The SLMSSA is pleased to host Jonathan Stapley on April 8, 2010. His lecture is entitled, “All These Years an Orphan”: Ritual Adoption in Mormon Theology and Practice.

Abstract

In this new study of ritual adoption the author evaluates its emergence in post-martyrdom Nauvoo and traces it through the inter-temple period, its return with the St. George Temple, and its revelatory end.  Focusing on both ritual practice and the ideas of ritual participants, this paper offers a revised perspective of its early practice and an expanded context for its later implementation in Utah.

Time and Location

The lecture will begin at 7:00 pm in the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building on the University of Utah Campus, room 101. The event is free and open to the public.

Dinner

At 5:15 pm at Hector’s Miramar [Mexican food] we will have dinner with Jonathan, and we’d love for those who can to come on down and join us. The address is 342 West 1300 South in Salt Lake City. Going west on 1300 S. toward I-15, it’s on the north side of the street just before you hit the freeway. Here is a google map just in case.

From dinner, go east on 1300 South until Foothill Drive. Turn left and follow Foothill Drive until Mario Capecchi Drive. Turn right and follow the map given below. Map.

Please pass this information to all interested parties and support the SLMSSA by printing and posting this flier far and wide! You can email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com for a pdf or jpeg image.

We  look forward to seeing you for dinner and the lecture! If you have any questions, please email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com. If you’d like a phone number where you can reach someone at the event (just in case you get lost or something), just email and ask. Thanks again!

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Map and Directions: There is a bit of construction in the area, so I’m putting up this map to show where to go to get to the building and parking area [click on the image to get the full size]:

So, follow the arrows, that’s 500 S. (starts out as 400 S. and turns into 500 S.), go until Mario Capecchi Drive and turn left. Follow Mario Capecchi until you come to the Legacy Bridge. As you pass under it, get into the left lane cuz you will be turning left almost immediately after at the stoplight. This is Wasatch Drive. Turn left at Wasatch Drive. Turn left at the third turn into a parking area. There is a sign at the entrance. Here is a picture:

Go straight, it will twist around and you’ll come to another sign just like this one pictured. As you can see on the map, you’ll have to turn a bit into the red parking area. The Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building is circled on the above map. Parking is free after 6 pm and there should be plenty of it by then. Please use this parking area as it is free and we cannot validate parking in the pay visitor lot.

The Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association will host Brian Cannon, Professor of History at BYU, on February 25, 2010 at 7 pm for a public lecture entitled: “Many Refractions of Light: Historians’ Treatment of Divine Influence in LDS History.”  The lecture will be held on the University of Utah Campus in the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building, room 101 (main floor).

Abstract: “My survey examines the challenges that historians have faced in reconciling their religious convictions with their academic training and professional standards.  My paper begins with the first generation of LDS historians like Andrew Love Neff and Thomas C. Romney trained in the decade and a half prior to World War II; follows the experiences and influence of Leonard Arrington, his peers and his protégés through the 1960s, 70s and 80s; discusses the emergence of BYU as a focal point for LDS history in the 1960s and the controversies that arose from writing LDS history at BYU and in the Church Historical Department under Arrington; and surveys trends over the past 15 years (post-New Mormon History).”

Map and Directions: There is a bit of construction in the area, so I’m putting up this map to show where to go to get to the building and parking area [click on the image to get the full size]:

So, follow the arrows, that’s 500 S. (starts out as 400 S. and turns into 500 S.), go until Mario Capecchi Drive and turn left. Follow Mario Capecchi until you come to the Legacy Bridge. As you pass under it, get into the left lane cuz you will be turning left almost immediately after at the stoplight. This is Wasatch Drive. Turn left at Wasatch Drive. Turn left at the third turn into a parking area. There is a sign at the entrance. Here is a picture:

Go straight, it will twist around and you’ll come to another sign just like this one pictured. As you can see on the map, you’ll have to turn a bit into the red parking area. The Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building is circled on the above map. Parking is free after 6 pm and there should be plenty of it by then. Please use this parking area as it is free and we cannot validate parking in the pay visitor lot.

Dinner: We will meet for dinner at Moochie’s (232 E. 800 S. Salt Lake City) at 5:15 p.m. From there it’s just a short drive to campus. Here is a map. The easiest way to get from Moochie’s to the lecture is just to go north up to 400 S. and following that street East until it turns into 500 S. and then refer to the map posted above.

Please pass this information to all interested parties and support SLMSSA by printing and posting this flier far and wide! You can email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com for a pdf or jpeg image.

We  look forward to seeing you for dinner and the lecture! If you have any questions, please email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com. If you’d like a phone number where you can reach someone at the event (just in case you get lost or something), just email and ask. Thanks again!

