Mystics against the Market: American Religions and the Autocritique of Capitalism (Rodseth & Olsen...

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Mystics against the MarketAmerican religions and the autocritique ofcapitalism

Lars Rodseth and Jennifer OlsenDepartment of Anthropology, University of Utah, USA

Abstract � This article asks what might be learned about Western cosmology byfocusing on religious traditions that originated in the United States and havedeveloped outside the mainstream of Christianity. Mormonism and other Ameri-can religions, we argue, carry a hidden repertoire of mystical and communalthemes that directly conflict with the Western ‘market mentality’ as oftendescribed in the anthropological literature. These religions, furthermore, havesurprising affinities with mystical and communal traditions outside the West,affinities that are fully revealed, ironically enough, only in the context of Ameri-can cultural expansion in the non-Western world.Keywords � capitalism � communalism � cosmology � frontier � Mormonism �mysticism

To understand better the local peoples ‘entering’ (or ‘resisting’) modernity,anthropology must surely try to deepen its understanding of the West assomething more than a threadbare ideology. (Asad, 1993: 23)

Among the first ‘local peoples’ to enter (or resist) modernity were West-erners themselves. This historical fact must be taken into account if anthro-pology is indeed to deepen its understanding of the West. Too often,however, ‘our own’ tradition remains but a threadbare ideology in theanthropologist’s hands. Individualism, rationalism, utilitarianism, con-sumerism – these and a few other market-friendly syndromes are offeredagain and again as the core values that distinguish the West from othercivilizations. What else there might be to the Western tradition, includingsome legacy of resistance to the market and its mind-set, has received sur-prisingly little attention from anthropologists.1

At the same time, a number of anthropologists have converged uponthis neo-Weberian thesis: before the Industrial Revolution, before evenNewton or Descartes, there was something about Christianity that gave theWestern mind a prototypically ‘modern’ cast (Asad, 1993: 123; Dumont,1986: 27ff; Hefner, 1993; Paul, 1998; Sahlins, 1996; Schneider, 1990). Thewellsprings of Western ideology, according to this view, must be sought in

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cosmological traditions of la longue durée. Thus the religious genealogy ofthe West, reaching back in some versions to the Fathers of the early Church(Dumont, 1986; Sahlins, 1996), has become a major focus of anthropo-logical interest.

In thus bringing anthropology to bear upon some perennial concernsof Western intellectual history, the recent research of Asad, Dumont,Sahlins and others is clearly of immense importance. What is surprising,however, is the way this research has tended to sharpen our focus on theideological ‘mainstream’ as it flowed through European cities, to theneglect of ‘alternative’ or ‘fringe’ traditions such as those of rural Europeor colonial America. Dumont, for example, describes his Essays on Indi-vidualism (1986: 267) as an attempt ‘to lay bare a general configuration thatunderlies the common way of thinking’ in modern (as opposed to ‘tra-ditional’ or ‘holistic’) society. He goes on to make clear that:

. . . if one speaks of modernity in a merely chronological sense, then it is foundto contain, not only on the level of social practice, but even on that of ideologyitself, much more than the individualistic configuration which characterizes itcomparatively. (1986: 268)

Similarly, Sahlins (1996: 395–6) admits to ‘the relative neglect of variantand conflicting positions’ in an effort to identify ‘some common averagemainstream Judeo-Christian ideas’ – basic elements of ‘the would-beauthoritative discourse’.

Yet such an approach raises important (and familiar) questions abouthow ‘a culture’ is to be defined and what the costs might be to identifyingan entire tradition with some set of ‘characteristic’ or ‘mainstream’ or‘authoritative’ ideas within that tradition (Rodseth, 1998; cf. Asad, 1993:18). Having deconstructed so much of the Orientalist imagery producedby earlier generations of anthropologists, those who turn now to the analy-sis of ‘their own’ civilization must resist the temptation to construct simi-larly broad, if ‘Occidentalist’, imagery. Following not only Gramsci orBakhtin but our own ethnographic sensibilities, we know that liminal orsubaltern groups are capable of sounding ‘a systematic counterpoint to themainstream of communication’ (Wolf, 1982: 390) – a counterpoint thatmay provoke a response within the prevailing order (cf. Williams, 1977:117). The mainstream itself may be difficult to comprehend, in fact,without some understanding of alternative and competing ideologies. Thisis not only because authoritative discourse is commonly constructed in reac-tion to existing alternatives, but because such discourse often carries withinitself masked or ‘recessive’ cultural traits that become apparent only whenthey are seized upon and elaborated by groups outside the mainstream (cf.Dumont, 1986: 17). To neglect the voices of such groups, even when theyreside within the West, seems a strangely un-anthropological enterprise –and one that is likely to rob us of important insights into what any culturaltradition is and how it came to be that way.

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Accordingly, this article asks what we might learn about ‘Western cos-mology’ by focusing not on Pauline, Augustinian or Calvinist sources buton American religions, grown up in the 19th century, which continue todiverge, often radically, from mainstream Christianity (Bloom, 1992, 1996).While Mormonism is the example to be considered here in detail, ourgeneral argument sheds light on a wide range of American philosophiesand faiths, from Emerson’s Transcendentalism to Southern Baptism andPentecostalism. The thrust of our argument is that these distinctly Ameri-can traditions have a hidden repertoire of mystical and communal themesthat directly conflict with ‘Western cosmology’ as described, for example,by Sahlins (1994: 439–40, 1996). The West, according to Sahlins, finds itsideological origins in the Augustinian notion of human finitude – ‘thenature of man as an imperfect creature of lack and need’ (1996: 397). TheWestern self, deprived and depraved, is thus separated by an infinite dis-tance from an infinite God. Homo economicus and other modern conceptsof the actor are traced by Sahlins back to the dogma of finitude and absol-ute separation from God. Yet this is precisely the dogma that American religions,especially in their 19th-century beginnings, have tended to repudiate. Even now, weargue, Mormonism and other American religions have surprising affinitieswith mystical and communal traditions outside the West, affinities that arefully revealed, ironically enough, only in the context of American culturalexpansion in the non-Western world.2

Two tiers for the spirits

If absolute separation of the self from God is to form the core of any cos-mology, that cosmology would seem to require a rather strict monotheismto eliminate the problem of multiple divinities or spirits that might fill thebreach, as it were, between humans and the supreme being. In its officialmanifestations, of course, Christianity would seem to embody just such astrict monotheism. To leave it at that, however, would not only mistake thewhole of the Christian tradition for its official manifestations, but wouldignore the fact that even official Christianity recognizes spiritual beings orpersonified powers that do indeed help to fill the gap between humans andGod. As Horton (1982: 213) argues:

. . . both Islam and Christianity allow for a multiplicity of lesser spiritualagencies operating under the aegis of the supreme being, whilst most if not allindigenous cosmologies allow for the same combination. Hence the conflictbetween the traditional religions and the so-called ‘world religions’ is not somuch a conflict between radically different world-views as a conflict over whatto worship and what to eschew within a single pantheon.

