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Why Denominations Can Climb Hills: RLDS Conversions in Highland Tribal India and Midwestern America, 1964–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2021
Abstract
Based on oral history interviews and archival sources, this essay analyzes the religious affiliation between Sora villagers in the highlands of eastern India with Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) members in the American Midwest. The relationship between these distinct groups transposed a pattern of interactions between highlands and lowlands in upland Asia to a new globalized space in the late twentieth century. Conceiving of “conversion” as a broad analytic trope to discuss various individual, group, and organizational transformations, this essay argues that “converts” in the Sora highlands and American plains instrumentalized their relationships with the other for their own ends. In the Americans, the Sora found a new patron for long-standing client-patron relationships between highlands people and valley people. In the Sora, the Americans found an “indigenous other” who could be used to justify reforms within their local church body along more cosmopolitan lines. As an upshot of these interactions, Sora and Americans effectively reterritorialized older patterns of “hills” and “valleys” that had been deterritorialized by state-sponsored modernization. Thus, the hills and valleys of upland Asia found a surprising afterlife within the space of a global Christian denomination.
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References
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29 Sumbara Sobor, interview, Gumiguda, Odisha, 23 June 2014; Sadanga Gamanga, interview; and Rao, interview. American RLDS reformers wanted to be part of the ecumenical movement and saw the Book of Mormon as a parochial nineteenth-century American text that did not have the same universality as the Bible. By saying the Book of Mormon was not relevant to the Sora, these leaders also suggested that it was not relevant to the American church if it wanted to be a global church.
30 Vitebsky, “Stones, Shamans, and Pastors,” 133.
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34 Sadanga Gamanga, interview.
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36 Budo Gamanga was baptized by Junesh Raika two years before Junesh affiliated with the RLDS Church. Birsuna Mandal, “Brief History,” 3.
37 Sadanga Gamanga, interview.
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39 Birsuna Mandal to author; and Howard S. Sheehy, “India, A Decade of Mission: Part II—East India,” Saints Herald 122, 15 January 1975, 81–82.
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45 This organization and structure mirrors such arrangements in the Sora Baptist Church. See Vitebsky, Living without the Dead, 174–175.
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