I thank those who participated in asao’s Guiart sessions in 2020 and 2021 and three anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions that improved this article.

1Jean Guiart’s Un siècle et demi de contacts culturels à Tanna (Nouvelles-Hébrides), published in 1956, was the first in a series of ethnographic monographs that tackled post-war social movements in the Southwest Pacific. This, which earned Guiart his diploma of ethnology from l’École pratique des hautes études, is the story of Tanna Island’s celebrated John Frum movement and the 150 years of “culture contact” that led up to this. More books about Melanesian social movements (most tagged “cargo cults”) soon followed, including Margaret Mead’s account of the Paliau movement on Manus Island (also 1956), Peter Worsley’s (1957) cargo cult overview, Kenelm Burridge’s (1960) history of the Mambu movement, Robert Maher’s Purari New Men (1961), and Peter Lawrence (1964) on Madang’s Yali Movement. This burst of interest in social change as the consequences of acculturation reflected post-war events but also disciplinal slippage in anthropological attention, from analyses of functionally coherent communities to investigation of crisis and breakdown.

2These investigations were both historical and applied. Unlike earlier structural-functionalists, post-war researchers explored historical events. Mead traced “cultural transformation” on Manus between 1928 and 1953; Maher chased after Papua’s “New Men”; Worsley’s compendium of “cargo” movements tracked these from the 19^th century up through the 1950s. Post-war anthropology also increasingly claimed useful applications. After documenting some frenzied religious outbreak and its possible causes, a subsequent step was to prescribe some antidote or cure to ameliorate social turmoil. Guiart, too, tracked 150 years of island history that led up to the outbreak of Tanna’s John Frum movement. And he drew on his conclusions to prescribe strategies that colonial administrators might adopt to reduce conflict and restore social order on the island. I assess Guiart’s ethnographic efforts first to diagnose the causes of the movement, then to prescribe therapy to remedy this, and finally his several prognoses about the movement’s future.

3As one of the first anthropologists to wrestle with a Melanesian social movement, Guiart had few models. F. E Williams’ account (1923) of Papua’s 1919 “Vailala Madness” was among these, as would have been historical accounts of resistance movements on New Caledonia. I explore here the scholarship that influenced Guiart’s John Frum analysis (based on his citations, which were not extensive), and also the broader historical context that shaped his career. Guiart’s focus on social transformation and on the applied uses of ethnography reflected his first professional position as the sole ethnographer recruited by the newly-established Institut français d’Océanie (ifo) in Noumea (Trépied and Wittersheim, 2019). He joined a growing number of anthropologists from Europe, the usa, Australia, and New Zealand who were increasingly interested in problems of social change. Guiart, thus, in Melanesia broke with

• 1 My translation, as are other broad translations of originally French quotations, included below.

“an ahistorical ethnography more concerned to decipher primitive thought than to decry what had actually happened in these islands affected by a century of colonisation" (Trépied and Wittersheim, 2019: 262) (« une ethnologie anhistorique plus soucieuse de décrypter la pensée primitive que de décrier ce qui se passe réellement dans ces îles bouleversées par un siècle de colonisation »1

Trépied and Wittersheim argue that although Guiart left behind the structural-functionalism that dominated pre-war anthropology, and its presumptions of permanence and social equilibria, he hardly theorized

“this approach to ethnographic research in colonial situations with its own concepts or methods.” (2019: 262) (« cette approche de la recherche ethnologique en situation coloniale à travers des concepts ou une méthodologie propres. »)

But Guiart did at least identify historical events and conjunctions that sparked social turmoil and change. “How,” he asked

“does one describe and analyse such a society always on the move? The sophisticated description of the social fabric by the functionalists does not give us a completely satisfying answer. The idea of looking for the dialectics inside dynamic situations has my sympathy from the start.” (2009: 67)

Contacts culturels

5Twentieth century historians reclaimed actual, eventful history, arguing forcefully against 19^th century theories of natural, developmental, and progressive human evolution (see, e.g., Teggart, 1925; Nisbet, 1969). They also criticized social functionalist models that, when these admitted the possibility of change, sought to embed “laws of change” within encompassing laws of social order (Nisbet, 1969: 239). Rather than naturally or progressively, they argued that change occurs unevenly and episodically, sparked by internal dynamics and contradictions or by external influences —notably those which eventuate when two cultures, somehow, come into contact. “Cultures,” here, are metaphorical. And so are “contacts” insofar as cultures are abstractions of mental processes. It is people, rather, who rub against one another, or who encounter different languages, alien goods, and unfamiliar images and ideas, either directly or through some mediative process. Such culture contact produces acculturation in both implicated communities, although in colonial situations in one more than the other. Social change is motivated by new contacts among people who acculturate one another.

6Mid-century anthropologists explored several avenues to incorporate change within their social models. Malinowski, famously, in a posthumous book about social change in Africa maintained functional holism by keeping separate his analyses of African society and White society, then linking these with an intervening set of “change processes” (1945; cf. Wilson and Wilson, 1945). In the Pacific, Raymond Firth’s 1959 account of social change on Tikopia mostly addressed changes in organization (though not yet social structure) caused by shifting internal conditions and a passing hurricane. Gregory Bateson —who called for attention to “the behaviour of the individuals”— proposed that culture contact sparked several sorts of schismogenesis, resulting in group fusion, elimination, or some dynamic equilibrium between communities in contact:

“Our first task is to study the relationships obtaining between groups of individuals with differentiated behaviour patterns, and later to consider what light these relationships throw upon what are more usually called ‘contacts’.” (1935: 199)

7Guiart, in a passing comment in a later essay, which suggested that Islanders who converted to Christianity were attracted by its millenarian promises, argued that

“Melanesians and Polynesians discovered functionalism and structuralism for themselves through being confronted with the white man’s culture and society.” (1962: 123)

8Culture contact sparks acculturation when contacted people, with new ethnoanthropological insight, commit to social transformation and change.

