Cargo, Sorcery and Two Kinds of Outside Attention

Two things brought this region a disproportionate share of attention in the study of religion, and both are worth handling carefully. The first is the movements that colonial administrators labelled cargo cults, which arose in various places from the late nineteenth century and intensified around the Second World War, and which anticipated the arrival of goods and a transformed order. The label was dismissive, it lumped very different movements together, and specialists have largely abandoned it: what it covered was in most cases a serious religious and political response to an overwhelming intrusion, and reading it as bewilderment at aeroplanes says more about the observer. The second is sorcery.

Belief in sorcery and witchcraft is widespread across the region, and accusations have led to violence, including killings, which national governments, churches and local organisations are actively working on. The atlas records that as a present social and legal matter rather than as ethnographic colour, because it is one. Neither subject is what religion in Melanesia mainly consists of. The area holds a large number of distinct traditions and a very substantial Christian population, and both of those are the ordinary case.