In 1925, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss termed the cross-cultural transmission of values, habits, and goods from one community to another after the two communities encountered each other, “contact and exchange.”  He argued that the “ritual exchange” of these “gifts” served as a way to define the social order of society. [1]

Recent scholarship in the field of Religious Studies has borrowed Mauss’s thesis that every culture bears the imprints and certain characteristics adopted and adapted from groups they have come in contact with. Catherine Albanese, for instance, explained that “whatever their ascribed religious identity, Americans were professing religions that bore the signs of contact with those who were other and different.” [2]  Also utilizing this model, though perhaps unaware, is the historian of American Methodism Russell E. Richey. Albanese summarized Richey’s 1991 volume, Early American Methodism, by explaining that the characteristics of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American Methodism–what Richey termed the “four languages” of early Methodism–“were products of the contact” with other religions in America–“goods that they had received and integrated in and through an economy of religious exchange.” Albanese further states that “Methodist contact worked outward as powerfully as it worked inward,” and points to John Humphrey Noyses’s Oneida community and the Holiness-Pentecostal movement as two examples of religions influenced directly by Methodism. [3]

My current research investigates the “outward” influences of Methodism on Mormonism during its formative years. Today, it seems logical that Mormonism in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere bears the imprints of cultures and communities encountered in each respective region.  However, for the purposes and intents of this thread, I am more interested in possible outward influences of Mormonism on other communities (religious or otherwise).  Are there any concrete examples of other cultures adopting (and adapting) traits borrowed from Mormonism?

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[1] Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967).

[2] Catherine Albanese, “Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls: Contact, Combination, and American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 203.

[3] Albanese, “Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls,” 215.  See also Russell E. Richey, Early American Methodism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).