I’ve never been more intellectually excited as I have been while studying this issue. I hope to interest you in some of the same issues about Remembering Joseph Smith’s First Vision. A few questions: What do you know about what is commonly called Joseph Smith’s First Vision and how do you know it? The answers necessarily deal with memory—ours and that of Joseph Smith. I think there are some fallacies about his vision because few have investigated it in light of scientific findings regarding memory. I’ve thought of these issues and this is the beginning of my inquiries on this. Thinking about Joseph’s memory and ours in light of finding in the relatively new field of memory studies. I’m not the first to try and get inside the mind of JS. Who could resist trying to get inside the mind of Joseph Smith’s fascinating mind? We think of I. Woodridge Riley’s work as maybe the first attempt to prove JS’s mind. Fawn Brodie’s 1945 book, No Man Knows My History was an important landmark. She cast his vision as an ambitious variation on what was a common visionary experience in Joseph Smith’s time and place, noted that as far as she could tell it went unreported to family and press in the 1820s and experienced a remarkable evolution in detail over time (expressed in her Second Edition, which was released after the 1832 and 1835 accounts were discovered in the 1960s. She said that “the awesome vision he described in later years was probably the elaboration of some half-remembered dream stimulated by the early revival excitement and reinforced by the rich folklore of visions circulating in his neighborhood” (25).

I want to focus on Dan Vogel’s book, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet. I’ll be in dialogue to some degree with Vogel tonight.  He says that the historical record, “cannot be taken at face value because accounts are so often tainted by a recorder’s subjective beliefs. The historian’s task is to determine, as best he or she can, what really happened” (xv). He continues, “When Smith fails to mention foundational visions until years after the event and gives conflicting and anachronistic accounts of them, how certain can one be that he relates events as he experienced them at the time?” (xv) He uses the “least embellished” account (1832), implying that the earliest memory is the most accurate (30). He parts with Brodie, rejecting the suggestion that Smith invented the vision in the 1830s. It was a typical conversion experience (Vogel argues) and was less concrete than Joseph later implied (30-31).

Then, I think of Richard Bushman’s two books on Joseph Smith. I’m influenced by this statement by Bushman, “My method has been to relate events as the participants themselves experienced them, using their own words where possible. Insofar as the revelations were a reality to them, I have treated them as real in this narrative.”

It’s explicitly subjective, “how early Mormons perceived the world.” Both Bushman biographies richly integrate all existing accounts to describe experience and simultaneously suggest how Joseph subsequently remembered it. Bushman is the only historian of the first vision whose work analyzes and represents Joseph’s accounts in light of how memory works.

If Vogel is vastly superior a historian to Riley and Brodie, Bushman is vastly superior to Vogel.

Bushman equates subjectivity with history, looking at events as experienced by the participants. He is conscious of the psychology of memory. Bushman told me that last year when Sam [research assistant?] interviewed Bushman, “The Hermeneutics of suspicion feels what we have to find out is the truth and since I cannot trust you I have to disregard the appearance that you present to me and find below what is really there which I can judge, I know what’s really there. The Hermeneutics of Trust begins with the position that we never can find out the truth, what really happened. Everything we know in this life is seen through someone’s eyes. All you have is the way this person saw it or that person saw it. There is no absolute truth somewhere out there that isn’t seen through human eyes. And so the purpose of history is not to find out what really happened but to…collect the way the set of human observers have described what they think happened looking at it through their particular set of eyes…It’s lovely. It means you are sort of becoming introduced to the inner lives and the inner thoughts and the way of looking at the world of all these different people…And frankly when I read history I don’t want to have the historian reduce whatever happens to the modern, common sense view what the possibilities are, I want to know what Mohamed thought was happening to him and what Buddha thought was happening to him, not some modern, scientific view of it. And I, as a historian is to explain to the world what Joseph Smith understood was happening to him.” (Interview of Richard Bushman, 2009)

Joseph Smith’s accounts of his vision provide the best access to his mind. Joseph used the word “mind” nearly 20 times in his accounts and then when he’s exploring his own mind, remembering what was in his mind in the days leading up to the experience. An initial glance suggests that this was a more frequent use of the word “mind” than in the rest of his corpus. The accounts are remarkably introspective. The earliest known account he left, 1832 account. He’s using the language of the revival culture. He describes a personalized experience, he is “convicted of my sins”, etc.

This account describes how he was filled with the spirit of God,  and “spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee.” He wrote it in his own hand. As a result of the vision, “my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great joy and the Lord was with me.”

