A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Southernbelle Reacts Reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The theory of human devolution, the notion that humans are deeply flawed, that humans have devolved rather than evolved or that devolution and evolution occur simultaneously in the human community has been around for a long time. One can, of course, trace aspects of it back to the Christian notion that Adam and Eve fell into original sin when Eve, in the second mythic tale of creation in the Tanakh, offered the willing Adam a bite from the proverbial apple which made both of them realise they were naked (note that this has, in actuality, no relation to sex though later puritanical Christians did tie original sin to sex at least before marriage). Apparently, god preferred to keep his human creations innocent and naive kind of like the gatekeepers of 1950s and 1960s American television who made the presence of toilets and talk of pregnancy, at least in English, verboten (apparently they did not understand Spanish as in "Lucy in Enceinte"). Christian Calvinism, of course, really picked up and ran with the notion of original sin. For hardcore Calvinism humans were and are, to put it nicely, fallible.

In the nineteenth century, sources tell us, an era when science was deeply wedded to a unilinear and progressive notion of evolution, science got into the devolution game as well. In 1857, for example, the French physician Benedict Morel argued that drug and alcohol use could lead to social degeneration or devolution in the offspring of those taking drugs and alcohol. In 1880 English zoologist Ray Lankester argued in his book Degeneration that degeneration or devolution was one of three paths Darwinian evolution might take. In 1909 the Baden born American ichthyologist Carl Eigenmann, who taught at my alma mater Indiana University and for whom a hall of accommodation for graduate students is named, argued that devolution occurred amongst those species who took to living in caves.

Devolution was also, according to sources, applied to human beings during these years by some. Thuringian physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon opined that races of humanity could devolve from higher forms into primitive forms. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were White and that all other races of man,who came from them, other than the Caucasian race, of course, had devolved thanks to environmental factors such as too much or too little sun and poor and poorer diets. Leclerc like Blumenbach, believed in the devolution of species from higher forms due to environment, climate, and diet, while also arguing that such devolution could potentially be reversed. 

The notion of human devolution was also something that interested many writers and musicians from the late eighteenth century on. Jonathan Swift, for example, played with the notion of human devolution in his satirical book Gulliver’s Travels of 1726. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine of 1895 portrayed a future world in which the human race had devolved into two forms: the Morlocks and Eloi. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story “The Rats in the Wall” starred a group of devoluted humans. Cyril Kornbluth's 1951 satirical short story (satire, of course, is also generally deadly serious as well as being darkly humorous) “The Marching Morons” portrayed a future where dysgenic or anti-social and maladaptive evolutionary pressures led to the rise of massive numbers of morons who a small group of geniuses had to assure did no damage to both others or to themselves. The satirical and parodic Kent, Ohio rock band Devo, who formed in 1973 and who rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, made devolution a part of their very name, a name they took in shortened form from a Christian pamphlet on which a devil with the word D-EVOLUTION was portrayed (see their song "Jocko Home", in particular, a song title that comes from the same pamphlet). What was originally a joke, says a source, became much more serious after the murder of four students at Kent State University, which some members of Devo attendted) by the Ohio National Guard and the subsequent realisation by members of the band that responses to that murder—specifically that this murder was not murder—could be explained by a a devoluted human herd clone mentality that functioned automatically in cognitive terms thanks to the disciplining or socialised enforcement (political and ideological correctness).

I mention all of this if briefly and selectively because it seems to me that anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the wasteland that is social media like YouTube must conclude that not only is devolution a general human condition (social media seemingly has replaced American television as the vast wasteland, as the even vaster wasteland) but that with each new group of reactors to, for example, the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer human devolution seems to be increasing compared to earlier crops of reactors, reactors (each social media generation a degeneration?) like SoFie REacts, The Lexie Crowd, and Domi.e all of whom were all slightly above average with SoFie being the most above average. (The same thing, by the way, holds true for reactors to Firefly, Sherlock, and Doctor Who).

