Cargo Cults

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[edit] History

During the Second World War, the Allies set up many temporary military bases in the Pacific, which exposed isolated peoples for the first time to Western manufactured goods (cargo). After the end of the war, the Allies left, removing the source of cargo and leaving the peoples nearly as isolated as before.

In one instance well studied by anthropologists, a group of Melanesians continued to maintain the airstrips and replace the facilities using native materials. This included remarkably detailed full-size replicas of airplanes made of wood, bark, and vines and a hut-like radio shack complete with headphones made of coconut halves.

This was a form of sympathetic magic, whereby the native peoples believed that imitating the behaviors of the former occupiers would cause more planes to land and deliver more cargo. It was supplemented by a religious belief that Western manufactured goods were created by ancestral spirits, but the occupiers had unfairly gained control of them.

The resulting set of religious and magical beliefs is called a "cargo cult."

[edit] Applications

The term "cargo cult" has caught the imagination of the public and is now used to describe a wide variety of phenomena that involve imitating external properties without the substance. In commerce, for example, successful products often result in "copycat" products that imitate the form but are usually of inferior quality.

In the 1950s, the late Richard Feynman[1] described what he called "cargo cult science" by analogy with this phenomenon. It contains many of the superficial trappings of science with little of the substance. Cargo cult science would more commonly be called pseudoscience today.