Cargo Cults

by Lamont Lindstrom
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6 books
When the Second World War ended in 1945, anthropologists resumed their studies of Pacific Island societies with new interest in social change and social unrest that had been sparked by wartime turmoil and the impending collapse of colonial empires. Defiant social movements were impossible to ignore. In the Melanesian islands of the southwest Pacific, anthropologists labeled these political and religious movements as “cargo cults.” They described several hundred of these political/religious organizations that erupted across New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji. Islanders, in a classic cargo cult, embraced new prophecies and innovative ritual practices that promised the arrival or return of “cargo.” Cult rituals typically included novel forms of dance, marching, and drilling, imaginative strategies to contact spirits and ancestors, and new moral codes to secure group unity and harmony. Community ancestors or, in the postwar period, the American military would reward the faithful with shipments of cargo. Cargo, as an object of organized community desire, was semantically complex. Sometimes, cargo meant money, or Western manufactured goods shipped into the islands in massive amounts, particularly during the Pacific War. Anthropologists also interpreted cargo to represent the return of dead ancestors, achievement of balanced exchange relations with Europeans, assertion of a sense of honor and self-worth, desire for political sovereignty, or the transformation and transcendence of everyday reality. Many cults flared up quickly but then burned themselves out when no cargo arrived. Others, however, have been institutionalized and survive today as churches, political parties, and business organizations. Most anthropologists by the 1980s renounced the cargo cult label as too simplistic, but many outside the discipline continue to bandy the term to castigate schemes and efforts that they deem to be irrationally organized.
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Cargo Cult

Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond
Lamont Lindstrom, 2019
I follow the origins, uses and misuses, and decline of the term “cargo cult” within anthropology. Cargo cult, along with worldview, ethnicity, bigman, ethnocentrism, culture shock, and a few other terms, is one of anthropology’s most successful neologisms. Although most anthropologists no longer use the term to describe social movements in the Pacific or elsewhere, many others today have borrowed “cargo cult” to disparage a variety of policies, efforts, or organizations whose goals and methods they take to be irrational or hopeless. I suggest that the term remains compelling in that it reflects modern notions of desire that fuels both our economic and romantic relationships—desire that is natural, unending, and ultimately unrequited.

The Trumpet Shall Sound

A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia
Peter Worsley, 1987
Originally published in 1957, this was the first, and now classic, compendium of Pacific social movements. It begins with Fiji’s Tuka Movement in the 1870s and ends with Madang’s Yali Movement. Worsley argued that movements meld small groups into larger organizations, which eventually may turn to rational politicking. Worsley hoped to conduct field research in Australian New Guinea, but authorities blocked his access, worried about his liberal, even Marxist, appreciation of anti-colonial movements. He instead published this overview of movements throughout the region. This expanded edition includes Worsley’s comments on charisma, millennialism, and social theory.

Mambu

A Melanesian Millennium
Kenelm Burridge, 2014
A reprint of Burridge’s 1960 account that traces twenty-five years of movement activity in Madang, Papua New Guinea, led by the prophet Mambu, and on nearby Manam Island. Burridge introduced the term “myth-dream” to explain interest in cargo, a term that enjoyed some subsequent popularity. He attributed cargo cult to the psychological wounds of colonialism and Melanesian desire to find honest, European “older brothers” who might relieve their distress. Beautifully written, the book has been much reprinted over the years.

Road Belong Cargo

A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea
Peter Lawrence, 1964
Lawrence begins with the establishment of colonial order over the island in 1871 and traces a succession of five cargoist outbreaks up through the 1950s, particularly among the Garia and Ngaing communities. He focuses on Yali, cult leader and prophet, who had previously served as a colonial and military functionary. Originally published in 1964, this book also has been reprinted several times, including a translation in Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea’s lingua franca. Yali died in 1975 just as Papua New Guinea achieved independence. His movement survives in a number of communities.

Like Fire

The Paliau Movement and Millenarianism in Melanesia
Theodore Schwartz, Michael French Smith, 2021
Schwartz accompanied Margaret Mead back to Manus Island in 1953. Mead had studied children on the island in 1928. During the Pacific War, the US military built a large base on Manus but then withdrew after Japan surrendered. Mead, on her return to the island, found people, led by Paliau, engrossed in a social movement to transform their lives. She published New Lives for Old in 1956. Her research assistant Schwartz published his own account of the Paliau Movement in 1962. At the end of his life, his student Smith helped him complete a longer account of the Paliau Movement that synthesizes its history and its transformation into a local church. They propose that millenarianism is rooted in human proclivity to seek meaning and to presume the cosmic importance of one’s own group. This search for millenarian transcendence, however, can spark irrationality, rage, and fear. The authors are among a few anthropologists who find “cargo cult” to be an informative label.

Tanna Times

Islanders in the World
Lamont Lindstrom, 2020
My account of the history and culture of Tanna, an island in southern Vanuatu. The John Frum movement erupted here in the late 1930s and continues today, institutionalized as a political party and indigenous church. Its rituals and holidays also attract international tourists. I follow a dozen remarkable figures and the times that shaped their lives. This history helps make sense of people’s desire to remake themselves and their societies and their strategies over the years to achieve this transformation. The book is available as a free digital download from the University of Hawaii Press.