This article compares ideas about the coming millennium in two culturally different parts of Papua New Guinea: Sek in Madang Province and Kasap in Enga Province. In both areas the Catholic church is historically predominant. Concerns and questions about whether the millennium will be marked by Christ's Second Coming are expressed with equal fervency in both areas, and there has been a transformation from more materialistic interests in cargo to more spiritual hopes of a ''good time'' that may follow the millennium. In both areas religious news continues to predominate as ways of looking at the world.The subject of this article is collective expectancy about the near future in rural New Guinea. With the approach of the third millennium (according to the Occidental-Christian calendar), what hopes are being harbored within villages and houselines in this locale? What ''level of expectation intensity'' is manifesting, and what about discernible trends in the content of expressed anticipations? Melanesia is renowned for its so-called cargo cults, commonly (and often simplistically) read in social scientific literature as a special profile of millenarian movements (e.g., Worsley 1970;Christiansen 1969; cf. Trompf 1991: 193-96). With the onset of the chronological millennium, we are bound to ask whether older yearnings and agitations are resurfacing or taking on new guises (cf. Stewart and Strathern 1997).The two cultural contexts chosen for discussion are patently dissimilar, one coastal (Sek, Madang) and the other highland (Kasap, West Enga). Comparison and contrast between seaboard and highland cultures has been a matter
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