What does «culto cargo» mean in Spanish?
- The term cargo cult refers to a group of social movements that began in Melanesia in the late 19th century and continue today. The basic idea of these movements is that manufactured goods, including canned goods, airplanes and automobiles, were created by spirits or ancestors of the Melanesian people. Europeans, they claimed, had diverted these goods from their intended recipients and used them themselves. Participants in these movements sought to redirect the flow of "cargo" to themselves. Some consider cargo cults to be religious movements, while others have argued that they are political movements protesting against European colonialism. Many scholars argue that the term "cargo cult" should no longer be used because Melanesian culture is full of movements designed to bring prosperity from abroad, and the so-called cargo cults are simply one example of this more general trend. The extravagant activities of cargo cults - creating bamboo effigies of airfields, tanks, etc., as well as imitating military marches - have captured the Western imagination and the term continues to be used in popular writing. Richard Dawkins, for example, has argued that the rapid rise of cargo cults could be an example of how mainstream religions get started, while Richard Feynmann has criticized scientific malpractice as "cargo cult science." In general, cargo cult is used in business and science to refer to a particular type of fallacy in which ill-considered efforts and ceremonies are made but not rewarded due to a faulty model of causality. For example, Maoism has been referred to as "cargo cult Leninism" and New Zealand's adoption of liberalism economic policies in the 1980s as "cargo cult capitalism."