Joseph and Frederick G. Williams wrote this account a decade before any others were published. It was unknown until published in a masters thesis in 1965. 3 years after, an eccentric visitor from the east inquired, in this account Joseph cast the vision as a first of a series that led to the translation of the BoM. Opposition in the grove, fruitless attempt to pray, couldn’t speak, one divine personage appeared followed shortly after by another. “I saw many angels.” “I was about 14 years old.” A week after dictating this account, another inquirer came and he told him about it.

The account most familiar with the LDS, the one in the Pearl of Great Price. Another, the Wentworth letter. And there are other contemporary hearsay accounts. Orson Pratt, Orson Hyde published a version in German, etc. I want to talk about memory and how it might help us understand these documents and open up new ways for us to think of them, we’ve been narrow minded in the way we think about Joseph’s accounts, both believers and non believers.

Memory is interpretative, a dynamic process.  Memories are a mixture of past and present. It is assumed that memory is static, like the contents of a filing cabinet or a video we just replay. There are no scholars of memory who think of memory that way. And we know that if we think about it for a minute that that’s not the way it works. Memory is not the wax tablet Plato thought it was, it is a selective and interpretative process.  We store, select, interpret, and integrate information. “We are active agents in the remembering process, such that what we remember depends on the process that we ourselves engage in when we encounter a thing or an event as well as the properties of the thing or event itself”

Major finding over past 100 years, memory is a multi-component rather than monolithic entity. Types of memory:

Sensory Store: Apparently unconscious retrieval of sensory information held for about a second while we decide what to attend to.

Short-Term Memory: Paying attention to something transfers it from sensory store to short term memory. Has limited capacity and decays quickly.

Long-Term Memory: Continuing to rehearse information transfers it to the long-term store.” Or secondary memory.  It has unlimited capacity, does not necessarily deteriorate over time.

Two types of long-term memory:

Episodic-Remembering specific events

Semantic-general knowledge about the world, facts, concepts

We process information at different levels, the more deeply we process information when we encode it, the more meaningful and memorable the information is likely to be.

Memories are mixtures of past and present. Whatever is influencing us in the present influences the nature of the memory and retrieval. This is the case of the first vision.

“Merely to remember something is meaningless unless the remembered image is  combined with a moment in the present affording a view of the same object or objects. Like our eyes, our memories must see double; these two images then converge in our minds into a single heightened reality.”

Our earliest memories consist of images. Infantile amnesia, can’t remember what you did when you were 6 mo. Why? Some think perhaps it is because we don’t have the background experience to be able to meaningfully interpret that experience and thus it is not remembered.

Dean Jessee, “When we have an experience and we relate it one time and later on we might see it in a different light due to events that have taken place in our own lives. I think that may have played a part into it also.” (Interview with Dean Jessee)

Episodic memories, autobiographical ones, are not either accurate or inaccurate, they are both.

“It is not the case that the meaning around which autobiographical memory is organized is a complete fabrication of life events. There is a fundamental integrity to one’s autobiographical reflections”

Emotion is a major catalyst of memory. Memory is subjective. Historians are in the business of describing subjective pasts—that’s the only kind there is. Historians must abandon the fallacy that subjective=unreal, inaccurate, inherently flawed. If we all go to the Jazz game, we can sit in the same row at the same time and have completely different memories of the event. Memory is subjective. Joseph’s vision was subjective. They describe his memories. We must stop substituting our subjective analysis for taking Joseph’s subjective memories at face value. He saw a vision, not a half-remembered dream, a vivid, emotional vision. When we study his accounts of it in light of how memory works, we find exactly what scientists of memory have come to expect.

Memory is sensory, short term, long-term. It’s constructed on what you focus on. Episodic Memory is both reliable and unreliable. There is fundamental integrity in the reflection, even though they may be wrong about the particulars. In the 1832 account, Joseph says, “At about the age of 12 years…” 1835: “I was about 14 years old…” 1838: “Sometime in the second year…early in the spring of  1820”

Joseph processed this emotional experience on a deep level

“My soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice…” All the accounts are richly descriptive of Joseph’s mental world—lots of cognitive words—mind, pondered, reflected, engaged, laboring. The epiphany with James 1:5 especially memorable.

Memory is a combination of the past and present—interpretative.

Subsequent experience gives the 1832 account meaning. It emphasizes keys given to Joseph. He had just had a revelation on keys, he might have been conscious of Sidney’s declaration that we’ve lost the keys. Joseph declares, the Keys are given to me. Interesting that we’ve got a very likely present influence influencing the recollection of the past as memory studies would expect. You don’t see much emphasis on Church until 1838. Is it because it’s a preoccupation in his present? Finding meaning from present circumstances in the First Vision? I don’t know that we’ll ever know, but not surprising if we see a mix of past and present. That’s what memory is.

