Book Reviews 633

between the monarch and the Buddha (whose positions in Buddhist mythology, as Chakravarti correctly points out, are curiously intertwined): the former gives the latter dispossessed khattxyas, that is, malcontents who threaten the monar- chy, along with their brdhmana counterparts (who often wielded considerable power) to populate the sarigha, but demands that the gahapatis remain in the lay community to ensure their continued support of the monarchy, within a few centuries this symbiosis leads to the rise of Buddhism as a state religion. Unfortunately, such an assertion is far beyond the scope of Chakravarti's work. The Social Origins of Buddhism can be valued for the wealth of informa- tion, based on an exhaustive inquiry into the social strata described in the Pali canon, it presents regarding the composition of the early Buddhist lay and

monastic communities. Its failure to expose any startling new principles by Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/LVII/3/633/779966 by guest on 01 October 2021 which we can understand Buddhism's sudden rise and relatively short life as a religio-pohtical movement in ancient is, I believe, a result of a viewpoint that fails to look beyond the Pali texts, and thereby reinforces the stereotypes established by generations of scholars unfamiliar with the Vedic milieu. For example, this failure leads Chakravarti to characterize the brdhmanas, despite die intriguing discovery that they form the largest single group in the early sari- gha, as a group bereft of an intellectual traction, seeking desperately to gain freedom from their own oppressive rites and myths. (Why then did diis group of blithering idiots joint the sarighal Who encouraged their membership?) This is the straw man of the Pali texts, embraced by scholars such as Rhys-Davids. Although The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, with its selective use of sec- ondary sources and exhaustive analysis of the Pali texts, is a model of careful scholarship, in die final analysis, it cannot be said to substantially further our knowledge of the growth and development of die ancient Indian tradition. Herman Tull Rutgers University

Salvation and : an Interpretation of , the , and . By David Chidester. Indiana University Press, 1988. 190 pages. $18.95.

Ten years after the murders and mass suicide at the colony of Peo- ples Temple, what are we to make of the event? By now, three scholarly books offer revisionist accounts diat share an interpretive effort to understand the meaning of Jim Jones' apocalyptic social movement. Judith Weightman's Mak- ing Sense of the Jonestown (1983) used die sociology of knowledge. My own Gone From the Promised Land (1987) is a cultural and sociological history. Now, Salvation and Suicide treats the events largely in theological terms. Given these books' commonalities, I will concentrate here on the distinctive contribu- tions of Salvation and Suicide and what, in my view, its limitations might be. David Chidester treats public reactions to the apocalypse at Jonestown as cognitive distancing, meant to avoid the potent stigma of the mass death. He 634 Journal of the American Academy of Religion thus theoretically explicates what scholars like Weightman, Gillian Lindt, and Jonathan Smith have observed: die mediated reactions were intended to sub- merge Jonestown, not to understand it. The authorities who dealt widi die dead bodies of Jonestown acted through "rituals of exclusion." The cultural effect was to categorize diose who died as less dian fully human. Chidester wants "to contribute to a recovery of the humanity of [Peoples Temple's] members by attempting to reconstruct something of the design of the worldview that infused it as a church." The book employs a structuralist method, using as a framework anthropologist Robert Redfield's treatment of worldviews as essentially defined by dieir classifications of persons and orienta- tions in time and space. Analyzing Jim Jones's worldview offers die basis for a

