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Scholars invoke the terms “millenarian,” “millennialist,” and “apocalyptic” to refer to movements and sects that embrace ideologies positing the (typically traumatic) end of one era, promising relief from the sufferings of this world and its present age, and purporting to give rise to salvation in a new “golden age,” “heaven on earth,” or realized utopian social order. The strikingly broad range of movements that adopt such ideologies includes peaceful conversionist movements and militant religious social movements undertaking “holy war,” anticolonial movements, agrarian movements, and modern revolutionary political movements. Moreover, movements vary widely in their scale of organization and significance—from those that attract little notice beyond their participants to movements within early Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, and contemporary Islam that have been civilizational, even world-historical, in their consequences. Despite the ancient Middle Eastern origins of apocalypticism and millennialism, non-Western religions and ideologies – for example, Buddhism–have on occasion provided independent inspiration for such movements. Sometimes too, non-Western movements (for example, the nineteenth-century Tai Ping Rebellion in China) have synthesized local cultural materials with millenarian Christian ideas. In short, as rich veins of case study and comparative research document, millenarian and apocalyptic movements vary in ideology, organizational form, scale, and trajectory. The broad range of cases poses an important theoretical challenge—whether to focus on shared characteristics, or alternatively, to theorize alternative types of such movements. Keywords: ideology; sects; social change; terrorism; utopianism

Joseph Priestley's millenarian prophecies were not necessarily at odds with his natural philosophy, nor his materialism with his theology, but to the French philosophes and to his friend John Adams they seemed incompatible and they may also seem so to us. That is what this article considers in its three parts: the first, Priestley's reading of revealed religion; the second, the politics entailed by it; and the third, the way a progressive direction is carried in to the future, uniting religion and politics in his late reading of Biblical prophecy.

This article criticises primitivist caricatures of the Baining in Melanesia as a society that lacks exegesis, symbolic logics, religion, structures of power and control, and even an interest in play. The mytho-poetics of gender and procreation in Mali Baining society are documented by focusing on how art and sexuality are traced onto each other. The formative power of painting, barkcloth, dancing masks, netbags and music are merged with the formative power of women. Art and sexuality are made to inform each other's generative potential, and even each other's aesthetic charm. These fertile mytho-poetic practices also underpin Mali political practices. Mali indigenous identity is celebrated as local control over the original powers of creation, which continue to reside in the earth, in the local landscape and, above all, in that which underpins all creation, women's procreative bodies with their creative potential to bring forth something new. The Mali localise creative processes so as to empower and revalue themselves within a culture of resistance to the hegemony of colonialism, modernity, settlers and regional ethnic elites. publishedVersion

In October 1689 Quirinus Kuhlmann, a Silesian poet laureate, millenarian and admirer of Jakob Boehme, met a heretic’s end in Moscow, one of many cities visited by this self-styled ‘son of the Son of God’, ‘Jesuel’, in his attempt to establish his ‘Kühlmonarchie’, which would usher in the Last Days. His travels took him to Amsterdam, Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Turkey, where he hoped to convert the Sultan and enlist him in his campaign to overthrow the Roman Catholic church. In the 1670s and 1680s Kuhlmann spent extended periods in England and Scotland, visiting York and Edinburgh, and lived for several years in Bromley-by-Bow, drawing on common ground shared with various English nonconformist groups. These groups flourished not least because of the political upheavals following the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Interregnum, the Popish Plot of 1678, and the ensuing Exclusion Crisis. This article analyses the poems Kuhlmann wrote on the death of Charles II and the accession of his brother James to the throne in 1685, locating them within the Kühlpsalter, his poetic account of and commentary on his physical and spiritual journeys, and drawing links with his wider millenarian vision.Im Oktober 1689 wurde der schlesische Dichter und Chiliast Quirinus Kuhlmann in Moskau als Ketzer verbrannt. Der Anhänger Jakob Böhmes, der sich selbst als ‘Sohn des Sohnes Gottes’ und ‘Jesuel’ bezeichnete, reiste herum, um seine ‘Kühlmonarchie’ einzuleiten, die der Endzeit vorhergehen sollte. Er hielt sich in Amsterdam, Paris und London auf, und reiste sogar in die Türkei, um die Bekehrung des Sultans herbeizuführen, die unter Chiliasten als eine Vorbedingung für den Sturz der römischen Kirche galt. In den 1670er und 1680er Jahren war Kuhlmann dreimal in England und Schottland. Er besuchte York und Edinburgh, und wohnte in Bromley-by-Bow. In London waren chiliastische Sekten, die Aspekte seiner Mission teilten. Diese Sektierer profitierten sowohl von den politischen Umbrüchen des Bürgerkriegs und des Interregnums, als auch von der sogenannten Papistenverschwörung (1678) und den darauf folgenden Versuchen, den katholischen Herzog von York als Thronfolger zu enterben.1685 schrieb Kuhlmann Gedichte auf den Tod von Charles II. und die Thronbesteigung von James II., die als Anhang eines 1681 geschriebenen Kühlpsalms über James im fünften Buch seines Kühlpsalters erschienen. Sie werden hier im Kontext seiner breiteren chiliastischen Mission analysiert.