9American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, contemplating “acculturation” in 1948, wondered at “the sudden interest, almost excitement, beginning about 1920-1925 and culminating perhaps in 1935-40, about a concept as wide, elusive, and protean as this.” (1963: 234)

10Acculturation, in those years, had subsumed earlier debates about cultural “diffusion.” Disciplinal acculturation excitement overtook anthropology’s earlier projects to map cultural evolution, and then to analyze the organic institutions and holistic structures that function to maintain enduring and fixed social organizations.

11Although the English word “acculturation” dates back to 1880, Google’s Ngram Viewer tracks the appearance and growing use of both acculturation and culture contact to 1920 when anthropologists tackled problems of describing changing, no longer “pristine,” societies. Felix Keesing dated American anthropology’s turn to acculturation a bit later, to 1936 (Keesing, 1939: xiii). Guiart maintained in Un siècle et demi’s Preface that the two terms were synonymous. This book was

“l’analyse d’une société en mouvement, au cours de plus d’un siècle et demi de contacts culturels”

or of

“‘acculturation’ pour employer le terme anglo-saxon.” (1956b: viii)

12Recognition of new necessities to investigate acculturated societies was prevalent enough that Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits (1936) published a “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation” in a 1936 issue of the American Anthropologist.

13In the 1930s, there was a parallel and growing ethnographic commitment to applied anthropology, to employing the results of field research and anthropological analyses to address economic and political challenges, notably including bothersome difficulties of colonial control and governance (Keesing, 1957: 2). With fewer uncontacted, “untouched” societies to describe, anthropologists instead turned to improving the lot of the already-contacted, ameliorating the trials and tribulations of acculturation and smoothing their assimilation into dominant social systems.

14The American turn to acculturation reflected research endeavors that focused on captive Native American communities largely confined on reservations. After 1918, French ethnographers also embraced issues of acculturation and likewise advocated applying anthropological knowledge to serve French colonial operations. In Africa, Michel Leiris and Georges Balandier, among others, took up “la situation coloniale” and increasingly obvious social transformations (Mary, 2019). The Centre d’études africaines was established in 1958 in large part to coordinate study of African societies

“no longer frozen in traditionalism, but inscribed in a history marked by contacts with Europe.” (Muel-Dreyfus, 1972: 670) (« non plus figées dans le traditionalisme, mais inscrites dans une histoire marquée par les contacts avec l’Europe. »)

15Max Gluckman, who founded Manchester University’s Dept of Social Anthropology in 1947, likewise directed ethnographic attention towards African issues of social change as did anthropologists based at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute, established in 1938.

16Earlier, Maurice Leenhardt, the great interwar anthropologist, during the 1937 Congrès des Sciences humaines, proposed that a center for South Pacific studies be established in Noumea (Leenhardt, 1949: 6). After wartime delays, the Office de la recherche scientifique d’outre-mer initiated the creation of an Institut français d’Océanie (ifo) and sent its envoy, entomologist Réne Catala, to Noumea to gauge local support for this. Catala negotiated the transfer of an American military hospital and its surrounding buildings at Anse Vata, and the French government created the Institut in August 1946, charging it to stimulate, promote, and execute scientific research throughout the French Pacific (Leenhardt, 1949: 7; Meunier, 2016).

Leenhardt himself took charge of the direction of the Institut:

“he had to definitively organize the Institute, prepare for the arrival of the first researchers, and direct them in the choice of their work.” (Leenhardt, 1949: 8) (« il devait organiser définitivement l’Institut, préparer la venue des premiers chercheurs, et les diriger dans le choix de leurs travaux. »)

17He included an anthropologist among these researchers. Entomologist Catala figured that Leenhardt had already collected sufficient data about Kanak societies, imagining that Leenhardt in 30 or 40 years of work had nearly completed, if not yet exhausted, this project.

“But ethnography would nonetheless get its own laboratory at ifo in that this was a discipline, Catala presumed, that would not cost very much.” (Meunier, 2016: 67)

18ifo’s ethnographic mission, Leenhardt wrote, would focus on acculturated Melanesian communities: to study carefully and with great attention autochthonous society both in its degeneration and its renewal. And, contra Catala, there was still much to learn, particularly about changing conditions: The situation was evolving so rapidly that ifo might in fact require employment of at least two qualified anthropologists (1949: 11). Study of degenerating or acculturating societies, moreover, would offer useful knowledge to government and to the settler community. Leenhardt’s earlier analyses of New Caledonia’s clans and chiefs, for instance, revealed dangers of local rebellion, especially after 14 colons were massacred, and reportedly some of these eaten. There were many important applied uses of ethnographic data:

“One understands that, if the ethnographer engages in the patient work of enumerating the clans and the relations among them, he is not engaged in theoretical work but only begins the start of a work whose social and scientific scope cannot yet be known.” (1949: 11) (« On comprendra que, si l’ethnologue se livre au travail patient du dénombrement des clans et des liens entre eux, il ne fait pas œuvre théorique, et commence seulement par le commencement une œuvre dont on ne peut savoir la portée et sociale et scientifique. »)

An initial report of ifo’s endeavors noted its applied interests:

“In all the disciplines represented, the activity primarily was oriented towards applied research; helping to develop our territories in Oceania.” (orsom, 1951: 226) (« Dans toutes les disciplines représentées, l’activité fut avant tout orientée vers la recherche appliquée : aider à la mise en valeur de nos territoires d’Océanie. »)

Guiart’s contacts

19Leenhardt’s initial ifo team included an entomologist, a phytopathologist, an oceanographer, a mycologist, and his recruited ethnographer. This was young Jean Guiart, then just 22 years old. Leenhardt had met Guiart at a Christian youth camp in 1941 and he continued to mentor him through his university studies (Trépied and Wittersheim, 2019: 262-263). Guiart, arriving in Noumea, joined ifo’s staff of natural scientists all of whom had set up laboratories within the former us hospital. This may have solidified his understanding of ethnography as an applied science, at least a social one, an appreciation shaped by his father’s and grandfather’s medical careers.