If the lesser spirits, then, find greater emphasis and elaboration in‘traditional’ religions, they are seldom eliminated even from the most‘monotheistic’ cosmologies, which usually acknowledge, with some

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ambivalence, the semi-divine status of angels and saints and the preternat-ural powers of demons, witches and ghosts.3 Such ‘lesser spirits’, further-more, are often of central importance in the religious practices of the laity,if not the official hierarchy, in many Christian denominations. Angels andsaints, in particular, serve not merely as external media for communicationwith the divine, but as manifestations of the divine within the believer’s per-sonal experience and spiritual consciousness (e.g. Bloom, 1996; Knox,1994). In this light, the separation of the self from God seems less thanabsolute within Christian cosmology. The idea of absolute separation maybe important within certain prominent Christian traditions, yet this doesnot imply that Christianity or Western cosmology in general can be definedby this idea. The challenge thus posed to Sahlins (1996) should be clearenough.

Beyond this, when Christianity’s full pantheon is recognized and takenseriously, Christian encounters with ‘traditional’ religions are cast in a newlight. Bearing the marks of its long history as a traditional religion, Chris-tianity in this light seems much freer to accept and perhaps to incorporatemany of the animistic beliefs of indigenous peoples. Yet this hardly fits ourusual expectations. Even Horton, who stresses the role of the lesser spiritsin both Christianity and Islam, tends to see these ‘monotheistic’ faiths ascatalysts for change within indigenous religions, but not vice versa. Thus heemphasizes the potential for Western and African religions to be reconciledin monolatry, the worship of one deity among the others of the pantheon:‘Indeed, it would seem that missionaries all over Africa have usually strivento discover the name of the indigenous supreme being, and, where suc-cessful, have gone on to tell the people of his “true” nature’ (Horton, 1971:100). From this perspective, African conversion to Christianity involves notthe overthrow of the indigenous pantheon but a reinterpretation and anelaboration of an element within that pantheon – the indigenous idea of asupreme being. At the same time, Horton tends to retain the assumptionthat cultural influences are flowing in one direction only. If Western andtraditional religions are to mingle and combine, they seem always to do sowithin the traditional culture and on terms favorable to the supreme being.

Yet there is a second front along which Western and traditional re-ligions might combine, a front that Horton recognizes but does not explore– the meeting ground of the ‘lesser spirits’. Because many Westerners areinclined to downplay or dismiss the lesser spirits included within their owncosmological traditions, they may fail to appreciate the potential at this levelfor reconciliation with ‘traditional’ (non-Western) beliefs. Among Africans,however, this potential is clear: African converts to Christianity, accordingto Horton (1971: 105), have a striking tendency to seek spiritual guidanceand support from the underground or countercultural traditions of theWest – i.e. ‘not only from the writings of the Western faith-healing sects, butalso from those of the Rosicrucians, the Spiritualists, the Theosophists, andother such followers of Western occultism’. What Horton does not mention

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is the possibility that Western occultists might eventually return the favor,seeking confirmation of their own beliefs within the traditions of an exotic– in this case, African – cosmology.

Indeed, to be symmetrical, Horton might have argued that exposure totraditional cosmologies has helped to enhance and elaborate Westernbeliefs about ‘lesser spirits’, but Westerners, after all, have always had suchbeliefs – have clung to them, in fact, long after being ‘Christianized’ (e.g.Butler, 1990; Favret-Saada, 1980; Ginzburg, 1983; Leventhal, 1976). Evenwithout the catalyst, then, of African or other traditional religions, themodern West has always carried the potential for large-scale ‘conversion’to what might be called polylatry – the honoring (if not the worship) of mul-tiple spirits or divinities. Such conversion would, in effect, reverse the ‘dis-enchantment of the world’ that Weber saw as the master trend of modernWestern history (see also e.g. Lévy-Bruhl, 1985; Tambiah, 1990; Thomas,1971). Reanimated with many lesser yet closer spirits, the cosmos woulddiverge dramatically from the image presented by Sahlins (1996) – theimage of the Western self cut off by an infinite distance from an infiniteGod. Under what conditions, however, would we expect Western cosmol-ogy to become polylatrous? Why would the ‘lesser spirits’, so long neglectedand subordinated, suddenly be recognized and promoted within the Judeo-Christian hierarchy?

The answer obviously depends on how these spirits are implicated,semantically or pragmatically, in wider contexts of culture and society. Whatdo the spirits mean to people and how does their meaning change? Againwe may take a clue from Horton’s classic essays on religious conversion inAfrica (1971, 1975a, 1975b). These essays propose a two-tiered model of a‘typical traditional cosmology’ in which ‘the lesser spirits . . . are in the mainconcerned with the affairs of the local community and its environment –i.e. with the microcosm’, while the supreme being is ‘concerned with theworld as a whole – i.e. with the macrocosm’ (1971: 101). The cosmos is thussemantically divided into local and global domains, each of which is associ-ated with one ‘tier’ of the pantheon (see also Horton, 1975a: 219, 1993:359). If this model seems rather too tidy to be anything but a ‘hypotheticalconstruct’, Horton claims to have arrived at the model ‘through a slow andpainful process of induction’ (Horton, 1975a: 220, n. 3), involving bothintensive fieldwork and a wide literature review.

However closely the two-tiered model adheres to empirical reality, itprovides a convenient tool with which to examine the spatial organizationof religious beliefs (Rodseth, 1998) – the myriad ways in which meaningsare distributed over a landscape, depending on prevailing patterns of travel,commerce and communication (e.g. Barth, 1990; Mann, 1986). In par-ticular, the model suggests that key religious beliefs depend on the degreeto which local communities have been incorporated into the modern‘macrocosm’ – Horton’s term, it would seem, for what Wallerstein (1974)calls the ‘modern world system’ or what Hannerz (1992, 1996) refers to as

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the ‘global ecumene’. As the macrocosm penetrates and then incorporateslocal communities, Horton argues, the religious emphasis tends to shiftfrom the ‘lower’ tier of the pantheon to the ‘higher’ (1975a: 220):

Where the way of life is dominated by subsistence farming and commerce ispoorly developed, the social relations of the people of a particular area arelikely to be largely confined by the boundaries of their microcosm. . . .However, where there is a development of factors making for wider communi-cation (for instance, a development of long-distance trade), the social life ofthose involved will no longer be so strongly confined by the boundaries of theirmicrocosm. Many of their relationships, indeed, will cut dramatically acrossthese boundaries. In this situation, given the same ‘basic’ cosmology, religiouslife is likely to take a somewhat different form. Less attention will be paid tothe spirits, and more to the supreme being.

