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E-boo Like Fire : The Paliau Movement and Millenarianism in Melanesia

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Penilaian

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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 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. But Ted’s vision was going from bad to worse and he was feeling his 80-plus years in painful and limiting ways. Similarly, I couldn’t interpret Ted’s data on my own. Even though I spoke the language of Ted’s cache of interviews fluently, I couldn’t hear in them all that he could.2Every time we listened to an interview, Ted broke in frequently to add remembered details or draw my attention to something that I hadn’t noticed but that leapt out at him because of his long familiarity with the people speaking and the larger context.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

994 FRE l

Penerbit

Australia : ANU Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

561 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781760464257

Klasifikasi

994

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

History of Australia

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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