Musings on China as Evil Other...

It is always intellectually fascinating to see that while things change much, simultaneously, remains the same. Take anti-communism, great power struggles, and nationalism, for instance. China, for instance, may be communist, if perhaps in rhetoric only, and the paranoid conspiracy theories of demagogues may continue to scare the masses by making threats of commie conspiracies dance in their socialised heats, in reality, however, China is predominately nationalist and bureaucratic, much like any other traditional, modern and postmodern nation the world has seen up to this point. China is, in other words, nationalist. It thinks of itself as a great nation and, given its economic, political, miilitary, cultural, demographic, and geographic power, it acts much like any of the great powers of the past and the present, particularly the nationalist great powers of the recent past, who were also stimulated by ethnocentrism in its traditional and modern nationalistic forms. Now this is not to say that nationalist entities aren't dangerous and that they don't engage in what some would call, to take one example, human rights abuses. Like the great powers of the past, including the great powers of Western Europe and the great power the United States, this mixture of ethnocentrism and economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic power can be and often is toxic and deadly to "dissident" others within and "inferior" others without. It simply means that some -isms, such as communism, socialism, and liberalism, often function as emotional identity markers of an us superior identity community and as sources of amnesia for the multitude of sins, including human rights abuses committed by the nation-state to which they believe they belong and with which they identify.

The Books of My Life: The Lord's University

Once I learned what BYU was like when I arrived in Provo, Utah as a doctoral student in sociology in the early 1990s I soon realised that I, an agnostic if not atheistic non-Jewish Jew with Quakery and Anabaptisty social ethical leanings, was not BYU material. Don't get me wrong, I liked aspects of my life at BYU and in Provo. I took some interesting courses, particularly on Mormonism, in the Sociology, History (Marvin Hill), and the Church History (Donald Cannon) Departments at the Y. I made some great friends who I talked with a lot about American religious history and Mormonism. I taught Social Stratification and had some wonderful and very interesting students. I attended many of the films the Humanities College showed via their wonderful International Cinema programme, films, by the way, which were, in my opinion, unfortunately sometimes censored. And perhaps most enjoyably I worked for several years at Walt West Books near Deseret Industries in Provo owned and run by the amazing Walt West.

During my years at BYU, I got into or almost got into cold and hot water on several occasions. I showed, at the suggestion of one of my students, the R rated film Raising Arizona in my Social Stratification class in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I had members of VOICE, the BYU feminist campus club, come to my class and talk about their personal experiences of inequality and inequity in Mormon culture. I attended the VOICE men can't walk on campus alone protest and supported it. I acted as liaison with the Sociology Club and when the club wanted to bring gay Mormon parents who were sympathetic to gays to campus I worked with Larry Young and David Knowlton to make it happen. Larry was magnificent at the forum. I was turned into the chair of the Sociology Department for bringing a copy of the Tanner's book on changes in the Mormon temple endowment ritual to campus. I went up to the Tanner's Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake with John and Rob. I went down to Quaker weekend during the Easter season to protest nuclear weapons testing in Las Vegas and Mercury, Nevada with Larry, Melanie, Rob, and Denise and afterwards, along with Larry, Melanie, Rob, and Denise, helped found the Mormon Peace Gathering, a Mormon group that went down to Las Vegas and Mercury to witness against nuclear weapons testing during the Easter season the next year. I visited a Mormon fundamentalist community down from the bench between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley. I drank 3.2 beer and beer beer, which I bought at the exorbitant price of eight bucks a six pack at the state liquor store in Provo. I frequented a coffee house on the border between Provo and Orem. I let my hair grow. I wore too short shorts. I walked during the playing of the US national hymn on campus. I whinged about the paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes of the general authorities in Salt Lake and Provo and especially about their rhetoric about gays and women. I opined against the firings of Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr in the Utah County Journal (though they got my first name wrong) and the Student Review and argued that BYU needed once and for all to make a decision as to whether it wanted to be a seminary or Notre Dame. I engaged in ethnographic experiments which I probably shouldn't have. I was, in other words, a naughty boy, a sometimes very naughty boy. But then I was and am a Gentile. Needless to say, I left BYU behind somewhere around 1993 or 1994 though I didn't leave Mormon Studies behind. 

