Alternative Modernities: Statecraft and Religious Imagination in the Valley of the Dawn

Many new religions promote the emblems and institutions of modern nation‐states. In this article, I consider an example from Brazil, analyzing the mimetic relations between its modernist capital, Brasilia, and a millenarian and ecstatic religion called the Valley of the Dawn located on the city's outskirts. I focus on the project of salvation that each sponsors and on a religious ritual that stages a judicial event associated with the state. Arguing against compensatory explanations, I suggest that both state and religion are performances, mutually critical, of the same paradigm of modernity. [Brazil, modernity, millenarian religion, spirit possession, ritual, nation‐state, bureaucracy, law]