Customer Reviews

Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea

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This is an in depth study of the Cargo Cults with New Guinea as the focus. I had a relative who was an explorer to the central highlands of New Guinea and this book gave us much to talk about. This book should be of interest to anyone interested in New Guinea generally.

or if you are one of the few with an indepth interest in either cargo cults or the indigenous peoples of the island of New Guinea. otherwise, it's dry and tough going. a better read would be a comparison of the cargo cults in melanesian New Guinea and the cargo cults in the polynesian islands of the South Pacific to the east.

Peter Lawrence strikes a balanced tone in his account of the Madang 'Cargo Cults', considering it is a work of early to mid twentieth century. This book is cited by various authors (such as Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz) in the debate over the meaning of Yali's question - why does his people not have cargo, and why do these 'others' from beyond the sea have so much? Lawrence clearly has his own agenda and his own predjudices, but this is a highly readable account of a fascinating period in human history, one which is so visible to us in the Pacific, but may have been rehearsed in various guises at many periods in history. Pidgin English is itself a fascinating subject, of which I must learn more. It seems to work like an inverted mirror in which humans from industrialised societies cannot recognise their own reflection. Road belong Cargo, indeed.