The Books of My Life: Four Classic Mormon Village Studies

 

In the mid-1940s and 1950s, as Howard Bahr notes in the introduction to his edited collection Four Classic Mormon Village Studies (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014), two ethnographic projects that involved fieldwork in Mormon villages in full or in part, were conducted amidst what almost amounted to an academic mania for ethnography in the wake of published fieldwork studies by ethnographic pioneers like Franz Boas and his students, Bronislaw Malinowski, the sociologists of the Chicago School, and Robert and Helen Lynd. The first, the Harvard Five Cultures Project, focused on five cultures in and around the Mormon village of Ramah New Mexico—Zuni, Navajo, Spanish, Texan, and Mormon. The second, the University of Chicago sponsored fieldwork for its graduate students and dissertation writers, focused on ethnography in Mormon villages in Arizona and southern Utah.

Bahr’s edited collection brings together four ethnographies, one from the Harvard project and three from the Chicago project, for the first time and, in one case for the first time in English. The first, chronologically speaking, is that of consent Saint and cultural anthropologist Wilfrid Bailey, a student at the University of Chicago at the time, who undertook ethnographic fieldwork in Pomerene, Arizona in 1946-1947. The second is that of Thomas O’Dea, a Catholic doctoral student in sociology at Harvard who was initially part of the Harvard Five Cultures Project, who did his ethnographic work in Ramah, New Mexico in 1950 and 1951. The third is that of University of Chicago trained political scientist, Edward Banfield, who taught at the University of Chicago at the time, who led an ethnographic expedition to Gunlock, Utah in 1951. The last is that of the French sociologist Henri Mendras, who studied at the Sorbonne and at the University of Chicago with Banfield, and who worked under the direction of Banfield in Virgin, Utah in 1951.


While all four ethnographies that came out of the Harvard and University of Chicago projects do vary somewhat, they are all grounded, as was American cultural anthropology in general at the time, in an ideology of cultural holism with its emphasis on recording the details of everyday life via in-depth ethnographic fieldwork or “thick description”, and in the notion of the community as a microcosm of broader culture and society. Each of these three ethnographies are characterised by an interest in ecology or geography (for example, the lay of the land, the proximity of peripheral villages to semi-peripheral villages or towns and to city centres and the ease of travel between them, the importance of water in arid environments), economics (for example, farming part-time and full-time, ranching, sewing, canning, the tourist trade, average acreage per farmer and rancher, working for wages, inheritance patterns), politics (the LDS ward as the quasi-official village government, government agricultural agents, status), culture (for example, religion, particularly the LDS religion, taboos, material culture, the cult of domesticity, official versus popular religion and religiosity, local boosterism, remaking nature, cowboy individualism), demography (for example, population, kinship, marriage patterns, age), society (for example, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, social psychology, social interaction, cliques such as “active” Saints versus inactive “Jack Mormons”, haves and have nots, the links between certain families and power), and change (for example, the impact of the automobile, secularisation, increased individualism), particularly when the ethnological gaze was fixed on modernisation. Finally, each ethnography points up the differences between the Mormon villages, in terms of their religious and hence social and cultural values and practises, and those of the broader society and culture making them all examples of cultural and Mormon exceptionalism.

Where the ethnographies do differ somewhat is in terms of the background of the observer, in the observer’s theoretical emphasis, and in the tone of the observer’s ethnography itself. Bailey’s study, one that is extended from the 1940s and Bailey’s dissertation, when Bailey did his initial fieldwork, into the 1990s in Bahr’s collection, is that of an insider social scientist. Bailey emphasises several economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors in his study of Pomerene. He emphasises the centrality of Mormon culture and ideology including the strived for but never fully achieved ideal of separatist or sectarian individualist “spiritual communism” among Pomerene’s Mormons. He points up the Mormon cultural, economic, political, and demographic dominance of relatively isolated Pomerene. He emphasises the hamlet’s domination by two Mormon kinship groups, one, the founding settlers who came from the nearby Mormon community of St. David and who were least active in the Church and tended to become less “orthodox” Mormons over time (the “Williams” family), and the other, refugees from the Mormon polygamous colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora who fled civil wars in Mexico, who were the most active in the Church, who tended to be more “orthodox” as a result, and who came to dominate the village politically over time (the “Marsh” family), something that sometimes led to tensions between the two kin groups. He emphasises the cooperative irrigation farming that dominates in Pomerene, the ranching agricultural economy of the village, and the hamlet’s sometimes irrational, as he puts it, use of the water that is essential to the survival of the mostly subsistence economy of the village. He notes that only slightly more than half of Pomerene’s farmers are full-time farmers and that many have part- or full-time jobs wage paying jobs in nearby Benson. Finally, he points up the differences between Pomerene and, in particular, the nearby Gentile dominated town of Benson and how Mormons in the village, in some cases adapted to and accommodated the increasingly changing and more diverse social and cultural environment they faced (the beehive response of the less “orthodox” Mormon and the “Jack Mormon”), while, in other cases, they resisted accommodation to the ever more influential broader non-Mormon social and cultural environment (the angel response of the more “orthodox” Mormon). Bailey ends his study of Pomerene by noting how dramatic the change was in the village after 1945 when the hamlet grew, its subsistence farming economy declined, the power and authority networks in the village changed as cleavages between Marsh’s and Williams’s were replaced by cleavages between Mormons and non-Mormons, technological changes increased, and Pomerene’s Mormons were increasingly integrated into broader American society and, if more limitedly, American culture. By 1990 Pomerene was, demographically speaking, no longer a Mormon hamlet. It had become a non-Mormon village with less Mormons than Benson, the city that was once notorious in Pomerene Mormon eyes for its “immoral” ways. This pattern was, as Bailey points up, a microcosm of what was going on in broader Mormon society and, if again more limitedly, in Mormon culture, and more broadly across the United States.