Joseph’s accounts include both factual and interpretive memory. Joseph likely conflated memories in two ways

-He compresses time (compare 1832 to 1838) and conflated events (the portion in the 1838 account where Joseph tells his mother that he learned for himself that Presbyterianism is not correct is inserted into the original account. It may be that he’s conflating two events. The Presbyterian conversation may have taken place at another time).

-He filled in gaps in his episodic memory from his semantic memory.

[Steve brought up the example of the 1832 version which seems to point to Joseph only seeing one personage. He says, in effect, "The Lord opened the heavens to me and I saw the Lord." Steve mentioned that perhaps Joseph didn't have the vocabulary, the conceptual framework to do anything but call each personage in this version "Lord". Perhaps he really is talking about two people here. He said that this would also be consistent with other versions that have one appearing then the other.]

Summary observations

-Was the first vision a half remembered dream? Richard Bushman, “Brodie speaks of Joseph’s vision as a sort of half-remembered dream. It’s an evocative phrase and shows some of her poetic nature. But if you read Joseph Smith’s accounts of his visions they are remarkably concrete and detailed. And if you have a dream and you wake up in the morning wanting to remember it by 9 o’clock in the morning you’ve forgotten most of it. And you just have little pieces of it still in your head. But especially with the account of Moroni, you know he’s talking about clothing and where he stands, what he looks like. It’s a very real remembrance. So call it a dream if you wish, but it is not half-remembered. It’s fully remembered. It’s details. Concrete details.” (Bushman interview, 2009)

How certain can we be?

Vogel says, “When Smith fails to mention foundational visions until years after the event and gives conflicting and anachronistic accounts of them, how certain can one be that he relates events as he experienced them at the time?”

We can be certain that:

-Joseph’s accounts are very representative of his dynamic memory

-That there is fundamental integrity to Joseph autobiographical reflections

-That he may be wrong about many particulars

-That his factual memory of the vision and subsequent experiences combined to create Joseph’s dynamic interpretive memories of his experiences.

-That Joseph likely filled in the gaps in his episodic memories with semantic memories.

We must recuperate the historical value of subjectivity ala Bushman. Joseph’s vision accounts are undeniably subjective. All remembered things are. It was his vision. He knew it, and he knew that God knew it, and he could not deny it.

So, follow the arrows, that’s 500 S. (starts out as 400 S. and turns into 500 S.), go until Mario Capecchi Drive and turn left. Follow Mario Capecchi until you come to the Legacy Bridge. As you pass under it, get into the left lane cuz you will be turning left almost immediately after at the stoplight. This is Wasatch Drive. Turn left at Wasatch Drive. Turn left at the third turn into a parking area. There is a sign at the entrance. Here is a picture:

Go straight, it will twist around and you’ll come to another sign just like this one pictured. As you can see on the map, you’ll have to turn a bit into the red parking area. The Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building is circled on the above map. Parking is free after 6 pm and there should be plenty of it by then.

Print this map out or take down the information before you leave home. Here is a link to one map that shows the building and roads [note the intersection of Wasatch and Mario Capecchi. Also note that this map does not show the third enterance, which now appears about where the word "Wasatch" is--follow the little beige road back to the parking area by the CTIHB]. Here is the original of the above map.

I hope that helps!

We will meet for dinner at Moochie’s (232 E. 800 S. Salt Lake City) From there it’s just a short drive to campus. Here is a map. The easiest way to get from Moochie’s to the lecture is just to go north up to 400 S. and following that street East until it turns into 500 S. and then refer to the map posted above.

Ok, look forward to seeing you for dinner and the lecture! If you have any questions, please email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com. If you’d like a phone number where you can reach someone at the event (you know, just in case you get lost or something), just email and ask. Thanks again!

Abstract: “The accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision are well known among historians of Mormonism.  However, no scholars have yet analyzed these documents in light of the scholarship on memory that psychologists and neuroscientists have generated in the last three decades.  In light of this scholarship, much that has been written and said concerning Joseph’s vision (by believers and unbelievers) appears to be based on assumptions that are not substantiated by the science of memory.  This informal presentation will discuss Joseph’s accounts in light of the science of memory.”

Mark your calendars! I will have a follow up post this week with details about how to get there, and parking. Also, as will be tradition, I will have details on place and time for those who would like to get together beforehand for dinner (Any recommendations? Steve, unfortunately, will not be able to make dinner).  We had a great turn out for dinner and lecture with Kristine Haglund (see notes here), and I hope we can make this and each SLMSSA lecture a success. Please pass this information to all interested parties and support SLMSSA by printing and posting this flier far and wide! You can email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com for a pdf or jpeg image.

