Why Cults Fascinate Us With UC Berkeley Professor Poulomi Saha

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the last several years, a cult industrial complex has emerged to capitalize on Americans’ fascination with groups such as Jonestown, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, and the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Ore., argues UC Berkeley professor Poulomi Saha. But in her highly sought-after class called Cults in Popular Culture, they emphasize that it’s important to look beyond the sensational examples and recognize how cult-like behavior shows up in many facets of our lives and society. We’ll talk with Saha about why some groups are labeled as cults, why people are drawn to them, and what cults reveal about spirituality and culture in America. Guests: Poulomi Saha, associate professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley. Saha teaches a course called Cults in Popular Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:51.2	Music From KQED From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:55.0	There are now dozens of documentaries about cults. Streaming across the major platforms, there are countless podcasts digging into unorthodox groups
1:00.5	past and present with documentary research. But despite all the shows, how much do we really know
1:06.0	about cults? Where is the line between religious devotion and cultish devotion? And perhaps more importantly, why are so many millions interested in consuming media about fringe movements that rarely had more than a few hundred followers?
1:18.6	That's the project of our guest today, Berkeley professor Palomi Saha, who teaches one of the university's most popular courses, cults in popular culture. She's coming up next
1:29.8	after this news.
1:39.1	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Today we're talking about the surge of popular culture about
1:46.4	cults. And if we're going to do that, we should probably start with the word itself. Our guest,
1:51.3	UC Berkeley professor Palomei Saha, likes to note that cult shares a linguistic root with culture,
1:57.6	the Latin cultists, which had a variety of meanings from cultivate to adoration.
	...

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