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media but also—and mainly—in the context of local meetings that
become, by this means, virtually global or planetary.
As described earlier, Raelian Guides are responsible for organizing local
group meetings at least once a month. These meetings are organized
around the stage and screen. Both operate in this specific ethnographic
case as windows connecting spatially dispersed experiences via the image of
a collectivity. Raelian’s image of community is planetary in scale. It is not
enough for this movement to be local; it has to be global. This explains
why the same images of Raelian groups are displayed across the world,
while video clips of Raelian Seminars and Raël himself “circulating” in
different continents allow people to imagine a planet-wide Raelian com-
munity. Indeed, this image is fundamental to shaping a religious experi-
ence founded on a project whose very essence is global. The idea of
extraterrestrial creators “necessarily” implies a collective congregation of
their “creatures” as a holistic group of “terrestrial human beings.” Therefore,
since the movement’s beginnings, mass mediated performances have been
the central aspect of its Structure; or, more precisely, the mass media has
always been “the” primordial “Structure” that makes the movement possi-
ble. Hence, we can conclude that, in the specific case of the Raelian
Movement, the mass media is essential to its existence and without it there
would be no sense in being Raelian.

Notes

1. The research on which this chapter is based involved multisited fieldwork.
During 2004 and 2005, I joined four Raelian groups in different countries,
usually during their local meetings: Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands and
England. In addition to these local meetings, the Raelian Movement orga-
nizes Annual Seminars, one on each continent. As indicated in the first lines
of this chapter, I participated in the European Raelian Seminar, 2005, in
Santa Suzana, Barcelona, Spain. I learned about the Raelian Movement
through the Internet and the book The Message Given by Extra-terrestrials,
written by Raël (year). For some months, this ethnographic research—which
was initially conducted in Brazil, where the movement has few followers—
made intensive use of digital and printed media sources. As the work devel-
oped, I realized that these mediations are legitimate and form part of the
religious experience of many members of the movement, who first discover
Raël through its digital and textual interfaces. This theme was further devel-
oped in the full text of my doctoral thesis Imagine se tudo isso for verdade
(“Imagine if all this were true”), supervised by Professor Patrícia Birman and
completed in October 2006 at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.