The disclaimer: one of the great things about being an editor is that I never have to have any original thoughts. There may not be any good new ideas in this talk, in which case, all you have to do is submit some new papers to Dialogue so I can get my plagiarisms up-to-date. I’m also not trained as an historian, and the applicability of what training I have is highly questionable. I will therefore talk very fast so that we can get to the interesting part of the evening where you tell me about why I am wrong and what you are going to do about it.

And the story—Jared asked for a title before I really had an idea of what I might have to say, so I hastily invented a title, in hopes that, since Jared would be here with his laptop, he could just simul-blog something that would make me sound smart.

Nonetheless, I think there was a kernel of something useful in the title I made up. The idea came from something my father used to say to me all the time when he was trying to dissuade me from majoring music (in favor of something practical, like, say, German literature). He would always say that “music is too important to be left to professionals” and extol the joys of being an amateur (in the full sense of that word) practitioner. When he elaborated on the theme, he would note that amateurs have unmixed motives; regardless of their truly noble intentions, professionals’ motives inevitably become muddied with practical concerns. The heart of the amateur is no purer, but her love can remain unalloyed with vile commerce. The amateur also is in a better position to remember that music is not technique—it is a social act, it uses tools to communicate something essential about the human condition. Finally, the amateur intuits, and does not lose sight of, the truth that beauty matters, that its existence is vital.

I think without too huge a stretch, we can see how these qualifications might inhere in the amateur practitioner of Mormon history. First of all, Mormons are conditioned to regard recordkeeping, the preservation of history, as a religious duty. Besides journals, they keep histories as part of their religious history—visiting- and home-teaching reports, Sacrament meeting attendance tallies, Sunday School attendance records. Our most sacred liturgy requires literally a mountain of genealogical records . And our weekly Sacrament meetings, but most particularly testimony meeting, involve the oral transmission of historical narrative. Despite endless injunctions against storytelling, the bearing of testimony remains essentially the practice of collective oral history—situating mundane events of individual lives in a shared religious history and mythos.

And there is more subtle historiographical knowledge available to members of the church, as well. Either through the 7-Up-laced Hawaiian punch of a Mormon childhood involving lots of pioneer stories and circumlocutions around polygamy, or through the bile of the anti-Mormon tracts regularly supplied to converts by friends and relatives, most Mormons imbibe the notion that objectivity is impossible in the practice of history, that the ordering of events and emphasis of particular detail is fraught with subjective intent.

This subjectivity is often posed as a false dichotomy of faith-promoting history vs. anti-Mormon history , which is kind of a strange view of history, adversarial and binary. Still, it has both official authority and a good deal of cultural heft—many people think this way. Despite being oversimplified, it is a rudimentary statement of a fundamental historiographical principle, and it’s critical, I think, that Mormons are not totally susceptible to the notion that an historian can just say “what really happened.”

In fact, armed with the religious injunction to record history as carefully as possible and with the sense that “doing history” is a project with ethical implications, amateur Mormon historians have provided the raw material to keep a few generations of professionals happily occupied, and independent scholars have produced some of the most important and influential accounts of the Mormon past—Juanita Brooks on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Lester Bush on the restriction of priesthood ordination, Linda Newell and Val Avery on Emma Smith, Todd Compton on Joseph’s other wives–being just a few of many examples that could be adduced.

Despite this long engagement with the past, the importance of history to the Church as an institution is retreating as it continues its transition from sect to creedal Church. For evidence of this (probably overly bold) claim, we might look at the most recent Sunday School manual for the study of “Doctrine & Covenants and Church History”—the material is organized by topic, rather than by chronology. There is little attempt at narrative history—instead, snippets and anecdotes from history are adduced to illustrate or emphasize doctrinal points or further devotional purposes. It’s not hard to see why this shift is occurring—we’ve moved from being a small, geographically isolated body to a large church, spread around the globe. The globalization of the church is disruptive, dis-unifying in ways we haven’t even begun to articulate, let alone deal with. Mormonism cannot be a tribe bound by shared history anymore—hence, the need for some sort of creed, for unity created by shared commitment to principles that can transcend national and cultural particularity. But, as the persistence of narrative in testimonies shows, such principles may exist more in theory than in practice; there is a very strong drive towards narrative, a need to fit the story of an individual life into something bigger. So, while the persecution-in-Missouri-trek-westward-Zion-in –the-mountaintops narrative is fading as a cultural signifier, it’s not yet clear what will take its place. It seems likely that many founding stories will be generated as the church flourishes in new geographies and cultures.

