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Cargo cult

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This article is about cargo cults as a religious phenomenon. For the musician, see Cargo Cult (music).

A cargo cult is any of a group of religious movements that occurred in Melanesia, in the Southwestern Pacific. The Cargo Cults believed that manufactured western goods ('cargo') were created by ancestral spirits and intended for Melanesian people. White people, however, had unfairly gained control of these objects. Cargo cults thus focused on purifying their communities of what they perceived as 'white' influences by conducting rituals similar to the white behavior they had observed, presuming that this activity would make cargo come. 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.

Cargo cults have been recorded since the 19th century, but have been continuously growing since World War II. The cult participants don't fully understand the significance of manufacturing or commerce. They have limited purchasing authority. Their understanding of western society, religion, and economics may be rudimentary. These cults are a response to the resulting confusion and insecurity. They rationalize their situation by the reference to religious and magical symbols they associate with Christianity and modern western society. Across cultural differences and large geographic areas, there have been instances of the movements independently organizing.

The most famous examples of Cargo Cult behavior are the airstrips, airports, and radios made out of coconuts and straw. The cult members built them in the belief that the structures would attract transport planes full of cargo. Believers stage "drills" and "marches" with twigs for rifles and military-style insignia and "USA" painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers.

Today, most historians and anthropologists argue that the term 'Cargo Cult' is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomena. However, the idea has captured the imagination of many people in the First World, and the term continues to be used today. For this reason, and possibly many others, the cults have been labelled millennialist, in the sense of a utopian future brought about by a messiah.

1 History
2 Other instances of cargo cults
3 Analogues in modern culture
4 References in art and design
5 Sources and further reading
6 See also
7 External links

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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 cargo cult was the 'Tuka Movement' that began in Fiji in 1885. Other early movements occurred mostly in Papua New Guinea, including the Taro Cult in Northern Papua, and the Vailala Madness documented by F.E. Williams, one of the first anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea.

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 air-dropped into these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders. Manufactured clothing, 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. By 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 serve to eradicate the religious practices that had existed prior to the war.

Eventually the cargo cults petered out. But, 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, which became a chapter in the book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". 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.

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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.

A religion described as a "cargo cult" developed during the Vietnam War among some of the Hmong people of Southeast Asia. The core of their beliefs was that the second coming of Jesus Christ was imminent, only this time he would arrive wearing camouflage fatigues driving a military jeep to come and take them away to the promised land. The origins are unknown, but one can surmise that it was assembled out of the images of new power apparent to them in that time period, in the form of the American Military and of western Christian missionaries.

A more recent example of a mythological worldview misinterpreting scientific practices occurred in Africa, where an aid organization, focusing on slowing and stabilizing population growth, distributed abaci with red and white beads corresponding to a woman's menstrual cycle. Women were instructed to move one bead a day, only having intercourse on days represented by a white bead. However, the experiment failed, and the population grew in the households using the abacus. The women believed the abaci were magical, and that they would be protected from pregnancy by moving a white bead into the place of the red bead before intercourse.

Some Amazonian Indians have carved wood mockups of cassette players (gabarora from Portuguese gravadora or Spanish grabadora) that they use to communicate with spirits.

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Analogues in modern culture

The cargo cult has been used as an analogy to describe certain phenomena in the First 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 original's substance.

In the world of military aviation, the Soviet Tupolev Tu-4 bomber is the subject of a cargo cult urban legend. The bomber was a direct copy of an American Boeing B-29 Superfortress which had, in 1944, been damaged while bombing Japan. The captain of the B-29 had set his plane down in Vladivostok, Russia. It was held by the Soviets while the design was copied. Supposedly, the Russian engineers (who were ordered by Stalin to make "exact" copies and feared for their lives) even copied the damage from Japanese air defense guns, incorporating the bullet holes into the design, assuming that they were design features. [1]

The term is also used in the world of software engineering, 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 computer bug.

In addition to these metaphorical uses of the term, believers in NESARA, an alleged secret law passed by Bill Clinton before leaving office, have also been described as modern cargo cultists [2].

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References in art and design

Peter Marigold concieved a Cargo Cult for one of his recent projects at the Royal College of Art in London. In his narrative, "a more recent occurrence of this type of behavior took place in 1979 when the Taiwanese ship Lunchaun, carrying a large cargo of electrical components, capsized in the Polynesian ocean. Much of its dumped cargo was plundered by the local islanders, and objects were fashioned from the found debris, some utilitarian, some ritualistic. Most interestingly many of them appear to have been intended as simple but powerful electromagnets, which, either through blind luck or experimentation, seem to have functioned to various degrees. Two of these are shown in the images below — a heating/scarification device, and a type of fish cooker/griddle."

Scarification devices

This man has patterns on his back inspired by copper traces on printed circuit boards.

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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. xxviii no. 4, 1957.
K, E. Read. A Cargo Situation in the Markham Valley, New Guinea. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. vol. 14 no. 3, 1958.