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Abstract
Affect has not been entirely established as a casual explanation in social science. The classic academic accounts of millennial movements emphasise both a period of ‘unease’ in the ambient atmosphere or ‘of tension’ at the actual start, and then a periodic culmination of fear or extreme emotion as the movement gains a following and the prophecy accelerates so much so, that ‘apocalyptic expectation’ equates with ‘anxiety’. In the instance examined here, a new Caribbean religion, there may well have been identified anxieties around the time of the founder’s visions, but once established the group have little strong emotion, negative or otherwise, although always facing the imminent end of all things.
Ethical approval
This work was undertaken prior to the existence of ethical review committees however the author maintained a professional ethical approach as expected in the field’. We cannot suggest that ethical permission was gained, or required for this work, in the same way as is otherwise expected in more contemporary submissions to A&M.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Münister Anabaptists – sixteenth century theocratic movement on the edges of the German Peasants’ War (Cohn Citation1957). Doukhobors – a Russian charismatic and Anabaptist sect who emigrated to Canada and the United States in the late nineteenth century; and who still exist (Hawthorn Citation1955).
2 Sabbatai Svi was a seventeenth century Rabbi recognised by many Jews and some Christians as the awaited Messiah. Under duress from the Ottoman situation he converted to Islam, but survivors continued to practice messianic Judaism under the guise of Islam until the twentieth century (Scholem Citation1971).
3 The Shakers were a female-led ecstatic and apocalyptic group who emigrated from England to the United States in the eighteenth century. They disappeared in the 1950s.
4 Generally local students and soldiers, the police and coastguard having stayed loyal to the government. Trinidad folklore says the mutineers’ triumphal march from an army base to the capital of Port-of-Spain collapsed as the marchers peeled off to listen to the Test cricket score on their portable radios. And certainly those rebel soldiers and students who did not engage in armed activity were generally treated leniently. The 1972 Mutiny is often regarded as the ‘loss of innocence’ for a Trinidad which had gained independence from Britain in 1962 along a relatively untraumatic parliamentary road. The older tensions between English administration and French-speaking white Creole colonists had dissipated in a now more or less anglophone community, and latent antagonism between the African-descended Creole population and the Asian-descended Indians was hardly salient in the national move to industrialisation and exploitation of the oil reserves.
5 Littlewood (Citation1993). I stayed with the group between 1980 and 1982, and have written this current paper in the ‘ethnographic present’, although Mother Earth (Jeanette M.) is now dead and the community are dispersed into four fragmentary groups. Direct quotes from the group come from my tape recording on my last stay with them. This current paper derives from my presentation at the 2015 Apocalypse Conference at Mansfield College, Oxford.
6 A local publisher, hiking along the coastal track, met the family at that time and has given an account of them then in a fabled folkloric history of Trinidad (Besson Citation1973).
7 My capitalisations here follows the Earth Peoples’ particular use of doctrinal emphasis. (Littlewood Citation1993); with italics for their other idioms.
8 This is not merely appropriated biblical rhetoric for there is an elderly man with leprosy in the nearby village of Pinnacle.
9 Which I have previously argued was thyrotoxic but at the time of my stay Mother Earth had no psychotic symptoms (Littlewood Citation1993).
10 Rather like the perpetration of maljo (evil eye) in local villages or the idea of the ‘woodtick’ in American counter-culture communes (Hall Citation1978).
11 Kerosene filled bottles, with a sacking wick, both bartered from Pinnacle Village.
12 The urban White world; a usage similar to the Rasta and African-American ‘Babylon’ which is also employed. Some members had been loosely influenced by Jamaican Rastafari which appeared in Trinidad in the 1970s. Rastafari does not focus on the last days but rather on redemption in our current life.
13 As one might say, langniappe in Creole: that little bit extra poured out by the shopkeeper’s goodwill over and above the purchased quantity of sweets or rice or whatever, which now conduces one to frequent that store in future.
14 If our ‘end times’ inevitably reflect the everyday problems of our life now, then these end times do show how the problems may be transcended – in art, fantasy, desire or madness. And, once reflected on in this way, these solutions may become a pragmatic possibility.