Perhaps the poster child for this further devolution of what is already devolved is Southernbelle Racts. I had seen and heard Southernbelle Reacts reactions before she began to react to Buffy recently. I had perused her reactions to a later Joss Whedon created television show Firefly. In Southernbelle Reacts reactions to Firefly I noticed what seems to be her modus operandi: she gabs and gabs over each episode of Firefly she reacts to missing important plot, informational, and character points (e.g., how one becomes a vampire) in the process. In her reactions to Buffy Southernbelle Reacts has compounded this attention deficit disorder (talking rapidly over television shows that require attention because they are unfolding texts (unattending, of course, is a common malady among YouTube reactors though often not to the degree it is with SoBelle) who even misses the rather obvious clues laid down about Angel from episode one to seven, season one...wow) with the questionable assumption that Buffy is a show for teens and tweens, an assumption grounded in nothing more than, presumably, the name of the show and/or the television channel it was on (initially the WB, later UPN). It is certainly not grounded in research either on what the author of the series said. (For Whedon, by the way, the title of the show was both parodic and satirical and explanatory. Nor was it based on data research, research shows that in the middle of the shows run the average age of the Buffy watcher was 27 or wandering why so many academics had written about Buffy (who are hardly tweens or teens. (Research, by the way is not a strong point for most of the reactors to Buffy though some do have more cultural capital to draw on than others). One would think that after watching Firefly Southernbelle Reacts would make the connection that Whedon shows are not only unfolding texts but are deadly serious amidst all the fun and tonal play and that they share several common themes (e.g., existentialism, chosen families). One wonders if she even realises that Whedon was deeply involved in both shows.

Southernbelle Reacts may be amongst the worst, in attention deficit terms and cultural capital terms, of the new crop of Buffy reactors. She even once said in one of her Buffy reactions in season two that these reactions are all about me, me, me (I can hear Cordelia saying the same thing as I type). If we delineate three mediocre ideal types—mediocre highbrow, mediocre middlebrow, and mediocre lowbrow or mediocre plus, mediocre in between, and mediocre negative (SoFie Reacts is above mediocre but below excellent for comparative purposes)—one can easily argue that Watch This! With Kevin and Joe are mediocre highbrow or plus though their reactions to Buffy aren't as incisive as their reactions to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a thriller that is in their wheelhouse since they appear to be fans of the James Bond films. North by Northwest, of course, is a Bond film before Bond films and Kevin and Joe view it exclusively in those terms and actually do a good job of talking about each scene of the movie. Chance's House of Horror, Shadowcat (a Canadian), and Nythical Reacts are decent in a mediocre middlebrow or mediocre in between sort of way. RolyPolyOllie Reactions, JayPerView, and JerBear Reacts are mediocre lowbrow or negative. Anna Alexander and 2 Girls 1 Episode, both of whom are below the gentleman's C average, and rival Southernbelle Reacts in attention deficit. Like her they also try desperately, too desperately, to be witty but are clearly unable to do so (perhaps proving in the process that the English are often right about Americans and wit) and lack the cultural capital in which to analyse the show in intellectual and scholarly terms. Tyler Alexander, who does have a degree if cultural capital thanks to his days studying creative writing at the University of Hull, is in a politically and ideologically correct world all his own. He makes even me, who makes use of critical theory regularly, cringe at his use of crystal ball textualist representational theories of writing and filmmaking.

I can hear the Beatles's song "You Never Give Me Your Money" as I type. How apropos when thinking about social media in this everybody wants to be a star postmodernist age.

The Books of My Life: Jesus and John Wayne

 

I, of course, have long known that Christianity, like other monotheistic “religions” or bureaucratised meaning systems such as theocratic Judaism and its predecessors and theocratic Islam, had and has a dark and intolerant side. I know about the Crusades, the execution of heretics, and the persecution of Anabaptists and Quakers, to choose three of the many instances of theocratic Christian paternalistic holier than thou intolerance. 

I also know Christian theocratic intolerance because I have experienced it in my life. One day, for instance, when I was walking through the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington I ran into one of the seemingly innumerable groups soliciting for ideological purposes in the Union. In this case the group soliciting for attention was, if memory serves, the theocratically oriented Catholic group, Opus Dei. I struck up a conversation—or perhaps better they forced a conversation on me—with them after they hooked me in. It was impossible for innocent me to avoid talking to them thanks to their tactics. The subject of abortion came up at one point. I told them that I was for a woman’s right to choose. As I stood there they lectured me in their tried and true paternalistic way on the evils and dangers of my pro-abortion ways as if I was a dangerous child because I was pro-choice. At one point during our “discussion" one of the female members of this group got as close to me as she possibly could. As our conversation continued she continued to yell at me and move closer and closer to me. In response I instinctively put my hands in self defence and pushed her back very lightly when she was literally almost upon me. 

