Cargo cults

In the final scenes of the film Mondo Cane, Gualtiero Jacopetti’s original “shockumentary,” we see eager Papua New Guinea islanders clustered around a huge, roughly-made model of an airplane. They are high up in the mountains, sitting on a new airstrip they carved out of the forest. Their eyes search the skies, so the film tells us, for airplanes full of wonderful “cargo” that they expect will soon arrive. But they are destined to be disappointed. No planes will land. These islanders are the misguided followers of a cargo cult.
Anthropologists, journalists, and others have used the term cargo cult since 1945 to describe various South Pacific social movements. Cargo cults blossomed in the postwar 1940s and 1950s throughout the Melanesian archipelagoes of the southwest Pacific. People turned to religious ritual (which was sometimes traditional, and sometimes innovative) in order to obtain “cargo.” The term cargo (or kago in Melanesian Pidgin English) is rich in meaning. Sometimes cargo meant money or various sorts of manufactured goods (vehicles, packaged foods, refrigerators, guns, tools, and the like). And sometimes, metaphorically, cargo represented the search for a new moral order which often involved an assertion of local sovereignty and the withdrawal of colonial rulers. In either case, people expected and worked for a sudden, miraculous transformation in their lives. Cargo cult prophets commonly drew on Christian millenarianism, sometimes conflating the arrival of cargo with Christ’s second coming and Judgment Day (locally often called “Last Day”). Among the most notable cargo cults are the John Frum and Nagriamel movements of Vanuatu, the Christian Fellowship Church of the Solomon Islands, and the Paliau and Yali movements, Hahalis Welfare Society, Pomio Kivung, and Peli Association of Papua New Guinea.
Fuente del texto: http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/rvw/022/022smpl1.htm

MONDO CANE - Shockumentary
Parte 1:


Parte 2:


Mondo Cane en Wikipedia