ABSTRACT

Paganistan is a word bandied about by the Pagans of the Twin Cities of Minnesota to describe themselves, both as Pagans that inhabit the 13-county Metro Area around St. Paul and Minneapolis and as a community of affinity. The work is intended to provide a preliminary record and analysis of the emergence of the Twin Cities Pagan community of Paganistan the complexities of its history, membership, the cultivation of the community's identity. The literature review and methodological framework of the thesis reflect on and record Paganistan's history, lore and emergence; its traditions of innovation and reconstruction. The ethnography is less about Paganistan as an imagined community more is at work than mindset as it presents an example of Tajfel's theory of intergroup behavioral strategies. Susan Palmer, though maintaining her outsider status, engaged in over a decade of research with the Raelians, an extra-terrestrial/UFO theological New Religious Movement (NRM).