The Trumpet Shall Sound

Record summary

Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia, published in 1957, is a major comparative study of prophetic, millenarian and anticolonial movements. It is not an incident report, but a documentary lead for tracing how postwar Melanesian movements were interpreted as responses to colonial inequality, Christianity, labor migration and rapid material change. The book can help identify named cases and older sources, while also exposing the history of the ‘cargo cult’ category itself. Later scholarship disputes some of its broad generalizations and theoretical framing.