Yali movement and Yali cults

Record summary

Yali, a prominent Papua New Guinean leader and former wartime figure, became associated with postwar religious and political expectations concerning ancestral power, equality and the removal of colonial domination. Reports sometimes describe local practices as a ‘cult,’ while later scholarship treats the phenomenon as a shifting combination of prophetic religion, political mobilization and indigenous modernity. It offers a useful comparison for accounts in which returning ancestors, powerful outsiders and a coming transformed age are fused. The chronology and geographical extent of specifically ‘Yali cults’ require careful source-by-source checking.