20Guiart in Noumea jumped into several research endeavors. Instructed by Leenhardt (1949: 11), he embarked on an inventory of New Caledonian and Loyalty Islands clans and chiefs. This promised to provide the Administration the tools to alleviate many difficulties (orsom, 1951: 230). In addition, a careful investigation of Kanak acculturation was most necessary in that the disintegration of indigenous culture was very advanced in New Caledonia (1951: 230). Guiart, probably facilitated by Leenhardt, soon established relations with Pierre Anthonioz, the French Resident Commissioner in the New Hebrides who in 1949 had recently assumed that posting (Trépied and Wittersheim, 2019: 278). Anthonioz brought Guiart to the New Hebrides in 1949 to investigate neo-pagan movements (“des mouvements néo-païens”) on Ambrym Island and their awakening nationalism (orsom, 1951: 230). Leenhardt termed these New Hebrides movements “dangerous effervescences” (“dangereuses effervescences”, 1949: 11).

21The Ambrym effervescence was an extension of Tanna’s John Frum movement, and Guiart that year also made a brief preliminary visit to Tanna where even more serious neo-pagan nationalism had erupted (Guiart, 2009: 15). On Tanna, Guiart made contacts that proved useful when he returned to the island in 1952, including Presbyterian missionary doctor William Armstrong who asked Guiart to keep his comments confidential as “he did not want to be obliged to start all over a new medical career in Australia” (Guiart, 2009: 15). Guiart also consulted Catholic missionary Pierre Massard, Native Medical Practitioner John Kalsakau, and several Island notables with their own views of John Frum. He submitted a report to Condominium authorities, “The Neo-Pagan ‘John Frum’ Movement on Tanna” (1949), which became the kernel of his 1956 monograph.

22Guiart briefly reported results of his investigation into what he called the neo-pagan disturbances on Ambrym in two publications (1950: 238; 1951d: 36-37), concluding that the agitations actually were not very serious (1950: 238). Here, and throughout his career, he combined his brief to investigate culture contact and social change with the standard anthropological project to describe traditional social and cultural structures. After a few paragraphs about John Frum on Ambrym, he turned to the unforeseen social and nutritional consequences of administrative orders to fence the island’s pig herds (1950), and also to the island’s grade-taking ceremonies and myths (1951d) which attracted more of his ethnographic attention than did scattered neo-pagan agitation. Of the latter, he reported several themes he subsequently would take up when he returned to Tanna: discarding money into the sea, nightly meetings summoned by bells, common access to women, the return of wartime Americans, and boycotting plantation work. These social and economic demands were naive efforts to rise to the level of Europeans that demonstrated a certain social malaise (1950: 238).

23Guiart’s American contacts deepened (in New Caledonia as well as on Ambrym and Tanna) when the post-war colonial powers established the South Pacific Commission (now the Pacific Community, spc), and situated this next to ifo’s offices in the former us hospital in Anse Vata. Like ifo, the spc’s mission was to assure the economic and social wellbeing of local populations in the South Pacific territories (Leenhardt, 1949: 12). The spc introduced Guiart to a new contact, to American anthropologist Felix Keesing (born in British Malaya, but educated in New Zealand and the us). us President Truman in 1948 appointed Keesing as the spc’s senior American Commissioner. Guiart met Keesing at the new spc offices in Noumea, enjoying an occasional chat with him (Guiart, 2012: 150). Keesing’s own main ethnographic interest was acculturation. He published his ma thesis as The Changing Maori (1928) and he continued to study culture contact and change throughout his career.

24Guiart found Keesing “simple and kind, and very conscientious” and he was one of the few scholars that Guiart acknowledged in one of his first accounts of the John Frum movement (1951b). In a footnote, Guiart thanked Keesing for making valuable suggestions:

“I must thank Professor F. M. Keesing, who read this paper in manuscript and made many valuable suggestions for improving my English. I would like to add here his own comment on my conclusion: ‘The factor of European race consciousness and superiority might perhaps be brought out more fully as driving the native back on himself and limiting opportunity. A dual education task exists, one facet native education, the other, education of Europeans to realize the seriousness of the by-products of their attitudes.” (1951b: 90, fn 25)

25In their conversations, Keesing mentioned his 1939 book The Menomini Indians of Wisconsin: A Study of Three Centuries of Cultural Contact and Change (Guiart, 2012: 150). Guiart would echo this subtitle in his John Frum monograph.