Monolatry, then, even without Western missionary activity, might havedeveloped in ‘traditional’ societies anyway, once enough of the populationhad been drawn into the macrocosm of the modern world (Horton, 1971:104).

In keeping with Horton’s logic, however, ‘modern’ societies are hardlyimmune to an ‘outbreak’ of polylatrous beliefs. Such beliefs would seem tothrive on any reversal of the process described by Horton – would thrive,that is, on a withdrawal of modern people into new microcosms. Under thesecircumstances, Westerners might be expected to rediscover the polylatrouspotential of their own cosmological traditions, ‘activating’ the lesser spiritsand coming to venerate them, along with the supreme being, as divineagencies in everyday life. Thus, by shifting Horton’s model into reverse, wecan imagine a scenario in which the modern world is ‘re-enchanted’ –infused with animistic and magical elements usually associated with the‘micro-cosmologies’ of the pre-modern or non-Western world.

But what is the evidence, if any, that the West has been re-enchantedin this way? The answer depends on what social and religious organizationsare to be counted as ‘new microcosms’. Esoteric orders such as the onesmentioned by Horton – Rosicrucians, Spiritualists, Theosophists – haveindeed formulated radical, post-Christian cosmologies, yet their socialorganization has generally not been local or microcosmic but strikinglycosmopolitan. Theirs is a mysticism of the macrocosm, it could be argued,generated by increasing transactions in spiritual capital between the Westand the ‘traditional’ cultures of the Levant, India and East Asia. At the sametime, with the commercialization and mechanization of modern society, theWest has seen scores of utopian and millenarian movements aiming tocreate more intimate and humane forms of social organization (e.g.Collins, 1988; Hobsbawm, 1959; Williams, 1962).4 Some of these move-ments provide dramatic examples of modern Westerners withdrawing intonew microcosms, yet the resulting communes, phalanxes and other utopianexperiments have often been cosmologically conservative or rationalistrather than mystical or polylatrous. This is perhaps understandable insofar

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as localism is not the cause of such movements but their effect – the oftenbrief flowering of what remains, at root, a macrocosmic ideology.

American mysticism and the market revolution

A proper reversal of Horton’s original scenario would involve the long-termparochialization of a large segment of the modern world – a return to local-ism, subsistence production and communal sharing in a population whoseancestors had been relatively worldly, market-oriented and individualistic.Such a process would require vast expanses of new land and formidable newbarriers to the penetration of state power, urban culture and market econ-omics. Yet these conditions were met in colonial North America – not alongthe coast, where cheap water transportation gave access to world com-merce, but inland, where Euro-American settlers ‘cut or greatly reducedtheir links to the market’ (Stokes, 1996: 19) and went on to create a locallyoriented and largely self-sufficient way of life.5 While coastal culture, then,was relatively ‘modern’, competitive and cosmopolitan from the earliestdecades of European settlement, a quite distinct economic culture devel-oped in the interior (Sellers, 1991: 5):

New World land closed the interior to the market it galvanized at tidewater.Moving goods was infinitely more difficult across the thinly inhabited reachesof America than in densely populated Europe. . . . Consequently people whosettled at any distance from navigable water mainly produced use values forsusbsistence rather than the market’s commodity values for sale. . . . By the endof the [18th] century, the majority of free Americans lived in a distinctivesubsistence culture remote from river navigation and the market world.

In this opening passage of The Market Revolution, Charles Sellers summarizesa new conception of Euro-American farmers in the early national periodand, by extension, a new conception of American cultural history. Only inthe last 20 years have historians exploded the idea, still commonly heldoutside their field, that America has always been a capitalist society, imbuedwith a distinctive entrepreneurial spirit going back to the Puritans (Stokes,1996: 3). Even the farmers of the remote interior were generally seen, inthe old perspective, as frustrated capitalists eager to break out of their localeconomies and to gain access to wider markets. Beginning in the late 1970s,however, this perspective was challenged by rural historians who arguedinstead that American farmers in the early national period were principallymotivated not by profit margins but by familistic and communal values thatgrew from a local and largely self-sufficient way of life (Clark, 1979, 1990;Henretta, 1978; Merrill, 1977).6 Thus reconceptualized, these farmers aredepicted by Sellers (1991, 1996) as the principal antagonists of the marketrevolution that was under way in the United States by about 1815 (see alsoJohnson, 1992; Stokes and Conway, 1996). As the barriers to overland trans-portation were surmounted, this revolution spread into the heartland,

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established the hegemony of capitalist culture in America, and in theprocess ‘created ourselves and most of the world we know’ (Sellers, 1991:5).

Before it could triumph, however, the market faced fierce resistance inthe form of a religious movement, or cluster of movements, known as theSecond Great Awakening (Carwardine, 1993; Hatch, 1989). In rural areasthreatened by capitalist transformation, this surge of religious fervor con-stituted a vast revitalization movement, a means of resisting and eventuallyof adapting to the encroaching market and its culture of competitive effort(cf. Leone, 1979: 16). Even as Yankee evangelists, then, stressed divinerewards for moral striving, self-discipline and other bourgeois virtues,‘plebeian’ preachers recharged the subsistence culture of the interior byinsisting that ordinary people could be saved by an ecstatic rebirth: ‘Directaccess to divine grace and revelation, subordinating clerical learning toevery person’s reborn heart, vindicated the lowly reborn soul against hier-archy and authority, magistrates and clergy’ (Sellers, 1991: 30).

Yet ‘born-again’ Baptists or Methodists were still theologically con-servative compared to many smaller sects that proliferated in this period.These sects, according to Johnson and Wilentz (1994: 6):

. . . went beyond evangelical orthodoxy into direct and often heretical experi-ence of the supernatural. Young women conversed with the dead; male andfemale perfectionists wielded the spiritual powers of the Apostles; farmers andfactory hands spoke directly to God; and the heavens opened up to reveal newcosmologies to poor and uneducated Americans like Matthias and JosephSmith.

