Date: Friday
9th May
Time: 11:30
am
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29,
rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Radu Umbres (IJN)
Title: “Cultural
imitation, cognitive opacity, and secrecy. The continuing enigma of the cargo
cult”
Abstract: Cargo
cults were one of the most spectacular phenomenon in human history, yet their
most puzzling aspect remains largely unexplained. In hundreds of (probably
unrelated) events across thousands of kilometres and spanning several decades,
Melanesian communities engaged in apparently irrational behaviour in response
to contact with Western civilisations. From makeshift airstrips cut through the
forest, equipped with guiding fires, observation towers and "radio"
shacks using coconut headphones, to "five o'clock teas", military
parades and handshakes, natives performed amazing replications of Western
behaviour and artefacts. While most anthropologists focused on these practices
as anti-colonial, revolutionary or forms of cultural accommodation, the task of
explaining an absurd form of cultural imitation was somewhat brushed aside. I
will argue that theories developed by CEU psychologists Gergely and Csibra
following Dan Sperber can shed some light upon the issue. By analysing what was
imitated and especially what was not, cargo cult imitation appears as neither
indiscriminate, nor unreasonable. Rather, given the huge technological
disparity between the cultures in contact, the polarised attitudes of Whites
versus Melanesians, and the local folk epistemology of linking knowledge, power
and secrecy, it is a case of hyper-creative cultural learning gone wrong
due to cognitive opacity and lack of cooperation. Moreover, cargo cults as
cultural imitation may raise a fascinating hypothesis about the adoption of
missionary Christianity in Melanesia and elsewhere.