The Lord's University: Freedom and Authority at BYU (Salt Lake: Signature, 1998) by Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel is a history of the BYU I knew and the BYU and Mormon history that I lived through. Waterman and Kagel cover the history of BYU from where Gary Bergera's and Ronald Priddis's history of BYU, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake: Signature, 1985), leaves off, from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s. Waterman and Kagel explore the BYU right wing Bircher fellow traveller, paranoia ridden, conspiracy theory ridden, and apocalyptic ridden Ernest Wilkinson, who was president of the Y as it "modernised" between 1951 and 1971, built. Waterman and Kagel explore Wilkinson's battle for dress and grooming standards, Wilkinson's surveillance of "liberal" and "left wing" faculty, Wilkinson's strategy to put some student-controlled practises, such as the honour code, and publications, like BYU's "student" newspaper the Daily Universe, under greater administrative and faculty control. Waterman and Kagel also explore the periodic purges of politically, economically, and culturally incorrect BYU faculty, BYU administrative oral policies, and the attempts of the BYU administration to clarify freedom of speech at the university, a university that, on the one hand, was a little bit Bob Jones and, on the other, a little bit Notre Dame, after Wilkinson retired.

Waterman's and Kagel's excellent, well researched, and very readable history of BYU in the 1980s and 1990s argues that the BYU that emerged in the wake of World War II was the product of a re-emerging American conservatism, the impact of intellectual American conservativism with its condemnation of communism, socialism, the counterculture, feminism, and gay and lesbian activism in Mormon culture and among Mormon political elites (e.g., J. Reuben Clark, Ernest Wilkinson, Boyd Packer, Merrill Bateman), and the culture war that emerged between these conservatives, neo-conservatives, and right wingers and "modernist" "secular" liberals.

Waterman and Kagel are certainly correct when they argue that the post-World War II culture war had an immense impact on Mormons and Mormonism. However, they don't, I would argue, take this culture war back far enough. Mormon and some Mormon elite were impacted earlier by culture wars over anti-evolution, which Waterman and Kagel do mention, over modern biblical criticism, over the New Deal, something which, in the long run, merged Dixiecrat states rights rhetoric, laissez rhetoric, and Bircher anti-communist rhetoric and which took over the Republican Party in the wake of Richard Nixon's George Wallace like Southern strategy and which also impacted Mormon culture in ways similar yet different to how they impacted American White right wing Protestant culture throughout the twentieth century and which increasingly tied them to White Protestant right wing evangelicalism and fundamentalism and right wing and conservative Catholicism in the late twentieth century. Local factors like the Mormon doctrines of continuing revelation and living prophets, doctrines which make Mormonism inherently authoritarian, the Mormon Correlation programme, which brought with it greater conformity in the Mormon community, Mormon patriarchalism, and Mormon paternalism also wove and threaded their way through these various battles in the twentieth century culture wars from evolution to Bolshevism to feminism.

I know there are some, including many Mormon elites and Reformed Christian historian George Marsden, who want to make BYU the hero and victim of a culture war on religious universities in postmodern America. However, by ignoring the way Mormon authoritarianism, inquisition, and a right wing and conservative political, economic, and cultural or ideological correctness, an economic and political correctness grounded in an ideology of revelation that polemicises for modern liberal laissez-faire capitalism and right wing and conservative politics and intolerantly makes these central for a Christianity that is, historically speaking, pre-modern, they seem to miss what BYU is really, empirically, like. What BYU is really, empirically, like, is that it is a place where academic freedom is limited and undermined by an authoritarian ideology of revelatory authority and power. For this reason alone one can readily raise questions about the continuing re-authorisation of the accreditation of BYU by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges and about whether BYU's continuing and, ironically, worldy attempt to bring a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to campus, should succeed. There are certainly students at the Y who are worthy of membership in Phi Betta Kappa. I am not sure the university is worthy of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, however.
 

