Reassessing Revitalization Movements

Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands

Michael E. Harkin

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780803224063
• eBook ISBN: 9780803203884
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The escalating political, economic, and cultural colonization of indigenous peoples over the past few centuries has spawned a multitude of revitalization movements. These movements promise liberation from domination by outsiders and incorporate and rework elements of traditional culture. Reassessing Revitalization Movements is the first book to discuss and compare in detail the origins, structure, and development of religious and political revitalization movements in North America and the Pacific Islands (known as Oceania). The essays cover the twentieth-century Cargo Cults of the South Pacific, the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements in western North America, the Tuka Movement on Fiji in 1885, as well as the revitalistic aspects of contemporary social movements in North American and Oceania.

Reassessing Revitalization Movements takes Anthony F. C. Wallace's concept of revitalization movements and examines the applicability of the model to a variety of religious and anticolonial movements in North America and the Pacific Islands. This extension of the revitalization movement model beyond its traditional territory in Native anthropology enriches our understanding of movements outside of North America and offers a holistic view of them that embraces phenomena ranging from the psychic to the ecological. This cross-cultural approach provides the most stimulating and broadly applicable treatment of the topic in decades.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Indian revolts and cargo cults
• Chapter 2 Visions of revitalization in the eastern woodlands
• Chapter 3 Priests and prophets
• Chapter 4 The Wasitay religion
• Chapter 5 Revitalization in wartime Micronesia
• Chapter 6 Revitalization as catharsis
• Chapter 7The evolution of revitalization movements among the Yangoru Boiken, Papua New Guinea
• Chapter 8 Recontextualizing revitalization
• Chapter 9 New life for whom?
• Chapter 10 Ogitchida at Waswaaganing
• Chapter 11 Expressions of identity in Tahiti
• Chapter 12 “Canny about conflict”
• References Cited
• Contributors
• Index