamilo organised in December 1953 to re-inter the remains of Cemetery Cult adherents’ deceased kin ................252 Figure 9.1: Pita Tapo became a strong advocate of the Cemetery Cult in Lahan, an Usiai hamlet of Bunai .................297 Figure 9.2: The gate to the graveyard Tjamilo and his followers built in Bunai in 1954 ...............................302 vii LIKE FIRE Figure 11.1: Paliau looked thoughtful before the meeting in Bunai at which he ended the Cemetery Cult ............337 Figure 12.1: In 1970, Paliau spoke at a conference on the anthropology of the Bismarck Archipelago at the University of California, Santa Cruz .............................372 Figure 13.1: In 1973, Paliau surprised Schwartz by dancing in full traditional regalia at an event in Lipan-Mok village, Baluan ....386 Figure 13.2: In the 1980s, Wind Nation began producing written documents bearing the elaborate but inexpertly drawn Wind Nation logo .......................................414 Figure 14.1: The Wind Nation meeting house in the centre of Pere village, 2015. 429 Figure 14.2: Paliau’s grave in Lipan-Mok village, Baluan Island, 2015. 441 Figure 14.3: In 2015, Smith visited Paliau’s house in Lipan-Mok village, Baluan Island, with (from left to right) Kumulau Paniu, Lady Teresia Maloat (Paliau’s widow), and Kisokau Pochapon. 442 Figure 14.4: The shrine to Paliau in the room in which he died, 2015. .443 Figure 14.5: Paliau explaining Wing, Wang, and Wong to Schwartz in the late 1980s. .444 Figure 14.6: This page of the plan for Freedom House shows double doors on opposite sides of the octagon .............445 Figure 15.1: An image of the Wind Nation logo is carved on one of the posts of Margaret Mead’s Resource Center in Pere village, shown here in 2015 .....................452 viii Acknowledgements We owe our greatest debt to several generations of the people of Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, which was the Manus District of the United Nations Trust Territory of Papua and New Guinea when the research for this book began. Too many people have contributed to name individuals. Those named in the book (we do not use pseudonyms) account for only some of the major contributors. We also would be staggeringly remiss not to thank Margaret Mead. In this book we take issue with some of her writings on Manus and Paliau, but we also draw on her findings. Above all, there would have been no book at all if she had not introduced Theodore Schwartz to Manus in 1953. We are deeply grateful to our spouses, Shirley Otis (Theodore Schwartz) and Jana Goldman (Michael French Smith). Aside from the encouragement and material support they have provided, they have put up with a lot of aggravation. We would not want to have been our own roommates during the many days and nights we each obsessed about the book. In Del Mar, California, Cecelia Gomez and Arlene Olivarria made it possible for us to swan about being scholars without thinking whence our next meals or other creature comforts were coming. We received an important early grant from Mary Catherine Bateson and the Institute for Intercultural Studies. As we continued, Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz made it possible for Smith to travel coast to coast to work with Schwartz as often as necessary without worrying about the expense. Adan Schwartz covered most of the costs of preparing the completed manuscript for publication, with help from Steve and Paula Mae. Aletta Biersack proved herself a colleague of unparalleled endurance. She read several drafts of each chapter and gave us detailed and thoughtful comments. Anything, however, that readers may find amiss with the final ix LIKE FIRE product is our fault alone, and probably something Aletta warned us about. Ton Otto, a leading scholar of things Manusian, gave us valuable comments on the penultimate draft of the book. Matt Tomlinson was our vital connection to ANU Press and cheered us on through all the stages of manuscript submission and approval. At that point, Emily Tinker took over and saw us to the end with great efficiency. It is hard to overestimate how important and how taxing copyediting and creating a book’s index are, and Tracy Harwood accomplished these tasks with elan. Diane Buric skilfully made our maps and other images, and prepared for print our photographs, some of which we feared were too old and worn to salvage. x Preface: Why, how, and for whom In early 2012, when I visited Theodore (Ted) Schwartz at his home in Del Mar, California, he had recently finished digitising audio recordings of interviews he had conducted with Manus people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) from 1953 through 1995; the annotated catalogue went on for many pages.1 Ted gave me an audio tour and we listened to Paliau, his supporters, and his detractors talk about the Paliau Movement, Paliau as saviour, Paliau as betrayer, and topics ranging from the politics of local- level Movement leadership to when the dead ancestors would return to life. There was more than enough material here for a book that would not simply update Ted’s early-career monograph (Schwartz 1962), but replace it as the primary scholarly source on the Paliau Movement. A lot had happened in the Movement since the monograph was published, and much of the data Ted had collected since the 1950s called for thinking again about Paliau and the events described in the 1962 volume. By early 2013, Ted and I had decided to collaborate on a new book on the Paliau Movement. I don’t remember exactly how we reached that decision, but it was obvious that we would regret not writing the book and writing it was clearly a two-person job. We knew that such an intimately detailed record of so many decades in the life of a social movement in the Pacific Islands—or almost anywhere—was rare, and we felt that making it widely available was virtually an obligation. Also, although his failing vision made it difficult, Ted had been reading some of the recent anthropological literature on cargo cults, of which the 1 These ecordingsr and Schwartz’s other original research records are now housed at the Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, library (library.ucsd.edu/ research-and-collections/collections/special-collections-and-archives/collections/melanesian.html). The archive provides a searchable online catalogue. xi LIKE FIRE Paliau Movement provides dramatic examples. I had been doing the same and I agreed with Ted that many anthropologists were entertaining ideas about cargo cults and millenarianism that needed firm rebutting. We also agreed that neither of us could write the book alone. It would require analysing decades of Ted’s still-raw data and reviewing literature in several fields.