ABSTRACT
Anthropologists began publishing accounts of the Melanesian cargo cult, so-called, in 1948. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Angelo Rizzoli’s 1962 outré film Mondo Cane, the first of a popular series of cinematic ‘shockumentaries’, climaxed with cargo cult. Cargo cults, however, are worth remembering. Anthropologists generated a sizeable ethnographic and theoretical literature to account for cults. Culting was a key problem for post-war Melanesian ethnography which had turned away from explanation of function and structural reproduction to issues of social change. Anthropologists borrowed the cargo cult label from Papua New Guinea colonial community, as they had Vailala Madness, an earlier term for island social movements. Cargo cult was born thus as a term of opprobrium and abuse, a portent of a fearful, unpredictable future of resurgent primitivism or, worse, ‘crack-brained’ democratic egalitarianism. Cult prognosticators continued to predict cargo cult demise, typically noting prophetic deceit and the constant failure of cargo to arrive.
