Mystics against the market - American religions and the autocritique of capitalism

This article asks what might be learned about Western cosmology by focusing on religious traditions that originated in the United States and have deve loped outside the mainstream of Christianity. Mormonism and other American religions, we argue, carry a hidden repertoire of mystical and communal the mes that directly conflict with the Western 'market mentality' as often des cribed in the anthropological literature. These religions, furthermore, hav e surprising affinities with mystical and communal traditions outside the W est, affinities that are fully revealed, ironically enough, only in the con text of American cultural expansion in the non-Western world.