Materials derived from observation of a West Coast millenarian cult are employed to develop a "value-addedJ' model of the conditions under which conversion occztrs. For conversion a person must experience, within a religious problem-solving perspective, enduring, acutely-felt tensions that lead him to define himself as a religious seeker; he must encounter the cult at a turning point in his life; within the cult an affective bond must be formed (or $re-exist) and any extra-cult attachments, neutralized; and there he must be exposed to intensive interaction if he is to become a "deployable agent!' A LL men and all human groups have of the Southwest Indians to Christianity. ultimate values, a world view, or a The continual emergence of tiny cults and perspective furnishing them a more sects in western industrial nations makes it or less orderly and comprehensible picture clear, however, that sometimes persons reof the world. Clyde Kluckhohn remarked linquish a more widely held perspective for that no matter how primitive and crude it an unknown, obscure and often, socially demay be, there is a "philosophy behind the valued one. way of life of every individual and of every In this paper we shall outline a model of relatively homogeneous group at any given the conversion process througl~ which a point in their histories." l When a person group of people came to see the world in gives up one such perspective or ordered terms set by the doctrines of one such obview of the world for another we refer to scure and devalued perspective-a small this Drocess as con~ersion.~ millenarian religious cult. Although it is Frequently such conversions are between based on only a single group, we think the popular and widely held perspectives-from model suggests some rudiments of a general Catholicism to Communism, or from the account of conversion to deviant perspecworld view of an underdeveloped or primitives. But the degree to which this scheme tive culture to that of a technically more applies to shifts between widely held peradvanced society, as from the Peyote Cult spectives must, for now, remain problematic.

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Lofland's earlier work, widely assumed to have been done on the beginnings in this country of the Unification Church of Reverend Moon, resulted in development of the most widely cited conversion model in the literature of sociology. Here he updates and extends this previous work, based on a follow-up study of the same group studied earlier.

The research strategy sometimes termed analytic ethnography has been a prominent—or even the dominant—form of qualitative inquiry for some decades. Lacking challenge by other qualitative approaches, however, there has been little need to articulate it as a distinctive strategy of qualitative research. The approach having now been challenged, it has become necessary clearly to adduce its defining features as a step in the larger task of undertaking accurate and systematic comparisons of diverse qualitative research strategies. I here attempt this first step by delineating seven features or tendencies that, in composite, constitute analytic ethnography. Following this articulation, I suggest some of analytic ethnography's successes and failures as a strategy of social research and I speculate about its future.