Books of My Life: Buffy Goes Dark

 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I became a fan of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its fifth and final year on the WB. I was unable to follow Buffy to UPN in its sixth and seventh seasons, however, the seasons that the writers of Buffy have described as centred and focused on "oh grow up", in the case of season six, and "back to the beginning", in the case of season seven. I wasn't, as a result, able to see Buffy resurrected in season six, all the Scoobies, including Buffy, Willow, Xander, Anya, and Spike, struggle in a world which Buffy thought might be hell, or the extended Scooby gang struggle against and finally triumph against the First Evil, until I got the DVD's and was able to watch seasons six and seven in reruns. Like many others I noticed that tone wise there was something different about season six to previous seasons, I eventually realised, however, that season six was all about the loss of innocence and the traumas that accompany growing up, something that was not absent in earlier seasons, in, for example, the first season episode "Nightmares", several intense episodes during season two including "Surprise"/"Innocence", "Passion", "I Only Have Eyes for You", and "Becoming", and in the episode "The Body", episodes all that reach the levels of emotional intensity and adult traumas of any Ingmar Bergman film, The emotional traumas associated with growing up, however, seemed to be much more prominent and central in season six.

Buffy Goes Dark, edited by Lynne Edwards, Elizabeth Rambo, and James South (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), by and large, explores various aspects of seasons six and seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Essays in the collection explore what two of Buffy's writers, Marti Noxon (David Perry) and Jane Espenson (David Kociemba) brought to Buffy, in Noxon's case, according to Perry, echoing Buffy creator, writer, and director Joss Whedon, some sado-masochism. Other essays explore Buffy characters Willow and Tara (Alissa Wilts and Brandy Ryan) and Andrew (Ira and Anne Shull and South). Still others explore a variety of aspects and the narrative threads of season six and seven (Michael Adams, Rhonda Wilcox, Gregory Erickson and Jennifer Lemberg, Elizabeth Rambo, Paul Hawkins, Agnes Curry and Josef Velazquez) engaging the question of whether season six, in particular, is different from earlier seasons of the show.

As with any anthology with a variety of essays grounded in a variety of perspectives there were some essays in Buffy Goes Dark that I found more compelling than others. I found the narrative focused essays by Wilcox, Erickson and Lemberg, and Rambo fascinating explorations of the symbology, existentialism, and structure of season. On the other hand, I found the essays by Wilts and Curry and Velazquez characterised by one of the three problematic traps of crystal ball textualism, specifically, the tendency of some to judge a text by the critics own political and ideological predilections, and hence more normative than descriptive analyses. Textual analysis as political and ideological social ethical activism! Wilts essay, it seems to me, misread the Willow and Tara relationship in ways noted in the essay by Ryan. Wilts wanted the Willow and Tara relationship to conform to what she wanted it to be and was less interested in what it, textually speaking, actually was. Curry's and Velazquez's contention that Buffy is anti-liberal, that it is manichean, proto-fascist if not fascist, and militarist, misses several textual facts. Curry and Velazquez miss that in the Buffy text evil is, while not entirely manichean, real rather than a social and cultural construct, that fighting this evil, according to the text, requires a leader (Buffy has charismatic and traditional authority as Max Weber defines them) and that the mission and strategy of the Scoobies, according to the text, at least until season seven, is reactive or defensive and essential though not triumphal. Like Wilts, Curry and Velazquez read their ideology and politics, in Curry's and Velazquez's case a self-proclaimed liberalism, into the Buffy text. I suppose in this context we should take a moment to recall the existence of many interventionist liberals in the pre-World War II years and during the Cold War era in the US.

