While change and flexibility in ritual practices and traditions have been in some sense constitutive elements of Hmong religion, the religious landscape of the contemporary Hmong diaspora is marked by dramatic changes of an altogether new scale. These include the proliferation of a wide range of competing millenarian movements. Leaders of these movements vie for recognition by casting traditional Hmong ritual practice in a way that allows them to convey their ritual innovations as more authentic than traditional religious forms, underwritten by a genuine mandate of heaven. This requires religious activists to decouple the indexical relationship between traditional ritual and its objects (ancestors and a prosperous future) in order to forge new semiotic relationships between new ritual canons, orthographies, and the future of Hmong society. Hmong millenarian activism challenges conventional notions of ‘conversion’ and ‘proselytizing’, both because the intended audience is limited to fellow Hmong, and because the suasive practices in which these activists engage are actively trying to rework semiotic connections within a broadly shared Hmong matrix of meaning.

中文翻译：

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恢复从未有过的东西：苗族千禧年主义和传统的重塑

虽然仪式实践和传统的变化和灵活性在某种意义上是苗族宗教的构成要素，但当代苗族侨民的宗教景观却出现了全新规模的巨大变化。其中包括各种相互竞争的千禧年运动的扩散。这些运动的领导人通过铸造传统的苗族仪式实践来争夺认可，使他们能够将仪式创新传达为比传统宗教形式更真实，并得到真正的上天授权。这需要宗教活动家将传统仪式与其对象（祖先和繁荣的未来）之间的索引关系解耦，以便在新的仪式规范、正字法和苗族社会的未来之间建立新的符号学关系。苗族千禧年活动主义挑战了“皈依”和“传教”的传统观念，既因为目标受众仅限于苗族同胞，也因为这些活动家所从事的劝导性实践正在积极尝试在广泛共享的苗族矩阵中重塑符号学联系。意义。