26Guiart, in 2012, recalled that, along with Keesing, Ian Hogbin was the leading student of culture contact in the Pacific: Keesing

“had specialized in culture contact across the South Pacific and, with Ian Hogbin, was the only Anglo-Saxon author who was then able to draw useful conclusions about a situation muddled more with value judgement than verified fact.” (2012: 150) (« [Keesing] s’était spécialisé dans le contact culturel à travers le Pacifique Sud et c’est avec Ian Hogbin le seul auteur anglo-saxon qui, à ce moment-là, parvenait à tirer quelque chose d’utile d’un dossier extraordinairement embrouillé, contenant plus de jugements de valeur que de faits vérifiés. »)

27Guiart, though, had less luck connecting with Hogbin. During a visit to Sydney University, he proposed to teach a course on Vanuatu and New Caledonian cultures but Hogbin opposed this, perhaps because his departmental rivals Harry Maude and Adolphus Elkin supported it (Guiart, 2012: 140). Guiart also suspected that while he had concluded that John Frum and other prophetic Melanesian movements were pre-nationalists (Guiart, 2012: 140), the anglo-saxon anthroplogists insisted that these outbreaks were instead merely irrational. Guiart failed to make contact with Hogbin given Sydney University politics but also because he knew that Hogbin was homosexual, and that frightened him a little as (he thought) he had not known any since his childhood (2012: 140). Although Hogbin likewise was primarily interested in changing island societies, as was Felix Keesing (2012: 140), he may have feared that Guiart had come to mostly to discuss revolutionary Kanaks (2012: 141).

Guiart’s sources

28Beyond personal connections with Keesing and Hogbin (if only passing with the latter), where did Guiart turn to explain the effervescences on Tanna (and their spillover on Ambrym)? In 1949 there were only scattered ethnographic descriptions of Melanesian social movements, F. E. William’s The Vailala Madness and the destruction of native ceremonies in the Gulf Division (1923) the most comprehensive of these. Guiart, in addition to collecting museum artifacts, also began ifo’s ethnographic library (Leenhardt, 1949: 11) and, in 1952, his neighbor spc librarian Ida Leeson compiled a Bibliography of cargo cults and other nativistic movements in the South Pacific. Guiart, though, in six articles about the John Frum movement, published between 1951 and 1956 which led up to Un siècle et demi, did not venture very far into the comparative literature. In early publications, Guiart only cited Williams (1923) and two Keesing (1941, 1945) books on social change in the Pacific.

29Guiart, in two papers, did pursue a debate with Cyril Belshaw who had been a British Solomon Islands colonial administrator during the war years. Belshaw, too, presented himself as a culture contact expert, publishing Changing Melanesia: Social Economics of Culture Change in 1954. This reported on social change in the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, as well as in the Solomon Islands. Belshaw (1950), earlier, also took on Melanesian “modern cults,” arguing that these mostly erupted in half-acculturated communities rather than among distant, inland people or those settled in coastal communities with long-term relations with missionaries and administrators. Guiart objected. As he instead had come to blame, mostly, meddlesome missionaries for John Frum enthusiasm, he questioned Belshaw’s conclusion (1951a). Melanesians, Guiart argued, join movements because of

“a lack of balance in the actual native society, the traditional frame having been undermined or destroyed, through the failure of administrative or missionary methods or simply through depopulation (Santo).” (1951a: 229; see 1951b: 89)

30Guiart, here, reverted to functionalist presumptions that social systems normally were in balance. Fully contacted Melanesians, thus, could be as cultic as the partially given particular aspects of that culture contact.

31Guiart, similarly, cited just a few published records about the John Frum movement itself. These included a few journalistic accounts (Rentoul, 1949; Barrow, 1951) and a longer report by Catholic missionary scholar Patrick O’Reilly (1949) who toured the New Hebrides in the late 1940s. (An English summary of O’Reilly’s report was published by Priday in 1950.) Rentoul, who served briefly as interim British District Agent on Tanna, suggested that the movement attracted people who were critical of the educational opportunities offered by the Presbyterian mission. He suggested that competition from (presumably) the Seventh-day Adventists had also unsettled the island. Barrow, also a British agent, similarly blamed difficulties of culture contact, notably failure of the copra market in the late 1930s which stimulated “feeling of frustration and inarticulate discontent” (1951: 382). Barrow may have read Guiart as he, too, concluded that the Tannese evinced a “lack of balance” (1951: 382), echoing Guiart’s conclusion that the common element in Melanesian social movements, including John Frum, was “a lack of balance in the actual native society” (1951a: 229). Acculturated societies lost the normal stability and equilibrium that earlier functionalist theory had presumed.

32O’Reilly, drawing on administrative archives and island sources, including Presbyterian missionary William Armstrong, presented a series of John Frum excitements from 1940 through 1947. He listed John’s prophesies: 1) Tanna would flatten and connect with neighboring Aneityum and Erromango islands; 2) everyone would become youthful and illness would disappear; 3) no one need work any longer as John would provide new money; and 4) European missionaries, traders, and administrators along with people from other islands should leave Tanna, people must discard their colonial currency, and revive island kastom —kava consumption, dance ceremony, and polygamy (1949: 194-195). Guiart, looking back some years later, was dubious. Who would want one’s island to overturn or to discard hard-earned money? O’Reilly, he suggested, had acquired his John Frum prophesies from gullible Catholic missionary priest Albert Sacco, then newly arrived on Tanna (2009: 76). John Frum, in fact, ordered an end to culture contact. European missionaries, traders, and administrators should leave. Islanders from elsewhere should also go home. Followers should no longer attend church and decamp from coastal mission villages. People must dump dollars and francs. John Frum also, like Guiart, figured that contacts culturels were at the bottom of things.

O’Reilly ended his account with a question:

“By what links are these rather revolutionary manifestations born in the heads of the Tannese?” (1949: 206) (« Par quels liens ces manifestations assez révolutionnaires se nouent-elles, dans le cerveau d’un man Tanna. »)

33He concluded that John Frum manifested a return to paganism and a revival of ancestral liberty by people tired of overly regimented mission lives (1949: 207), particularly (foreshadowing Belshaw) by those “haf haf” communities that had encountered Christianity without yet abandonning their pagan lifeways (1949: 207).

