CARGO CULTS [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS]. Since Peter Lawrence wrote his confident, empirically rich discussion of the cargo cult for the first edition of this encyclopedia in 1987, the terrain of Pacific religion and politics has changed, as has the terrain of scholarly analysis. It is no longer so clear that "cargo cults" ever existed, or at least whether the analytic category is valuable.

Over the past fifty years in the Pacific, the post–World War II decolonization imperative has proceeded apace. New nation-states, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, proliferating evangelical groups, and other postcolonial institutions and agents populate the islands. The imperial world system entanglements of the era of European capitalist and colonial expansion are replaced by global interconnections of the post–World War II United Nations world, including regional nation-state alliances, aid and development programs, migration, tourism, multinational corporate penetration, consumption, and media flows...