What was ‘awakened’, then, in the Second Great Awakening was not justspirituality in the orthodox sense but what Sellers (1996: 323) calls magic –‘the vividly experienced everyday presence and agency of the supernatural’.The farming interior, already heir to a ‘peasant animism’ that had for cen-turies ‘magicalized the patriarchal Christian God’, now expressed this ‘deepstrain of pre-Christian animism in suitably Christian theological terms’(Sellers, 1991: 29–30).7 Thus began an American Kulturkampf, according toSellers, pitting ‘the magical spirituality of a parochial and fatalist country-side against the self-reliant effort of a cosmopolitan and activist market’(1991: 31). The lesser spirits of the local community were being mobilizedagainst the macrocosm.

Paradoxically, however, the very religious movements intended todefend a ‘traditional’, community-oriented way of life could end up pro-moting distinctly ‘modern’ forms of competition and individualism. AsHatch (1989: 14) observes:

. . . insurgent religious leaders . . . defied elite privilege and vested interests andanticipated a millennial dawn of equality and justice. Yet, to achieve thesevisions of the common good, they favored means inseparable from the indi-vidual’s pursuit of spiritual and temporal well-being.

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What were these ‘means’ so inseparable from the flowering of the indi-vidual? Hatch writes of an ‘individualization of conscience’ flowing fromthe conviction that one’s ‘own interpretation of Scripture should not bemediated by any other authority, historical or ecclesiastical’ (1989: 41).With this radical democratization of religion, however, established denom-inations soon found themselves in cut-throat competition, while the ‘spiri-tual market’ was thrown open to wildly divergent points of view (Butler,1990: 273). In such a spiritual marketplace, every individual was a potentialvisionary or seer, turning inward not only to choose the right but to feel thepresence of angels and of God.

In this sense, the ‘lesser spirits’ of the Second Great Awakening werenot just local but personal gods, moving within the souls of the believersthemselves. At the extreme, in fact, they were the souls of the believers them-selves. This is why Bloom (1992: 52–3) identifies ‘Orphism’, the cult of thedivine or shamanic self, as one of the broad influences flowing equallythrough the American folk tradition, the religious movements of the early19th century, and the writings of ‘our elitist seer’, Ralph Waldo Emerson.In an Orphic mode, the lesser spirits are not external agents – angels,demons, ghosts – but seeds or sparks of divinity within human hearts.

In a broader perspective, however, American Orphism is just anextreme manifestation of a mystical tradition that can be traced fromEmerson back to the earliest colonial heretics (Miller, 1956: 189–90):

To our minds, no longer at home in the fine distinctions of theology, it mightseem that from the Calvinist doctrine of regeneration, from the theory that aregenerate soul receives an influx of divine spirit, and is joined to God by adirect infusion of His grace, we might deduce the possibility of receiving allinstruction immediately from the indwelling spirit, through an indwelling spiritwhich is essentially mystical. Such was precisely the deduction of Mistress AnneHutchinson, for which she was expelled into Rhode Island. It was exactly theconclusion of the Quakers, who added that every man was naturally suscepti-ble to this inward communication, that he did not need a special and super-natural dispensation. Quakers also were cast into Rhode Island or, if theyrefused to stay there, hanged on Boston Common.

Mysticism is carefully defined by Miller (1956: 189) as ‘the doctrine that theultimate nature of reality or of the divine essence may be known by animmediate insight’.8

Yet the paradox now seems all the more intractable: how could suchmysticism, with its radically individualized conception of the divine, providea basis for collective life? If the lesser gods were bulwarks, as Sellers wouldhave it, against the macrocosm of the market, they could also be corrosiveagents within the local community or congregation: ‘Americans found itdifficult to realize . . . that a commitment to private judgment could drivepeople apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity’(Hatch, 1989: 81). The free spiritual market might favor, for a while, areligious entrepreneur whose visionary experiences could inspire

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congregational, or even national, solidarity. Yet the same entrepreneur wasever vulnerable to challenge from the next wave of spiritual innovation.Over time, then, in Hatch’s (1989: 14) view, ‘religious movements eager topreserve the supernatural in everyday life had the ironic effect of acceler-ating the breakup of traditional society and the advent of a social order ofcompetition, self expression, and free enterprise’.

Under these conditions, for a new religion to survive, it would have tobecome more ‘corporate’ in organization, capable of absorbing and chan-neling innovation to serve its own ends. In particular, an enduring Churchwould require a hierarchy of credentialed authorities entrusted to evaluateand authenticate new claims to divine revelation. Even as the market revol-ution, then, spread into the rural interior, replacing familism and fatalismwith a bourgeois ethic of self-reliance and self-control, American denomi-nations began to cross the familiar Weberian terrain of institution-buildingand routinization. Communal mysticism, as a Church’s founding impulse,could hardly be repudiated, but it could be hidden away where few wouldfind it: deep within a routinized creed of social decorum, personal responsi-bility and the methodical improvement of body and soul.

Cosmologies in collision

By the 1850s, American Baptists, Methodists and Disciples of Christ wereplaying down their plebeian beginnings in the interest of achieving bour-geois respectability (Hatch, 1989: 201–6; Sellers, 1991: 375; cf. Carwardine,1996). The invention (or reinvention) of proper ecclesiastical and scholarlyauthority was so successful that Baptists and Methodists, in particular, cameto constitute the religious establishment in many parts of the country,boasting their own colleges and seminaries as well as increasingly ornatechurches. The keen irony of this turn of events is pinpointed by Sellers(1991: 161): ‘Eventually capitalist transformation would obliterate from thememory of both great popular denominations their origins in a massive cul-tural mobilization against the market and its ways.’ Yet traces of communalmysticism were apparently preserved, especially within the Baptist tradition,which is still capable of launching ‘primitivist’ movements intended torestore a vaguely remembered, pre-market world of local familism andmagical spirituality (cf. Johnson and Wilentz, 1994: 173).

