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Article Excerpt
The Mormon story, as Donald W. Meinig first reminded us in 1965, is of particular significance to Americans (and others elsewhere), for it is about origins, an instinct to move far and escape from that which we do not like or to find space and make of that a home ground. Pushed away, if not persecuted, in New York, then Ohio, then Illinois and Missouri, and finally in Council Bluffs, Iowa--whence believers following Brigham Young launched their handcart migration to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake--Mormonism was a faith on the move. Freedom to escape represents a chunk of the American way, offering a means of eluding oppression and discrimination (Meinig 1965; Lopez and Gwartney 2006). But the "freedom" to do so is not without costs, and the price of exceptionalism can be high. As Meinig later wrote, "Many Americans, near or far, didn't much care how the Mormons formed or ran their families, but influential people in Utah and elsewhere did care how they ran their sociopolitical system" (1998, 111).
Examining how Mormons--adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)--build themselves into their churches, especially their ward chapels, or "meetinghouses," as they are commonly referred to, is a lead theme of this inquiry. But a second goal is laying out the processes of ideological and physical expansion of a prominent conversion-bent church. This is, then, both a specific look at a smallish topic, at a self-proclaimed "peculiar people," and, simultaneously, a broader look at a social phenomenon (Ferguson and others 1968; Vaughan 1993; Moore 1994; Promey 2001; Yorgason 2002).
Religious components in landscape are taken for granted in the United States; they are places for ritual. Religious space commonly is made special and segregated from everyday life. But not always, and the LDS case offers an illuminating contrast. In a social perspective on landscape, we might think that churches would be paramount and fascinating; religious spaces represent, after all, the compromise of ideals, of faith, with zoning, economics, and other mundane, but unmistakably secular, realities (Colten 1985). And if any single great lesson can be learned from observing social patterns, it is that, wherever compromises are drawn, they scribe a line illustrating the relationship of power to geography, with all the Fou-caultdian, Derridian, de Certeauian, Lefebvrian, and Polanyian principles such study may engage. When the elusive, but palpably real, power of faith is added to the verifiable facts of geography, the product is truly a social landscape (Sopher 1967; Starrs and Wright 2005).
BUYING INTO STUDYING BUILDINGS
Whether humble or vaunted, plain or ornate, churches are an embodiment of faith. Religious architecture can take thousands of forms; each distinctive, each a statement. By virtue of size, style, cost, and durability, churches testify to the intentions and ambitions of their creators. Geographers and historians have expressed interest in the implications of church styling and building for hundreds of years. After John Ruskin and his heavy pondering of Gothic significance (Cosgrove 2008), there is Henry Adams's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, which--for all its flaws--brilliantly links changes in the medieval and Renaissance mind to the monumental form of churches themselves, especially to their vaulting supports: "The peril of the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the vagrant buttress; the uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of the syllogism, the irregularities of the mental mirror--all these haunting nightmares of the church are expressed as strongly by the Gothic cathedral as though it had been the cry of human suffering" (1905, 377).
If the meditation by Henry Adams is a hundred-year-old attempt to link belief with building, more recent--and less idiosyncratic, if likewise less eloquent-examples exist of why folklorists and anthropologists and cultural geographers are interested in how buildings, though silent artifacts, speak to the beliefs of their creators. In particular, mentalite history forges an important link between the work of the French annaliste historian-geographers, the studies of folklorists such as Henry Glassie, and the ongoing historical geography and material culture analysis represented in the early going by Fred Kniffen and Wilbur Zelinsky but certainly today entwining many other workers, with branches formed to vernacular architecture and historical archaeology. And a particularly acute contribution of D. W. Meinig's was the addition of a clearly formed vision of how imperial expansion and political geography shape regional character and identity (Meinig 1969, 1986, 1992, 1996; Baker 2005; Wynn 2005). The case of the Mormon church, as Meinig put it some forty years ago, has an additional element: "an admission that this spiritual Zion could even be extended to those rooted beyond the bounds of God's chosen continent of America" (1965, 219). Across time and territory, the spread has been unrelenting.
Drawing ironclad connections between religion and sacred space, between a public face and private devotion, between community building and pious religiosity, is a touchy matter (Sawatsky 1971; Jordan 1980; Heatwole 1989; Zelinsky 2001). Invoking such connections need not necessarily mean they are there: Ours, after all, is an avowedly secular society that nevertheless harbors oftentimes strong beliefs; in surveys, far more Americans consider themselves "religious" than do Europeans or Latin Americans. Religious architecture exists in a spectrum: the more powerful, the more militant, the more well-to-do the church the more deliberate the message of its church architecture and presentation of self. But even vernacular buildings, adapted by believers to the purpose of common worship, are immensely revealing (Blake and Smith 2000) (Figure 1).
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This is nothing less, of course, than a credo for the study of material culture: People invest their churches with their own beliefs. Buildings can, as the so-called new cultural geographers are given to pointing out, be portrayed as simply "bricks and mortar." But they offer a palpable--and remarkably permanent--reality, one that in many circumstances endures and, with time, evolves; such was the point of Henry Adams, in Mont-Saint-Michel, and no less is the conclusion of David Turnbull in Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Sciences and Indigenous Knowledge (2000), where, in the words of one reviewer, the methods of material culture study "define the cathedral as a laboratory in a sense familiar to the sociologists of science: a 'knowledge space,' oriented by technical devices and processes of 'contingent knowledge' " (Harpold 2002, 398).