This is, of course, the moment where I invite you future professional scholars of Mormonism to ride in on white horses. Not (you’ll be relieved to hear!) to be Old Mormon History missionaries, or neo New Mormon Historians, or priests of proto-postmodern-post NMH Mormon Studies (or whatever it is the kids are doing these days). It won’t do for professionals to just do _better_ reconstructions of the past, with new documents and niftier theories; there is a much larger project that amateurs cannot do without teachers. It’s a building project, really –the construction of discursive spaces in which individual and local histories can speak, not just as anecdotes but as meaningful, important elements of a communally-discovered truth. I want to make a couple of tentative proposals about how that project can proceed.

First, Mormon Studies can begin to be less about time, and more about space. I’m thinking here partly about literal, physical space, following Foucault’s call for a history of space, and, even more, Edward Soja’s extension of that call:

So unbudgeably hegemonic has been this historicism of theoretical consciousness that it has tended to occlude a comparable critical sensibility to the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld as being creatively loated not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes: social being actively emplaced in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization.

So where are the Mormon geographers?? Our study of the spatial relations created by Mormonism is in its infancy (or maybe even its premortal existence). We’ve really mostly considered the vectors that spread out from here, from Utah. Even when we do history about people in the diaspora we do it along two axes—the chronological, and the one geographical line that goes to Salt Lake City. A Mormon Studies that paid attention to topology as well as chronology and narrative would make space for a thicker Mormonism, that more potential amateur Mormon historians could claim.

And it needs to be not just “how do we translate and explain American Mormon culture in new places”, but being willing to be influenced by the Mormonism that is created in other spaces. For instance, we should think not just about how to explain desert/springs to people in the rainforest, but how to understand scriptural metaphors of fecundity and lushness in the vernacular of the rainforest? What do we learn about creating space for families from European saints who have lived with a pluralistic family culture for decades? What can we discover about Mormonism from its different growth in its Midwestern iterations—the Community of Christ, the Strangites, etc.?

What professionals trained in critical theory and method can do that is more difficult for amateurs is to create discursive spaces, widening the borders of historical conversations from the reductionist “faith-promoting- vs. anti-Mormon” paradigm, with careful articulations of both historiographic methods and the larger discourse in which the practice of “history” takes place—the linguistic, metaphorical, and symbolic universe within which, and by means of which, a group of human beings understand themselves in relationship to one another and to the political, social and economic structures that define/constrain their experience.

It’s probably useful to first talk about some discursive spaces which are being abandoned. I’ve already mentioned one of the “ghost spaces” in Mormon discourse—the one in which the first vision was the first missionary discussion and many (most) Mormons had kinship ties within a couple of generations to Utah pioneers, and in which tribal and religious affiliations were virtually indistinguishable. We built a wing onto this space after the era of immigration to Utah ended, and emigrants from Utah joined local converts in the Mormon diaspora. But even with the addition, I don’t think it’s big enough any more. Another discursive space w was created by the New Mormon history (and its discontents). This space had windows on the past, but it was, in large measure, oriented towards its present. And it was situated in Utah, about halfway between BYU and the Church Office Building, I think. It was largely institutional history, or biography of church hierarchs. Although there were wonderful attempts to attend to previously neglected subjects, by defining “ordinary Saints” as not hierarchs, not bishops, for instance, or in constructing Mormon Women’s history as a special category, this kind of history inadvertently reproduced and reinforced some of the same power structures as the institutional church (neatly symbolized, I think, by the fact that the only time the Mormon History Association can manage to allot the Women’s History Initiative is a breakfast AT 6:30 IN THE MORNING ON A SATURDAY–Thanks—I needed to get that off my chest).

So, it’s all well and good and admirably jargon-y to talk about creating discursive space. But what in the world does that mean in this context? I don’t really know, but I can think of some of the rooms we need:

1) A room for talking about gender and family which doesn’t have masking tape on the floor for people to take sides in the mommy wars

2) A place to talk about church involvement in politics

3) A polygamy chat room

4) A theology workshop

5) A LOT more rooms with windows to other churches

6) A place to talk about the ideology of missionary work…

You get the idea. None of these rooms fit into the space of official or devotional history, or the New Mormon history, and they’re not the work of the sort of democratic history I suggested with my title.

However, what must be preserved from the “ordinary member”-created history I suggested in my title is the sense of history as an ethical project, which I asserted that Mormons possess to an unusual degree. This is something that scholars need to learn over and over from “ordinary” historians. So I want to talk for a bit about Mormon Studies as an ethical project, and a formidably difficult one, at that. In describing it, I want to turn to a couple of unlikely sources—

First, Talal Asad, in his essay, “Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” He’s criticizing another anthropologist’s paper urging ethnographers not to be unduly charitable in interpreting the practices of their subjects for the British audience, that they ought to take a stand and go ahead and say they think a given mode of thinking or acting is primitive, or irrational, or simply bad. Asad (rightly, I think) points out that it is very strange to be publishing a moral judgment, either positive or negative, which the subjects of that criticism will never see and could not read.

