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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Dr. Mair's feeling of inconclusiveness, after an examination of so much material, comes, I believe, from a failure to choose the right units. Anthropologists have traditionally dealt only with those cults which arose among primitive – that is, preliterate – peoples in situations of contact with advanced cultures. They have left to historians the discussion of cults within part-literate societies in the past, and to sociologists, social psychologists and psychiatrists the study of contemporary cult phenomena in modern literate societies. Recent work in the narrowly defined anthropological studies has made possible the delineation of differences attributable to culture area, date and conditions of culture contact, and discrimination between the retrospective orientation of American Indian nativistic cults, like the Ghost Dance, and the future-oriented cults of the Southwest Pacific, the Cargo cults. Dr. Mair discusses a third regional type, the cults of South Africa. Such organization of materials by period and area does make it possible to demonstrate that cults differ in form and content, in different times and different places. They do not help us isolate the universals involved. The area frame of reference gives no detail about the specific tribal situation, the personality of the leader and the other personnel of the cult. It is too large for detailed psychological explanation of social process, and too narrow for the understanding of cult formation as a social process.
page 324 note 1 See Schwartz, T., “The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–1954,” Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1958.Google Scholar
page 325 note 2 See also Schaffner, B., ed., Group Processes, Proceedings of the Fifth Conference, October 1958, in which a day was devoted to the discussion of cult formation as group process of evolutionary significance.Google Scholar
page 327 note 3 See, for example, Erik, Erikson's discussion of Martin Luther's fainting in the choir in Young Man Luther (Norton, 1958).Google Scholar
page 328 note 4 There have been various psychological approaches to the problem of how this demand for wholeness arises. Two of the most promising ones at present are those of Dr.Margaret, LowenfeldGoogle Scholar, the proto system (to be fully discussed in her forthcoming book on The World Technique), and Dr. Sandor, Rado's (1956) “Action Self”. Both of these conceptual schemes lean heavily on the child's earliest experiences of its own body.Google Scholar
page 328 note 5 But the Soviet Union still displays a considerable amount of cult behavior, extreme fear of heresy, need for strong boundaries, and a lack of trust in the ability of its own system to prevail without precautions (Mead and Calas, 1955).