Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem

ABSTRACT

This article explores how religious communities actualize the virtual problem of temporality. Analysing two case studies from contemporary America, Mormon Trek re-enactment and a creationist theme park re-creating Noah’s ark, I argue that replication is a strategy for constructing a relationship with time in which a strict past–present divide is collapsed through affective means. This work contributes to comparative studies in the anthropology of religion and temporalizing the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• Christianity
• Ethnography
• North America

Acknowledgements

I owe a special thanks to Jon Bialecki for his incisive feedback on an earlier manuscript draft. My thinking in the area of temporality and virtuality is deeply influenced by Jon’s work, and the contours for this article were built in earnest during our Union Lodge No. 1 conversations at the 2015 American Anthropological Association meetings. Additionally, I thank Simon Dein for first pointing me to the phenomenon of 770 replicas; Jacob Hickman for an insightful conversation about Trek; and, Amanda White, a student at Miami University, for helping me design Materializing the Bible. The latter has been most persuasive for me in solidifying the vitality of replication as a religious practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For exquisite photographs of selected 770 replicas, see this collection by a New York-based artist. Accessed January 13, 2016. http://robbinsbecher.com/projects/770/.

2. Deleuze’s “virtual” has also been used by anthropologists to think through matters of ontology, variation, and ritual productivity. For example, Kapferer (2004) and Viveros de Castro (2007); cf. Bialecki (In press).

3. Source: Accessed January 9, 2016. https://www.lds.org/youth/activities/stake-and-multistake-activities/camps-and-youth-conferences/treks?lang=eng.

4. Accessed January 10, 2016. https://www.lds.org/youth/activities/bc/pdfs/stake/Handcart-Trek-Guidelines-June-2015.pdf?lang=eng.

5. Accessed January 10, 2016. https://www.lds.org/callings/church-safety-and-health/training-and-video-resources/trek-safety?lang=eng.

6. This is an established strategy for heightening the immersive effect. For example, visitors to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum begin their museum tour by receiving an identification card with the biography of a man or woman who experienced Holocaust persecution (Linenthal 1995).

7. Accessed January 10, 2016. https://www.lds.org/youth/activities/bc/pdfs/stake/Handcart-Trek-Guidelines-June-2015.pdf?lang=eng.

8. For example, accessed February 27, 2016. http://www.nps.gov/mopi/learn/historyculture/index.htm.

9. The use of “affect” in this article to understand relationships of temporality—with emphases on bodily inscription, expression, and experience—resonates with other mobilizations of the concept by anthropologists of religion. See, for example, O’Neill (2013) and Johnson (2015).

10. Accessed January 18, 2016. https://www.civilandhumanrights.org/civil-rights-exhibit.

11. Auslander (2014) addresses the political and moral complexities of white bodies re-enacting African-American experiences.