The Ghost Dance of 1890 and the Nature of the Prophetic Process

Abstract

The phenomenon of prophecy is discussed in terms of a model concerned with the dynamics of the prophetic act itself. This model provides the framework for a study of the origin, transmission, and alteration of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance of 1890 in which the interaction between the supernatural, the prophet, his disciples, and the people is of central importance. It has been widely recognized that the phenomenon of prophecy tends to occur in times of stress or crisis. In the Old Testament, for example, all the prophetic figures known to us from the books of Samuel and Kings, as well as the great canonical prophets, carried on their work in times marked either by the stress of major internal cultural change or that of civil or foreign wars. On a more general level this recognition can be seen in the vast literature dealing with prophetic under such rubrics as revitalization movements and crisis cults. Discussions of prophecy have tended to focus either on its normative aspects or on a description of the socio-cultural results of a population's response to a particular prophet's activity. The first of these are concerned with prophecy as the word of God, the true revelation of the divine will, and therefore seek to locate a particular prophetic movement within a broad theological context. Attention is thus directed primarily toward the content of the prophet's message. The second approach, typified by the title of James Mooney's classic study, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, views the prophet's activity in the context of the cultural-historical upheaval out of which it arises and to which it contributes. At a more general level, this approach leads to the classification of various types of responses to 37