I quite enjoyed reading the essays in Buffy Goes Dark. It was nice to see an anthology largely focused on the controversial season six and season seven. I learned a lot from several of them. Recommended to anyone interested in film, television, and literary criticism, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Books of My Life: Undead TV

 

Like many others I was late to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV programme party. This was partly because I have long been more of a fan and had more of an interest in British television. I have for some time found some British TV better written and more intellectually stimulating and challenging than most American television I have seen over my sixty plus years. I also, and I am ashamed to admit this, missed the Buffy partly because I initially judged the Buffy book by the Buffy cover and assumed the show was yet another example of American television tween fluff. I somewhat unintentionally intentionally missed the Buffy party, in other words.

Boy was I wrong about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I finally caught up with the show in its fifth season. I initially happened upon Buffy one night during a couple of passes through all the over the air channels my small SONY television set could pick up. I stopped, for some reason, on a station that was showing an episode of Buffy that I later learned was the fifth season episode called "The Replacement". I found the split personality and difficulty in growing up metaphors of that episode intelligent and ultimately quite moving on both an intellectual and emotional level, something I thought that only some British TV shows could do. From that moment on I was hooked on BtVS and I began I looking backwards and forwards in order to try to catch up with every episode of Buffy that I could and to catch up with it in broadcast order since I quickly recognised the novelistic nature of the show. Today, Buffy remains, with Inspector Morse and Lewis and others, one of the finest things I have ever seen on television, seen on the cinema screen, or read in books.

Though I do not consider myself a specialist in film studies, television studies, or literary studies, I have kept abreast of currents in Buffy Studies, a subdiscipline of textual studies that has been massively influenced by currents in film and literary studies from the 1950s to today. I even published a paper critiquing some of the theoretical approaches used to study Buffy and my discontents with them. Given my strong interest in social theory and my occasional interest in film studies, television studies, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have tried, if fitfully, to keep up with what is happening in the scholarly Buffy Studies and Whedon Studies world. So, it was only a matter of time that I got around to reading Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), a collection of essays on Buffy and Angel, the Buffy spinoff, edited by Elana Levine and Lisa Parks.

Essays in Undead TV explore several aspects of the series. Mary Celeste Kearney's paper explores the economic demographics of the WB, the netlet Buffy initially was broadcast on, and the influence this marketing strategy had on the form and on the substance Buffy took. Susan Murray's essay explores the commodification of Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Chosen One and saviour of the world, a lot, and promoter of Maybelline cosmetics. Annette Hill's and Ian Calcutt's paper explores the convoluted and controversial scheduling of Buffy and Angel as children's and young adult shows on the BBC and Channel 4 and how such scheduling required cuts to and censorship of both shows since they weren't really children's or young teen shows. Hastie and Calcutt argue that this miscategorisation of Buffy and Angel, two globally sold television shows, gave rise to specific and local fan concerns. Amelie Hastie's essay engages Buffy as a knowledge making machine and explores how the scholarly and fan criticism that has grown up around it is a mirror that reflects the rich interpretive nature of the show. She also ponders how a feminist approach might have a transgressive power that allows viewers to break out of their dominant hermeneutic square shells they are socialised into. Cynthia Fuchs's paper explores otherness in Buffy and Dark Angel, another female centred show that ran on the WB. Allison McCracken's essay explores the complex transgressive and queer nature of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jason Middleton's paper explores the eroticisation of Buffy, the female hero, in male oriented fan magazines like Femme Fatales sold in comic book shops. Elana Levine's essay explores second wave feminist and third wave feminist readings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer arguing that there are third wave feminist aspects to the show.

