Restoring that which has never been: Hmong millenarianism and the reinvention of tradition

Abstract

While change and flexibility in ritual practices and traditions have been in some sense constitutive elements of Hmong religion, the religious landscape of the contemporary Hmong diaspora is marked by dramatic changes of an altogether new scale. These include the proliferation of a wide range of competing millenarian movements. Leaders of these movements vie for recognition by casting traditional Hmong ritual practice in a way that allows them to convey their ritual innovations as more authentic than traditional religious forms, underwritten by a genuine mandate of heaven. This requires religious activists to decouple the indexical relationship between traditional ritual and its objects (ancestors and a prosperous future) in order to forge new semiotic relationships between new ritual canons, orthographies, and the future of Hmong society. Hmong millenarian activism challenges conventional notions of ‘conversion’ and ‘proselytizing’, both because the intended audience is limited to fellow Hmong, and because the suasive practices in which these activists engage are actively trying to rework semiotic connections within a broadly shared Hmong matrix of meaning.