One American sect that remained openly communal and mysticalthroughout most of the 19th century, only to turn all the more sharplytoward respectability around 1900, was the Mormon Church – more prop-erly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Mormonismoriginated in western New York, where the Second Great Awakening ‘strucka tinderbox’ and left the region ‘burned over’ by the fires of religious revival(Arrington and Bitton, 1992: 3; Cross, 1950). The Mormon prophet, JosephSmith, Jr (1805–44), came from a family of uprooted Yankees who had for

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three generations suffered the hardships of boom-and-bust capitalism,moving many times before settling on the New York frontier in 1816. Overthe next decade, the construction of the Erie Canal ‘thrust capitalistimperatives inland’, slashing shipping costs to New York City, rapidly replac-ing subsistence farming with commercial agriculture, and ‘bringing theAmerican Kulturkampf to a climax’ (Sellers, 1991: 217). Losing their farmnear Palmyra, New York in 1827, the Smiths were one of many impover-ished and demoralized families in the region who sought relief in magicaland occult practices as well as in religious mysticism (Brooke, 1996; Quinn,1998).

Mormonism from its beginnings included key elements that are mysti-cal in the sense that we use the term. Joseph Smith’s visions of God andJesus Christ, for example, and his translation of a mysterious sacred text areclassic cases of knowing ‘the divine essence . . . by an immediate insight’(Miller, 1956: 189). Moreover, as Mormon cosmology was elaborated in aseries of revelations from the late 1830s on, the mystical union of humanand divine came to be anchored in the very structure of the universe.Before the creation of the earth, according to this cosmology, all humanbeings resided as ‘spirit children’ in the presence of God. The place whereGod dwells, while not ‘a planet like this earth’, is in fact ‘a globe like a seaof glass and fire’ – a crystal sphere, apparently, with divinatory properties(Doctrine and Covenants, 130: 6–8). Those spirits who were faithful to Godreceived human bodies and were born to earthly parents. Yet the cosmol-ogy denies any sharp contrast between spirit and flesh: ‘All Spirit is matter’,according to Joseph Smith, ‘but it is more fine or pure’ (Doctrine andCovenants, 131: 7–8). The possible sources of this idea and its radical anti-Calvinist implications are well summarized by Brooke (1996: 202):

All things were dually spiritual and material, a concept that would haveemerged naturally from an immersion in divining magic, where stones grewalchemically into silver and gold, to be buried in the ground and protected byvolatile spirits. God had not created the world and humanity from nothing, exnihilo, but from preexisting substances. . . . Spirit and matter were pervasivelylinked rather than divided by a chasm negotiated only by grace and atonement.

Having taken bodily form, furthermore, human beings were expected tokeep this form, even in the afterlife: ‘We will lose our bodies in death for abrief span but they will be returned to us more beautiful than we have everknown them before, and they will be as real and tangible as they are now’(Richards, 1976: 309). Rather than meeting God, then, in a purely spiritualcondition, Mormons remain after death in exalted but decidedly materialbodies.

This is only appropriate, in fact, because God himself is conceived inMormon cosmology as a finite and material being (Ostler, 1989). Rejectingthe doctrine of original sin and Christianity’s general denigration of theflesh, Joseph Smith dared to conceptualize the deity as a fleshly creature,

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though more glorious than an ordinary human being: ‘God himself wasonce as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonderheavens! That is the great secret’ (in Burton, 1970: 202). Because divinity,furthermore, is not an absolute status but a matter of degree, the Mormonuniverse is replete with gods and various ‘lesser spirits’ – a striking contrastto the stripped-down pantheons offered by most Christian sects. In no otherway, in fact, does Mormonism depart so dramatically from traditionalJudeo-Christian doctrine. To reconcile his own conception of the pantheonwith the Bible’s, Joseph Smith claimed that Paul had alluded to ‘gods manyand lords many’ (Burton, 1970: 208) and that the Old Testament had beenmistranslated from the Hebrew:

The word Eloheim ought to be in the plural all the way through – Gods. Thehead of the Gods appointed one God for us; and when you take [that] view ofthe subject, it sets one free to see all the beauty, holiness and perfection of theGods. (Smith in Burton, 1970: 208–9)

Mormon deities, furthermore, are not exclusively male. From JosephSmith’s time to the present, LDS theology has included often vague butpersistent references to ‘Heavenly Mother’, the wife and companion ofHeavenly Father (Wilcox, 1989). For God to be a Father, there must be aMother: this seems to be the reasoning from ordinary experience that hasled many Mormons, from the 1840s onward, to posit the existence of afemale deity. In fact, by 1909, this tenet had been incorporated into officialChurch doctrine, which states that all men and women ‘are in the simili-tude of the Universal Father and Mother’, were ‘begotten and born ofheavenly parents’ and are ‘literally the sons and daughters of Deity’ (Smithet al., 1909: 80). Although Latter-Day Saints might be seen as monotheisticin the sense that they worship only the one deity who was ‘appointed forus’, Mormon cosmology clearly implies the existence of a multitude ofworlds, each ruled by divine parents.

In sharp contrast, then, to Augustinian and Calvinist cosmology, Mor-monism holds that ‘man’ and God are of the same substance, separated byseveral grades of exaltation but not by an infinite chasm. As a result, human-ity is capable of contacting and even merging with the divine. Havingreached ‘celestial heaven’, the highest of three levels of salvation, thosehuman beings deemed worthy can expect to become gods themselves. Thisdoctrine was revealed to Joseph Smith in 1843 (Doctrine and Covenants,132: 20):

Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be fromeverlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all,because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because theyhave all power, and the angels are subject unto them.

As Brigham Young explained: ‘We are created, we are born, for the expresspurpose of growing up from the low estate of manhood, to become gods,like unto our Father in heaven’ (in Smith and Sjodahl, 1950: 827).

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According to the Mormon prophets, then, the universe is characterized bya continuous, cyclical process whereby spirit children take human and thendivine form, eventually creating spirit children of their own. In light of thistheological punctuation, Bloom (1992: 105) describes Mormonism as akind of modern gnosticism, ‘in which spirit and matter, God and man, wereto be different only in degree, not in kind’.

In short, one could hardly imagine a putatively Christian tradition thatdiverges more radically than Mormonism does from what Sahlins (1996)calls ‘Western cosmology’. Even if a distinction between body and soul isuniversal, Sahlins argues, ‘what has set the West apart is the notion of a civilwar between them’ (1996: 402). This war was inevitable given ‘the famous“metaphysical evil” ’ of human finitude, according to which ‘The world,including the creature, was created ex nihilo: nothing divine as such is in it’(Sahlins, 1996: 396). As ‘an imperfect creature of lack and need’, forevertainted by the Fall, ‘man’ is doomed to ‘wear out his body in the vainattempt to satisfy it’ (1996: 397). From this Augustinian starting point it isbut a few historical steps, in Sahlins’s account, to Economic Man and all therest of the Western market mentality. Yet none of these observations sup-posed to capture the fundamental ideology of the West apply to the dis-tinctively American religion of the Mormons.