In a 1982 paper I argued that perceptions of time scarcity in Kragur Village, Papua New Guinea, in the mid-1970s were best understood as a reaction to new forms of authority characteristic of the growth of capitalism and calls for greater time order were grounded largely in its perceived ritual significance. More than forty years later, villagers are much more familiar with Western time, but less likely to perceive time as scarce. As in the 1970s, aspiring leaders still press for greater time order. Millenarian illusions informed advocacy of time order in the 1970s. Although today these illusions are, if not extinct, then dormant, unquestioned assumptions mirroring Western capitalist views of time inspire many of today's advocates. Yet, lacking the authority to impose new forms of time order, they have little effect on the rhythms of village life, and economic incentives to abandon comparative indifference to time remain weak.

Research into liberation theologies has rarely had an interreligious perspective. To that end, I shall carry out a comparative study of Christian and Islamic versions of liberation theology and I shall highlight the similarities and differences in their approaches. It will be a thematic study that is structured around three key mentalities which are shared by the approaches of both religious traditions. Firstly, the need to reinterpret their own religions from the perspective of the poor; secondly the interrelated emphases on action, orthopraxy and the agency of the oppressed; and thirdly a rejection of excessive other-worldliness. I conclude from my analyses with the following hypotheses: firstly, due to the lack of an authority akin to the Catholic Church, Islamic liberation theology is comparatively more likely to create the potential for social upheaval and is more likely to lead to an attenuation of metaphysical religious feeling; secondly, all liberation theologies contain latently the potential for creating millenarian outbursts; the best example to offer from modern history of this latent feature becoming manifest is in the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979.

This article considers A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, in the light of theories of sacred kingship and religious change. Although Muslim kingship has tended to be presented as an essentially secular institution, Moin is able to show how deeply divine images and understandings shaped kingship in both the Safavid and Mughal empires, which were bound together by mutual influence and competition. The divine matrix of kingship was facilitated by the influence of preeminent Sufism, Mongol universalism, millenarian technologies and dreams, and Persian tradition. The article suggests that the methodological approach adopted here, resembling l'histoire des mentalites, shows how our analyses of sacred kingship can be obscured by a focus on canonical and prescriptive texts. Taking up the theme of transgression, it compares Moin's work with recent anthropological reflections on the symbolism of the stranger-king. The article also uses Moin's work to indicate the problems with the critical dismissal of “legitimacy” as an indispensable (though insufficient) analytical tool. The subject matter is further placed within an overarching conceptualization of global religious diversity based on the tension between transcendentalist vs. immanentist impulses. In that light the reassertion of “transcendentalist” religiosity in the guise of an orthodox push-back against the enchanted cultural world re-imagined by Moin only appears in greater need of explanation. Avenues of comparative reflection are also opened up with Christian monarchy, which was both less profoundly “immanentized” in the early modern era and less successful at exporting itself in areas outside of imperial influence. The article concludes by considering the implications for theories of a global early modernity, and a comparison with Andre Wink's quite different characterization of Akbar as a secular-minded rationalist.

Contemporary (post-1945) liberalism functions analogously to Roman Catholicism in the decades after 1443. Both ideologies, in their respective periods, represent the hegemonic ideology of Western civilization, despite the fact that both comprise a miscellany of competing belief systems. Both ideologies are dominated by a single hegemonic power—the United States and the Renaissance papacy, respectively—which strives for doctrinal stability. All who reject official “doctrine,” however, are rendered liable to violent suppression. In this, papal Catholicism and American liberalism display an ultra-conservative outlook; but they also evince a powerfully millenarian streak, as evidenced by their dual proclamations of the “end of history” and their zealous missionary responses to macro-historical events in the final decades of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. For ideologues of both regimes, those events speak to an ultimate harmony of truth and value that only serves to entrench their own dogmatism. This, however, has dire consequences when it comes to war, as can be seen in the “crusading” character of contemporary liberal warfare. Ultimately, the Renaissance papacy proves unable to maintain its monopoly on Christian doctrine; and one has to wonder if a similar fate may befall America's perceived role as the champion of liberalism.

Shi‘ite Messianism has been accommodated constitutionally and has been portrayed as an indispensable aspect of political culture under the Islamic Republic. If the state is using the concept as a form of legitimacy, the concept is standardized in accordance with the prevailing perspectives of the political system. Thus, if there are other emerging grassroots messianic narratives incompatible with the political ideology, they could undermine the legitimacy of the state. This article examines the emerging paradoxes in a climate in which the state uses messianism as a legitimacy tool but, at the same time, is unable to monopolize the concept primarily for its own use. This article will assess a situation in which the state and the grassroots are struggling in order to maintain dominance over ideas that advocate millenarianism. There will be a critical discussion on how the politics of the Shi‘ite Messianism have proved to be contradictory, and the dilemmas over the politicization of Mahdism will be identified.