34Guiart’s subsequent ethnographic analysis of John Frum drew on these preliminary descriptions of the movement. His articles cite O’Reilly (1949) and also Rentoul (1949) but he failed to reference Jean Poirier (1949), a colleague researcher with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Poirier, in a jso article, reviewed John Frum along with the “Naked Movement” on Espiritu Santo (see Miller, 1948), concluding that these were indeed movements of liberation although a liberation more mythic than political:

“Actually, there is no real autonomist movement; there is rather an agitation born of war that follows ancient themes.” (1949: 102) (« À vrai dire, il n’y a pas de véritable mouvement autonomiste : il y a une agitation née de la guerre et servant des thèmes anciens. »)

35Poirier, as did Guiart, explained John Frum as motivated by culture contact (World War Two, in particular), but fundamentally shaped by Tanna’s culture.

36Guiart possibly ignored Poirier in that the latter tagged John Frum as a probable “culte du cargo” (1949: 99) —a cargo cult— as did Pierre Martin (1957) who drew on Guiart’s John Frum reports and the burgeoning literature about post-war Melanesian movements. A question in those years concerned the comparability of post-war Melanesian movements. Were these substantially related, with similar elements? Or was each sui generis and best understood in its own terms? And if they were essentially the same, what to call them? They were “movements,” to be sure, but of what sort? Keesing, before the war, already had written of “mythical religious movements” (1939: 245) among the Menomini; and then nativistic and “adjustment” movements in the Pacific (1953: 46).

37Poirier (1949), O’Reilly (1949: 207-208), Guiart (1951b), and many others presumed they could indeed lump post-war movements together as reflexes of some shared underlying causes. They disagreed, however, about what to label them. Poirer (1949) hedged “cargo cult” with a broader label: movements of mythical liberation O’Reilly (1949) labeled them “prophétisme.” Two us Army officers who investigated John Frum in October 1943 called the “native movement” the “Jonfrum uprising” (Carson and Patten, 1943: 1). Guiart was wary of the label “cargo cult” although he occasionally used the term in early publications (1951a; 1951c; 1952a). He mentions “cargo” only once in the Preface of Un siècle et demi: loss of land and other deprivations resulted in a widespread myth of an ancestral white ship that would bring mythical cargo and provoke Whites to depart (1956b: viii). But then cargo was just one mythic theme that did not fully capture John Frum’s main essence.

38The term cargo cult, in print at least, was brand new. It first appeared in a letter published in the November 1945 issue of Pacific Islands Monthly (Lindstrom, 1993: 15). Norman Bird, a disgruntled Australian settler, wrote to that journal complaining of dangerous native outbreaks in Papua New Guinea. The term quickly spread into Australian popular and anthropological circles and gradually beyond. Australia-based anthropologists popularized the label, along with German missionary anthropologists Georg Höltker (1946) and Emil F. Hanneman, based in Papua New Guinea, who borrowed “cargo cult” soon after it first appeared in 1945.

39Hogbin (1958: 212-215) in Australia and Peter Worsley in Britain (1957: 227-228) did not hesitate to lump John Frum in with other Melanesian cargo cults. Guiart, however, was hesitant. Americans Margaret Mead (1956) and Robert Maher (1961) likewise used the “cargo cult” label sparingly in their descriptions of the Paliau and the Tommy Kabu movements. Guiart argued that cargo cults were a less common although related sort of Melanesian movement:

“Incidentally, the study of ‘Cargo Cults’ should not be separated from the study of the more typical nationalist movement. They both have a common base.” (1951b: 229, fn. 8)

40Years later, he would argue that cargo cult was “un faux nom” for Melanesian prophetic movements, and that anthropologists should never have accepted this label so uncritically (2012: 66; see 2009:112). The term, alas, was “an unhappy choice” (2009: 68). Guiart wasn’t much happier, either, with “movement” (2009: 79). He was never, however, displeased with “culture contact” —using that analytic metaphor throughout his life (e.g., Guiart, 1993: 105).

41If not a cargo cult, what then was John Frum? Guiart preferred “neo-pagan movement” or “proto-nationalist movement.” The first signaled his conclusion that John Frum supporters revived traditional religion as they escaped Presbyterian mission stringencies; the second reflected his conclusion that John Frum was anti-colonial, at least incipiently. He came to these conclusions quickly during his first exploration of the movement, titling his 1949 unpublished report “The Neo-Pagan ‘John Frum’ Movement on Tanna.” And, in this, he foresaw that

“it remains to anticipate the growth of a political struggle on the European model.” (1949: 8)

John Frum diagnosis

42Given his family’s history in the medical arts, Guiart might well have appreciated the practice of applied anthropology in that its challenge was first to diagnose some condition or disorder and then to suggest a remedy. He approached John Frum as a clinician but also as an ethnographer. As one notes in his earlier reports about John Frum activity on Ambrym, he combined analysis of culture contact with prevailing ethnographic concern to document traditional social systems. Guiart recognized that this ethnographic fusion of social structure and change might confuse. His mix of history with ethnography could

“give the regrettable impression of a scattered presentation. Our attempt is quite new in ethnographic writing and we cannot hope to give complete satisfaction to our readers.” (1956b: ix) (« donner à notre exposé un aspect d’éparpillement que l’on pourra trouver regrettable. Notre tentative est assez neuve dans la littérature ethnologique et nous ne pouvons espérer donner satisfaction complète à nos lectures. »)

43Guiart’s aim, however, was not to describe Tanna as captured or frozen in time, but to follow the island’s history of contact seeking the causes of John Frum (1956b: 258; see Ballard, Rallu this issue, for Guiart’s focus on island history elsewhere). The structure of Un siècle et demi evinces this doubled interest. The first section of the book, “Sociologie traditionnelle,” documents Tanna’s pre-contact social structure and culture, while the second, “Un siècle et demi d’évolution,” tracks culture contact on the island leading up to John Frum. Guiart —a good ethnographer— attributed the movement’s causes to acculturation, but explained the substance and style of the movement as determined by the island’s enduring traditions.

