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Jonestown. by David Chidester. Indiana University Press, 1988 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 India 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 Suicide: an Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. By David Chidester. Indiana University Press, 1988. 190 pages. $18.95. Ten years after the murders and mass suicide at the Guyana 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 Suicides (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- cult 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
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