In the middle 1940s, at a time when white people were just beginning to penetrate the western highlands of what would become Papua New Guinea, a cult spread quickly among Engas, Ipili speakers, and Somaips. In the seminal article ‘The Sun and the Shakers' published almost 40 years ago, Mervyn J. Meggitt would call this cult the ‘Cult of Ain.’ The cult's core feature involved a massive sacrifice of pigs to the sun in an attempt to enlist the sun's aid. Participants stared at the sun and shook, entering a trance-like state. While massive pig sacrifices to the sun occurred in all cult variants, local versions of the cult differed in emphasizing one or two themes: acquiring wealth (pigs and pearlshells but also white manufactured goods) and/or ascending to the sky. Interpretations of the cult reflect this variation, some focusing on apparent cargo cultic dimensions while others train on the cult's millenarian aspects. This reprise of Meggitt's article argues that the themes of wealth acquisition and ascent to the sky were at base the same, intelligible with respect to the cosmological discourse that so clearly informed all the cult's manifestations (hence the emphasis upon the sun), a discourse that this article attempts to interpret. This, the first of a two-part article, summarizes what is known of Cult of Ain variants, highlighting the features other reporters have emphasized as well as those that may provide insight into underlying cultural and even transcultural logics.

This article focuses on the ‘theo-political’ core of US Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism. The political militancy characterizing two Millenarian/Messianic movements such as Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism constitutes a still under-researched and under-theorized aspect that, at present, is paramount to address for its immediate and long terms implications in the highly sensitive and volatile Israeli-Palestinian issue, in the US and Israeli domestic domain, and in the wider international community. Although processes of the ‘sacralisation of politics’ and ‘politicisation of religions’ have already manifested themselves in countless forms over past centuries, Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism are unprecedented phenomena given their unique hybridized nature, political prominence and outreach, mobilizing appeal amongst believers, organizational-communicational skills and degree of institutionalization.

This paper deals with the aestheticization and commoditization of culture in specific grand rituals held in Vanuatu. Through political, commercial and juridical processes, the traditional referent of these neo-ritualizations has been replaced by a celebration of the kastom theme itself; the official value of a regional, national, and global cultural heritage. The examination of two iconic rituals, the Nagol land dive on Pentecost island and the 15th February annual commemoration of John Frum on Tanna island, reveals them as similarly invoking a Christian and colonially inspired reverence in their idealization of an ancestral past. Nevertheless, the increasing monetarization of village communities through the global promotion of kastom spectacles by media and for touristic purposes is ever more frequently considered locally as a factor of inequality or division.

Between 1844 and 1863, fragments of disappointed Millerism developed the landmark ideas, the denominational name and the basic structure of what is now the Seventh-day Adventist Church with fifteen million members (2008) in 201 countries. This article contextualises the struggle of recent decades between continuity and change in Adventist teaching, suggesting that a score of doctoral theses/dissertations and other studies offer a coherence that is deeply disturbing for some believers, insufficient for some others, but satisfying for many. The demands in Western culture for faith to be shaped by evidence and to offer existential meaning have elicited three stances in relation to traditional Adventist thought: reversion, alienation, and transformation. Whereas the consequent tensions may be viewed as evidence of "growth, vitality and increased understanding," they also constitute an urgent call for effective internal and external dialogue.

In South Africa’s Eastern Cape frontier zone, a millenarian movement known as the Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1856–1857) devastated local populations and stunned observers. How could the messages of its prophetess, Nongqawuse, and the exhortations of her uncle, Mhlakaza, lead to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle, to the death of tens of thousands of people, and to the subjugation of the Xhosa? Historians and authors of literary works have attempted to answer this question, and their explanations have followed the contours of South African history through three general phases. The first (1857–1947) characterized the movement as a failed revolt against British expansion and a necessary step in social and religious Darwinism. The second period (1948–1988) saw the continuation of these interpretations, and, with National Party rule and the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, an increasingly radical group of historians brought about politicized and alternative interpretations embedded in Xhosa oral history. The third phase (1989–) began with the publication of Jeff Peires’The Dead Will Arise, which renewed interest in the history and has inspired a new wave of historical critique.

A new dispensation demands that details, indeed memories, of the old ways be forgotten as fresh ideals and modes of action become paramount. This article proposes that an initial step in forgetting involves neglect-more specifically the neglect of certain patterns of comportment or material evidence or practice that recall a past now considered undesirable. In a millennialist Caribbean community, past memories and technical practices are discouraged by 'ideological work' that constantly weighs the old order against a new world in the process of creation: 'directed forgetting'. For a post-communist Albanian village, by contrast, neglecting a technology appears a more transparently 'spontaneous' process. For both, memories are insubstantiated in an older material world, which must be avoided or destroyed. © 2009 Royal Anthropological Institute.

