Cargo cults and discursive madness

Understood as mimetic portrayals of the image of unlimited good projected b y European colonial culture, Melanesian 'cargo cults' are therefore viewed as 'irrational' within indigenous understandings. Consequently, Western ant hropological discourse has sought to functionally normalize and nativize 'c argo cult' behaviors at the expense of denying their nonrational character. The result has been a lexical and semantic uncertainty and explanatory ins tability in 'cargo cult' discourse that can be analyzed as a type of discur sive 'madness.' A strategy of reading the 'madness' of 'cargo cult' discour se is outlined and applied to key anthropological texts. in particular Pete r Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound.