CARGO CULTS [FIRST EDITION]. In 1980, a motorcade drove into Madang, a provincial capital in Papua New Guinea (independent since 1975), and stopped outside the local branch of the national bank. The drivers and passengers came from a Catholic village sixty kilometers to the west. Their spokeswoman, Josephine Bahu (about twenty-eight at the time), asked the bank manager, a European, to give her the keys to his vaults, for God had revealed to her the truth about money—its true source and its proper use as a road to economic development.

This incident was a recent example of cargoism, the most common form of millenarianism in Melanesia since the nineteenth century, when colonial rule reduced its inhabitants to the status of cheap labor for European employers. The millennium, as it has inevitably come to be manifested in this context, is the anticipated arrival of...