Although a relatively obscure book in the past, The Turner Diaries (by Andrew Macdonald) attracted considerable attention since April 19, 1995. The trial of Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing, shines a bright, examining light on the novel, but reveals much more than blueprints for bombing federal buildings. In The Turner Diaries, racially extreme ideologies and revolutionary worldviews both figure prominently, and the novel's potential readership is growing steadily amongst the more radical political and racial groups. National Alliance ideology, for instance, reaches tens of thousands of readers through The Turner Diaries. Written pseudonymously by William Pierce, who is the current head of the National Alliance, the novel tells the story of the dawning of the New Era. This New Era occurs through an intriguing combination of cataclysmic apocalyptic events and Neo-Nazi racist practices. The novel is the result of a complex fusion of Christian theologies, Neo-Nazi ideologies, scriptural interpretations, and extreme militancy. By the novel's end, the reader gains interesting insight into the Aryan worldview and its outlook on the future. In this article, I explore the unique worldview presented in The Turner Diaries by locating it in a framework of apocalyptic and sectarian theories. These theories deal specifically with sect ideology, common characteristics shared by apocalyptic groups, and the relationship between the interpretation of Christian doctrines and resulting actions. Because little critical material deals specifically with Macdonald's text,' primarily I will follow Gary Schwartz's sectarian theories, Norman Cohn's theory of millennial ideology, and Barkun's insights into extremist right wing groups to provide interpretive direction. While none of these texts provide specifics on Macdonald's novel, they do offer general patterns that help clarify the peculiarities of the Aryan visions presented in the text. Millenarian Ideology The primary worldview presented in The Turner Diaries is apocalyptic, with a decidedly premillennial quality.' This premillennial concept of the apocalypse is of cataclysmic political, social, and racial proportions. Moreover, it has incorporated certain characteristic features common to general millenarian belief systems, which are useful to review. Generally, groups that have a millenarian theme running through them: ... always picture salvation as (a) collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity; (b) terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly heaven; (c) imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly; (d) total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection of itself; (e) miraculous, in the sense that it is to accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies. (Cohn 13) All of these characteristics are present in The Turner Diaries, although in varying degrees. The other influences in the text, such as the Neo-Nazi racist elements, are incorporated with the millenarian group characteristics, distorting them and subtly forging a new, complex ideology that defies clear delineation. This new ideology, however, nevertheless maintains the general millenarian characteristics. The first of Cohn's criteria for classifying apocalyptic groups is that salvation is collective, and will be enjoyed by those who have faith in the prescribed doctrines (Cohn 13). This element features prominently in The Turner Diaries, where the driving theme of the book is the creation of a world where there is not only a separation of Whites from other "ethnic" groups, but also where the faithful's actions reflect the collective's doctrines: Those who were admitted [to the Organization]'-and that meant only children, women of childbearing age, and ablebodied men willing to fight in the Organization's ranks-- were subjected to much more severe racial screening than had been used to separate Whites from non-Whites in California. …

Temporal issues have remained relatively unelaborated in the rich body of research that applies cognitive dissonance theory to millenarian movements following a failed prophecy. We engage these issues by exploring how the meshichistim (messianists) among the Jewish ultraorthodox Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim employ temporal categories to deal with the crisis entailed in the death of their leader, the expected Messiah. In messianic Chabad, a double-edged “work of the present” has continued to evolve, simultaneously obfuscating and accentuating temporal delineations between past, present, and future. The ensuing dialectical reality puts into question the common notion that millenarian movements such as Chabad strive at all costs to restore the balance disrupted by failed prophecy. [millenarian movements, messianic temporality, cognitive dissonance, Chabad-Lubavitch]

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed several incidents of collective violence involving millenarian/apocalyptic New Religious Movements. This article reviews the academic literature that has emerged over the last few decades on millenarian violence, focusing on the key recurring characteristics and dynamics that have been highlighted by commentators as playing a significant role in both predisposing millenarian groups to volatility/violence, and also in precipitating these incidents of collective violence.

SUMMARY How did a storefront Sanctified church that was founded and formally led by a female change to one in which female leadership now occurs in ceremonial and ritual arenas, and what does this suggest about the institutionalization of female power? How might the positioning of the investigating ethnographer inform both the anthropological process and a humanistic interpretation of religion? These two questions shape this study of gender dynamics during two generations of an unaffiliated millenarian storefront church of a hundred souls, which began during World War II and has survived into the 21st century. Drawing on interpretations of doctrine, migration narratives, and germane cultural and historical contexts, this work explores the interplay of human agency, cultural legacies, and social contingencies in changing gender practices. As I was raised in this faith community, the study also provides a model for addressing the complexity of conducting insider/outsider ethnography.

This paper explores how Melanesian villagers have harnessed modern, technological ways of seeing. It begins by analysing the politics and narrative structures of dreams and popular stories about secret photos concerning the dead. These are stories about losing control and regaining hidden, alternative representations of Melanesians. I then analyse how millenarian followers have experimented with ‘constructing’ their own versions of cameras, televisions and videos so as to gain access to the omniscient powers of modern technology and merge them with those of a Christian god and with the gaze of the dead. In the Pomio Kivung movement, ‘televisions' and ‘videos' have even been used to create new forms of moral surveillance for policing and governing communities. Here the customary shamanic worlds of dreams and possession have been modernised and redeployed to re-mediate the governmental practices and disciplinary schemes of civilisating projects originally belonging to Western churches and government.

This article analyses ‘Santidade’, the most important Indian millenarian movement to occur in colonial Brazil. Santidade erupted during the 1580’s in the Jaguaripe area in the captaincy of Bahia. Santidade’s greatest peculiarity, besides the blending of Catholic and indigenous beliefs and rites, was the fact that a slave plantation owner decided to protect it, promising to defend the Indians’“religious freedom” on his land and attracting them to his Jaguaripe sugar mill. The leader of the Santidade movement, an Indian baptised as Antonio, proclaimed himself to be the ancestral indigenous deity Tamandare. After luring the leader of Santidade into a trap set by the Jaguaripe sugar mill owner, the movement was destroyed in 1585.

