Watching Movies in Jonestown: A Cultural Interlocutor Approach to Visual Media and New Religions

This article argues that new religious movements (NRMs) develop as cultural interlocutors. As emergent social bodies that respond to extant norms, structures, and values, NRMs can deploy cultural products as a shared vocabulary and grammar in their response to surrounding society. To demonstrate this approach’s ability to parse NRMs’ relations to popular culture while highlighting organizationally distinctive dimensions of such interactions, this article examines Jim Jones’s references to visual media shown in Jonestown in 1978. Jones critiqued movies and television as tools of social control, repurposed documentaries and films as evidence to support his proffered doctrine, and creatively presented movies as analogues of the commune’s perceived challenges. This threefold hermeneutic shaped the Peoples Temple’s beliefs and behavior, as well as its own media productions.

The Instructions of Melanesian Cargo Cults for the Asia-Pacific Future

So-called cargo cults are new religious movements best known among the indigenous population of Oceania, especially Melanesia. Their focus of attention is the mystery surrounding the new goods brought by light-skinned strangers in awe-striking ocean-going vessels and (later) in great flying ‘bird-like’ containers. Various socio-religious movements arose in response to these European-style wares (later internationally-marketed commodities), or “the Cargo” (pidgin: Kago), often in agitated collective expectation of an extraordinary arrival of new riches. The Melanesian outbursts have been typically inspired by prophet-type leaders, with their messages reflecting a transition between indigenous traditions and more settled islander Christianities. This paper moves on from describing and explaining southwest Pacific cargo-type movements to the issue of the ethos out of which they arose, and addresses the sociology of hope for Cargo (or modern commodities in plenty) as a global issue, best described as “Cargoism.” Sets of beliefs in the coming bounty and changing power of Cargo have much more than ‘provincial’ or local-indigenous implications. They point to a worldwide plethora of expectations wherein material items define the essential comforts of life and capture the individual, family and collective imaginations about the preferred human future. Exploring some of the ‘universally human’ implications within the logic of cargo-cult thinking in its Pacific context, this paper introduces Cargoism as a transoceanic and intercontinental issue that has enormous environmental and politico-economic ramifications. Presages of environmental stress lie with globalizing cargoist dreams and pressures, including hopes for progress and technological solutions offered by trade and commercial expansions (proffered by powerful nations, including China, for the Asia-Pacific future).

Yorùbá Coastal Christian Communities: From the Evangelist Band Mission to the Zion and Holy Apostles Communities

This article highlights the diversity of African Christianity in the Ìlàjẹ and Ìkále areas of present-day Ondo State, as well as in neighboring communities. It compares the successive religious movements led by E. M. Líjàdú and his Evangelist Band Mission, which represents an African missionary effort of the first generation in the Ikale and Ìlàjẹ areas, and the more recent Zion and Holy Apostles communities that have been established along the coast as independent Christian settlements under local spiritual leaders and kings. The article shows that there are certain similarities and differences between the successive movements. While the different conditions of the periods in which these movements operated, and the different conditions in which these religious activities were organized, matter, both movements offered their converts a new understanding of the world in which existing practices, were re-examined through an engagement with education and ‘modernity’ in a more general sense, and through existing forms of spiritual expression such as music, dance, and dress.

Dialogue of East and West on the Example of Arab-Muslim Сulture

The dialogue expresses the simultaneous coexistence of the past and the present, the preservation of continuity between them. The Arab-Muslim civilization, in its heyday, embodied the ideal of dialogue between East and West. The purpose of this study is to study the mechanisms of intercultural dialogue of the Eastern Renaissance era, analyze them for their application in the conditions of the modern globalized world. Islam played a key role in the formation and development of the Arab-Muslim civilization. Religion, along with philosophy and science, played the role of a connecting link in the spiritual and intellectual life of medieval Muslim society. Dialogue is possible when, in the collision of different cultural traditions, some new unifying knowledge is synthesized. The development of their own spiritual and religious movements as Sufism among the peoples of Central Asia conquered by the Arabs indicates that the Arab-Muslim culture was not limited to Islam. The peoples of the Arab Caliphate preserved and developed their distinctive cultural and religious traditions.

FROM RELIGIOUS DIVISION TO SOCIAL DIVISION: TO THE QUESTION OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE VIEWS OF A.P. SHCHAPOV

В статье рассматривается эволюция взглядов А.П. Щапова на раскол. Первоначально он придерживался традиционной концепции, считавшей раскол порождением невежества народа и его приверженности старине. Через несколько лет Щапов уже утверждал, что раскол - это выражение недовольства народа усилением феодальной зависимости, проявившееся в религиозной форме. Причем среди направлений раскола он уделяет внимание тому, которое предполагало общий труд. Таким образом, его позиция совпала с позицией революционных демократов и некоторых русских историков, рассматривавших религиозные движения (преимущественно европейские) как форму выражения интересов определенных социальных групп. The article considers the evolution of A. P. Shchapov's views on the religious split. Initially, he adhered to the traditional concept, which considered the split to be a product of the ignorance of the people and their adherence to the past. A few years later, Shchapov already argued that the split was an expression of the people's discontent with the strengthening of feudal dependence, manifested in a religious form. Moreover, among the directions of the split, he pays attention to the one that suggested common labor. Thus, his position coincided with the position of the revolutionary democrats and some Russian historians who considered religious movements (mainly European) as a form of expressing the interests of certain social groups.

The Baltic Countries

The three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) have a varied religious history. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they were the last region of Europe to be Christianized. Today, they—and especially Estonia—are among the most secularized societies in the world. This is not only due to the Soviet past but also to Baltic German dominance at key moments in their history. While Lutheranism has dominated in the north (in Estonia and Latvia), the Roman Catholic Church is still the main religious player in the south (in Lithuania and parts of Latvia). Primarily due to Russian migration, the Orthodox Church also plays a significant role in Baltic affairs. There is, finally, a small but vibrant cluster of new religious movements, notably neo-pagan groups.

The Siberian Village of Okunevo as a Place of Power and its Sacred Landscape

The paper deals with contemporary places of power and New Age sacred landscapes in Russia.* It focuses on the Siberian village of Okunevo, its sacred sites, and their worshippers. Formation of this place of power was a result of the activity of individuals (both academics and adherents of new religious movements), combined with the specific interpretation of archaeological sites and the natural landscape of the area. The landscape around the village of Okunevo affects the interaction of people with the sacred loci and the ways the signs, symbols and narratives about them are created.