Guest Post: Martyn Oliver, “Made in America”

PLEASE NOTE: All issues with the images below are the result of Cristine’s lack of technical prowess.

I?m pleased once again to present a guest post from another colleague whose work explores images of minorities in American culture, Martyn Oliver. Martyn is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He holds a BA from the University of Puget Sound, and earned his PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. Martyn?s work explores the construction of religious identity with particular emphasis on how Western literature depicts Islam and Muslims. 

I?m going to have to start with a confession: I don?t really know a whole lot about Mormons or the LDS Church. Aside from a few ex-Mormon friends and a very strange night in Paris? Charles de Gaulle airport, [1] my encounter with Mormonism both personally and professionally has been frighteningly thin.

So it?s been with great interest that I?ve followed The Juvenile Instructor during this month on Many Images of Mormonism. Crissy has this wonderful habit of inviting folk to do things they don?t know they can do and then convincing them they?re perfect for the task. Needless to say, I?ve been trying to figure out what her nefarious scheme is for me this time around.

To get right to it, she asked me to contribute something for y?all because I study Islam and the religious traditions of Central Asia, often in terms of how these traditions conform to or challenge our preconceptions about them, or in terms of how ?foreign? religions are depicted in the West (by which I don?t mean cowboys, I mean white folk?we should be honest about what the ?West? implies).

Anyhow, I?ve got this idea brewing: there?s an obvious tension within Mormonism, which you all have begun to spell out in fascinating detail, between the maintenance of?for lack of a better term?Mormon exceptionalism and Mormonism as authentically American. Without intending to gloss over the many subtleties of this situation, it seems that by and large there has been a push (as illustrated by Erin Anderson?s reprinting of Calvin Grondahl?s cartoon) for Mormons to be the ?most? American, and in the process not only contort themselves into rigid caricatures, but also implicitly illustrate the foibles of American self-perception. To put it another way, they try and out-WASP the WASP?s.

From my view, this is a mistake. If Mormonism really wanted to make common cause with a group of fellow Americans who are both religiously peculiar while still being deeply and inherently American, the obvious choice is clear. They should cozy up with what was once the Nation of Islam.

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John Wesley Jones’s Pantoscope of California, Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons (1852)

Jones’s Great Pantoscope of California. Broadside, ca. 1852 from Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (Yale UP, 2002), 50.

Another post in the Mormonism’s Many Images series.

In late 1852 and 1853, a new and dazzling show debuted on the stages of Boston and New York. Playing to eager audiences, including the ?elite and intellectual,? John Wesley Jones?s Pantoscope of California. Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons became something of a sensation, running briskly for more than a year and garnering almost uniform praise from critics. It was, an advertisement boasted, the ?LARGEST PAINTING IN THE WORLD,? produced at the astronomical cost of $40,000. Audiences were thrilled by its stunning reproductive detail of the landscape; indeed, Jones claimed that his work was empirical, it was based on 1,500 newfangled daguerreotype images of the American West he and a crew had taken exclusively for that purpose. [1]

Jones?s Pantoscope belonged to the passing nineteenth-century genre of the ?panorama,? and to an age of experimentation with audiovisual entertainment. The absorbing experiences of radio and film were still decades away and popular entertainment remained confined to the stage theater. Panoramas took a variety of forms, but they often constituted ?moving pictures? in the most literal sense. Enormous canvas paintings produced by teams of artists?some reportedly miles long and covering hundreds of thousands of square feet?were rolled across the stage, moving across the audience?s line of sight from one giant spool to another. Accompanied by music and narration, these exhibitions simulated the experience of travel: they were ?designed to convey a sense of movement across space and time? in a uncommonly realistic visual world. For contemporary audiences, this was a new and delightful vicarious experience. Like the telegraph and the steamboat, the panorama was, some proclaimed, a ?wonderful invention for annihilating time and space.? [2]

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Guest Post: Erin Anderson, “In and Out”

Today, as part of our continuing series on Mormonism’s Many Images, we are pleased to welcome Erin Anderson as a guest blogger. Erin left the LDS Church in her early teens, along with her parents and siblings; her extended family is still active. She holds degrees in religious studies from New York University and Boston University, and works as an administrator at Harvard.

The last time I set foot in an LDS building, more than a decade ago, I spent the entire day in the foyer. It was an ideal location. Like the rest of my immediate family, I had come to welcome these in-between settings: close enough to see friends and relatives, but removed from problematic religious spaces. My uncle?s wedding at the temple? We?ll volunteer to watch the kids outside. Visiting grandparents? Let?s fly in on Sunday afternoon, to spare them from asking us to church. We kept the peace by finding comfortable gray areas, neither embracing nor rejecting our heritage.

My parents, sisters, and I had withdrawn from a tight-knit congregation two years earlier, resulting in this ?betwixt and between? strategy. Even in Massachusetts? progressive Mormon community?surrounded by the lovely women of Exponent II?it had simply become too difficult for my mom and dad to raise three liberal, feminist daughters. And so I twiddled my thumbs that Sunday outside the chapel doors, already a veteran of living between two cultures at fourteen.

