Sacred Theatres: Shakers, Spiritualists, Theatricality, and the Indian in the 1830s and 1840s

In the 1830s and 1840s, the manifestations of spirits in Shaker meetings share a number of features, such as ethnic impersonations by whites of Indian spirits, with the emergence of a form of spiritualism that continues into the present.The overlap of the performance codes for these apparitional figures offers a means to construct one part of the popular belief system of 19th-century Shakers and also sheds light on their radical theology and its relationship to racial and gender rights.