In the 1960s the Library of the Academy of Science in Leningrad received a generous donation of papers and manuscripts describing the history of an obscure Russian sect, the Wanderers (stranniki or beguny), a radical offshoot of priestless Old Believers. The donor, Maksim Zalesskii (1894-1976) from a remote village in Kargopol' region, belonged to the sect from the age of 17. During the collectivization campaign in 1930, Zalesskii was arrested and compelled to collaborate with the Arkhangel'sk secret police. As a person thoroughly familiar with the sectarian underground, he assisted the OGPU-NKVD in the 1930s-1950s in investigating the activities of various religious groups in the region and in consulting the organs about the "ideological" content and political implications of their diverse religious teaching. Zalesskii calls our attention to an insufficiently understood phenomenon, the relationship between popular religious dissent and revolutionary ideology. The recent interest in marginal religious histories in Imperial and Soviet Russia has helped to reestablish sectarianism as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry. These studies have focused on the representation of sects by the intelligentsia, on the mutation and adaptability

God's hospitality or welcome of human beings into eternal life can be approached by means of Western (kataphatic) or Eastern (apophatic) strategies. I explore Derrida's understanding of "pure hospitality", which contains parallels with apophatic theology. I then appeal to Irenaeus's eschatology, which exhibits a fruitful tension between kataphatic and apophatic elements, to provide a transcendent warrant for human hospitality. On the one hand, the Bishop's millenarian opposition to Gnosticism implies the continuation of the substance of creation in the eternal Kingdom. On the other hand, Irenaeus's emphasis on deification and visio Dei suggests a future of "pure hospitality" and openness.

This paper argues that some of the key determinants of the style and repertoire of the South African township revolts of the mid-eighties lie in the changing configurations of race, class and authority within townships over a long period of time. One major and pivotal change in these relationships is identified, and the paper employs ideal-typical constructions of the nature of townships in the two crucial eras concerned: what could broadly be described as the era of “welfare paternalism” and succeeding it after a period of complex change, the equally broadly characterized era of “racial modernism”. Though both eras were racist, exploitative, and engendered class and community struggles they differed from one another in important stylistic and spatial ways. This paper suggests that the move from the one era to the other constitutes the move from a mode of “governability” to one of “ungovernability”, and highlights the form, repertoire and style of rebellion.

James Fisher (1832-1913), known as the “Nunawading Messiah,” was the leader of a millenarian sect now virtually forgotten. This article describes the beliefs and practices of the sect, the Church of the Firstborn, which he led for nearly fifty years, first in Nunawading (Vic.) and later Wickepin (W.A.). From limited sources, the development of the sect is outlined, noting the eighteenth-century English background from which it drew inspiration and the Christian Israelite traditions which it followed to some degree. Fisher’s attempt to succeed Wroe as an Angelic Messenger is detailed as is the public controversy of 1871 concerning Fisher’s prophetic claims and alleged polygamy. An analysis of the reasons why Fisher was able to attract a following and retain it for so long is included. The final years of his life as the leader of a communal settlement in Western Australia is followed by a discus-sion of his place in the millenarian tradition in Australia and his sect is compared with millenarian behaviour generally.

David Willson was the charismatic leader of a small Utopian Quaker sect, the Children of Peace (1812–89), who prophesied a millenarian transformation of the British empire. This article examines the confluence of social forces and historical conditions that made this charismatic ministry possible. Following Csordas, the emphasis is placed on the means by which followership is created, rather than on the personality of the leader. I argue that Willson's charismatic leadership was predicated upon inculcating a distinctive habitus, on shaping and molding cultural conceptions of self and of emotion, which create the distinctive disposition to obey infollowers. A "theology of mind" was critical to Willson's ministry, and the culturally and historically distinctive emotions and dispositions it described were inculcated in the communal ritual practice of "sitting in silence."

Jehovah's Witnesses' long-term development presents an interesting case of evolution in line with the “deformation thesis,” an attempt at explaining dramatic shifts in organizational forms, activities, and even beliefs in controversial religious minorities. Derived from resource mobilization tradition, this thesis assumes that radical transformations result from major defensive resource allocation mandated by negative reactions of societal institutions. This is especially the case with reference to the adoption by Jehovah's Witnesses, a millenarian group, of a “disciplined litigation”strategy in the 1940s, a pattern later to be incorporated in religious activities and beliefs of the organization. Today, disciplined litigation and its successor, “vigilant litigation,” seem legitimate ways to adapt to the prevailing religious climate and structure. As such, it can be conceived as a model for defensive moves taken by “younger” controversial religious minorities and reflects the enormous influence of the law and legal systems in shaping minority religions.

