Editing Cargo cult (section)

== Origin of the term and definitions ==
The term "cargo cult" first appeared in print in the November 1945 issue of ''[[Pacific Islands Monthly]]'', in an entry written by Norris Mervyn Bird, an ‘old Territories resident’, who expressed concern regarding the effects of World War II, the teachings of Christian missionaries and the increasing liberalisation of colonial authorities in Melanesia would have on local islanders.<ref name="Lindstrom-20182" />
{{Blockquote|text=Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use. . . By his very nature the New Guinea native is peculiarly susceptible to these ‘cults’|author=Norris Mervyn Bird|source=Pacific Islands Monthly, 1945}}
Previous similar phenomena, first documented in the late 19th century, had been labelled with the term "[[Vailala Madness]]", to which the term "cargo cult" was then retroactively applied.<ref name="Lindstrom-20182" /> Bird took the term from derogatory descriptions used by planters and businessmen in the Australian [[Territory of Papua]].<ref name="Otto-2009"/>{{rp|86}}  From this issue, the term became used in anthropology following the publications of Australian anthropologists [[Lucy Mair]] and [[Ian Hogbin|H. Ian Hogbin]] in the late 1940s and early 1950s.''<ref name="Lindstrom-20182" />''

[[Peter Worsley]] defined cargo cults as follows in his 1957 book ''The Trumpet Shall Sound'';<ref name="Worsley-1957"/>{{rp|11}} this description became the standard definition of the term:<ref name="Lindstrom-20182" />

{{Blockquote|text=strange religious movements in the South Pacific [that arose] during the last few decades. In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss. The people therefore prepare themselves for the Day by setting up cult organizations, and by building storehouses, jetties, and so on to receive the goods, known as ‘cargo’ in the local pidgin English. Often, also, they abandon their gardens, kill off their livestock, eat all their food, and throw away their money.}}

In 1964, [[Peter Lawrence (anthropologist)|Peter Lawrence]] described the term as follows: "A cargo ''belief'' (myth) described how European goods were invented by a cargo deity and indicated how men could get them from him via their ancestors by following a cargo prophet or leader. Cargo ''ritual'' was any religious activity designed to produce goods in this way and assumed to have been taught [to] the leader [of the cargo cult] by the deity. ... A cargo ''cult'' [was] a complex of ritual activity associated with a particular cargo myth".<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Lawrence |first1=Peter |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=T368AAAAIAAJ |title=Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea |publisher=University of Manchester at the University Press |year=1971 |isbn=9780719004575 |pages=Introduction, page 5, second full paragraph}}</ref>

In 2010 Australian anthropologist [[Martha Macintyre]] gave the following elements as what she considered characteristic of cargo cults:<ref name="Tabani-2013" />

{{Quote|text=<nowiki></nowiki>
* They involve ritual activities that in some way imitate or mimic actions associated with whites/Europeans.
* These activities are aimed at effecting transformations and/or reversals in status (often associated with skin colour), wealth and power for adherents.
* They involve stories of the ‘loss’ of skills, goods and knowledge to white people (often those who colonized them) through some moral failure or offence. Some of the rites or practices aim to redeem these failures in order to effect the transformation.
* They have (charismatic) local leaders.
* They have strong nativist elements – that is, they aim at advancing the political interests of local people by appealing to the reinstatement of specific ‘traditional’ practices and they see their movement as one that reclaims self-determination and independence from (white) foreign control.
* They entail beliefs in the return of ancestors bringing wealth in the form of money, European goods etc –‘cargo’.
* They include utopian and/or millenarian ideas of a future in which people will not have to labour.
* They have continued over many decades, changing slightly, but maintaining core beliefs and practices.}}

Anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom has written that some anthropologists consider the term to be a "false category" because it "bundles together diverse and particular uprisings, disturbances, and movements that may have little in common". Lindstrom also writes that "anthropologists and journalists borrowed the term to label almost any sort of organised, village-based social movement with religious and political aspirations", and that their usage of the term "could encompass a variety of forms of social unrest that ethnographers elsewhere tagged [[Millenarianism in colonial societies|millenarian]], [[messianic]], nativistic, vitalistic, [[Revivalist (person)|revivalistic]], or culture-contact or adjustment movements". Lindstrom writes that while many anthropologists suggest that "cargo" often signified literal material goods, it could also reflect desires for "moral salvation, existential respect, or proto-nationalistic, anti-colonial desire for political autonomy".<ref name="Lindstrom-20182" />