Monographs in Anthropology Series. Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2021. xx, 540 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$75.00, paper. ISBN 9781760464240.
This weighty tome details the history of the Paliau Movement, a millenarian religio-political movement that has been active in the Manus region of Papua New Guinea since 1946. The book primarily targets anthropologists of Melanesia as its readership but it should be consulted by anyone interested in religious movements emerging in the wake of Western colonization. It will also be of concern to people in the region, so it is great that it’s available for free at press.anu.edu.au.
Building on the work of Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune in the 1920s, Theodore Schwartz’s research from 1953 until the 1990s, Michael French Smith’s fieldwork in the region in 1973, and later extensive research by Ton Otto among others, Like Fire presents the most complete historical narrative of the Paliau Movement so far. Schwartz and Smith take issue with Mead’s New Lives for Old (New York: William Morrow, 1956) that is based on fieldwork in 1953 (in which Schwartz participated), as failing to acknowledge the extent to which millenarianism encouraged the Movement. Mead was keen to see the Movement as the harbinger of rational modernization. In contrast, Schwartz and Smith put much emphasis on millenarianism and people’s tendency to find conscious agency behind events.
Like Fire’s main character is Paliau Maloat, a “protean figure, melding politician and prophet” (11) who established the movement almost immediately after the Second World War. The book details the then-fertile ground for a prophet caused by rapid culture change due to colonialism: “people were eager for someone to help them overcome their reluctance to abandon old, reliable ways of understanding the world for something untested but infinitely more exciting. In the early years of the Movement, some of its adherents yearned for a prophet and found one in Paliau” (56–57).
The book is well written, and I especially enjoyed reading about Paliau’s self-transformations, starting with the retelling of the story of his life, including a critical revelatory dream, and the “Long Story of God” in chapter 5. As Paliau got older and most Manusians began to accept the post-colonial political order of Papua New Guinea, millenarianism became less revolutionary. By the 1970s, the movement began to develop theocratic ideologies and Paliau told Schwartz that Manus should have a “government of the Holy Spirit” (388). Under its new name, Win Neisen (Wind Nation), the Movement also became a vessel for Paliau’s regional and national political aspirations albeit with limited success. Just a year before his death in 1991, Paliau stated to Schwartz that he was a kind of Jesus, and in 2015, when Smith visited Manus, some were keen to suggest that Paliau was in fact Jesus (421–422). At present, Win Neisen is still active and has become institutionalized and formalized amid half a dozen other congregations. Alongside apotheosizing Paliau, followers now also engage in monumentalization which Smith documents nicely in chapter 14.
Theoretically, the book’s main contribution is its challenge of the concept of religion and its focus on finding an explanation for widespread millenarianism. People’s seizing on prophecy from the start of the Movement onwards highlights, according to Schwartz and Smith, a Manusian and perhaps even universal inclination to personify causation (chapter 3). By this they mean that people assume that the world is governed by conscious forces that manifest in a wide variety of numinous forms (450). There is of course nothing new to anthropologists crediting people’s tendency to see humans as the centre of extra-human attention. But we also know that the concept of religion invites exploration of the kinds of theologies fashioned by Paliau as well as the social constructions and political aspirations related to those theologies.
The Movement’s ongoing imaginations and constructions of social institutions documented so well in this book remind us that it is important to recognize how people explicitly self-institute. They do not, as much of the cargo cult literature wanted us to believe (chapter 2), just act upon the wonder that the West, missions, and the state brought in terms of power and wealth. While these foreign institutions led people to chase a revelatory rush as new possibilities emerged and the world became increasingly unsettling, they were and still are also seen as useful for new social forms and rituals for power, politics, and social formation.
In other words, any analysis of millenarian movements should not restrict itself to personified causation but also firmly engage with elements of self-institution and its sources of inspiration— including church, state, economy, past, present, and future. In addition, rising regional nationalism throughout Melanesia and attempts at building Christian nations warrant a conceptual apparatus beyond the narrow concept of the personification of causation, and interestingly, might usefully bring us back to Peter Worsley’s identification of the Paliau Movement as “proto-nationalist” (The Trumpet Shall Sound, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957). Despite this critical note, I appreciate the interesting messages this book brings, and I hope they will spark much fruitful discussion.
Jaap Timmer
Aarhus University, Aarhus
Macquarie University, Sydney