Prophets, Cults and Madness

Rating:
Summary: Interesting ideas, but shallow in some places
Review: I really wish there was a half-star rating on Amazon.com, because this is really more like two-and-a-half stars. Stevens's idea of prophets and messianic figures springing from the same root cause as schizophrenia and serving an evolutionary function in causing group fission is interesting (and may receive incidental support from Jane Goodall's work with the chimps at Gombe, who fissioned and essentially went to war with one another, resulting in the destruction of the smaller group by the larger). However, he is way too wedded to his biological paradigm and doesn't seem to understand the flaws in such an approach--one of the main problems with evolutionary psychology is that it works from a post-hoc ergo propter-hoc format, e.g. "We see this is serving this function so therefore it must have evolved to serve this function."

Stevens also displays only a superficial understanding of the ethnographic examples he picks out to illustrate his ideas, in particular those of Handsome Lake and other Native American examples, and to top it all off, his analysis of gender leaves a great deal to be desired. He states on page 122, "Males are orientated toward political issues of group leadership and group allegiances whereas females are primarily committed to motherhood and childrearing," and goes on to assert that this distinction is found in all cultures except our own of the last twenty years. The assertion that females are concerned primarily with house and home and not with political matters is patently false, and arises from a profound historical male bias in ethnographical fieldwork, as anthropologists anywhere will tell you; the world over, females practice power strategies as assiduously as males do, but tend to employ more subtle strategies as spreading rumors about opponents, attempting to manipulate others into doing their bidding, and so on. Here is where a greater understanding of his data might have come in handy, as well as an understanding of the conditions under which some of these ethnographic examples were collected.

Rating:
Summary: Prophets,Messiahs and Cult Leaders Mad or Misguided?
Review: This is a MUST-READ book covering all the obvious cults and leaders and less obvious ones like Jesus. Interesting details about John Nash (A Beautiful Mind---Russell Crowe) Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Hitler and every other cult leader and an explanation of how and why they were. The man who walked around London in the 1660s with a fire-filled brasier on his head warning Londoners of the Great Fire and the Plague to come.

Don't miss the interesting suggestion of providing schizophrenic patients with their own virtual reality world filled with cult followers all courtesy of the Internet.