44O’Reilly regretted that no observer of the John Frum movement, except missionary Armstrong, could speak island languages or had lived among the Tannese earning their confidence:

“None has actually lived among the Islanders. None knew their language. None had ever won their confidence other than in administrative dealings.” (1949: 206)

45Then came Guiart who wandered around Tanna for six months in 1952. During these months, he honed the “social inventory” method he had developed earlier in New Caledonia where he tackled counting up the population and compiling lists of chiefs and clans (see Tebani, Adams, Ballard, this issue). Never staying long in one place, Guiart hiked along island roads and paths, visiting every hamlet and village he could locate, numerating residents, and quizzing people about their chiefly titles and magical and other traditional rights (2009: 7). He published the results as “Inventaire sociologique de Tanna,” an appendix in the monograph, along with excellent maps of the island’s villages and kava-drinking grounds and the system of traditional roads that connected these.

46Guiart believed, it seems, that he had indeed achieved the local confidence that O’Reilly called for (1956b: 8). He shared kava with island men although worried about its effects on his health; he commanded women to attend his group interviews (which functioned, it seems, like today’s “focus groups”) “so as to ensure a greater amount of credibility” (2009: 8, 11); he spoke some Bislama. Guiart, years later, published a revised English translation of his sociological inventory with much comment on anthropologists who had followed him to Tanna. In this, he recalled that his field method partly involved

“Just listening to the people and letting them do as they wished, deciding where I should go next and who would come with me. I was systematically making use of the wide curiosity about myself and my queer ways, inside Tanna drinking kava in the evening, sleeping everywhere in the open, on the yimwayim (local houses are usually crammed full, and I would not have been able to find a niche for myself), eating anything which came my way and which they were kind enough to offer (never eating, on my own, food I wouldn’t share with others).” (2009: 13; see Adams, 1987: 8).

47If Guiart by these means achieved some degree of confidence among the Tannese, he did not altogether trust their declarations in that “when alone, men will more easily bring their at times torrid imagination into play” (2009: 8; see Saura, this issue). Guiart rightly noted the effects of copyrighted knowledge on Tanna that influenced and sometimes limited what people might be able to reveal to inquiring anthropologists.

48Guiart drew on this field research, along with colonial records, to diagnosis the causes of John Frum, and then to suggest an administrative program to suppress the movement —one that would succeed better than the arrests and exiles that the Condominium had previously employed. Guiart summarized the culture contacts he had identified on Tanna (1956a), listing a long series of these: incursive and severe Christian missionaries, traders, colonial agents, instigation of cash copra production, interference in island land tenure, repression of island cultural practices, and World War Two and the arrival of the American military. All this contact with “White Man’s culture” made Tanna “one of the most interesting chapters of the history of culture contact in Melanesia” (1956a: 105). Of all these contacts, Guiart concluded that missionary and to some degree administrative interference, and the resulting island demand for autonomy and self-determination, were the key drivers of the John Frum movement.

49Guiart’s initial investigation on Tanna had concluded that “the Presbyterian Mission is mainly responsible for this state of affairs” (1949: 6), and he repeated this assertion in an expanded version of the report published in 1952 (1952: 172). Missionization and other culture contact unsettled and unbalanced traditional island society. People were “uprooted”; Christian leaders lacked authority; and the new social framework was “an artificial edifice” (1952: 172). Culture contact

“was not made without shocks, most often unsuspected and in time the reactions of the native society brought these to the surface in an unforeseen explosion.” (1952: 165)

50The Presbyterian mission, in turn, acquired copies of Guiart’s report and vigorously deflected the blame. Charles McLeod, from the east Tanna’s Iarkey mission station, denounced Guiart’s “libelous attack” (1952). When I interviewed McLeod in September 1979 he was still upset about Guiart’s hostility to the mission, and the cup of tea he had offered Guiart at some encounter. McLeod argued instead that the arrival of Seventh-day Adventist and Catholic missionaries had unsettled island society, and noted rightly that the Presbyterians had promoted education from the earliest days of the mission. McLeod’s response also included witness statements from faithful Presbyterians that matched and countered the John Frum testimonials that Guiart had attached to his reports.

51Guiart’s thesis —culture contact causes social breakdown that then sparks a social movement— paralleled American anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace’s (1956) contemporary model of “revitalization movements.” Wallace’s model of cultural revitalization, which noted the Vailala Madness and cited Keesing but not Guiart and John Frum, proposed that people under stress turn to new ideas, often prophetic, to satisfy new emotional and physical needs and thus transform their cultural systems. Wallace, who had also analyzed historically a culture contact movement, the early 19th century Handsome Lake movement among the Seneca (1969), thus incorporated personal decisions and physical and emotional needs as social change motivators. Like Guiart, he highlighted the importance of local structures in shaping social transformation. Wallace called this a “mazeway,” or “nature, society, culture, personality, and body image as seen by one person” (1956: 266), while Guiart generally preferred “myth” —the “more exalted part of the oral tradition” (Guiart, 2009: 34). Other anthropologists of that day might just have said “culture.”

