Word: socialize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Nothing but Couscous. Confronted by people with medieval habits who refuse to use modern laundries or eat anything but pasty couscous, and who sometimes riot when social workers try to bathe their children, the French army's Sections Administratives Specialises officers have done surprisingly well in some spots with the 700,000 regrouped Moslems in their care. Thirty miles south of Algiers the S.A.S. have built from scratch the Village du Sahel. It has modern schools, electricity and running water, army-built stone-and-plaster houses and shops. Its men have found work locally as agricultural laborers or herdsmen...
...proposal, as leaked from the office of Finance Minister Rufo Lopez Fresquet, was so zany that the Cuban press thought somebody was pulling its leg: anyone mentioned in the Cuban social register or newspaper society pages would have to pay a tax for the honor. The bite would be $1 per mention, plus $1 for each flattering adjective. Titles of nobility would be taxed $100, and photographs $10 per column inch. For collecting the tax, the newspapers would be allowed to keep 25% of the take. Going along with the gag, Prensa Libre used up seven adjectives in describing Minister...
...Lopez Fresquet turned up at his office and ended the joke. "I'm dead serious about this tax," he said. The law will discourage "conspicuous consumption" and besides, might net $5,000,000 a year. Cuban society editors, who have always collected an under-the-table fee for social puffs, will lose a profitable racket...
Australian patrols venturing into the central highlands of New Guinea just after World War II found that their arrival set off a tremendous religious movement. The natives killed all their pigs-principal sources of food and symbol of social position-in the belief that after three days of darkness, "Great Pigs" would appear from the sky. Imitation radio antennas made of rope and bamboo were set up to receive news of the millennium, when black skins would turn white and all the harsh demands of life would miraculously disappear...
...cargo never comes. Then, instead of abandoning the cult, they tend to form splinter groups, organized around a "purer" faith. As long as the islanders' social situation remains unchanged, says Worsley. the cargo cults persist, but with the development of modern political forms, they begin to wither away. "In Melanesia, ordinary political bodies, trade unions, and native councils are becoming the normal media through which the islanders express their aspirations ... It now seems unlikely that any major movement along cargo-cult lines will recur...