Paliau Maloat

Paliau Maloat, a man of Baluan in the Admiralties, is the pivotal figure of continuing Manus religious history. Returning to the islands after the upheavals of the Second World War, he preached a comprehensive reform that fused Christian teaching with indigenous ideas and reorganised village society; a more ecstatic millenarian current, remembered as 'the Noise', ran alongside it. His movement condemned the propitiation of the household ghosts, and under it the ancestral skulls were cast aside and the seances abandoned, so that within a generation the religion Fortune had documented was largely dismantled. In popular memory Paliau himself acquired a mythologised, quasi-messianic aura, and later observers noted expectations of his return. Sources differ on how far his own teaching encouraged the cult that grew around him.

Domains

• prophecy and reform
• religious authority

Powers

• founded a new religious and social movement among the Manus
• ordered the abandonment of the ancestral skulls and the ghost cult

Epithets

• Paliau — the prophet of BaluanTheodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands (1962) (secondary)

Relations

• enemy: Sir GhostPaliau's reform set itself expressly against the guardian-ghost cult, which it abolished.Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old (1956); Theodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands (1962) (secondary)

Sources

• Paliau Maloat of Baluan led a postwar religious and social reform movement among the Manus that displaced the old ancestral ghost cult, and around whom a mythologised, quasi-messianic reputation gathered.: Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation - Manus, 1928-1953 (1956) (secondary); Theodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946-1954 (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 49, 1962) (secondary)