Mormons in the land of Mammon

Mormonism was ‘founded on the principle of continuing revelation’, suchthat ‘the ultimate earthly authority of religious matters resided in the livingprophet’ (Arrington and Bitton, 1992: 244). Yet many other Mormons, noless than the Church’s founder, are assumed to have had direct experienceof the divine. Even now, the President of the Church is considered aprophet, and any Church member can bring questions to God for personalrevelation. Thus the ‘individualization of conscience’ that Hatch (1989)traces to the Second Great Awakening remains crucial to modern Mormonpractice. The cosmology of the Church, furthermore, is not a closed orstatic system but continues to be revised according to what is revealed(Leone, 1979: 192–3):

. . . on at least one point – free access to theology – Mormon doctrine is vitallyand brilliantly alive among the people, having emerged just where everybodyofficially proclaims it ought to be, but where no one is prepared to find it. Safein the hands of the people, it can take whatever turns are required; unimpededby higher authority or formal logic, Mormons do not see what they are doing,which is keeping a vital faith vital, creating and recreating Mormonism just asJoseph Smith wanted.

At the same time, as Leone (1979: 166–7) makes clear, the Church hier-archy has been transformed since the late 19th century, emerging as anelaborately stratified bureaucracy governed by flexible, rational regimes.

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Increasingly, in fact, the Church has attempted to adapt to mainstreamChristianity by downplaying the mystical dimensions of Mormonism(Brooke, 1996: Ch. 12; Quinn, 1998) and emphasizing its codification inscripture and its respect for clerical and other credentialed authorities(Leone, 1979: 37–8). Thus, while it is still possible in principle for anyChurch member to experience direct communion with God, current claimsto divine revelation are subject to evaluation and authorization by theChurch hierarchy. This helps to create a profound tension between theChurch’s original mystical impulse and its current strain toward bourgeoisor ‘mainstream’ respectability (see especially Brooke, 1996: 296–9).

Another, equally profound tension has developed between theChurch’s original ideal of communal solidarity and the modern realities ofcompetitive individualism (Leone, 1979: 7–8, 166). The early Church wasconceived as a ‘United Order’ in which all households would partakeequally of the available resources (Arrington, 1958: 28):

In May 1831, when the New York converts to the infant church began to arriveat the newly established gathering place of Kirtland, Ohio, the Lord is reportedto have inspired Joseph Smith to instruct that land and other properties beallotted ‘equal according to their families, according to their circumstances,and their wants and needs.’ The revelation went on further to say: ‘And letevery man . . . be alike among this people, and receive alike, that ye may beone.’

The communal ethic was reflected in a range of institutions that were criti-cal to the survival and growth of the early Church. The ‘consecration’ ofproperty, eventually replaced by a system of tithing, helped to redistributewealth and ‘assure the socialization of surplus incomes’ (Arrington, 1958:7). Construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing and merchandisingwere all organized on a largely cooperative basis. The Perpetual EmigrationFund assisted the poor in relocating to the Church’s gathering place, whichshifted from Ohio to Missouri and Illinois before the migration to the GreatSalt Lake Valley in 1847. Throughout much of the 19th century, Mormoneconomic ideals helped to establish village-like colonies in which propertywas held in ‘stewardship’ from the Church and productivity increasedthrough cooperative industry.

In all of this, it may be argued, the early Mormons were attempting to‘stay ahead’ of the market revolution that had earlier transformed the fron-tier world of Joseph Smith, drawing his western New York into the com-mercial economy and destroying a relatively self-sufficient, agrarian way oflife. If religious persecution was the immediate cause of Mormon migra-tion, each new westward settlement offered the hope of both religious andeconomic autonomy: ‘The goal of colonization, of the settled village, andof resource development was complete regional economic independence.The Latter-day Saint commonwealth was to be financially and economicallyself-sufficient’ (Arrington, 1958: 26). Under the leadership of BrighamYoung (1801–77), the Mormons rapidly developed the arable valleys in

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Utah and surrounding territories. Before the 1870s, they seemed indeed tohave established their own ‘Great Basin Kingdom’ beyond the reach of boththe American government and the world market. In 1869, however, withthe completion of the transcontinental railroad, the Mormon territorybegan to lose its economic independence. The Panic of 1873 triggeredbank failures and the closing of mines, shops and factories throughout Utah(Arrington, 1958: 323):

That the Panic should have any appreciable effect on the Mormon economywas due, of course, to the ‘entangling economic alliances’ with the East whichhad been built up after the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In themore or less self-enclosed system of the Mormons the railroad had catapultedan enclave of merchants, bankers, freighters, and prospectors.

Just as the Erie Canal, then, had carried the capitalist culture of the East toJoseph Smith’s family farm, the railroad now drove it into Brigham Young’stheocratic kingdom. In response, communalism temporarily resurgedamong the Latter-Day Saints.

Through agencies created by the church Mormon leaders carried out aneconomic action program which delayed and mollified the absorption of theMormon economy into the broader social economy of the nation – an actionprogram which constituted a unique response to the challenge of easterncompetitive capitalism. (Arrington, 1958: 235)

The most sweeping initiative was the ‘United Order of Enoch’, a compre-hensive reorganization of Mormon society designed ‘to root out individu-alistic profit-seeking and trade and achieve the blessed state of opulentself-sufficiency and equality’ (1958: 324). By the time of Young’s death,however, in 1877, the economy had improved and the United Order wasabandoned in practice, though maintained as an ideal to be realized in afuture generation (Arrington, 1958: 385; Arrington and Bitton, 1992: 126).

While founded, then, on an ethic of communal solidarity, the MormonChurch has come to embrace the hegemonic culture of private enterprise,personal responsibility and methodical self-improvement. Such bourgeoisvalues can be observed not only within LDS industries and storefronts butwithin the Church hierarchy itself. Like their Baptist and Methodist coun-terparts in the 19th century, Mormons in the 20th century have developedelaborate institutions of sacred and scholarly authority. If the Baptists thusbecame ‘the Established or Catholic Church of the American South’(Bloom, 1992: 174), Mormons are poised, perhaps, to secure a similar pos-ition in the American West (1992: 192). Joseph Smith’s vision of ‘every man. . . alike among this people . . . that ye may be one’ has now given way to asystem of credentialed statuses within a vast bureaucracy. What the modernChurch most obviously values is not communal sharing or mystical experi-ence but the improvement of the self through education, moral striving andadherence to bourgeois propriety. Such improvement is a major aim of themissionary work expected of all young Mormon men (Arrington and

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Bitton, 1992: 300). Although less upwardly mobile than their male coun-terparts, women missionaries can have what Shepherd and Shepherd(1994: 170–1) call ‘a liberating experience in which demanding dutiesoutside of marital and family obligations are assumed, self-reliance andorganizational skills are exercised, and self-confidence and a sense of sister-hood are presumably strengthened’. The general pattern here is obviouslycongenial to the world of corporate capitalism, in which competitive indi-vidualism is combined with loyalty and deference to authority to allowmobility up and down a well-defined ladder of success.

