A Brief Comment on Difference and Rationality

In the fall of 1999, 1 taught an undergraduate seminar entitled 'Contemporary Millenarian Movements.' Although social movements are not my specialty, I did know something about cargo cults, and I wanted to capitalize on the opportunity to offer such a course on the eve of the millennium. Ten students enrolled, and we had a wonderful experience. The class began with some general historical information, theoretical issues, basic definitions and concepts; then we examined a vast array of relatively contemporary millenarian movements, including Heaven's Gate, Branch Davidians, Christian Identity, B'nai Noah, Aum Shrinrikyo, survivalists, Y2K and fears of the New World Order, and environmental apocalypticism. We read Burridge's Mambu (1995 edition, originally published in 1960) as just another example in this long list of possible 'End Time' scenarios. One of the volumes we used early in the course (Tabor and Gallagher 1995) had a frontispiece with a quote from Tom Wolfe's In Our Time that asserted 'a cult is just a religion without power,' and after considerable discussion, the students agreed that we would ban the word 'cult' from our discourse. I was the only one who slipped and needed to be corrected, and then only in the context of Burridge's monograph. No one else had difficulty in conceptualizing these Melanesian phenomena as just another example of a potential new religion.1 My habit of saying 'cargo cult' was a deep one that had been with me for about twentyfive years, so it was difficult to change. What I want to argue here is simply that there was more to my persistent use of 'cult' than embedded routine. As I thought about the word and its usage, I began to understand that its continuing unquestioned prominence in the anthropological discourse on cargo cults, unlike some other disciplines that have begun to question its applicability to similar phenomena elsewhere,2 reveals as much about anthropology as it does the cargo cultists: a near-obsession with difference and rationality, both integral to Western culture as a whole but especially prominent in our discipline.3 1 want to begin by exploring difference here in some detail, but I do so primarily as an avenue into considerations of rationality, where I will end. Thus, my comments do not serve as a specific commentary on the papers here, but rather they continue what Dalton's able Introduction identifies as the nature of the original panel discussion, i.e. they are meant to be a contribution to a more philosophical discussion, 'more of an intellectual journey than a scientific marker' (this volume p. 286). The application of the word 'cult' to particular human behaviors and beliefs at this time necessarily implies negativity, otherness, and difference. In one way or another, difference has always been at the heart of anthropology. Its beginnings were attempts to explain or understand what we conveniently today gloss as the 'other,' and this has, almost by definition, remained at the core of the discipline. Many have argued that anthropology is really all about comparing ourselves with others, and that this comparison is necessarily at the heart of what we do: 'in fact, if we remember the history of our discipline, it is in the end about the relationship between the West and the Rest' (Fabian 1983:28). To define anthropology as an attempt by Western scholars and intellectuals to apprehend the differences between themselves and others may seem unnecessarily cynical, but it is not far from the mark when we