An ‘infinite pause’ at Dreikikir? Forty years of change in rural Papua New Guinea

I first arrived at the Urat-speaking villages of Tumam and Ngahmbole, near the government station of Dreikikir in East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, in June 1971, to begin 15 months of fieldwork for a PhD degree in human geography. I planned to study the adoption of rice and coffee grown for sale. But just before I arrived at Dreikikir, a new activity began near Yangoru, a government station 100 km to the east, and was spreading rapidly in the local area. Known as the Peli Association, it promised that if people paid a 70 cents joining fee and carried out certain activities, they would eventually receive a regular salary. By the time I arrived, over 90 per cent of village families had paid the joining fee. This activity had all the hallmarks of a millenarian movement or ‘cargo cult’ but Peli members insisted it was not a cargo cult. They compared it to events that had occurred in 1956 when people had marched up and down the village, saluted, bowed to each other Japanese style, jumped up and down on the spot for long periods, fell unconscious while jumping, spoken with their dead ancestors while unconscious, and used vines to erect radio antennas up trees from graves in the village cemetery so they could communicate with them further. ‘That was a cargo cult’, they said, ‘Peli is different’. To me the 1956 movement and Peli were, at least on the surface, the antithesis of cash cropping. Cash cropping was encouraged by the colonial administration whereas ‘cargo cults’ had been suppressed and the leaders charged with ‘spreading false rumours’ and jailed. So I thought it would be interesting to do a comparative study of the spread and adoption of cash cropping and the spread and adoption of cargo cults in the Dreikikir area.