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Cargo Cults Unlimited explores the complex theme of the globalized economy. Highly material, to the point of threatening to exhaust the earth's resources, the economy is also composed of ethereal abstractions, prophetic discourses, mimetic behavior and bureaucratic protocols. The exhibition invites visitors to explore this complexity by drawing on images associated with the notion of the "cargo cult".

The term refers to a set of millenarian rituals that appeared in Melanesia with colonization in the 19th century. Guided by charismatic leaders, followers imitate selected forms of Western behavior – arranging cut flowers, conducting military parades or constructing bamboo harbors and airstrips – with the apparent aim of capturing the wealth produced overseas and imported by boat or plane. As anthropologists have shown, the popularity of this term testifies above all to the ethnocentrism and paternalism of the colonizers faced with practices they deemed naïve or irrational.

Reversing the perspective, the exhibition questions whether the magical thinking once attributed to distant savages might not better characterize contemporary relationships with the globalized economy. Do we not find echoes of cargo cults in the fetishization of brands and external signs of wealth? In the more-or-less deliberate ignorance of the places and conditions under which clothes, food and electronics are produced? In the mimetic behavior observed on financial markets? In faith in a caste of experts who speak on behalf of supernatural entities known as growth or the market?

To explore this hypothesis, the public is invited to visit a container port made of cardboard, in the image of the simulacra typical of cargo cults. Drawing on selected collections from the Museum as well as research carried out at the Anthropology Institute (University of Neuchâtel), the exhibition questions the organizational principles of a two-tier system: on the ground floor, the so-called real economy based on the production and consumption of material goods; on the upper floor, the models, norms and discourses that govern this circulation. Throughout, the exhibit builds on a fundamental lesson of anthropology: that the economy does not exist in and of itself, but through its entanglement within a thick web of cultural representations and socio-technical devices.