Mendras’s study of Virgin, which Bahr edited from Mendras’s comparative study of Aveyron in France and Virgin, is that of a French critical outsider who, amidst his inventory of arid geographical realities, the subsistence and modernising economic life of the hamlet, the LDS dominated political life of the village, a social life where Church and village are much integrated and Mormonism dominated the cultural life of Virgin, and the similarities and differences, differences rooted in variations in adaptation to modernity and culture, between Mormon village life and French peasant life in Aveyron, notes the economic irrationalities—Mendras was writing during the New Deal which was characterised by government attempts to rationalise the American rural economy and make it more efficient— and repetitiousness of rural Mormon village life with its seemingly endless daily rounds, rituals, and routines.

Banfield’s study of Gunlock is an outsider “clinical sociology” written during the New Deal era by a political scientist who wants to know why, something that gives Banfield’s ethnography just as it does Mendras’s, a bit of a normative flavour, farming productivity is lower in the more peripheral, more isolated, and rural Gunlock than in nearby less isolated and more modern if still somewhat peripheral St. George, and why cooperation is so limited in tiny Gunlock. Banfield finds the answer in Gunlock’s culture, values, or morals. Gunlock’s values, Banfield argues, are those associated with a farming and livestock subsistence economy while those of St. George are more associated with a modern economy of bigger and more productive farms thanks to the fact that St. George farmers are more inclined, thanks to their more modern value of acquisitiveness and their networks of technical-efficient communication networks, toward modern technologies and hence less resistant to change. For Banfield, then, Gunlock lies somewhere between a modernising cowboy subsistence economy and a modernising “rational” economy, leaning more in the direction of the former in some ways and more in the direction of the latter in others. As a result, argues Banfield, Gunlock’s values are individualist in such a way that they inhibit cooperative community planning, functional in that LDS Church ties bind Gunlock into a kind of extended family, and dysfunctional since Gunlock’s semi-subsistence economy results in low economic productivity (at least from the vantage point of the more modern and the modern), dysfunctional since Gunlock’s residents resist a cooperation that would better serve the village economically, politically, and culturally, and dysfunctional since Gunlock’s residents are resistant to change.

O’Dea’s ethnography, which Bahr edited largely from O’Dea’s Harvard doctoral dissertation, touches on the ecology, economics, and details of everyday rural life in Ramah, which the Harvard project gave the fictitious name Rimrock to, as was ethnographic practise, but his focus, particularly in its final pages, is on modernity or secularism, which was a hot topic within the discipline of sociology and within the subdiscipline of the sociology of religion at the time. O’Dea argues in his conclusion (and, more generally, in his later 1957 book The Mormons) that social strains or contradictions set in motion by secularism, were causing strains or tensions within Mormon Ramah and bringing changes to Mormon Ramah in the 1950s.

Howard Bahr’s edited collection of Mormon village studies does students of Mormonism, students of anthropological ethnography, students of rural sociology, and students of the history of community studies in the US, a great service. It reacquaints contemporary students of Mormonism, students of anthropological ethnography and rural sociology, and of American community studies, with four important, historically significant, and in retrospect quite impressive Mormon village studies from the 1940s and 1950s. Not everyone will agree with the holistic approach of each but it is hard not to appreciate the fact that all of them emphasise both stasis and change, do not ignore the broader social and cultural environment of each village, and take a non-reductive economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic approach to Mormon villages and village life. Bahr’s edited collection is a must for anyone interested in Mormon Studies, the ethnography of villages or communities in the United States, and the history of ethnography in the United States.

Note: Portions of this review appear in the revised and expanded edition of my book Mormon Studies: A Critical History, the original version of which was published by McFarland in 2022.