Despite rare occasions like this in the 1970s, occasions during which I experienced the dangers of theocratic Christianity, I really didn’t grasp how dangerous theocratic Christianity could be and was until the 1990s when I moved to Utah and later to South Dakota. I had moved to Utah to study and research Mormonism. There were several things that struck “Gentile” me after I arrived in the Mormon Zion, things that clued me into the prominent presence of theocratic and right wing populist intolerance in the United States. There was, for example, the popularity of the book None Dare Call it Treason by the “born again” fundamentalist Christian, John Bircher, and Republican John Stormer, a book I repeatedly ran across in Provo’s used book shops. This book, which one of the city’s used bookshop owners told me was a popular seller, argued that America was being betrayed by pro-communist elites whose mission was to take over America by growing an activist American state. Sound famiiar? I soon discovered to my horror that a significant number of Mormons, including several of the Mormon elite, had ties to the John Birch Society including its president and prophet from 1985 to 1994, Ezra Taft Benson and his son Reid, who taught religion at BYU.

My next lesson in right wing theocratic Christian intolerance involved one James “Bo’ Gritz. Gritz was popular in certain circles in Utah and in the Mormon culture region (Utah, southern Idaho, parts of Arizona and even Southern California). Gritz, a retired US military special services officer who converted to Mormonism, had ties to the anti-US government Christian Patriot movement and right wing militias, militias that shared the anti-big government and anti-communist ideology of the John Birch Society. I later learned that Gritz had tried to mediate the dispute between Randy Weaver, a Christian separatist and survivalist who had ties to the White identity group Aryan Nation in Idaho. In 1992 Gritz ran for president (shades of Joseph Smith) of the United States on a platform of opposition to the New World Order, a populist rightwing catchphrase for the supposed one world government that some believed elite others were trying to secretly foist on unknowing and unaware Americans; opposition to US foreign aid, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the federal income tax, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the Federal Reserve Bank, still another populist rightwing favourite; and non-opposition to the reestablishment of a "Christian America”, yet another populist rightwing favourite. Gritz received 2.13% of the vote in Idaho, a state with a significant population of Mormons. In that election year Gritz garnered 10% of the vote in Duchesne County, Idaho and Oneida County, Idaho and 23% of the vote in Franklin County, Idaho where he almost pushed the Democratic Party nominee Bill Clinton into fourth place. He did even better in heavily Mormon Utah (Mormons constituted over 70% of the population of the state when I lived there in the early 1990s) where he received 3.84% of the vote or almost 30,000 votes. He received 7500 votes in Utah County, the intellectual capital of the Mormon version of the Bible Belt, home to Brigham Young University and seat of a goodly number of Mormon apologists and polemicists. I heard rumours, in fact, that Gritz actually did better than Clinton in several BYU wards where he finished second behind the Republican nominee and eventual president George Herbert Walker Bush.

After I left Utah with a friend in order to travel and hike our around the US and Canadian Wests I ended up living in Rapid City, South Dakota for three months while my touring and hiking companion worked at the Indian Health Service hospital in Rapid. With time on my hands I decided to do ethnography at a local Mennonite Church, a Mennonite Brethren church, a fact to remember since there is a great diversity theologically and ideologically among American and Canadian Mennonites. The Mennonite Brethren are Mennonites who immigrated to the US and Canadian Wests from Russia and who have since been heavily influenced by pietism and later evangelicalism and fundamentalism, both of which tend to make Mennonite Brethren politically conservative and less enamoured of historic Mennonite pacifism or non-resistance. The pastor of the church, apparently feeling that I needed to know what a real man was, urged me to attend the Promise Keepers meeting at the church. The Promise Keepers were then and are now an evangelical men’s group founded by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney—something that points up the links between football, evangelical Christianity, and the Christian manhood movement (we haven’t gotten to the links with the US military yet and won’t)—dedicated to “traditional values” and to melding masculine strength with the what have traditionally been the female values of nurturance, churchgoing, and marital fidelity.

