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.

中文翻译：

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为什么教派可以爬山：1964-2000 年印度高地部落和美国中西部的 RLDS 转换

本文基于口述历史访谈和档案资料，分析了印度东部高地的索拉村民与美国中西部重组后的耶稣基督后期圣徒教会 (RLDS) 成员之间的宗教关系。这些不同群体之间的关系将亚洲高地高地和低地之间的互动模式转变为 20 世纪后期一个新的全球化空间。本文将“皈依”视为一个广泛的分析比喻来讨论各种个人、群体和组织的转变，本文认为，索拉高地和美国平原的“皈依者”将他们与对方的关系工具化为他们自己的目的。在美国人中，Sora 找到了一位新的赞助人，以维持高地人和山谷人之间长期的客户-赞助人关系。在 Sora 中，美国人找到了一个“土著他人”，可以用来证明他们当地教会机构内沿着更国际化的路线进行的改革是正当的。作为这些互动的结果，索拉和美国人有效地重新界定了旧的“山丘”和“山谷”模式，这些模式已经被国家支持的现代化去领土化。因此，亚洲高地的丘陵和山谷在全球基督教教派的空间内发现了令人惊讶的来世。