Abstract
A peculiarity of Kenelm Burridge's work on cargo cults and Melanesian religion is his emphasis on what he calls the divine. Although superficially resembling Durkheim's concept of the sacred, the divine designates a realm of experience that challenges the moral sphere, rather than endorses it. This departure from functionalist tenets takes the limited and incomplete character of the social order into account, dispensing with the premise of culture as a closed and integrated system in order to examine the ways in which an openness to events and their transformational possibilities highlights the improvisatory and mobile character of Melanesian cosmologies.