achilles wrote:Would it help to view it all as sociological field work? You know, going native and writing an ethnography.
Here a piece a friend of mine wrote for Dialogue some years ago.
He was a Stakepresident in the 80´s and a colleague on the high council.
He is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Anthropology.
Article here:
https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-cont ... N04_11.pdf
Here a brief excerpt.
The "Tribe" of Deseret
The Deseret tribe inhabits a remote hinterland of the continent, occupying
a large territory with fuzzy boundaries, united by its one important
ritual center. The people are bound to the land by a mythical charter
using ancient images such as "the everlasting mountains," a new Jordan
river with another Dead Sea, and the "people of Israel." Effectively they
see themselves as a chosen people who fled from an oppressing government
to an unpolluted land. The promised land is considered to have
been prepared by deity. They view themselves as a replica of a mythical
tribe that once, on another continent but in similar surroundings, possessed
such a land. The area was considered to have been empty, despite
the presence of a small remnant of an old population. These remnant people
(in African situations often considered half-mythical creatures) enjoy a
special status in the founding myths of Deseret. They represent a positive
presence, not as such, but only as remnants of history. As remnants they
were watched with some fear and apprehension, tolerated and
marginalized. The Deseret tribe tends to accentuate its distinctiveness
from its own earlier cultural origins in a large neighboring territory; but it
still retains more of the earlier culture and religion than the people of the
tribe suppose.
The tribe of Deseret is kin-based, as is any tribe. As people flee
from their recruitment area to the relative safety of the new mountain
homeland (a very common situation in Africa too), they cannot at first
participate in a structure of consanguine relations. A myth (the "blood
of Ephraim") offering fictive kinship is called upon to explain how all
those who heeded the call and gathered from the recesses of the world in
fact belong to one of the tribes of the Israelite diaspora. This mythical
kinship is linked with a quest for the tribal homeland, making immigration
a permanent feature of tribal self-definition. Of course in due time,
fictive kinship evolves into real kinship, for the tribe has a very strong
tendency towards marriage within the group (endogamy). As in any
tribe, marriage is an important concern for the elders: women form a
very important asset, and procuring progeny (the more the better) is a focal
point of the religion. Apparently, much of the appeal of polygyny is
due to this desire.
Polygyny forms one of the most obvious parallels with Africa, as
throughout that continent polygyny is the rule. However, Deseret polygyny
is based upon an explicit myth ("revelation") and is one of the most contested—
and therefore cherished—issues of the tribe. Polygyny in the Deseret
tribe is as deeply engrained in religious life as African polygyny is in social
life. In Deseret the ecclesiastical elders dominate the marriage market.
They happen to have an extra inducement to marry more wives and usually
the means at their disposal to do so. In consequence, "plural wives" tend to
be considerably younger than their husbands, in Deseret as in Africa. The
tribe follows peculiar drinking taboos, and they manifest other unique customs,
too. The tribe routinely excludes nonmembers (and even nonconforming
members) from the rituals in their temples, stating that outsider
presence would spoil the ritual and pollute the shrine (a quite common
view in African religions, too).
A standard amount of ethnocentric bias can be recognized in the
tribe. They call themselves "the elect," "Saints" or "God's people," thus
drawing a clear boundary between themselves and others, for whom counter-
names are employed, such as "the world," or "gentiles," sometimes
"the sectarians." Still, these out-groups are not considered evil per se, as
they contain actual kinsmen and potential tribe members. So out-group
relations are, on the whole, on a double footing: The difference between
the tribal society and the outer world is stressed, yet the larger society is defined
as a recruitment area. As far as routine life experiences are concerned,
people beyond the tribal border cannot be trusted.
People tend to restrict their social encounters to tribesmen. With
them they share the same language, values, and social (including authority)
structure. Consequently, they rely on them for help and support, the
extended kin group being important in this respect. As is usual among
tribes, they have a more complex folk sociological model in which they differentiate
between kindred tribes containing potential kinsmen and
tribes to which no kinship can be traced; in short, they are neither
color-blind nor innocent of ethnic labeling.
