Cargo cults

These movements received their name from the Melanesian movements early in this century characterized by the belief that the millennium would be ushered in by the arrival of great ships loaded with European trade goods (cargo). The goods would be brought by the ancestral spirits and distributed to natives who acted in accordance to the dictates of one of the cults. Some of the cults advocated the expulsion of all things alien, the renunciation of all things European and the return to traditional ways of life. Others called for the rejection of traditional ways of life and the adaptation of European customs. These movements developed where there was extreme material and other inequality between societies in contact. They attempted to explain then erase the differences in material wealth between natives and Europeans.