52Following Guiart, insofar as every Melanesian movement followed its own myth, anthropology’s generic labels like “cargo cult” only blurred essential differences. O’Reilly concluded that Tanna’s “return to paganism” was a spontaneous indigenous movement (un mouvement indigène spontané)” (1949: 207) rather than one much stirred by outside agitators, but also one with an added grain of insanity (1949: 208). Guiart’s John Frum diagnosis bent more towards essential island culture than madness (Lindstrom, 1993: 109). Years later, he asserted the “perfect rationality of movements that were called cargo cults to denigrate them” (2003: 331; see 2009: 81, 84). And that

“We had established at the time that the seemingly irrational aspects […] constituted a symbolic language understood by all, except Whites, which made it possible to convey implicit mesasges protecting secrets from outsiders.” (2003: 333; see 2009: 68) (« nous avions à l’époque établi que les aspects irrationnels en apparence […] constituaient un langage symbolique compris de tous, sauf des blancs, et permettaient de faire passer des messages qui n’avaient pas à être entièrement explicites, ce qui protégeait leur secret vis-à-vis de l’extérieur. »)

53John Frum, Guiart concluded, was at once a novelty and an avatar of old mountain spirit Karapenumun (Karaperamun): “John Frum, alias Karaperamun, is always the god of Mount Tukosmoru, which will shelter the planes, then the soldiers,” and “the content of the myth itself determines the form of certain actions” (Guiart, 1952: 173; cf. 2003: 315; Poirier, 1949: 102; Martin, 1957). Culture contact gave birth to John Frum but one must delve deep into island culture to comprehend the specific and distinctive course of movement belief and action. “The message of John Frum provided for decisions, acts which were already in the minds of people and for which some had shown the way. The myth here gave an opportunity for the crystallization of long pent feelings, and as far as can be seen, helped towards a positive, if very partial solution” (Guiart, 1956a: 116). Traditional culture, reembodied as John Frum, resolved the distress and miseries of culture contacts. Un siècle et demi ends even more fervidly:

“It is in John Frum myth and its successive variants that we find the answer, the definitive solution for escaping a state of subjugation that became unbearable […] Finding itself at an impasse, indigenous society reacted in a means of its own, found within its own internal structure” (1956b: 257) (« C’est par l’intermédiaire du mythe de John Frum et de ses variantes successives que l’on s’essaye à chercher une voie de sortie, une solution définitive pour échapper à un état de sujétion devenu insupportable […]. Se trouvant dans une impasse, la société indigène réagit par des moyens qui lui sont propres, trouvés à l’intérieur de sa structure même. »)

54Within Guiart’s synoptic history of culture contact, one misses much discussion of specific people making new choices. Change follows when those who endure culture contact modify both their behavior (coerced or otherwise) and innovate and circulate new stories, concepts, and explanations. Why did some convert to Christianity? Why stop drinking kava? Why abandon one’s home ground and move to new Christian villages? Why walk miles to commune with an unknown spirit, John Frum? Why skip Sunday services and dance for John Frum every Friday night?

55Although Guiart conducted ethnographic research on Tanna during only a few months, he was quick to identify the disruptive effects of external forces on island life. He may have bided his time for a month or two until he figured what questions to ask; he may have been wary of people’s initial responses; he may have took care to compare one answer with others; he did draw on interviews with several informants including John Kalsakau, William Armstrong, sda member and Assessor James Ianhaiu (Yehnayeu), and perhaps Lomhani at White Sands, among others, and he included a few testimonials as appendices in Un siècle et demi. His peripatetic field method, however, prevented the sort of deeper, extensive conversations that a more settled ethnographer might have enjoyed. Time constraints, Guiart claimed, justified his method. Since he only had six months on Tanna,

“It was necessary to substitute deeper analysis of particular facts with the collection of comprehensive information permitting cross-checking and verification.” (1956b: 8) (« il fallait remplacer la profondeur de l’analyse implicite dans chaque information, par une quantité telle que les recoupements et les vérifications puissent se faire d’eux-mêmes. »)

56“I never obtained so much material in so short of time,” Guiart recalled. “I never took with me more than I could carry myself in a rucksack […] I would not take the risk of being caught anywhere unable to move on” (2012: 14). Once he had started to move along, he “could not stop” (2012: 14). Guiart practiced “multi-sited ethnography” avant la lettre (Adams, 1987: 8). His extensive island survey (and resultant sociological inventory) informed his analysis of John Frum as a consequence of culture contact, but this larger picture omitted a more detailed examination of the personal drivers of social change.

John Frum therapy

57Having diagnosed the causes of the John Frum movement, Guiart put on his applied anthropological hat. What, then, should be done about it? He prescribed even more culture contact, albeit of a different kind. “The future of islanders,” Guiart advised, “obviously lies in co-operation with the white man” (1951b: 99). The main intervention he proposed was better education, repeating anthropology’s favorite antidote to Melanesian movements and outbreaks, from the Vailala Madness onwards (Lindstrom, 1993: 45). F.E. Williams (1923) had previously recommended some revival of native ceremony along with “ethical teaching” to counter the Madness. Guiart echoed O’Reilly’s earlier recommendation that the best treatment would be more education, combined with political and economic development (O’Reilly, 1949: 209). Guiart’s initial John Frum report concluded with prescribing “sufficiently comprehensive educational facilities [that] would make individuals less receptive to irrational contagious collective action” and, alongside this, “the granting on the local plane of a certain administrative autonomy” (1949: 9): new island-wide governmental councils, perhaps. “The best antidote seems to be a democratization of the native community life” (1952: 175). He prescribed similar administrative treatment of the Malekula Native Company, a “marginal” cargo cult, or rather an islander-organized cooperative society that Guiart (1951c: 247) presumed to have both rationale and irrational components (see Rallu this issue).