Authority is strongly centralized in the tribe, as usual without a de facto
separation between religious authority and political power. The paramount
chief, who has more wives than most tribesmen (like one of the great classical
case studies in anthropology, he is like a Trobriand chief), enjoys tremendous
popular respect, though on a basis of affective kinship rather than in a
specifically "political" sense. He may be affectionately called "Brother,"
though usually the formal title of the chieftainship, "President," applies. In
daily life he distinguishes himself as little as many African chiefs do, wearing
about the same outfit as any of his people. People listen with respect; and
when he sends people off to distant places to enlarge the tribal territory,
normally they go unquestioningly. Few material symbols of kingship are
used. In ceremonial gatherings, the overt symbols of power are practically
absent, though the placement of the elders in ritual settings is highly significant:
Chiefs are seated higher than the commoners and always face them.
The authority structure is reinforced in a semi-annual rite with all those attending
raising their right arm in support of the chief leaders. Authority is,
in fact, unchallenged. It is based upon an unquestioning acceptance of the
legitimacy of the chief, who has a personal history of close association with
the much mythologized founding hero and with whom he is even said to
have had a fleeting moment of supernatural identification.
The chiefs appointed community and lineage elders try to follow his
example. They lead their communities as undisputed authorities; in theory
their authority is grounded just as directly in the supernatural world as that
of the great chief. In practice, however, they have to follow his general counsel
and policies. They, like the chief, have their own businesses to tend, their
fields to plow, and their harvests to reap. In their tribal section leadership as
well as in their utilitarian work, they tend to rely on kinsmen and in-laws.
Leadership is not considered a full-time occupation, although on the level
of the chief and his counselors, in effect it is.
Religion, as in any well-organized tribe, is of prime importance for the
unity of the tribe. The hierarchical structure is heavily imbued with ritual
power, the political system depending on the religious one. Tribal character-
istics in the religion are found in, among other things, the territorial myth,
the absence of full-time religious specialists, ritual clothing, patriarchal
blessings as divination, a sacred initiation at the start of adulthood for boys,
and girls' initiation into the tribal secrets at the age of marriage. African
tribal religion usually is rooted in its geography: sacred places, holy mountains,
shrines along the footpaths of the ancestors. These religions often do
not travel well, though individual cults may.
Deseret religion has its holy grounds as well. The main messianic message
is couched in territorial terms: the tribe has a gathering place for eschatological
times. Its relations with the neighboring tribes are often stated in
terms of this messianic territoriality. Characteristically, for any tribe, the future
holiness of a territory links to pre-historic elements: gathering places of
ancestors, high points of the tribe's specific history, and spots significant to
the founding hero. As with any tribe, the landscape of Deseret is part of sacred
history and future eschatology. As with any African tribe, magic is a basic
element of the religion, both in its grounding myths and in everyday life,
as tales of miracles and healing testify.
This only partially tongue-in-cheek description of a few aspects of
early Deseret Mormonism—perhaps an exercise in what Nibley called
"the art of telling tales about Joseph Smith and Brigham
Young" —shows how apt is our depiction of the Mormons of the
mid-nineteenth century as a tribal group: that is, as a group of people
bound together by fictive and real kinship ties and a mythical charter, occupying
a definite territory to which they are ideologically bound, their
group life facilitated by sharing a culture and speaking a common language,
and unified by a comprehensive power structure.
Of course, there are differences. A crucial one is the claim to universality
and exclusiveness by Deseret religion. Traditional religions, be they
African or other, have no claims on unique truth, nor on universal application
or exclusive authority. Such a pretension is far removed from the
everyday practicality of local religions. Claims of universality and exclusivity
belong in the Christian/Moslem sphere, not in the tolerant and
easy-going traditional religions of Africa and elsewhere. It is this feature,
however, that will transform the colonized Deseret people into the
religious colonizer of the rest of the world.
"Getting the Mormon out of the Church is easier than getting the Mormon out of the Ex-Mormon"