THEODOR AHRENS [*] 1. May/should grace interrupt reciprocity and retribution? Lorenzo Brutti in his fine study "Waiting for God,, [1] sees fertility rites based on periodically performed human sacrifices, at the core of traditional Oksapmin religion. [2] Such rites were meant to regenerate "the ground, the forest, the garden, the animals, the plants, in a word, the whole cosmos" of the Oksapmin territory. [3] Brutti's question of how the Oksapmin people became Christians [4] may be largely, yet perhaps not fully answered with his suggestion that they adopted Christianity as a functional substitute for a pre-modem native "millenarianism". That "nativistic millenarianism" as Brutti calls it, and in so doing stretches the word millenarianism perhaps a bit too far, was rooted in a local myth about the primordial killing of a human victim, an act which subsequently set free a circle of "sacrificial exchange(s)". [5] The Oksapmin people became Christians basically and mainly because they wanted the "hardware". [6] As a result, a Christian god took over the Oksapmin universe whilst the polytheistic background of the traditional religion remained "almost unaltered". [7] That makes sense and has been observed in other places. [8] In line with P. Lawrence [9] Brutti suggests that the Oksapmin people and the Christian missionaries could not fully understand each other for linguistic and cultural reasons. [10] The Seventh Day Adventists, who according to Brutti were influential as missionaries among the Oksapmin, not only give biblical millenarianism, with its explicit phantasies of retribution and retaliation, a prominent place in their teaching; they also consider the suffering and death of Jesus expiating for human sin an uncompleted event [11] and the celebration of the Lord's supper as a memory thereof. It might be that the Oksapmin people and the Adventist missionaries had as a common denominator not only some sort of "commodity millennialism" [12] and its sense of punishment and reward, but also a basic notion that for life to go on life must be given, and in return for the killing of a human person a new generation may live. In other words, it may have been the Adventist combination of retributive millennialism with a notion of the eucharist as an ongoing sacrificial process, which provided two focal points for the Oksapmin people as they attempted to make sense of Christianity in terms of their pagan religion. To phrase the basic issue in somewhat more general terms: The Oksapmin worldview assumes that something like a cosmic balance in a cycle of crisis and socio-cosmic order is re-established time and again by means of the killing of an innocent victim. Can Christianity be presented within that frame of reference, or would that amount to some sort of repaganization of Christianity? Perhaps it is that Christianity is making sense of the system of retributive logic in its cosmic and anthropological applications, in a different way than that usually assumed. In other words, can and should Christianity be presented as (perhaps) confirming, enlarging and cultivating a traditional Melanesian, and in fact universal ideology of reciprocity, retribution and retaliation, or does grace interrupt or absorb retribution (or, to use another word, "karma")? This as far as I can presently see, is the basic issue confronting the contextualization of Christianity in Melanesia. 2. Christian folk religion meets 19th-century Protestant soteriology In the Pidgin Lotu Buk (hymnal) used in many congregations of the Lutheran Church in Papua New Guinea, one can find numerous references to Jesus having died "blong lusim sin b'long mi". [13] In many cases these songs are more or less literal translations from Anglo-Saxon revival songs of the 18th and 19th century, when a sacrificial understanding of Christ's death had a "central importance within Protestant soteriologies". …

A CALL FOR A PAN-AFRICAN THEOLOGY Jambo (greetings), ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters from the African continent and its "diasporan" communities and to fellow Africanists, i.e. those with a deep interest in the people and affairs of the African continent and its peoples. It is a privilege to be a part of a community of African Christians in Europe. The conference theme "Open Space: The African Christian Diaspora in Europe and the Quest for Human Community" has wide-ranging implications for Christians in Europe, Africa and the Americas. There now reside in the United Kingdom four generations of African-Caribbean people since the early mass migration of the 1940s and 1950s. The black Christian institutions, i.e. churches, supplementary schools and other auxiliaries, have been an oasis of affirmation and capacity building for those youngsters who came and stayed within their influence. However, a phenomenon that has not be adequately researched reveals that between twenty and forty percent of Christian young people leave the orbit of these churches during their mid-to-late teens. Many reasons have been given for this phenomenon, which may have been covered by others in this conference. I wish to speak to one of the reasons, viz. the quest for African-Caribbean youth identity and culture. One thing is certain in recent times. The issue of identity among Caribbean youth has become a major priority within their hierarchy of needs. The black Christian community has not adequately addressed this need and in several cases does not even recognize it as an issue. They therefore continue to lose many of their young people from their worshipping communities. This attitude exacerbates the idea, which many young people hold, that the church is irrelevant to them and their needs, and that Christianity is a white man's religion. I therefore welcome this conference for two reasons: It attempts to read and understand the times, and it desires to avoid piecemeal solutions by having a pan-European approach to the challenges before us. I believe I am right in saying that this is a millennial conference. In other words, we believe that it will have significance for the future. Today, we are 112 days away from the year 2000. It is noteworthy in our desire to harness the future that we can so easily lose sight of the past. This would be contradictory to our African worldview, our ancestors and our traditions. I believe that this is a crucial issue for Caribbean and African youths in Europe. Millennialism in the black religious experience My point here is that we seem unwilling to use the past as a tool for engaging and wrestling with the future. There was little or no reference in the conference brief to the idea of millennialism in the black religious experience, whether in the black churches in the Caribbean, United States of America, United Kingdom or in the indigenous religious communities in Africa. In order to entertain the future and to speak of African-Caribbean youth identity in the United Kingdom, I ask your indulgence and to take a look at the past. Millennialism, is the belief rooted in Christian tradition and thought that history will be fulfilled in a golden age based on Revelation 20: 1-7. It has been observed that millenarian sects or movements always picture salvation as collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, miraculous. [1] Black millennialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries identified this golden age with ancient Israel and the hope of entering the "Promised Land" of Canaan. Black millennial thought can be categorized into three types: cultural millennialism, millennial Ethiopianism, and progressive millennialism. [2] Cultural millennialism denotes the ideology of blacks working out the millennium through the forces of Western civilization, education, Anglo-Saxon culture, American democracy, and republicanism. …