This is what Mormonism has, in practice, become. Yet the teachings ofJoseph Smith and other founders of the Church are always there to be redis-covered in Mormon scripture, even if the communal and mystical importof these teachings has little bearing on the lives of most Mormons today. AsHefner (1993: 18) notes, ‘a religion’s central doctrines may remain latentfor long periods, only to be taken up when conditions favor their revivalistapplication to new historical circumstances’. Since the 1920s, splintergroups of ‘fundamentalist’ Mormons have indeed revived practices ofcommunal living and polygynous marriage long abandoned by the main-stream Church (Baer, 1988; Van Wagoner, 1992). Such groups take inspi-ration not only from Mormon scripture but from divine or angelicrevelations, the use of seer stones and other mystical influences (Brooke,1996: 297–8). Despite the evolution of the Church, then, from a small com-munal movement to a multinational and militantly bourgeois institution,the ideals of small-group solidarity and mystical experience not only persistin ‘recessive’ form in Mormon populations, but carry the potential to inspireand sustain actual behavior.

In this light, Mormons stand in an ambiguous relationship to theAmerican capitalist culture that they attempted for decades to outrun orresist. On the one hand, most Mormons today would seem to personify thatculture, defending as they do a classic conservative agenda of free enter-prise, American patriotism, ‘family values’ and the like (Bloom, 1992: 88).On the other hand, many of these same Mormons are ‘carriers’, in the epi-demiological sense, of a radical critique of capitalism, a critique inspired bythe communal mysticism of the early Church. Because the critique is ‘reces-sive’, in fact, and only occasionally expressed in social action, it is all themore difficult to eradicate from the ‘pool’ of Mormon culture. Such apattern is hardly unique to Mormonism or the other American religionsconsidered here. Many ‘shamanic’ traditions, as Samuel (1990, 1993) andThomas and Humphrey (1994) argue, have been absorbed into moreofficial, clerical religions intolerant of the potentially subversive activities offreelance religious specialists. Yet shamanic strands persist within suchreligions and can suddenly come to life, threatening the survival of manyotherwise comfortable kings, priests, and presidents.

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The ghost in the ecumene

The West looks different, we have argued, when American cultural currentsare recognized alongside and not just within the European ‘mainstream’. Byvirtue of its sojourn in a strange and dangerous hinterland, what is now‘American culture’ occupies an extremely ambiguous position in thehistory of the West as a whole. This was more apparent, perhaps, in the 19thcentury, when the United States was not ‘leader of the Western world’ butwas often viewed instead as a marshland (or backwater) of dubious culturalcredentials. How the country is conceptualized thus depends on ambigu-ous and shifting conceptions of center and periphery. Colonial America hasbeen described by Bailyn (1986: 113) not as a progressive frontier but as ‘aragged outer margin of a central world, a regressive, backward-lookingdiminishment of metropolitan accomplishment’. Much the same might besaid of the early republic, especially outside the new centers of metropolitanaccomplishment on the eastern seaboard. From this perspective, culturalinnovations on American soil appear not as extensions of a Great Traditionbut as parochial curiosities beyond the pale of Western progress.

Our own view, however, aligns with that of Hannerz (1992: 266), whodevelops the metaphor of ‘creolization’ as a way of capturing the ebb andflow of meanings between center and perhiphery: ‘Anglo culture, theculture of the WASPs, may have provided the metropolis, the Standard, themainstream, but as it reaches out toward every corner of society, it becomescreolized itself.’ Thus, what Hallowell (1957) called the ‘backwash of thefrontier’ – the often powerful influence of Native American culture onEuro-American settlers (Bailyn, 1986: 128–9) – is but one example of thecreolization to which the modern West is surprisingly susceptible. The his-torical development of the ‘global ecumene’, in Hannerz’s (1992, 1996)terms, has involved countless pulses of Western expansion and indigenousresponse. Each response has tended to leave its trace on the outposts thatwould serve in turn as staging points for the next expansionist pulse: ‘Mar-ginal with respect to the conquering power, these peripheral worldsacquired distinctive and permanent characteristics, and they eventuallyformed core worlds of their own that, in many cases, generated marginseven more complex than they themselves had been’ (Bailyn and Morgan,1991: 1). The same point is made, interestingly, by Dumont, whose empha-sis on individualism as the hallmark of Western ideology can easily eclipsethe larger picture he presents (1986: 17–18):

If nonindividualistic elements, aspects, or factors are present in contemporaryideology and in society at large, where do they come from? They derive in thefirst instance from the permanence or ‘survival’ of premodern and more or lessgeneral elements – such as the family. But they also derive from the veryoperation of individualistic values, which has let loose a complex dialecticresulting in combinations where they blend subtly with their opposites – indiverse domains, and for some of them as early as the end of the eighteenth

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and the beginning of the nineteenth century. . . . To the extent that the indi-vidualistic ideas and values of the dominant culture are spreading worldwide,they undergo modifications locally and engender new forms. Now – and thishas escaped notice – the new, modified forms can pass back into the dominantculture and operate there as modern elements in their own right. In that waythe acculturation of each particular culture to modernity can leave a lastingprecipitate in the heritage of global modernity. Further, this process issometimes cumulative inasmuch as this precipitate can in turn be transformedon the occasion of a subsequent acculturation.

This extremely rich argument – later elaborated and prominently pre-sented in the first chapter of German Ideology (Dumont, 1994) – anticipatesmany recent trends in the anthropology of transnationalism and globaliz-ation (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Clifford, 1997; Hannerz, 1996). Yet Dumont’sargument has at least one implication that seems to have gone unexplored.If Western culture does indeed contain ‘nonindividualistic elements,aspects, or factors’, what happens when these are carried along with (or deepwithin) the dominant ideology to local peoples who are said to be ‘enter-ing’ (or ‘resisting’) modernity? Our suggestion is that these submerged ele-ments, freed from their original matrix, may be ‘activated’ in the encounterwith non-Western cultural forms and indeed, as Dumont notes, ‘leave alasting precipitate in the heritage of global modernity’.

