ABSTRACT
To answer the question ‘Why do Cargo cults occur?’ would entail raising profound metaphysical issues beyond the scope of this book. Hysteria, dream visions, tensions, release of tensions, rites, ceremonies, time, and place are all too easily explained away. They pose the sort of problems one can pretend to be wrestling with by circling warily round them. Nevertheless, certain features seem plain enough. It is clear that if cargo means manufactured goods, Cargo embraces a set of acute moral problems; that Cargo movements are not due simply to a misunderstanding concerning the origin of manufactured goods, but that they are embedded in, and arise from, a complex total situation; that free access to cargo is but one—if the most spectacular—of many problems contained within the notion of Cargo; that even if one regarded Cargo cults as proceeding from a mistaken view of the process of manufacture it would be necessary to explain why the mistake was made—and then persisted in.