In the fall of 1999, 1 taught an undergraduate seminar entitled 'Contemporary Millenarian Movements.' Although social movements are not my specialty, I did know something about cargo cults, and I wanted to capitalize on the opportunity to offer such a course on the eve of the millennium. Ten students enrolled, and we had a wonderful experience. The class began with some general historical information, theoretical issues, basic definitions and concepts; then we examined a vast array of relatively contemporary millenarian movements, including Heaven's Gate, Branch Davidians, Christian Identity, B'nai Noah, Aum Shrinrikyo, survivalists, Y2K and fears of the New World Order, and environmental apocalypticism. We read Burridge's Mambu (1995 edition, originally published in 1960) as just another example in this long list of possible 'End Time' scenarios. One of the volumes we used early in the course (Tabor and Gallagher 1995) had a frontispiece with a quote from Tom Wolfe's In Our Time that asserted 'a cult is just a religion without power,' and after considerable discussion, the students agreed that we would ban the word 'cult' from our discourse. I was the only one who slipped and needed to be corrected, and then only in the context of Burridge's monograph. No one else had difficulty in conceptualizing these Melanesian phenomena as just another example of a potential new religion.1 My habit of saying 'cargo cult' was a deep one that had been with me for about twentyfive years, so it was difficult to change. What I want to argue here is simply that there was more to my persistent use of 'cult' than embedded routine. As I thought about the word and its usage, I began to understand that its continuing unquestioned prominence in the anthropological discourse on cargo cults, unlike some other disciplines that have begun to question its applicability to similar phenomena elsewhere,2 reveals as much about anthropology as it does the cargo cultists: a near-obsession with difference and rationality, both integral to Western culture as a whole but especially prominent in our discipline.3 1 want to begin by exploring difference here in some detail, but I do so primarily as an avenue into considerations of rationality, where I will end. Thus, my comments do not serve as a specific commentary on the papers here, but rather they continue what Dalton's able Introduction identifies as the nature of the original panel discussion, i.e. they are meant to be a contribution to a more philosophical discussion, 'more of an intellectual journey than a scientific marker' (this volume p. 286). The application of the word 'cult' to particular human behaviors and beliefs at this time necessarily implies negativity, otherness, and difference. In one way or another, difference has always been at the heart of anthropology. Its beginnings were attempts to explain or understand what we conveniently today gloss as the 'other,' and this has, almost by definition, remained at the core of the discipline. Many have argued that anthropology is really all about comparing ourselves with others, and that this comparison is necessarily at the heart of what we do: 'in fact, if we remember the history of our discipline, it is in the end about the relationship between the West and the Rest' (Fabian 1983:28). To define anthropology as an attempt by Western scholars and intellectuals to apprehend the differences between themselves and others may seem unnecessarily cynical, but it is not far from the mark when we

In this paper, I explore the creative practices of cargo cult followers in the Kaliai bush of West New Britain. I focus on how rural villagers reworked their experiences of meaning and sociality through their appropriations of western technology. In particular, bush Kaliai cult followers frequently used telephones and cameras in idiosyncratic ways that mapped out anew and redisclosed the spaces occupied by a racialised human existence. Through their novel use of western technology, cult followers struggled to resituate and overcome the new distances and cleavages of modernity by unearthing other ways of being white that came from their customary past and ancestral homelands. Throughout Melanesia, at various times and in different cults, villagers have used telephones, cameras, wirelesses, videos, televisions, submarines, ships and planes as new vehicles for the imagination. Villagers searched for new material techniques to sustain, move and transform their thoughts and existence. Western technology seemed to offer new innovative tools for mediating, crossing, tying together and overcoming the old cleavages of tradition and the new dividing practices of race. In this paper, I move away from a materialist view of technology or rather I incorporate technology into a materialist view of the human mind and its imaginary underpinnings (Bachelard 1969, 1983; Castoriadis 1987; Ricoeur 1978, 1979, 1986). Whilst it is true that technology changes history for people by changing their relations of production, I am more interested in how for millenarian followers technology offered them new forms of history by offering new techniques for positioning and disclosing the terms of human relatedness.1 Melanesian cargo cult followers used technology to change the horizon within which race relations were placed and unfolded. Here technology's power to redraw the horizon or boundaries of race relations was intimately bound up with its power to shift and redraw the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, what was public and what was secret, what was close and what was distant (Lattas 1998; cf. Friedson 1996). Traditionally, these types of boundaries and their disclosing possibilities had underpinned men's house cults, gender relations, dreams, visions and conversations with the dead. With the coming of western institutions, these customary practices of secrecy and disclosure were reconstituted and remediated by the new disclosing possibilities of western technology unearthed by Melanesian villagers. In bush Kaliai cults, the forms of social distance that villagers lived in their relations were remeasured, laid out anew and, even seemed to be shortened, by that new perception of the world brought by the instruments of western technology. The cultural forms that racial politics took in the cults involved using western technology as a vehicle for imaginatively resituating and re-placing the secret terms of human existence. The realm of the invisible, which traditionally had helped constitute the boundary or horizon of the visible world, was

Millennialism is traditionally defined by reference or resistance to Christianity. What has remained unappreciated is how enduring the notion of a millennium and millennialism has been to aspects of secular culture. Drawing upon the history of secularism and humanism, this article provides a critique of British and western European attempts to construct secular millennia. It is argued that secular millennialism has found itself under threat at the end of the century from various species of anti-rationalism expressed by critics including Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and some feminists. Resistance to rationalism and secularism manifests itself through popular culture, including the novels of Umberto Eco, rejuvenated religiosity, and theories inspired by postmodernism. The eclipse of rationalism opens up the spectre of a secular apocalypse with no rapture or redemption.