58Presbyterian missionaries, even earlier, had recommended the same treatment. H.M. (Jock) Bell, reporting from Iarkey mission station in 1941, blamed John Frum on “idle hands and minds” and, like Williams among the Vailala, concluded that something must be devised to take the place of “unequivocally evil” although entertaining dancing: “More games must be taught and encouraged, schools made more adequate to teach English, arithmetic, handcrafts, agriculture, etc.” (Bell, 1941: 11).

59Guiart claimed credit for one counter-cult initiative. He himself was a culture contact on Tanna. He convinced the Condominium to release most of the John Frum leaders and activists who had been imprisoned or exiled from the island, including Nagat.

• 3 The more tolerant and newly appointed British Resident Commission John Shaw Rennie, who arrived in (...)

“I had negotiated with the Condominium government to obtain his release after his conviction for violating public order, as well as that of all the leaders of the movement who had been imprisoned and exiled since 1941.” (Guiart, 2003: 323; see Guiart, 2009: 76, 80, 112)3(« J’avais négocié avec le gouvernement condominial et obtenu sa libération, après sa condamnation pour atteinte à l’ordre public, ainsi que celle de tous les dirigeants du mouvement emprisonnés et exilés depuis 1941. »)

60Guiart recalled that all had returned to Tanna by the end of 1953, but some including Sulpher Bay’s William Nakomaha and Thomas Nampas were only finally released three years later. Authorities, since, only occasionally have arrested John Frum partisans (as during the island’s short-lived rebellion at independence), or have repressed movement outbreaks (burning down the headquarters village of Prophet Fred Nase in 2003). Better education, autonomy, and governmental tolerance, however, have yet to cure John Frum.

Guiart the prophet

61John Frum prophesized the elimination of culture contact on Tanna and the recovery of island autonomy. Jean Guiart foresaw even more culture contact with improved educational and new administrative systems. But would better acculturation defuse John Frum and other Melanesian movements? Guiart wasn’t sure but he anticipated several possible futures for John Frum:

“Will it follow an evolution along these lines? Or will it be replaced by an apparently less irrational theme? Unfortunately, we are unable to predict.” (1956b: 258) (« Suivra-t-il une évolution propre dans son cadre ? Ou sera-t-il remplacé par un thème d’apparence moins irrationnelle ? Nous ne pouvons malheureusement le prévoir. »)

Guiart hoped that a renewed island culture, with better culture contact, might cure the disorder with some improved “myth”:

“One must hope that elements would be put in place that permit the renewal of the myth or even its abandonment for a new, more satisfying synthesis that would be less « reactionary » in the true sense of that word.” (1956b: 259) (« Il faut espérer qu’on se décidera à mettre en place les éléments qui permettraient de renouveler ce mythe et même de provoquer son abandon pour une nouvelle synthèse plus satisfaisante, moins ‘réactionnaire’ au sens propre du mot. »)

62Guiart predicted that John Frum, no matter the movement’s future direction, would continue to transform the island’s social systems: “It has created with the passing of time more and more organized and efficient structures. For the present, I cannot see any reason why this evolution should stop” (1951a: 229). In the worst case, the movement would indeed become fully nationalistic and rebellious, perhaps uniting with Santo’s so-called Naked Cult and Malakula’s Malnatco. Should better culture contact not eventuate, “The alternative is a new movement, more political and more effective, which would unite John Frum in the south with the Naked Cult” (1949: 9). Years later, Guiart acknowledged the twilight of Melanesian movements, but he predicted that these might well erupt again:

“Prophetic movements have in a way won the day and, being recognized for what they were—an attempt to gain independence of thought and of action for each island nation—are fading away too. They will come back if and when they are needed anew.” (1993: 105)

63Guiart, in Un siècle et demi, professed some surprise that John Frum was still in business—then in its 16th year of official recognition (1956b: ix). Much later, in 2009, he may have remained surprised as he concluded his English republication of Tanna’s social inventory. Or perhaps not, since he argued that the island’s culture had converted into John Frum myth:

“The John Frum business can be looked at, not as being the birth of a ‘movement,’ but as the coming out in the clear of what white men never thought had any reality: the existence of Tannese public opinion. In that way, John Frum is Tanna.” (2009: 77)

64John Frum is just a public means of expressing “what people deeply thought” (2009: 113). Although, looking back, he also admitted that “in conclusion we may say that the Tannese society does not allow easy generalisations” (2012: 113).

65Guiart’s own ethnographic mythos, like John Frum, has endured. When he revisited Un siècle et demi in 2009, he defended his ethnographic practice. Guiart outlived the series of theoretical fashions in anthropology from the 1940s onwards, starting with structural-functionalism, then acculturation, structuralism, structural Marxism, cultural ecology, feminist anthropology, post-structuralism, ontology, and more. He re-introduced Tanna’s social inventory affirming his lifelong commitment to social fact collection. Guiart may not have been entirely anti-theoretical but he insisted that generalization and explanatory schemes must follow fact collection, and then comparison of fact: “No fact in our science is ever a clear cut instance […] They must first be analysed as such in all their internal interactions and their outside links, without which they have no existence whatsoever” (2009: 6). The scientific method demands working “from the data to the proof giving mechanism” (2009: 93). Only this empiricist approach “could bring new light on the inner workings of changing Melanesian societies and cultures” (2009: 10; see also 61, 105-106). Guiart’s historical and inventoried facts —what we make of them— survive him.