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Prophecy on Stage 209

through his appearances on TV programs and at book launches and
press conferences covered by the mass media, reaffirming not only the
movement’s global reach, but also its recognition by the general public
and Raël’s presumed fame.
The notion of the production of “fame” as a religious value operates in
a significant way within this group, and formulates methods of construct-
ing the self and establishing relations with others both inside and outside
the movement. The production of fame, which starts with the projection
of images of Raël on stage, permeates outward to the audience of followers:
experiences at shows and parties provide moments when the stage is shared
with the audience, along with the possibility of becoming famous.
Fame making and mass media performances are directly related.
Marshall (1997), whose work focuses on the concepts of fame, celebrity,
and power in the realm of communication studies, provides a compelling
analysis of the “celebrity” and how fame operates as a powerful form of
legitimization in contemporary culture. Although his arguments pertain
to the field of entertainment, some of his ideas about the power conferred
to celebrities through the production of fame help emphasize one of the
main points made in this chapter: namely, how fame making becomes a
religious form of constructing power within the Raelian Movement,
including the way their leaders are present in the public sphere.
However, focusing directly and exclusively on the relationship between
fame and media, risks reducing the phenomenon in question to a debate
limited to the mass media. The anthropological meaning of “fame,” as
analyzed by Munn (1992) on the island of Gawa where mass media are
largely absent, highlights elements that extend the concept of a “circulation
of fame” far beyond the specificities of mass media performance (as pointed
by Marshall), expanding its analytic use as a cultural category. Presented as
a “circulating dimension of the person” (Munn 1992, 105) beyond his or
her physical presence and, as such, as a creator of positive values, this
anthropological reading of fame makes the mass media just one of its forms
of mediation, without attributing exclusivity to this format.
As Meyer (Meyer and Moors 2006a) suggests, the idea of mediation
emphasizes the entanglement of religion and media in two different ways:

as well as stressing the presence of modern mass media forms in different
religious contexts, it also, and principally, provides us with an insight into
how media mediate and thus produce the transcendental and make it tan-
gible. Fame emerges in my own research as a product of mass media mod-
els operating as a transcendental category within the Raelian religious
movement. In this chapter, therefore, I discuss the production of fame
through different media forms both inside and outside the Raelian
Movement, as well as its religious meaning within the group’s experience.