What I saw of the radical populist religious right in Utah and beyond frankly ended up scaring the bejesus out of me. In fact, the fear I felt as I moved amongst the radical populist right and the radical Christian populist right in the Intermountain West (see also Alberta) was akin to the fear I felt as a Jew when I lived in blood and soil nationalist Russia where Jews could not really be blood and soil Russians save by dispensation, usually fame, and where I heard on several occasions statements that were clearly anti-Semitic. By the way, the Russia I lived in was not only a place of anti-Jewish prejudices, it was home to anti-Gypsy sentiments. One day while I was at a market buying food to eat near the Universitet metro station I witnessed an attack on Gypsies by the militsia, the police. 

My experience of Russian blood and soil nationalism made me sensitive to the similarities and differences between blood and soil nationalism like that of Russia and other Eastern European and Western European nations and American White Christian nationalism. Like blood and soil Russians (and their kin in other parts of Europe and across the known universe) the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right in Utah, South Dakota, and beyond delineated and delineate between the elect or chosen, those with the right mentality, themselves, of course, and those who were not one of them, whoever the them might be—heretics, communists, socialists, New Dealers, liberals, you fill in the blank. For the radical populist right the US was and is their nation, not the nation of liberals, socialists, communists, or recent immigrants (paradoxically they, of course, are the children of immigrants themselves). Like much blood and soil nationalism the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right was and is militantly patriarchal and misogynist thanks to their patriarchal cult of domesticity ideology, a cultural system in which males were leaders and women were groomed for marriage and hence the domesticated helpmeets of their husbands. Like blood and soil nationalists the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right were and are nationalist and even fascist, seeing the nation, their nation, as a extension of their chosen church. For the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right the US was and is the promised land, a promised land charged with a messianic mission not only to the nation itself but to, in a very parochial form, the world (something remarkable given that Christianity in its infant form was internationalist), a world that, they believed, must be a mirror image of the US economically, politically, and culturally. Nationalist Russians, of course, believed and believe their nation has a messianic mission to save the world as well. 

There have been a number of excellent books on nationalist, militant, militaristic, misogynist, and “literalist” White evangelicalism. No one, however, has helped me understand the ins and out and twists and turns of the culture and cultures of blood and soil, authoritarian, misogynist, and cherry picking "literalist" White evangelicalism than Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, edition with a new preface, 2021) by Kristen Kobes Du Mez. In Jesus and John Wayne Calvin College historian (Calvin is a conservative Christian Reformed college located in Grand Rapids, Michigan) Du Mez takes readers on a journey into post-Cold War  militant White evangelical culture, its subcultures (for example, complementarian, dominionist, Zionist, an ideology that links American nationalism with a support for Israel, Calvinist, Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, intellectual), and the battles for hegemony within this social movement between the various cultural identity groups each of whom, to a great extent, create overlapping if somewhat different ideologically grounded realities (Americanism, anti-abortion, anti-femisist). 

No one I know of has done a better job than Du Mez of taking readers into the White nationalist evangelical countercultural media bureaucracies (for instance, publishers, bookstores, schools, camps, parachurch organisations and interest groups). No one I know of has done a better job of  exploring the saints superstars and stars of the movement, the chilvarous Knights of the golden mediaeval and Christian past, including John Wayne, Rambo, and Oliver North (a fascinating mixture of the fictional and factual, many of the factional, of course, made somewhat fictional by the saint making practises associated with the movement), and the history of the failings, foibles, and hypocrisies—including bullying, wife abuse, the abuse of children, sexual abuses of adults and children, the abuse of power, and hubris—of several of these White right evangelical superstars and stars. Given this discourse it should not be a surprise that White right evangelicals would find politician “cowboys" like Ronald Reagan appealing. It probably does not need to be said at this point that many of these Christian nationalists have rallied behind a bully, a narcissist, a con man, a xenophobe, and a perceived strong man named Donald Trump and adopted him as one of their own.

White Warrior Theocratic Christian evangelicalism, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere, creatio ex nihilo, as Du Mez shows. We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore social movements  have been around for a long time and they are not going anywhere soon as there is always something that people can whinge about. Du Mez notes, for example, one longue durée precedent for White right evangelical Christian nationalism and anti-modernism, Billy Sunday, the avuncular anti-Communist and anti-evolutionist and anti-modernist Biblical criticism former baseball player (there is that sport connection again) and evangelist. 