Here’s the concluding paragraph I think might be relevant for us: He asks, rhetorically, why he has spent so many pages attacking Gellner’s work? And answers himself,

The reason is quite simple: Gellner and I speak the same language, belong to the same academic profession, live in the same society. In taking up a critical stance toward his text I am contesting what he says, not translating it, and the radical difference between these two activities is precisely what I insist on. Still, the purpose of my argument is not to express an attitude of intolerance toward an immediate neighbor, but to try to identify incoherencies in his text that call for remedy, because the anthropological task of translation deserves to be made more coherent. The purpose of this criticism, therefore, is to further a collective endeavor. Criticizing “savages who are after all some distance away,” in an ethnographic monograph they cannot read, does not seem to me to have the same kind of purpose. In order for criticism to be responsible, it must always be addressed to someone who can contest it.

Of course, trying to do Mormon history or Mormon studies involves power structures that are radically more complicated than the academic politics Asad addresses, and even than the problems of a hegemonic global North over the South which all social scientists have to reckon with somehow. Mormon scholars have very, very little power in relation to the institutional church, _especially_ if they are (and want to continue to be) also practicing members of that institution. And then there is the matter of how Religious Studies are situated in the academy, to say nothing of the harrowing problems of securing and maintaining employment, tenure, and collegial regard in an academic profession. But it is still largely a translation project, an attempt to mediate between “official” Mormondom, practitioners of genealogy and family history, independent scholars at various points along the spectrum of orthodoxy, and interested non-Mormon scholars of religion. Asad’s injunction, then, to address criticism to those who can contest it, might be one possible element of an ethics of Mormon Studies.

But how—the obvious target of some criticism is the institutional church, maybe the “Brethren” collectively or some few of them individually. They are surely in the best position to contest scholarly criticisms, but they do not engage the discussion, and, indeed, have sometimes tried to prevent it altogether. How can there be dialogue if only one side is willing to speak—how to construct a discursive edifice with half the building missing? I have no solution to this dilemma, except to say that I think it’s important not to deliberately exclude the objects of one’s critique from the discussion by acts of rhetorical hostility. Furthermore, I think critical work ought to be extended to consider the structures that constrain the subject position of institutional actors. Where they feel themselves sincerely constrained by the truth claims of the religion, or by the existential exigencies of a world-wide church and we ignore those forces while critiquing the effects of their choices or, worse, ascribing their actions to imagined motives of misogyny or greed or homophobia, then our scholarly competence as well as our ethics should be questioned.

I want to insert here an excerpt from an interview Dallin Oaks did with Helen Whitney, in which he explicitly addresses some of those forces.

It’s an old problem, the extent to which official histories, whatever they are, or semi-official histories, get into things that are shadowy or less well-known or whatever. That’s an old problem in Mormonism — a feeling of members that they shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened, they should’ve been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life.

There are several different elements of that. One element is that we’re emerging from a period of history writing within the Church [of] adoring history that doesn’t deal with anything that’s unfavorable, and we’re coming into a period of “warts and all” kind of history. Perhaps our writing of history is lagging behind the times, but I believe that there is purpose in all these things — there may have been a time when Church members could not have been as well prepared for that kind of historical writing as they may be now.

On the other hand, there are constraints on trying to reveal everything. You don’t want to be getting into and creating doubts that didn’t exist in the first place. And what is plenty of history for one person is inadequate for another, and we have a large church, and that’s a big problem. And another problem is there are a lot of things that the Church has written about that the members haven’t read. And the Sunday School teacher that gives “Brother Jones” his understanding of Church history may be inadequately informed and may not reveal something which the Church has published. It’s in the history written for college or Institute students, sources written for quite mature students, but not every Sunday School teacher that introduces people to a history is familiar with that. And so there is no way to avoid this criticism. The best I can say is that we’re moving with the times, we’re getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn’t.

So, of course we will have a different agenda as scholars, and will probably never agree that the Church shouldn’t be more forthright about sharing documents—we’re operating in a different universe, a different discourse, than church leaders are. But the passage above is remarkable, stunning, really, for its candor, its willingness to describe the position Elder Oaks inhabits. I think an ethic of Mormon Studies would have to start with that kind of honest assessment of one’s subject position and agenda—where do you locate yourself with respect to the institutional church? What motivates your research? What do you love and hate about Mormons? Who are you talking to? Why should your work matter, and to whom? Where are your loyalties divided? Are you writing to get a job, or keep one? Are you writing to persuade people not to be Mormons? Or to be feminists? Or to be more Mormon? That is, to whom is your critique (either explicit or implicit) addressed?

