Vailala madness

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The Vailala Madness (English Vailala Madness ) was a social movement in the Gulf of Papua in the Australian Papua Territory , which began in the last months of 1919 and gradually came to an end after 1922. It is widely recognized as the first well-documented cargo cult , a class of millenarian religious-political movements, although the term cargo cult itself dates back to the mid-1940s.

Surname

The Vailala delusion got its name from observations of the behavior of people involved, which included glossolalia , shaking and psychosomatic symptoms. In the local language, participants called it iki haveve ('belly don't know'), which roughly means “dizziness (fit)”.

Return of the ancestors

The movement included the belief that soon a controlled by the returning dead 'ghost steamer' will arrive, the cargo (Engl. Cargo brought) with itself, in addition to the dead relatives also canned, tools, various other treasures and in a version also included rifles to drive out the European colonizers. The latter point is controversial and may have come from the account of contemporary plantation owners who had fled who were very concerned about the events.

"White ancestors"

The ancestors returning by ship were imagined as whites , a concept that recurs in many post-war cargo cults. Communication with them was possible using a device described as a 'flag pole' - a large pole attached to a pipe in the movement's 'office'. An expatriate observer said it was an imitation of a radio receiver and claimed to have seen a pumpkin hoisted on a pole to transmit messages to ancestors. Albert Maori Kiki, however, who grew up in the area, said the device was actually connected to a myth in which the morning star uses a long string of reed to come from his very distant home to the village to get a woman to meet who he likes. The syncretistic nature of many cargo cult rituals is well illustrated by this.

Life regulation according to colonial custom

Another aspect of the movement, which heralds traces of the later cargo cults, is the so-called “imitation of the white man”. The leaders of the movement wanted to drill the grassroots like soldiers, they banned going out in the manner of regulated life in the plantations and they held a ceremony that looked in every way like a European-style tea party . A table was decorated with crotons and food was served to the participants while sitting on chairs. According to Francis Edgar Williams , the anthropologist who observed this, under no circumstances would a local suffer from sitting at the table this way; however, there was no explanation, for example, linking this to the ancestors. This illustrates another aspect of the cargo cult, namely that some activities described as cargo cults could be rituals with a secret meaning or their description as such could be a result of the observer's expectation of a secret meaning.

Strict moral code

Some reports claim that the movement resulted in widespread sexual licentiousness, but this cannot be proven. Indeed, the movement officially taught a strict moral code that included prohibition of adultery and other moral offenses. Abuses were remedied by the leaders of the movement by imposing fines. To find out who had committed sins, these leaders organized divination ceremonies that featured a large tree trunk held by several men that was said to have the ability to find out any culprit.

This resulted in the movement that was classified as a form of extortion by the colonial administration. This offense has been that of 'spreading false rumors' ( spreading false rumors ) added that under the law the Code of Australian Papua territory was punishable. Several of the leaders have been detained indefinitely.

Abandonment of ceremonies

The Vailala madness was also indomitable in giving up the great cycle of initiations that used to be at the center of social life in the Gulf of Papua. The cycle known as hevehe and semese took a decade to complete and included the construction of a huge, cultic men's house, known as eravo , in which ritual objects ( ritual paraphernalia ) were kept that were forbidden to women . The Vailala madness destroyed the ritual objects (paraphernalia), which had often been violated by being displayed to uninitiated people.

Origin of these beliefs

The origin of the organizational model, which included drill, no-night-time and tea, was most likely observed by the leaders of the movement when they worked in plantations far from the Papua Gulf, where they also caught (the Creole language) Tok Pisin . It is likely that they also learned about the war with Germany there, because the glossolalia was described as "djaman" (a word similar to English German ). It was alleged that ideas about 'cargo' - especially the belief that it was derived from ancestors by whites - came in the context of the native workforce of the plantations.

Christian mission , instituted by missionary James Chalmers in the 1890s, had a profound impact on the people, and it is possible that many ideas in the moral code came from it. The movement set about implementing its slogan "throw 'em away bloody new guinea somethings", which should not be interpreted as an internalization of colonialist ideology. In reality, the colonialist ideology in Papua required the indigenous society to remain relatively stable in its tradition and culture, and for this reason the Vailala Madness was seen as an indicator that the social order could collapse under the pressure of change.

Observer and the end of the movement

The movement was observed firsthand by GM Murray , the Acting Resident Magistrate of Kerema Patrol Station, in 1919; Francis Edgar Williams , the government anthropologist for the Australian Administration of Papua Territory, arrived in 1922 when the movement was still powerful despite being already showing signs of decay. It was no longer active in the late 1920s. Numerous other religious and social innovations continued their way through the Papuan Gulf before the Second World War.

See also

Web links

literature

  • Erik Schwimmer (Ed.): FE Williams : The Vailala Madness and Other Essays . London: C. Hurst and Company 1976
  • G. Cochrane : Big Men and Cargo Cults . Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970
  • AM Kiki : Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime . Melbourne: Cheshire 1968
  • Peter Worsley : The Trumpet Shall Sound . 2nd edition. London: Granada 1968 (German under the title: The trumpet will sound. C.-K. in Melanesia, 1973)