ANU Press Chapter Title: 'The last few weeks have been strange and exciting' Book Title: Like Fire Book Subtitle: The Paliau Movement and Millenarianism in Melanesia Book Author(s): THEODORE SCHWARTZ and MICHAEL FRENCH SMITH Published by: ANU Press (original) (raw)

The full text of LIKE FIRE: THE PALIAU MOVEMENT AND MILLENARIANISM IN MELANESIA is available at no charge from the ANU Press website. From pre-publication reviews: ‘Like Fire consummates remarkable longitudinal ethnographic research on the Paliau Movement in Papua New Guinea, pursued from the 1950s into the 1990s by Theodore Schwartz, with Michael French Smith as his sometime assistant, and updated by Smith in 2015. The theoretical arguments are highly provocative and the book is well written and fascinating throughout. Like Fire poses important questions about the driving forces and contours of Pacific Island history and the place in it of cargo cults and other millenarian movements.’ —Aletta Biersack, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon ‘Like Fire synthesises old, but inaccessible, and new material on an important and long-lasting indigenous Melanesian movement, while making extensive use of the wider literature on cargo cults and millenarianism. I find the theorising in this book both very original and an important contribution to the debates on Melanesian religion, cargo cults, and millenarianism more generally. As the authors state, the topic of millenarianism has great relevance because of its ubiquity in the contemporary world.’ —Ton Otto, Professor of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark, and James Cook University, Australia