The term cargo cult(s) is a reference to aboriginal religions that grew up in the South Pacific, especially New Guinea and Melanesian islands, initially in the mid 1800s, but most commonly in the years during and after World War II. There was no one Cargo Cult so this proper name is a misnomer—no one who participated in a cargo cult actually knew that they were doing so.The vast amounts of war materiel that were air-dropped into these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of these islanders as manufactured clothing, canned food, tents, weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers—and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. When the war moved on, and ultimately when it ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new "cargo" was then being dropped.
In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders adopted a shallow version of the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in [self-constructed] control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.
The cultists thought that the foreigners have some special connection to the ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to spill such riches. By mimicking the foreigners, they hoped to bypass them.
[MIMICKING ... that's what it is all about]
In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size mockups of airplanes out of straw, and created new military style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. The cultural impact of these practices was not to bring about the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, but to eradicate religious practices that had existed prior to the war.
A similar cult, the dance of the spirits, arose from contact between American Indians and the American civilization in late 19th century. The Paiute prophet Wovoka preached that by dancing in a certain fashion, the ancestors would come back on railways and a new earth would cover the white people.
Believers in the Ghost Dance spirituality were and are convinced that performing the Ghost Dance would eventually reunite them with their ancestors coming by railway from the spirit world. In effect, the ancesor spirits including the Spirit of Jesus are called upon to heal the sick and to help protect Mother Earth. Meanwhile, the world would return to a primordial state of natural beauty, opening up to swallow up all other people (those who do not have a strong spirituality based upon the earth, while the performers of the Ghost Dance theoretically will floated in safety above with their ancestors, family, and peoples of the world who follow the extensive spirituality.
Though originally nonviolent in nature, the movement ultimately attracted militant elements who favored armed conflict as a means to fight the whites. However, this is not a fact and it theoretical at this time.
Ultimately, the Ghost Dance inspired hysteria among white settlers and resulted in the wholesale massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Wovoka was ordered by the U.S. to stop the dance or more people would be murdered. However, the Natdia has survived into the present day.
Some Amazonian Indians have carved wood mockups of cassette players (gabarora from Portuguese gravadora or Spanish grabadora) that they use to communicate with spirits.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris has linked the social mechanisms that produce cargo cults to those of Messianism.
Eventually, the Pacific cultists gave up. But, from time to time, the term "Cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom, to mean any group of people making obeisance to something that it is obvious they do not comprehend.
In this sense, they are perhaps best known because of a speech by physicist Richard Feynman at a Caltech commencement, which became a chapter in the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". In the speech, Feynman pointed out that cargo cultists create all the appearance of an airport—right down to headsets with bamboo "antennas"—yet the airplanes don't come. Feynman argued that scientists often produce studies with all the trappings of real science, but which are nonetheless pseudoscience and unworthy of either respect or support.
Similar analogies have been made to other shallow emulation practices:
*) Cargo cult programming is an incompetent style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. Cargo cult programmers will usually explain the redundant code as a way of working around a computer bug encountered in the past. Typically, however, they do not understand either the bug or the apparent solution (compare shotgun debugging, voodoo programming).
The term 'cargo cult' refers to aboriginal religions which grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The practices of these cults centered on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and military landing strips in the hope of summoning the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war. Use in computer programming probably derives from Richard Feynman's characterization of certain practices as Cargo cult science.
*) Cargo Cult Science is a term invented by Richard Feynman to describe a particular type of pseudoscience in which all the superficial aspects of scientific inquiry are adhered to, although the underlying causal link between the conditions and the outcome is not understood. Feynman introduced the phrase in a speech at Caltech in 1974, the transcript of which can be found in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! : Adventures of a Curious Character (Norton, 1985) and on many web sites. He based the phrase on an existing concept in anthropology, the cargo cult.
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