Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea (Lawrence)

Peter Lawrence's anthropological study of cargo movements in the Madang district of what is now Papua New Guinea, published by Manchester University Press in 1964, based on extended fieldwork among the Rai Coast peoples. It gives the fullest scholarly account of Yali Singina, a Second World War veteran and government-recognized local leader whose movement was widely read, and in some accounts encouraged for political effect, as a cargo prophecy, though Yali himself repeatedly denied preaching that the ancestors would return with wealth and instead framed his message as reform of custom and community organization. Lawrence traces how a movement can be simultaneously understood by different audiences as political leadership and as prophetic cargo belief. Its strength is Lawrence's decades of direct fieldwork among the movement's own participants. Its limit is a study of one regional cluster of movements rather than a comparative survey of Melanesian cargo phenomena generally.