Neither Cargo nor Cult by Martha Kaplan PAPERBACK 9780822315933

Neither Cargo nor CultRitual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji\nAuthor(s): Martha Kaplan\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Duke University Press, United States\nImprint: Duke University Press\nISBN-13: 9780822315933, 978-0822315933\nSynopsis\nIn the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed \""dangerous and disaffected natives,\"" were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor a.