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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 other countries in the southwest Pacific, particularly Vanuatu. 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]

The inception of cargo cults essentially is based on a flawed model of causation, often being the confusion between the logical concepts of necessary condition and sufficient condition when aiming to obtain a certain result.

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

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Other instances of cargo cults 4 Analogies in Western culture 5 Cargo cults in popular culture 6 Sources and further reading 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

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 sticks 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 cargo^{[citation needed]}.

Today, many historians and anthropologists argue that the term "cargo cult" is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomena^{[citation needed]}. 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.

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.

The error of logic made by the islanders consisted of mistaking a necessary condition (i.e. building airstrips, control towers etc.) for cargo to come flying in, for a sufficient condition for cargo to come flying in, thereby reversing the causation. On a lower level, they repeated the same error by e.g. mistaking the necessary condition (i.e. build something that looks like a control tower) for building a control tower, for a sufficient condition for building a control tower.

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 researchers often produce studies with all the trappings of real science, but which are nonetheless pseudoscience and unworthy of either respect or support.

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]}

Cargo cults have also been compared to the modern UFO religions. This is because cults like Heaven's Gate believe that by imitating extraterrestrials' looks and behavior, they will gain access to the landing spacecraft.

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^[2].

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^[3].

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

The 1971 movie The Last Movie involves indigenous peasants in Peru fabricating Ersatz film equipment and ritually emulating the activities of film production after the departure of a film crew which had been making a western.

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 1984 movie, Where the Green Ants Dream, directed by Werner Herzog portrays Australian aborigines whose spirituality includes elements associated with cargo cults.

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 for whom they have been dutifully waiting 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 prominently features a cargo cult.

French musician Serge Gainsbourg's 1971 concept album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, features a cargo cult as an element of the plotline, and ends with a song titled "Cargo Culte." (lyrics in French and English)

• 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.
• A chapter is devoted to cargo cults in Richard Dawkin's book, The God Delusion.
• Wagner, Roy. 1981. The invention of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Prince Philip Movement
• Dream Park — Cargo Cults were used as a backdrop to this science-fiction/murder mystery novel.
• Island of the Sequined Love Nun
• Johnson cult
• John Frum
• Mondo Cane
• The Gods Must Be Crazy
• Magical thinking
• Guns, Germs, and Steel — the author, Jared Diamond, poses as the initiating question "Why did you [Europeans] wind up with all the cargo?", as asked by a Papua New Guinean (Yali, who was actually the 'cargo cult'-associated political leader prominent in Road Belong Cargo)
• Culture wars
• Culture shock

• Vanuatu cargo cult marks 50 years (BBC News)
• Information on the Jon Frum Cargo Cult (still active)
• Contemporary Cargo Cults by John FitzGerald
• Western Oceanian Religions
• 2006 Smithsonian Magazine article entitled: "In John They Trust."
• Cargo cults includes a bibliography
• Account of a Visit to a Jon Frum Village in 2005
• Air Force Magazine, January 1991, Vol. 74, No. 1. Summary from the guys who fly those Cargoes.
• Cabinet Magazine article

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Michael Urbanowski