Essays and books characterised by approaches that are text centred and anemic when it comes to primary production research, generally speaking, fall into several interpretive traps. First, such criticism is often as much if not more normative or ideologically grounded than descriptive, the attempt by a critic to understand the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts in which a given text is produced. Much contemporary humanities criticism, in other words, is grounded in notions of what the critic thinks the text (and by extension the world) should look like rather than in what the text actually looks like. In this normative or ideological style or form of criticism ideologically grounded ethical and moral concerns tend to overdetermine the empirical description of a text raising questions about the validity of such interpretations, interpretations that should perhaps be ultimately seen as varieties of reader response criticism. Second, such criticism tends to assume that all one needs to do in order to analyse a film, television, or literary text is to analyse the final text as it stands, an approach that one of my former academic colleagues calls crystal ball textualism and another refers to as an approach with a massive empirical donut hole at its heart since it generally doesn't engage in an exploration of the production aspects of the final text. Such an approach assumes that an exploration of the parts of a text is not necessary for an understanding of the whole of the final text, a deductive rather than inductive approach. Third, much contemporary film, television, and literary criticism assumes the existence of ideal readers who read texts in the same way academic and scholarly readers read texts or they assume that readers need the help of experts in order to unlock the secrets of the real nature of a text and can then engage in changing the textual world and the world beyond the text, textual analysis as social ethical activism. Such an approach, however, at least on the level of hermeneutics, is problematic given the differences in social and cultural capital of readers and given what we know about how readers actually read texts. We know, for example, thanks to qualitative empirical research that readers read texts in a variety of ways, including active and focused ways and more inactive, passive, and unfocused ways, and that many readers of texts multitask while watching or reading them. 

What I liked about many of the essays in Undead TV is that they didn't fall into the crystal ball textualist traps as much as essays in other anthologies and books I have read in Buffy Studies over the years. I found many of the essays in Undead TV to be some of the most interesting work on Buffy Studies and Whedon Studies I have read in some time. McCracken's and Levine's essays were, for example, fascinating and somewhat compelling text centred explorations of the queerness and feminist aspects of the Buffy text while Kearney's essay does, and thankfully so, engage in much needed production research, production research that is essential if we are to ultimately understand how cultural texts like Buffy are produced. A keeper. Recommended.

The Books of My Life: Brigham Young University

When I transferred from Ball State University to Indiana University in Bloomington in the late 1970s, I decided to change my major from Classical Civilisations to Religious Studies with a specialisation in Biblical Studies. By 1980, however, I began to develop an interest in the history of American Christianity and particularly the history of Protestantism along with an interest in social theory and particularly semiology and hermeneutics, theoretical interests themselves stimulated by my studies in Biblical Studies. 

At some point in the 1980s, I don't remember precisely when, I also developed an interest in Mormonism. By the early 1990s my interest in Mormonism was such that I decided that I wanted to learn more about Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I thus decided to apply to the doctoral programme in sociology at Brigham Young University, the university run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, in Provo, Utah. Where better, I thought, to study and research Mormonism than in a Mormon run research university in the heart of the Mormon culture region? So in the early 1990s I matriculated into the doctoral programme in sociology with an emphasis in the sociology of Mormonism at BYU.

One of the things that surprised me when I applied to BYU was that I had to meet with a Mormon Bishop (roughly equivalent to a vicar in the Anglican Church) and covenant to follow the BYU honour code with its mandated grooming, clothing, and behavioural standards for all Y students, undergraduate or graduate, faculty, and administrators. At the time, I simply couldn't imagine that a large research university with doctoral programmes could or would take such standards seriously. I, a Gentile in Zion, certainly didn't take parts of the honour code seriously, an honour code I thought a throwback to the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century paternalistic college and university. Instead I assumed that in practise BYU would be much like the University of Notre Dame, a place where I briefly undertook graduate work in American Studies and did research on the history of American conservative Protestantism, and which had no grooming and dress standards for its students, faculty, and staff. 

In retrospect, I wish I had read Gary Bergera's and Ronald Priddis's well documented Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake: Signature, 1985) before I thought about going to school at BYU and before I matriculated at the Y. For if I had read the Bergera and Priddis book I would have known that  BYU did take its honour code seriously, all of it, that BYU culture like Mormon culture was authoritarian and paternalistic, that the Y and Mormon culture had a significant right wing our way or the highway moral theocratic culture that included, at one time, an inquisitorial spy ring established by the president of BYU to, using students, ferret out and monitor "liberal" and "left wing" faculty (that good old time right wing political and ideological correctness), that films were routinely censored at the Y (that good old time right wing cancel culture), and that things that are now accepted as long standing BYU distinctives or exceptions, such as the dress and grooming components of the BYU honour code, were actually reactions to the post-WWII fashion industry, the 1950s youth culture, and the counterculture of the 1960s.