In this light, the missionary expansion of the Mormon Church ishardly the blunt instrument of cultural imperialism it might otherwiseappear to be. While missionaries may intend to send messages in one direc-tion only, they are often deeply influenced by the ‘backwash’ of the culturein which they operate (e.g. Lian, 1997). Missionary experience thusbecomes one of the many ways in which ‘cultural imperialists’ participate,however inadvertently, in their own acculturation. At the same time, evenwithout intercultural contact, the very efficacy of Western modes of expan-sion tends to generate ‘otherness’ among Westerners themselves – as witnessedby the development of Mormonism and many other traditions on theGreat Frontier. When these Western ‘others’ are overtaken by the main-stream of capitalist expansion, they are often pressured to re-adapt to thatmainstream by relegating their communal and mystical tendencies to aninner sanctum of the (‘merely’) domestic, psychic or sentimental. Somedo not or cannot adapt in this way and may be forced into a socially mar-ginal and stigmatized position, as in the case of ‘Holy Ghost people’ andother Pentecostal charismatics (Anderson, 1979), memorably described byBloom (1992: 175) as ‘American shamans’. Yet if they emerge – reborn –as creatures of the market, they also find themselves uniquely equipped toteach others, outsiders, how to make the same adaptation. In this way,perhaps, the most ‘backward’ of Westerners come to form the vanguardof Western expansion, even as they discover and rediscover the manymeanings of ‘the West’.

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Notes

Thoughtful and encouraging comments on an earlier draft were provided by DeanMay and Eric Hinderaker of the Department of History, University of Utah.

1 One recent work that directly challenges any easy identification of the Westwith individualism or rationalism is Jack Goody’s The East in the West (1996).Despite the title, however, Goody’s main purpose is to demonstrate that manyso-called ‘Western’ patterns are found in the East as well. Here we are princi-pally concerned with the complementary question of whether communal andmystical patterns usually associated with India and other parts of ‘the East’ arein fact integral to the West (cf. Collier, 1997: 10–16; Dumont, 1994: 6–16,215–16).

2 Whether such expansion might actually be facilitated by maintaining in‘recessive’ form a potentially radical critique of the dominant and explicittraditions of the West is a question for further research.

3 The same point was made by Anthony F.C. Wallace (1966: 72–3) in his revealingcomparison of the pantheon of the Iroquois with that of ‘the small Christiancommunity’ in which he grew up. As Wallace put it, ‘Even the so-called“monotheistic” religions invariably include an elaborate pantheon (rememberthat we are using the term “religion” in the summative sense and not as thelabel for a particular cult institution which happens to be monotheistic).’

4 In Europe, in fact, the pattern may go back to the late Middle Ages, when thenew profit economy seems to have triggered a spiritual crisis, especially in thereviving cities (Little, 1978; Ozment, 1980: 94–5; cf. Grundmann, 1995: 231–5).The intitial reaction, according to Little (1978), was the founding of reformedmonastic orders such as the Carthusians and Cistercians, which were pledgedto religious poverty and withdrew into the countryside to pursue a more self-sufficient way of life.

5 A strikingly similar pattern is described by Thompson and Lamar (1981: 27) inthe case of white settlers on the southern African frontier (see also Ross, 1981).Despite the fact, they argue: ‘that the Cape peninsula and the neighboringarable lands performed a minor but useful role in the capitalist system, duringthe 18th century the white pastoralists who dispersed beyond the arable beltloosened their links with it. Transportation was exclusively by horse and by oxwagon on tracks that were subject to seasonal inundations. The pastoralists didobtain a few imported goods . . . in exchange for farm produce and for sheepand cattle they sold on the hoof to itinerant traders from Cape Town, but therewas no market for the bulk of their flocks and herds and there were no realtowns in the colony except Cape Town. It was not until diamond and goldmining began toward the end of the 19th century that the means existed forfull-blooded capitalist practices to flourish in southern Africa.’

At the same time, ironically, Thompson and Lamar emphasize the contrastbetween southern Africa and North America, where a ‘vast, usable system ofwaterways and portages’ is argued to have ‘facilitated [the] penetration’ of themarket (1981: 28). At any distance from such waterways, however, white settle-ments in North America seem to have closely resembled their 18th-centurycounterparts in southern Africa.

6 Anthropologists will recognize in this debate echoes of the formalist-substan-tivist controversy in economic anthropology. Significantly, Sellers and otherhistorians in his camp have been influenced by both Polanyi (1944) and an

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earlier incarnation of Sahlins (1972), erstwhile leaders of the substantivistmovement (Sellers, 1991: 6 and 449).

7 Many or most Europeans, in fact, held on to animist beliefs and occult practicesright through the 18th century, even as such beliefs and practices weregenerally abandoned by educated elites (e.g. Butler, 1990: 28–30; Thomas,1971: 570–83). In this light, rural American religions of the early 19th centurywere perhaps continuous with the religious countercultures of Europe.Mormonism in particular has been interpreted as an American outgrowth ofEuropean hermeticism (Brooke, 1996; Quinn, 1998).

8 When such an insight is achieved through an ‘alternate state of consciousness’,mysticism is equivalent to ‘shamanism’ in Geoffrey Samuel’s (1990, 1993)sense. According to Samuel (1993: 8), a shamanic religion involves: ‘the regu-lation and transformation of human society through the use (or purported use) ofalternate states of consciousness by means of which specialist practitioners are held tocommunicate with a mode of reality alternative to, and more fundamental than, the worldof everyday experience’ (emphasis in original). For our purposes, the mostimportant implication of this definition is that shamanic religions remain open tochange through divine revelation. What Samuel calls ‘clerical’ religions, bycontrast, appeal to scholarship and philosophical analysis as sources ofauthority, and exhibit a tendency toward stable orthodoxy.

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� Lars Rodseth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. Hereceived his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1993. He has conducted field-work in Nepal and Micronesia, and is the author of ‘Distributive Models of Culture:A Sapirian Alternative to Essentialism’, American Anthropologist 100 (1998): 55–69.Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 270 S 1400E rm 102, SaltLake City, UT 84112-0060, USA. [email: [email protected]]� Jennifer Olsen received her BA degree from the University of Utah in 1996. Sheconducted fieldwork in India and Nepal in 1995, and currently lives in Wisconsin.

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