Why Build a Runway With No Aircraft? Movements That Explain a New World

The movements arose in Melanesia from the late nineteenth century and most prominently during and after the Second World War, when islands were occupied by armies whose supply operations delivered manufactured goods in quantities nobody had seen. Groups constructed landing strips, control towers, wharves and equipment resembling what they had observed, performed drill and ritual modelled on what the newcomers did, and in several cases destroyed existing gardens and possessions in expectation of replacement. The movements typically had a prophet, a set of predictions with dates, and an explanation for the goods that connected them to ancestors. They were numerous, varied considerably between islands, and several persisted for decades in modified forms.

The behaviour makes sense once the available evidence is considered from the participants' position:

• •Manufactured goods arrived without anyone visibly making them, which invited an explanation
• •The newcomers did not produce the goods either, but performed activities that preceded their arrival
• •Existing local frameworks explained wealth as coming from ancestors and from correct ritual
• •The reasoning was therefore that the newcomers had obtained access to something and had not shared it
• •Reproducing the observed procedures was a reasonable test of that hypothesis
• •Much of the activity was also a claim to equality rather than a literal expectation of cargo

Anthropological work has consistently found that these movements were substantially political, which the popular account of them omits. They occurred under colonial administration in which the participants were subordinate, poorly paid and excluded from the sources of manufactured wealth, and the movements asserted that the arrangement was illegitimate and would be reversed. Several involved refusing to work for the administration, withdrawing from the colonial economy or establishing independent organisation, and colonial authorities treated them as a security problem and suppressed several by force. Some developed into political parties and independence movements. Reading them as naive misunderstandings of technology misses that the participants understood their position perfectly well and were acting on it.

Movements of this shape appear wherever a society is disrupted by an overwhelming outside power, and setting the Melanesian cases among them removes their apparent strangeness. Revitalisation movements, as anthropologists call them, typically feature a prophet reporting a revelation, a programme combining new elements with restored traditional ones, a prediction of imminent transformation and instructions about what adherents must do or stop doing. The ghost dance among Plains peoples in the 1890s, several movements in colonial Africa, and millenarian episodes in European history all follow the pattern. What they share is arising among people whose existing explanations have stopped accounting for their circumstances, and assembling a new account from whatever materials are to hand, which is a general response rather than a local peculiarity.

The term entered wider use after a 1974 lecture by the physicist Richard Feynman, who used it to describe research that reproduces the outward form of scientific procedure without the substance, and the phrase has since been applied to management practices, software engineering and much else. The metaphor is vivid and it carries a claim about the original that is largely wrong, since it depends on the participants having been simply confused about cause and effect. Anthropologists have argued for decades that the category itself is unhelpful, grouping diverse movements under a label coined by outsiders and defined by what struck those outsiders as absurd. Using it as a metaphor is not thereby forbidden, and knowing what it obscures is worth having.

Groups built runways, wharves and equipment from local materials after observing wartime supply operations deliver goods nobody was seen making. Their reasoning was that the newcomers had access to a source and were withholding it, which is a fair inference from the available evidence. The movements were substantially political assertions against colonial arrangements, which the popular metaphor omits.