“Mambu is the name of a native of New Guinea, a kanaka who in the late 1930s led what has come to be known as a ‘cargo’ movement. Most of his activities took place in the Bogia region of the Madang District in the Australian Trust Territory of New Guinea. Mambu was a rebel, a radical, a man sufficiently able to free himself from the circumstances of his time to grasp what he thought to be valuable in tradition and weld it to his perception of what he would have liked the future to be… Typically, participants in a cargo cult engage in a number of strange and exotic rites and ceremonies, the purpose of which is apparently to gain possession of European manufactured goods such as axes, knives, aspirins, china plate, razor blades, colored beads, guns, bolts of cloth, hydrogen peroxide, rice, tinned foods and other goods to be found in a general department store… Large decorated houses, or ‘airplanes’ or ‘ships’ made of wood, bark and palm thatch bound together with vines, may be built to receive the goods, and participants may whirl, shake, chant, dance, foam at the mouth or couple promiscuously in agitated attempts to obtain the cargo they want, not from a shop or trade store but directly from the mystical source supposedly responsible for manufacture and distribution… Though comparatively tiny in scale—which, however, makes them more easily appreciated as a total phenomenon—cargo cults are movements of positive protest and dynamic aspiration whose study can provide valuable insights into such convulsions as the French and Russian revolutions and the more gradually emergent African and Asian nationalisms.”

Publisher: Princeton University
Paperback: 296 pages
Illustrated

In this provocative text professor Tatar examines images of sexual crime in the art, film and literature of the Weimar Republic and how art and murder have since intersected in the “sexual politics of culture.” After a concise overview of the escapades of the most notable sex criminals of the period, Franz Haarmann and Peter Kürten, Tatar goes on to explore the ways in which Weimar artists dealt with the roles of victim and murderer in their work, and how all too often (she feels) they found themselves identifying most greatly, and most cheerfully, with the murderer. An extremely thoughtful treatment written with a minimum of academic jargon. JW

Publisher: Princeton University
Paperback: 213 pages
Illustrated

“At the height of the religious ferment of the 1970s, Van Zandt studied firsthand the most vilified of the new radical religious movements—the Children of God, or the Family of Love. By living full-time in COG colonies in England and the Netherlands, first feigning membership and later with the permission of the Family, he produced an informed, insightful and humane report on how COG members function in what seems at first to be a completely bizarre setting… Led by the charismatic David Berg, known as Moses David, the group demands total commitment from its full-time members and proselytizes continuously. Until recently the COG used sex as a proselytizing tool, and it continues to encourage full sexual sharing among group members.”

Publisher: Princeton University
Hardback: 236 pages
Illustrated

“Dr. Jung is a seer and a mystic after the fashion of the magicians of the Renaissance. Some think he is a spiritual pagan, while others accuse him of being biased in the direction of Christianity. This little book would set both of these opinions in the wrong, for it shows that he is a kind of Gnostic.”

Publisher: Princeton University
Paperback: 336 pages