"religiohistorical interpretation of die Peoples Temple" (48-50). The book cat- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/LVII/3/633/779966 by guest on 01 October 2021 egorizes Jones' statements in terms of (1) die classification of persons as super- human, human, and subhuman; (2) die classifications of cosmic space, geographic space, and body space; and (3) the classifications of cosmic time, historical time, and body time. The most exhaustive exploration of Jim Jones' worldview to date, Salvation and Suiddr argues for die coherence of diat worldview and its connection to the mass suicide. With a "musical" ear for religious ideas, David Chidester has shown diat Jones's sermons were hardly the incoherent ramblings of a mad- man. In Chidester's view, Jones invoked his own life as a "superhuman" inter- vention intended to salvage his followers from "subhuman" existence in the face of racism, classism, and sexism. Jones's quest for Utopian space in the community of Jonestown and his apocalyptic rendezvous with historical time in "revolutionary suicide" in turn required the submission of die body, in time and space, to a reality ordered by die quest for martyrdom. The theology of revolutionary suicide led to an unusual impasse in die struggle of the Peoples Temple widi its opponents. The price of salvation was mass suicide that would redeem the humanity of Jones and diose of his followers who willingly died, deadi that would affirm life. The book concludes, "The Jonestown dead were human dead" (169). The book's formal analytic categories have the advantage of permitting a comprehensive, theoretically-grounded specification of Jones's worldview and its implications, but die approach also has its problems. Certain ideas, e.g., Jones' images of nuclear holocaust and his dabbling in astrology, may receive undue emphasis because they logically "fill" a particular cell. By die opposite token, aspects of worldview not categorically thematized might have helped bring into clearer focus important features of die movement, for example, its socialist ethics. The generic problems of structuralist mediod should alert us to a series of issues diat elude Salvation and Suicide. One is die question of whether the "worldview" actually obtained coherence in die minds of Jones and his follow- ers. "Worldview" has an ahistorical character, it is constructed from disparate statements, each wididrawn, for analytic purposes, from its temporal occasion of invocation. The Temple was striking for its amalgamation of disparate Book Reviews 635 groups and interests, and some former members and survivors have said they used selective attention to "tune out" things that didn't "fit" with their own beliefs. This would suggest the need to consider whether Jones had a coherent worldview or was simply adept at weaving together disjoined ideas that con- nected to distinctively different audiences. The methodology has other problems. While many religious scholars recently have moved to more dialectical analyses of the relation between ideas and history, Chidester basically moves in one direction, from ideas to their sali- ence for history. The transhistorical consolidation of worldview makes it diffi- to trace its historical, emergence and transformations and in turn to balance the salience of worldview with other historical forces, or, indeed, with other than religious ideas. Eschewing detailed historical analysis, the book tends to rely uncritically on received historical accounts, and in a way that favors expla- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/LVII/3/633/779966 by guest on 01 October 2021 nations on the level of ideas and symbolic conflict, for example, the popular depiction of negative California press articles as the cause of the Temple's 1977 collective migration to Jonestown (96, 138), when in fact the emigration ini- tially was spurred by more material concerns about prosecution for tax evasion. As Chidester recognizes (137), mass suicide is only one of a number of possible response to "subclassification" at the hands of others. For Jones, the concept of "revolutionary suicide" did not necessarily require physical death. The question of how physical suicide became the chosen path thus is a histori- cal question grounded in, but not explained by, Jones's theology. Chidester correctly locates this question in the struggles of the Peoples Temple with its opponents, but, because the analysis is pitched largely at the level of ideas, it describes perceptions of persecution by Jones and Temple staff without exam- ining actual collaboration among Jones's cultural, political, news media, and governmental opponents (contrary to Salvation and Suicide [139, 151-52], for example, Congressman Ryan embraced an "anti-cult" perspective long before he was approached by the Temple's countermovement—the Concerned Rela- tives, and he allied himself with their cause some six months before his ill-fated visit to Jonestown). Theology indeed made the act of mass suicide possible, but only in the dialectic of historical struggle with opponents did it become the final solution. Since the main focus of Salvation and Suicide is to establish theological coherence, it gives insufficient attention to the sociological tension between ide- ology and action. No doubt Jones was a prophet for those who willingly fol- lowed him, but he was a flawed one, filled with ressentiment, establishing a confinement by appropriating the social control techniques of the bureaucrati- cally-organized capitalist world against which he struggled. In its emphasis on ideas, Salvation and Suicide does not critically examine the actual practices of the Peoples Temple, ignoring the disjunctures between sexual ethics and sexual practice, between ideology of liberation and control of individuals. To assert the humanness of the people who died at Jonestown is an important endeavor, but humanness sometimes has its perverse side, and Chidester sometimes avoids the hard questions, partly by concentrating on ideas rather than events. 636 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In my reading, the book seems to suggest that theology is the main criterion on which to base critical understanding: if actions follow from a theology that is intended to retrieve people from "subhuman" status, then the results, even to the point of mass suicide, must be recognized as successful in affirming the humanness of the participants. This is the final—and central—question. Martyrdom, as Salvation and Sui- cide indicates, is the principle meaningful axis of Peoples Temple. Let us ask specifically about the mass suicide, did it succeed or fail? Chidester goes to great lengths to show that "collective suicide, revolutionary suicide, gave closure to a human identity that had been constructed in relation to the superhuman power of socialism in protest against the dehumanizing conditions of an inhu- man world" (160). Yet his argument does not sufficiently reckon with the sense of failure that hung over the mass suicide's participants. To be .sure, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/LVII/3/633/779966 by guest on 01 October 2021 Chidester has Jones making fatalistic statements at the suicide ritual that he and his followers were "born out of due season," and that mass suicide was the "will of sovereign being." But he does not quote Jones shortly before the ritual was begun: "I have failed," and "All is lost." For people who affirmed "the celebration of life," it seems to me that the collective martyrdom salvaged the humanity of those who willingly participated only in a limited way, in the bleak honor of a chosen death. Salvation and Suicide is an ambitious and courageous book. Yet it applies one method to debunk the activities of cognitive distancing after Jonestown and a different method to understand the movement itself. The profound challenge is to recognize that Chidester correaly establishes the general coherence of Jones's theological worldview as an apocalyptic, anti-capitalist messiah. Yet the relation of theology to history is filled with contradictions, twists of fate, irony. As Chidester shows so well, the world has not yet come to terms with Jonestown. By cataloguing the religious aspects of Jones's ideas and their war- rant for mass suicide, Salvation and Suicide offers an important" benchmark of theology by which questions about the meaningful history of the Peoples Tem- ple may be measured. John R. Hall University of Missouri, Columbia

God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of . By Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds. University of Cambridge Oriental Publica- tions, No. 37. Cambridge University Press, 1986. 157 pages. $39.50.

The traditional view of Sunni Islam, supported by most Western scholars, is that when Muhammad died in the seventh century his office as prophet ceased, political leadership of the community devolved upon the caliphs, and religious leadership passed to a rising class of religious scholars (ulama) who were responsible for remembering what the Prophet said and did. Continuing a line of revisionist historiography of early Islam that she began with Michael Cook in