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Preferred term

cargo cults  

Definition

  • Cargo cults are millenarian and messianic movements that have emerged in the island nations of Melanesia, though with local variations, as a result of cultural contact. They sprang from the 19th-century arrival of Westerners with their ships loaded with what must have appeared as mind-boggling, out-of-this-world cargos on islands whose inhabitants had hitherto lived in cultural isolation. [Source: Encyclopedia of Global Religion; Cargo Cults]

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URI

http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/N9J-DJ3N040Z-Z

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