In the same way that store-goods once became the symbolic cornerstone of certain millenarian movements, features of development projects in rural areas of contemporary Oceania may become mythically and ritually re-contextualised. This paper examines the ritual metamorphosis of a modernising dairy development scheme in the eastern interior of ‘Big Fiji’, a scheme which is also caught up in the collective processes of animal sacrifice and festive redistribution. The paper asks: what impact does ritual incorporation have upon the individualistic ethos and nucleated organisation of the project? A pattern commonly noticed by rural development workers in Fiji, but rarely acknowledged in the literature, is of an initial period of local activity and the promise of change which, in the longer term, slowly regresses to a slightly modified version of the old life.

Lying between the Huli and Paiela peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Mt. Kare, the site of a gold rush from 1988 to 1990, presently inspires millenarian speculations about an imminent cosmic revolution. Mt. Kare was traditionally a ritual site where pigs were sacrificed to Taiyundika, a totemic python, to promote the fertility of plant, animal, and human species. Today it is where gold is mined in pursuit of unprecedented riches and millenarian transformations. Although sacrifices are no longer conducted at Mt. Kare, the python still has some salience for Paielas, who consider the gold to be the flesh of the totemic python. Blending Christianity with traditional cosmology, Paielas interpret the finding of the gold as a millenarian sign. As an ancestral figure who guarantees the continuing fertility of the earth in exchange for pork sacrifices, the python stands at the core of Paiela constructions of nature and humanity's position within it. Paiela totemism is explored for what it can teach us about an indigenous symbolic ecology and how “local knowledge” or a “cognized model” can inflect capital-intensive resource development at a time of ostensible globalization. The ecology of Mt. Kare gold mining must be sensitive to intercultural processes and how global flows (of ideologies, technologies, and capital) are mediated by vernacular constructions. [Papua New Guinea, mining, totemism, symbolic ecology, place]

From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture. Patricia Pessar, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 273 pp.

This essay explores the effects of applying Darwinian logic to the millenarian problem of limits to knowledge. Darwinian logic has solved or clarified many otherwise intractable problems in biology and sociobiology and might provide a solution here. Although unable to define the limits of the "knowable," the essay aims to set the problem in clearer terms than before. "A well-posed problem is a half-solved problem," according to an old dictum.

This paper explores the ramifications of encounters which two Abelam men and the author had in the Australian Museum and Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 1982. Rather than place a ready-made analytic framework on the men's experiences and rather than removing myself from the frame, as is usual in much anthropological analysis, I have chosen to explore the effects of these experiences on my own imagination. In the latter part of the paper I explore the way in which the imaginative entanglement of the Zoo and Museum experiences with my own memories has acted as a path of clues. This path has led to the development of the notion of sign which includes the idea of efficaciousness and transformation.

Expert witnesses and scholars have been unable to locate the wellsprings of the postwar millennial ardor of the Pokot, an East African cattle-keeping people seemingly untouched by modernity and colonial rule. In this article I provide a revisionist reading of Pokot religious enthusiasm and the social terrain in which it took shape. Drawing primarily on new ethnographic data about the activities and aspirations of Pokot adherents of the proscribed Dini ya Msambwa movement, I argue that the lure of an earthly Zion in a Kenyan colonial backwater bespeaks a crisis of mobility in the spiritual and material worlds. More generally, I show how millennialism in colonial settings may remake modernity by relocating its iconographies and technologies of power and worth.

Anthropologists and social historians have debated whether the participants in violent attacks on the church and clergy in Spain during the Civil War period were “millenarian” protestants whose actions sprang from a premodern sociopolitical mentality or were pragmatic radicals whose actions simply represented a series of well-calculated attacks on a key ideological institution. In analyzing the events leading to anticlerical violence in an Andalusian town, this article argues that the attacks were the outcome of hegemonic processes of differing scope, intensity, and duration. Neither pure traditionalists nor modernists, the revolutionary anticlericals of August 1936 sought to define the specific character of the present in ways that were gauged to have the maximum effect on their allies and adversaries alike. The article discusses implications of these findings for analyses of “tradition,” “modernity,” and contemporary sociopolitical movements. [hegemonic processes, Spain, anticlericalism, tradition, modernity, social movements]

William Miller was a Baptist lay preacher who played an instrumental role during the so-called Second Great Awakening or Great Revival. He has been called “the most famous millenarian in American history” (Sandeen 1970: 50), and is credited with the beginning of the Adventist movement of the 1830s and 1840s in North America. Among his direct spiritual heirs are several major religious denominations, including Seventh-day Adventists and Advent Christians. Keywords: Miller, William (1782–1849); baptist lay preacher; apocalyptic revivals in christian history; the second advent, premillennial