Cargo Cult

Cargo cults are spiritual and political movements documented among indigenous Melanesian communities following Western colonization from the late nineteenth century onward, and especially during and after the Second World War, when Pacific islanders witnessed the vast material output of Allied military logistics. They are organized around the belief that spiritual agents would, at some future time, give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products to the cult members, and typically feature a charismatic prophet, a millenarian worldview, and rituals imitating colonial military and administrative activity. The first documented case is the Tuka Movement in Fiji in 1885. Anthropologists have offered competing explanations: Peter Worsley read the movements as proto-national resistance to colonialism, Theodore Schwartz emphasized relative deprivation and value dominance within Melanesian materialistic systems, Peter Lawrence stressed continuity with pre-existing indigenous value systems, and Lamont Lindstrom has criticized the term itself as overly broad and pejorative.