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legend
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Machines
fly over rainforest gardens and churn past canoes hunting dolphin
at sea, but their mysterious energy remains a wonder to villagers.
For those who construct the fabric of their own existence
by hand with the help of ancestors, factories and production lines
are unimaginable, and industrial wealth such as wristwatches, tools,
shoes, sunglasses, canned food, and motor vehicles, are credited
to alien gods. Perhaps a missionary will reveal rituals to open
the secret source, or maybe a European school master will teach
the children the correct ceremony.
Meanwhile,
odd objects, part of the "cargo" or goods of the industrial
world,
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are
carried lovingly home by youth who have ventured out to labor on
plantations as a kind of coming of age experience before marriage.
Cargo also continues to wash up on the tides. When anyone finds
a piece of cargo, whether a child playing by the sea or a woman
diving in the mangroves for oysters, they bring it to the sacred
grove. Here, they add the cargo piece to a growing collection set
on top of a platform of coral rocks along side the rack of ancestor
skulls.
Villagers imbue these bits of the machine world with the strength they wish to appropriate into their own world of nature and ancestors. Ancestor spirits, the living dead who surround daily life, must help facilitate |
success in everything from fertility and productivity, to fishing
and winning fights. In the grove, those women with the knowledge
of incantations and naming assemble power objects. They give the
cargo "stranger" eyes to see shadows, invoking an ancestor
spirit to enter. Once inside, the ancestor interacts with machine
forces inherent in the newly consecrated creature.
In
these masks, power staffs, and idols, the ancestors meld with machine
gods. So it is that people closer to nature than ourselves chose
to marry and house their ancestors with the cargo gods from "civilization",
their word for the modern world.
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Direct
e-mail to| smeltzoff@rsmas.miami.edu
|for more information.
current
section : legend
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