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Mormonism as a Upas Tree

When I signed up for today?s slot in the Many Images of Mormonism series, I told Crissy I would write about Mormonism as a figurative octopus, but I was distracted by Edgar E Folk (1900): ?[Mormonism] is the Upas tree of our civilization, the octopus of our political life.? [1] I know what an octopus is, but what is a upas tree, and does civilization need one?

The short version: The upas (/’yoo-puss/) tree grows from Southeast Asia to Australia; its bark produces poisonous chemicals. In the nineteenth century the upas had a widely-known folkloric and literary life as the source of an air-borne poison potent and far-reaching enough to rival present-day nuclear weapons. References to the upas appeared in a variety of political and literary contexts, including criticism of slavery and of Mormonism. In some contexts identifying something as a upas tree merely suggested that the thing was undesirable. More developed versions of the metaphor implied that the target was so dangerous / evil that compromise was impossible and the whole ?tree? must be removed at the roots. By the early-to-mid-1900s upas / Mormon metaphors seem to have disappeared, partially due to the Mormon achievement of ?respectability? and partially because a more scientific understanding of the upas had penetrated popular culture.

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Review: Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth, updated edition

Terryl L. Givens. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Paperback. 978-0-19-993380-8. $24.95.

Since its original publication in 1997, Terryl Givens? The Viper on the Hearth has been a mainstay of the study of Mormonism and anti-Mormonism in American culture. And deservedly so. Givens? work provided the first substantial scholarly book-length exploration of images of the Latter-day Saints in American culture in any time period. His examination of the representations of Mormons in the United States in the 19^th century is sweeping in its coverage of the period; thorough in its inclusion of a wide variety of sources, from newspapers to popular fiction to fictive memoirs; and convincing in its argument that, whatever American claims of separation of church and state and tolerance for differing religious views may have been, religion was at the heart of mainstream America?s intolerance, suspicion, and occasional violence toward the Mormons. For many students of Mormonism and of American religion, Viper has served as an introduction to anti-Mormonism in America. For the generation of scholars who have examined the subject since Viper?s first publication?including Megan Sanborn-Jones, Patrick Q. Mason, and J. Spencer Fluhman?Givens? scholarship has served as a guide. No one can engage in a study of anti-Mormonism in the United States without responding to his arguments about the mechanisms of and motivations behind anti-Mormon sentiment in American culture.

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Southwestern States Mission: Boils and Other Skin Lesions

Caveat Lector: I have no medical training and this post discusses medical conditions, including those that suppurate, necrotize, and/or ooze. The medical aspects of the following post are, therefore, potentially both disgusting and unreliable.

A boil is a bacterial infection of a hair follicle resulting in a painful swollen area on the skin. [1] Four of the eight missionaries in this study report a total of ten instances of missionaries with boils. [2] I have not cataloged other types of skin lesions, but blisters and bug bites also appear in the diaries and affected missionaries in similar ways. [3]

Guest Post: David Walker, “The Mormon Image and Railroad Guidebooks”

[Another contribution to our Many Mormon Images series. David Walker (PhD, Yale University, 2013) will be joining the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, this fall, as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. His dissertation focuses on intersections of religion, settlement policy, tourism, and technology in 19th-century Utah. His ongoing research projects concern theories of religion, citizenship, and historical progress formed through Gilded Age bureaucracies, land grant disputes, P. T. Barnum?s circuses, and Harry Houdini?s magic shows.]

This is a brief story about the religion of railroad guidebooks. More specifically it is a tale about railroad agents? efforts to re-imagine ? to package, promote, and to prescribe ? ?Mormonism? in the late-19th-century American West. Railroads, often in collaboration with LDS leaders, designed templates of national intelligibility for Utah and its Mormons, even while U.S. marshalls raided Utahn homes, businesses, and churches.

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Pinning the Mormon Image: on Mormon (non)distinctiveness

Last September, I wrote about the Mormon “hey girl” meme as a signifier of Mormon culture. I’d like to continue in that vein today when talking about Mormon pins on Pinterest.

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THE CHURCH: Non-Mormons, Ex-Mormons, and the Perceptions of Mormonism

Note: I have tamed my views considerably since high school. Not living in Southeastern Idaho for a while has helped.  Anyone who would like to critique my rash, abrasive high school self should remember their own foibles first and that I was acting from a place of pain and alienation.  I?m also not saying that Ed Decker or Fanny Stenhouse is correct in their depiction of Mormonism ? just that we need to take their geographic location seriously.

Recently, there has been a spate of work about how Mormons have been perceived in American popular culture.  Spencer Fluhman recently published A Peculiar People, which explores the role that anti-Mormonism played in defining what counted as ?religion? in the United States in the nineteenth century and what was dismissed as fanaticism and lunacy. J.B. Haws will also be publishing a book on the Mormon image in the twentieth century with the same publisher next year.  Cristine Hutchinson-Jones and Megan Goodwin have both written about the public perception of Mormonism on this and other blogs.  (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Although I have used a lot of this work in my dissertation

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Mormon Robots

[Part of the Many Images of Mormonism series.]

In the 2012 US presidential campaign candidate Mitt Romney was frequently described as a robot or robot-like. Mormons in general are sometimes compared to robots, the Borg (a cybernetic species from Star Trek), or Stepford Wives. In this post I will look at some of the context for using robots to describe people, particularly when those people are Mormon. [1]

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