Cargo cult

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A cargo cult is any of a group of unorthodox religious movements appearing in tribal societies in the wake of Western impact, especially in New Guinea and Melanesia. Cargo cults sometimes maintain that manufactured western goods ("cargo") have been created by divine spirits and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that Westerners have unfairly gained control of these objects. Cargo cults thus focus on overcoming what they perceive as undue 'white' influences by conducting rituals similar to the white behavior they have observed, presuming that the ancestors will at last recognize their own and send them cargo. Thus a characteristic feature of cargo cults is the belief that spiritual agents will at some future time give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products to the cult members. In other instances such as on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, cult members worship Americans who brought the cargo. [1]

Based on the above definition, cargo cult is also used in business and science to refer to a particular type of fallacy whereby ill-considered effort and ceremony takes place but goes unrewarded due to a flawed model of causation. For example, Maoism has been referred to as "cargo cult Leninism" and New Zealand's optimistic adoption of liberal economic policies in the 1980s as "cargo cult capitalism".

Overview

An isolated society's first contact with the outside world can be a shock — often the natives will first assume that the newcomers are spiritual beings of some kind who possess divine powers. With time, however, it will inevitably become apparent that the outsiders are mortal and that their power comes from their equipment (or cargo). Cargo cults tend to appear among people that covet this 'magical' equipment, but are unable to obtain it easily through trade. Given their relative isolation, the cult participants generally have little knowledge of modern manufacturing and are liable to be skeptical of Western explanations. Instead, symbols they associate with Christianity and modern Western society tend to be incorporated into their rituals as magical artifacts. Across cultural differences and large geographic areas, there have been instances of the movements independently organizing.

Famous examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices and the fetishization and attempted construction of western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw. Believers may stage "drills" and "marches" with twigs for rifles and military-style insignia and "USA" painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers, treating the activities of western military personnel as rituals to be performed for the purpose of attracting cargo. The cult members built these items and 'facilities' in the belief that the structures would attract cargo. This perception has reportedly been reinforced by the occasional success of an 'airport' to attract military transport aircraft full of cargoTemplate:Fact.

Today, many historians and anthropologists argue that the term "cargo cult" is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomenaTemplate:Fact. However, the idea has captured the imagination of many people in developed nations, and the term continues to be used today. For this reason, and possibly many others, the cults have been labelled millenarian, in the sense that they hold that a utopian future is imminent or will come about if they perform certain rituals.

History

Discussions of cargo cults usually begin with a series of movements that occurred in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The earliest recorded cargo cult was the Tuka Movement that began in Fiji in 1885. Cargo cults occurred periodically in many parts of the island of New Guinea, including the Taro Cult in Northern Papua New Guinea, and the Vailala Madness that arose in 1919 and was documented by F.E. Williams, one of the first anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Less dramatic cargo cults have appeared in western New Guinea as well, including the Asmat and Dani areas.

The classic period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. The vast amounts of war matériel that were airdropped into these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Japanese before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers — and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war the airbases were abandoned, and "cargo" was no longer being dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cultists thought that the foreigners had some special connection to their own ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size mockups of airplanes out of straw, and created new military style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, though these practices did not bring about the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating the religious practices that had existed prior to the war.

Over the last seventy-five years most cargo cults have petered out. Yet, the John Frum cult is still active on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu. And from time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom, to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance.

The term is perhaps best known because of a speech by physicist Richard Feynman at a Caltech commencement, wherein he referred to "cargo cult science", and which became a chapter in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. In the speech, Feynman pointed out that cargo cultists create all the appearance of an airport right down to headsets with bamboo "antennas", yet the airplanes don't come. Feynman argued that some scientists often produce studies with all the trappings of real science, but which are nonetheless pseudoscience and unworthy of either respect or support.

Other instances of cargo cults

A similar cult, the dance of the spirits, arose from contact between Native Americans and the Anglo-American civilization in late 19th century. The Paiute prophet Wovoka preached that by dancing in a certain fashion, the ancestors would come back on railways and a new earth would cover the white people. Some Amazonian Indians have carved wood mockups of cassette players (gabarora from Portuguese gravadora or Spanish grabadora) that they use to communicate with spirits.

Cargo cults have also been compared to the modern UFO religions.

Analogies in Western culture

The cargo cult has been used as an analogy to describe certain phenomena in the developed world, particularly in the area of business. After any substantial commercial success - whether it is a new model of car, a vacuum cleaner, a toy or a motion picture - there typically arise imitators who produce superficial copies of the original, but with none of the substance of the original.

The term is also used in the world of computer programming as "cargo cult programming", which describes the ritual inclusion of code which may serve no purpose in the program, but is believed to be a workaround for some software bug, or to be otherwise required for reasons unknown to the programmer [1].

The term cargo cult software engineering has been coined in the field of software engineering to describe a characteristic of unsuccessful software development organisations that slavishly imitate the working methods of more successful development organisations [2].

Any new management fad is a possible subject for cargo cult like adoption by poor managers.

Cargo cults in popular culture

The 1980 movie The Gods Must Be Crazy tells the story of how a "gift from the gods" in the form of a Coca-Cola bottle carelessly discarded from a passing airplane comes to be rejected, thus presenting a southwest African counter-example to cargo cults.

The 1983 comedy movie Luggage of the Gods! explores similar themes.

The 1985 sequel to Mad Max and The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, had an element of cargo cultism. The secondary plot revolves around Max (played by Mel Gibson) ending up at a desert oasis of feral children who are convinced that Max is 'Captain Walker' and is there to take them to 'Tomorrow-morrow Land'. Once they have the pilot that they have dutifully been waiting for for years, they enact rituals they think will enable a crashed commercial airliner that is lying in a sand dune to fly again.

The 1997 novel "Island of the Sequined Love Nun" by Christopher Moore prominantly features a cargo cult.

Sources and further reading

  • Jebens, Holger (ed.). Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004.
  • Kaplan, Martha. Neither cargo nor cult : ritual politics and the colonial imagination in Fiji. Durham : Duke University Press, 1995.
  • Lawrence, Peter. Road belong cargo : a study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea. Manchester University Press, 1964
  • Lindstrom, Lamont. Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond. Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
  • Worsley, Peter. The trumpet shall sound : a study of "cargo" cults in Melanesia. London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1957.
  • Harris, Marvin. "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture". New York : Random House, 1974.
  • Inglis, Judy. "Cargo Cults: The Problem of Explanation". Oceania vol. xxvii no. 4, 1957.
  • K, E. Read. "A Cargo Situation in the Markham Valley, New Guinea". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3, 1958.
  • Trenkenschuh, F. 1974. Cargo Cult in Asmat: Examples and Prospects'", in: F. Trenkenschuh (ed.), An Asmat Sketchbook, vol. 2, Hastings, NE: Crosier Missions.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Cargo cult lives on in South Pacific Phil Mercer, BBC News, 17 February 2007.

External links

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