ABSTRACT
By the first years of the twenty-first century, the anticult movement's fortunes had changed considerably from ten years earlier. The old Cult Awareness Network, the most visible North American anticult movement organization, was bankrupt and defunct. Several attempts to resurrect it under other names were moribund. Sociologists have long maintained that one major purpose of the discipline is to recognize the general in the particular, that is, to seek the larger implications of individual incidents or cases. This has also been a fundamental assumption of ethnography in Anthropology. Social life is organized in patterns, no matter how, at first glance, one element may seem randomly occurring or unconnected to any other. Countermovements monitor the activities and dominant strategies of the groups with which they are concerned, and vice-versa. Countermovements adjust their own activities and strategies to accommodate/counter those of their opponents. Legitimacy is a symbolic interactionist construct, a matter of definition over which social movements and countermovements contest.
