Cargo cult

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For other uses, see Cargo cult (disambiguation).

A cargo cult is any of a group of religious movements in Melanesia, in the Southwestern Pacific, which believe that manufactured western goods ('cargo') have been created by ancestral spirits and intended for Melanesian people. Cult members believe that white people, however, 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.

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[edit] Overview

Cargo cults have been recorded since the 19th century. The cult participants generally do not fully understand the significance of manufacturing or commerce. They have limited purchasing ability. 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 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 have been 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 aircraft 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, many 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 developed nations, 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.

[edit] 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. 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. 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.

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 called cargo cult science, 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.

[edit] 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 abacuses with red and white beads corresponding to a woman's menstrual cycle.[citation needed] 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 problem was that the women believed the abaci themselves were magical, and that they would be protected from pregnancy by moving a white bead into the place of the red bead before intercourse.[citation needed]

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

[edit] Analogues in Western 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. 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 software bug.

Cargo cultism can also be seen in the adoption of management structures without understanding or implementing the underlying processes necessary. For example, creating a program to get ISO 9001 certified, thinking that having the certification will make the group successful, when ISO 9001 simply recognizes formalization of an underlying management structure which documents repeatable processes. It is the repeatable process that breeds success, yet poor managers think that by putting forth the minimal paperwork effort to achieve the certification will yield a successful organization all by itself.

The same mismanagement can be seen in slavish following of UML in programming - generating documents without actually performing the thorough analysis or getting stakeholder buy-in and understanding.

Any new management fad is subject to abusive cargo cult adoption by other poor managers.

[edit] Popular References

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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