Cargo cult (Anthropology)

The South Pacific cargo cult was one of the outstanding puzzles of post-World War II anthropology. In the post-war era, the discipline turned its attention away from the colonial management of subject peoples, and the recording of rapidly dying cultures, to issues of social change, modernization and development and its effects. One such reaction to an amplifying global system was the millennial movement which, in Melanesia, came to be labelled ‘cargo cult’. Since 1945, anthropologists and others have located several hundred cargo cults, most of these in Melanesia. Some of these movements continue to be active, having institutionalized themselves into local churches and political parties.

The basic lineaments of cargo cults became well known, so much so that a cargo cult provided the climactic scenes of the 1963 cult classic movie, Mondo Cane. (The cargo story has also been replotted by novelists, poets and playwrights including Ayi Armah, Maurice Guy, David Lan, Thomas Merton and Randolph Stow.) A cargo prophet receives a message that ancestors, or often the Americans or other powerful outsiders, have promised boatloads or planeloads of cargo. This cargo consists of Western manufactured goods, including tinned food, clothing, tools, vehicles and refrigerators, as well as money. Many Melanesians had enjoyed improved access to such items during the war years, but goods became scarcer when military forces pulled back from the Pacific. A variant of the cargo story is that ancestors are already shipping cargo, but that Europeans have schemed to hijack these shipments so that they fail to arrive.


The typical prophetic message holds that if people establish social harmony and consensus, setting aside disputes and disruptive practices such as sorcery, then cargo will arrive. In some cults, including the John Frumm movement on Tanna, Vanuatu, prophets advocated the revitalization of traditional practices of dance, the use of the drug kava (piper methysticum) and restoration of pre-colonial residence patterns. In others, such as Munus Islands Paliau movement, cult leaders recommended wholesale abandonment of tradition and its replacement with European manners. Prophets typically prescribed more specific courses of action to induce cargo’s arrival, including mass gatherings on appointed days, the construction of airfields, docks, warehouses and new villages, the raising of flag-poles and shortwave radio masts, burial or washing of money, sexual licence or abstinence, graveyard offerings of money and flowers, military-style marching and drilling, and especially dancing.

It was this sort of cultic ritual, alongside people’s increased resistance to Christian missionaries and to labour and head tax obligations, that excited administrative concern. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, colonial regimes commonly arrested cult leaders, including those of the Solomon Islands’ Maasina Rule (organized principally on Malaita Island), the Yali movement of Papua New Guinea’s north coast, as well as the Paliau and John Frumm movements. By the late 1950s, government policy towards cults shifted from repression to co-optation. Relations between long-lived movements and the now independent Melanesian states continue to oscillate between suspicion and cooperation.

Beginning also in the 1950s, cargo cults stimulated a rich ethnographic literature of description and comparison; and this literature contributed to important arguments about the nature of anthropological understanding (e.g. IanJarvie’s The Revolution in Anthropology [1964]). Monographs by Jean Guiart (1956) and Margaret Mead (1956) provided early descriptions of John Frumm and Paliau, respectively. Kenelm Burridge’s Mambu (1960) and Peter Lawrence’s Road Belong Cargo (1964) were important cargo monographs; as was Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound (1968 [1957]), as an influential overview of the cargo literature.

Anthropologists have approached cults from two directions. Some take cargo cults to be a Melanesian version of universal millennial movements that erupt in periods of social crisis and disruption. This sort of explanation seeks the psychological and social functions of cargo cults. Responding to emotions of relative deprivation and to general confusion precipitated by rapid social change, cults may transform local systems of understanding, work to re-establish people’s sense of dignity, provide explanations of/for inequality and so on. Socially, cults may function to create larger unities to resist the colonial or postcolonial oppressor, providing a language of political protest.

Other anthropologists have instead explained cults as emerging from Melanesian culture itself. Rather than a universal form of reaction to social change and oppression, cargo cults are particular Melanesian forms of creativity and cultural imagination. An emphasis on acquiring cargo reflects the cultural importance of exchange of wealth within Melanesia. Cultic ritual and organization, likewise, reveal island understandings of economic production, of ancestral inspiration, the nature of social change and local Big Man politicking.

Anthropological explanation of cargo cults, either as reactions to external forces or as internal processes of cultural dynamism, soon raised misgivings about the accuracy of the term. Cargo means much more than simple goods, and cult more than irrational ritual. The label ‘cargo cult’ first appeared in the November 1945 issue of the colonial news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (Bird 1945). Usage of the term spread rapidly, anthropologists borrowing it to relabel Pacific social movements dating back as far as the 1830s. Previously, many of these had be described as instances of Vailala Madness after F.E. Williams’s 1923 analysis of a movement near Kerema, Papua New Guinea.

Although a terminological improvement upon Vailala Madness, use of the label ‘cargo cult’, within anthropology at least, has declined. While still standard fare in introductory anthropological texts, ethnographers have turned to more politic descriptive alternatives (e.g. nativistic, adjustment, protonationalist, micronationalist, local protest, developmental self-help, regional separatist or Holy Spirit movements).

Journalists and others, however, still apply the term to describe social movements in Melanesia and beyond. Reports of cargo cult, for example, coloured accounts of a secessionist movement on Bougainville Island in the 1990s. Although cargo cults are less commonly discovered in the Pacific,they now erupt globally in a lively politics of labelling. Euro-Disney, the new Australian Parliament House, Japanese enchantment with Hollywood movie studios, Eastern European fascination with capitalism, Third World development efforts and a panoply of other ventures have all been denounced as cargo cults (Lind-strom 1993). Along with ‘culture’, ‘worldview’ and ‘ethnicity’, the ‘cargo cult’ is proving one of anthropology’s most popular concepts beyond the discipline.

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