Besides this rigorous self-examination and articulation of one’s position in the various hierarchies and entanglements that are inevitable in the communal creation of knowledge, I think another maxim might be that one should, as fully as possible, imaginatively enter the space one’s subjects inhabit. I’d want to perhaps modify my title to say not just “Every Member an Historian”, but every member a subject of Mormon Studies. And I mean subject in its impossibly contradictory dual sense there—both as the subjects of your study and as the occupiers of subject positions in which they are architects of their own history and their own relationship to Mormonism.

This interdependence of professional historians and “Everyman” is elegantly articulated in a speech by Carl Becker in 1931, from which I unwittingly plagiarized my title (Carl Becker’s 1931 address to the AHA, titled Everyman his own Historian)

Played upon by all the diverse, unnoted influences of his own time, the historian will elicit history out of documents by the same principle, however more consciously and expertly applied, that Mr. Everyman employs to breed legends out of remembered episodes and oral tradition.

Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices, leave us it may be to cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of antiquarian research. Such research, valuable not in itself but for some ulterior purpose, will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common knowledge. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world. The history that does work in the world, the history that influences the course of history, is living history, that pattern of remembered events, whether true or false, that enlarges and enriches the collective specious present, the specious present of Mr. Everyman. It is for this reason that the history of history is a record of the “new history” that in every age rises to confound and supplant the old. It should be a relief to us to renounce omniscience, to recognize that every generation, our own included, will, must inevitably, understand the past and anticipate the future in the light of its own restricted experience, must inevitably play on the dead whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind. The appropriate trick for any age is not a malicious invention designed to take anyone in, but an unconscious and necessary effort on the part of “society” to understand what it is doing in the light of what it has done and what it hopes to do. We, historians by profession, share in this necessary effort. But we do not impose our version of the human story on Mr. Everyman; in the end it is rather Mr. Everyman who imposes his version on us—compelling us, in an age of political revolution, to see that history is past politics, in an age of social stress and conflict to search for the economic interpretation. If we remain too long recalcitrant Mr. Everyman will ignore us, shelving our recondite works behind glass doors rarely opened. Our proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it, to correct and rationalize for common use Mr. Everyman’s mythological adaptation of what actually happened. We are surely under bond to be as honest and as intelligent as human frailty permits; but the secret of our success in the long run is in conforming to the temper of Mr. Everyman, which we seem to guide only because we are so sure, eventually, to follow it.

Neither the value nor the dignity of history need suffer by regarding it as a foreshortened and incomplete representation of the reality that once was, an unstable pattern of remembered things redesigned and newly colored to suit the convenience of those who make use of it. Nor need our labors be the less highly prized because our task is limited, our contributions of incidental and temporary significance. History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor, since it makes, as Santayana says, a gift of “great interests … to the heart.

I suspect those words are even more true of Mormon Studies—though your work will not be read by many, it can nonetheless offer gifts of great interest to the heart as it widens the sphere of Mormonism, makes room for more histories to become sensible in connection with a world that is bigger and more curiously wonderful than any of us can explain.

So–be wise, do good work, and publish it in Dialogue.

When: December 3, 2009, 7 pm

Where: The Warnock Engineering Building (link to map), Room  1230 (The University of Utah).

Free parking is available right across the street from the Engineering building as show in the map linked to above. Room 1230 is on the street level.

This event is free and open to the public.

For further information, please email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com

Please pass this information on to any interested parties.

The parking area in yellow highlighter is still accessible but it’s now accessible through an enterance to the parking area above the hatchmarks in the map I posted in the last blog entry. There is a sign pointing to it that says, “High School Football General Parking.”  Follow that down through that small lot and into the larger lot. The CTIHB will be the large new building at the corner of that larger lot as seen in the map.

This just came to my attention a few minutes ago. Sorry for any inconvenience.

There is a lot of construction in the area, but  this map should help. Email saltlakemormonstudies@gmail.com for a larger, more detailed copy.

It will now be November 19, 2009 on the third floor common area of the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building at 6:30 pm. Refreshments will be served.  If you are a student at a college or university in Salt Lake County, please come to mingle and learn about the Association and future events.

As a result, the lecture by Paul Reeve that was scheduled for November 19, will be rescheduled.

However, the lecture by Kristine Haglund December 3, 2009 will proceed as scheduled with further information on the location coming soon.