Bergera and Priddis argue that BYU and its mostly secondary school predecessor, the Brigham Young Academy have, since its founding, been strongly impacted by tensions between Mormon distinctives or what Mormon sociologist Armand Mauss calls the angel, and the beehive, Mormon assimilation to dominant Victorian American society and culture. Bergera and Priddis explore in detail tensions between the angel and the beehive at BYU and between what Mormon historian Richard Poll called Iron Rod or fundamentalist and literalist Mormons and Liahona Mormons, Mormons that are roughly akin to more moderate and liberal Roman Catholics and Protestants. In nine well documented chapters Bergera and Priddis explore in historical and thematic terms tensions, religious versus secular tensions, surrounding the relationships between faculty and bureaucrats at BYU and the general authorities of the Church, who claim at least some degree of prophetic authority, the honour code, evolution and higher Biblical criticism, politics, student government and student clubs, athletics, the humanities, the social sciences, paintings and sculptures, and films.

The BYU I matriculated at, took classes at, did research at, and taught at in the 1990s, was like the BYU Bergera and Priddis describe. It was rent through with tensions between the "secular" academic life and a revelation grounded Mormon religious culture. After I entered BYU I found a university that was, as was Mormon culture, deeply authoritarian and paternalistic. I found a campus and a community that was characterised by strong right wing elements, something that in retrospect foreshadows the mainstreaming of Bircherism and Dixieism in the Republican Party of the early twenty-first century. I found a university that would not let those who violated honour code grooming and dress standards take tests or check out books from the library. I found a university that fired faculty for their explorations into some aspects of Mormon history and culture and their feminism. I found a university where I could be turned in to the chair of the Sociology Department for bringing a copy of the Tanner's book on the changes in the Mormon temple rituals over time (the Tanner's are well-known and notorious ex-Mormon turned evangelicals who polemicise against the Church). I found a university that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be Bob Jones University, a university where an authoritarian faith trumps (pun intended) all, or the University of Notre Dame, a university that had come to grips with modern and postmodern scholarship in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts though Notre Dame too had its own right wing intellectual culture, in Notre Dame's case a law school that ferreted out "homosexuals" in the Theology Faculty. I ultimately found a university that, like Notre Dame, which seemed to me an isolated secular monastic community with football and a limited and much more parochial intellectual culture compared to Indiana University, simply wasn't for me.

At the same time that I found an authoritarian, puritanical, paternalistic, and petty Y, I also found a Y with quality faculty in several academic departments, a Y with a vibrant intellectual culture, particularly when it came to the history of Christianity and Mormonism, a Y with several ethically and morally heroic students (e.g. the amazing Cari Petersen), and a Y with some of the best students I ever taught Social Stratification to, students who, in some cases, had the ability to do research in non-English archives because of the fact that they had been on missions overseas. Several of the students in my class would end up in top graduate programmes at Yale, the University of Texas, Indiana University, and the University of Washington. I found, in other words, a Y that was, as Bergera and Priddis described it, schizophrenic.

I found Brigham Young University: A House of Faith an excellent history of Brigham Young University and the tensions that have been at its heart since it was founded. Bergera's and Priddis's book should be on reading list of anyone interested in higher education in the United States, anyone interested in tensions between religion and "secularism" in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anyone interested in the tensions between religion and education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anyone interested in the tensions between religious authority and "secular" authority, and anyone interested in Mormonism. I must, however, note a few unfortunate mistakes I found in the text. On page 199 Bergera and Priddis have Robert Francis Kennedy representing Massachusetts rather than New York in the US senate. On page 287 Bergera and Priddis refer to the University of Indiana rather than Indiana University. On page 343 and 344 Bergera and Priddis place the University of Oxford in Cambridge rather than in Oxford. On page 358 Bergera and Priddis claim that the Graduate Theological Union is part of the University of California Berkeley; it isn't though the students at the eight schools that now constitute the Union can take classes at UC Berkeley.