Discoveries about societies, their complex internal workings, and their myriad citizens are resolutely tied to place: Buildings are constructed on specific sites, and knowledge is gained in the process of planning and construction. In Putting Science in Its Place, the geographer David Livingstone notes that for centuries scientific knowledge was gained in laboratories, gardens, museums, observatories, hospitals, with corpses, ships, and tents, in public spaces (read: bars), and in cathedrals; ideas and practices diffuse from these sites (2003; see also Entrikin 2006). Not only are enduring structures embodiments of human desires, aspirations, and knowledge, they are expressions of the minds and beliefs of their creators and designers (Glassie 1975; Lewis 1975).
Any form of paper documentation, scholars recognize now, offers distinctive stylistic tool marks that give the forensic historical geographer ideas of the document's creator. As the cartographic historian J. B. Harley put it in 1989, "Pick a printed or manuscript map from the drawer almost at random and what stands out is the unfailing way its text is as much a commentary on the social structure of a particular nation or place as it is on its topography. The mapmaker is often as busy recording the contours of feudalism, the shape of a religious hierarchy, or the steps in the tiers of social class, as the topography of the physical and human landscape" (p. 6). And when the material being worked is bricks and mortar, rather than paper or plan, then the signature can be all the more distinctive.
The changeover from vernacular, or artisanal, design and building to clinically formal structures, laid out in blueprint and stamped by planning officialdom, is a transition rich with meaning and moment. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold writes, "Only when the architect ceased to be a master-builder and retreated to the drawing board were templates replaced by the ruler, and taut threads by the ruled lines of the diagram. From that time on, builders were no longer ruled by the architect in person but by the straightness of his lines, on plans and specifications nowadays backed by force of law and contractual obligation" (2007, 161). The shift from vernacular to planned, which J. B. Jackson called the movement from everyday to establishment, is a significant juncture (J. B. Jackson 1989; Starrs 1998).
THE MORMON CULTURE REGION
In few places in the United States of America is a cultural group so distinctive as within what Meinig in 1965 called the "Mormon Culture Region." Meinig, linking cultural groups with geographical areas, was building on the work of Leonard Arrington, Bernard DeVoto, and Wallace Stegner; scholars since Meinig simply take as given the existence of a Mormon Culture Region and launch skyward from there (Arrington, Fox, and May 1976; L. C. Bennion 2001; Yorgason 2003). In every regard from religion, to economic power, to social cohesion, to literature, folklore, and material culture, the Mormon Culture Region holds together, a cleanly knit concept that befits a distinctive place (Figure 2). In the sphere of LDS practice, a reference to "Zion" fills much the same role, capturing a unity of people, place, and period (Stegner 1964; Bradley 2005; Cohen 2006). Little wonder that the telltales of Mormon culture are favored themes in lectures on introductory cultural or human geography.
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Courting isolation and deliberate renunciation of the gentile realm, Mormons theocrats established themselves in a broadly bounded State of Deseret in 1847, fully intending to remain safely apart. Over 160 years--first with Utah achieving territorial status in 1850, then with statehood delayed until 1896 for various reasons, including Mormon allegiance to polygamy--connections to a larger world were restored. But distinctive symbols of Mormon originality remain, as Meinig suggested in 1998:
While other millennialists set a time, the Mormons appointed a place. ... Whereas most Americans tended to sit lightly upon the land, ready to sell out and move on at the slightest opportunity--as the many streams of migrants filling up all the other regions of the West well displayed--the Mormons took firm root; for them it was the end of a search. ... Thus the region they created took on a human geographic quality quite unlike anything in the surrounding areas. 11 was a homeland in a more profound sense, with a unity, homogeneity, order, and self-consciousness not to be found in any other region in the United States. (Meinig 1998, 104)
Using the beehive to represent their industry--and drawing on far earlier Masonic roots--Mormons threw neat fences around their multiroomed, but distinctive, central parlor houses (Francaviglia 1971, 1978; Carter 2000). They grew everywhere the Lombardy poplar, and church steeples reached heavenward like the trees. The wide streets of Mormon villages, as in Kanab, Utah (Figure 3), are the practical and adaptable result of a relentlessly transplanted orthogonal, village-centered street plan, based on Joseph Smith's City of Zion plat whose creation was an intellectual exercise in upstate New York (Stegner 1942). Often paralleling these well-ruled streets is an irrigation system, a symptom of the traditional, though now less than constant, unity of Mormons with agriculture. Geographers are contributors to a steady analysis of vernacular culture and land-use change in Utah (Jefferson 1916; Spencer 1945; Francaviglia 1978; R. H. Jackson 1981; Kay and Brown 1985; Peterson and Bennion 1987; Wright 1993; L. C. Bennion 2001).
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More--or less--subtle social indications of a strong Mormon presence exist, too: the missionary program, the church...
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