Cargo Cults

Gary Arndt (0:00)

During the 20th century, people on remote Pacific Islands witnessed something that would forever change their societies. Foreigners arrived with extraordinary wealth, powerful machines and seemingly endless supplies of manufactured goods. When those foreigners left, some islanders began performing elaborate rituals and building strange replicas to bring back the prosperity that they had witnessed. Learn more about the cargo cults of Melanesia on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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When cultures come into contact with each other, you never know what will happen. It could spark a pandemic, a war, a technological revolution, or as what happened in Melanesia in the 20th century, something totally unexpected. Melanesia is one of the most linguistically diverse regions on earth, with over 1500 languages across relatively few islands. This extraordinary linguistic diversity mirrors the region's religious diversity. Before the arrival of Europeans, the region's religious values were largely based on local animistic traditions. Traditional island beliefs held that spirits, deities, and mythical beings inhabited the region's jungles, volcanoes, rivers, and caves. During the 19th century, Britain, France, and Germany raced to claim as much of the region as possible. As European powers partitioned the Pacific, they rapidly restructured traditional indigenous economies. Ships visited the region's waters, hauling away agricultural goods, and dropping off various forms of cargo. European traders and merchants flooded local communities with cheap manufactured goods including axes, knives, textiles, metal tools, and firearms. These goods were revolutionary for a region that had virtually no metalworking.

The arrival of Europeans also brought missionaries and colonial administrators to convert the region to Christianity. Under European colonial administration, sacred places, carvings, and other traditional religious relics were routinely destroyed. Despite intense pressure, traditional Melanesian religion did not simply vanish. Because Melanesian spirituality was practical and focused on real-world results such as health, agriculture, and safety, indigenous communities used their existing world view to try to make sense of overwhelming European power. As missionaries preached Christian teachings like heaven, creation, and Christ return, Melanesians connected these ideas directly to their own traditions, often viewing Christian figures as powerful ancestral spirits. At the same time, islanders faced a glaring inescapable contradiction. Foreign missionaries preached spiritual salvation and Christian equality. Meanwhile, the Europeans hoarded massive amounts of manufactured goods that the locals collectively called cargo. Because European goods arrived on massive ships with no local manufacturing, and the colonists hoarded wealth instead of sharing it as traditional leaders did, islanders faced a crisis that shattered their social structures and forced them to rethink their world view. Traditional Melanesian societies operated on a big man principle. In this system, the most powerful people drew their social status, power and authority not from hoarding wealth, but from distributing it through gift exchanges. Rather than abandoning their spiritual search for wealth and balance, some indigenous people fused Christian beliefs, European trade and military methods, and traditional ancestral worship into a new world view. And these became known as cargo cults. The first cargo cult movements were born in the late 19th century. Because Europeans didn't engage in local gift exchange networks and manufactured goods arrived on massive cargo ships with no visible local production, islanders concluded that the goods were generated through spiritual or ancestral means and selfishly withheld by colonial administrators. In their world view, industrial goods came from an invisible source of power. To the Melanesians, these goods arrived when Europeans performed certain actions, such as writing on paper, wearing uniforms, talking into radios and waving flags. To access the wealth that gave the Europeans such immense power, some Melanesians just mimicked what they saw Europeans doing, creating replicas of airships and planes and radios, creating fake military uniforms and weapons, believing that these actions would bring them cargo just like it did the Europeans.