It is here, in this genealogy of the forebearers of White right nationalist evangelicalism, that I had a problem with Du Mez’s book. There were important others, many of whom Du Mez unfortunately elides, who are cut from the same intolerant ideological cloth as the Cold War “Christian” warriors Du Mez focuses on. There was more recently than Sunday, for example, Gerald L.K.Smith. Smith was yet another former supporter of the New Deal who, like Father Coughlin, morphed into a rabid right wing anti-Communist and anti-Semite White supremacist Christian nationalist crusader and evangelist populist. In 1943 Smith founded the isolationist America First Party and ran for president of the US as its nominee in 1944. Later he would run as the presidential candidate of the Christian Nationalist Crusade Party. In 1948 Smith instituted an annual passion play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas modelled after one at Oberammergau, Germany, which many considered anti-Semitic until changes were made to to its script after World War II. There were and are the White right wildcat oil men from once Confederate Texas who helped fund the White populist right evangelicals and build their counterculture, subcultures, and parachurch organisations (on this see, for example, Darren Dochuk’s Anointed in Oil). 

There are other problems I had with Jesus and John Wayne. Du Mez does not explore, in as much detail as I would have liked to have seen, the links between Mr. Potter style prosperity capitalism and its ideology of godly winners and losers (shades of Donald Trump and his ilk), an ideology comparative historian and social scientist Max Weber linked to modernisation and the de-Calvinisation of Puritanism, something that eventually linked up with extreme individualism, narcissism, and hedonism in the modern and postmodern world. She downplays the role of geography, specifically the strong presence of White populist Christian nationalism US South, including Texas, and in the intermountain and far West, and the intersections between it and racism (Jim Crow, anti-Asian ethnocentrism). She downplays the echoes and the influence of the 19th and 20th century muscular Christianity and the Christian health reform of the 19th century (think the Seventh Day Adventist Kellogg) on White right populist evangelicals, some of whom clearly assume consciously or unconsciously the greater fitness of Whites and who are as conscious of the food they eat as the heirs of the countercultural hippies they so often despite and slur in order to be the strong men and obedient women god intended them to be. She downplays the fact that the cult of domesticity, the notion that males should be the head of household and the protectors of the family and by extension the nation (a notion one also finds in fascism) which maintains that women should be queens of their household and nurturers of their family, has a long history elements of which go back to the Victorian era, an era so much of White right Christian evangelicalism draws on and from (and an ideology that may even go back to hunter-gatherer societies and cultures). She does not explore the impact of romanticism with its nationalisms, its revival of chilvaric warriorism (Wagner's Parsifal, for instance), and its nationalist hiking group excursions into nature, on American populist White right evangelicalism (on this and the intersections between romanticism, nationalism, fascism, and ethnocentrism see George Mosse’s superb The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries).

Despite these underemphases and lacunae Jesus and John Wayne (did she want to write a more popular academic book for a broader intelligent audience and not burden it with information overload perhaps?) remains one of the best books I have read on Cold War nationalist and patriarchal evangelicalism. It should be on the must read list of anyone interested in American history and how America got to the Donald Trump now. 

Among the Mormons, 1991 to 1993

 

Sometime in the mid-1980s I became interested in Mormonism. I blame it on Jan Shipps whose book on the early history of Mormonism I read and loved.

At the time I had completed a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. For the latter degree I, of course, took four comprehensive examinations in Archaeology, Linguistics, Bioanthropology, and Cultural Anthropology and wrote a thesis on Quakers as a social movement rather than as a reform movement contra Charles Tilly. I decided, however, against completing a doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology, a decision I occasionally regret.  I felt strongly, at the time, that Anthropology needed to have a strong historical dimension and component to it but didn’t even though that was beginning to change somewhat thanks to scholars like Eric Wolf. Despite this increasing historical consciousness and an increasing reflexivity among Cultural Anthropologists, a reflexivity that often was more text than context oriented, I still found Cultural Anthropology too ahistorical for my liking, too focused on moments rather than broader contexts.

At the time I still wanted to take a Ph.D. I was still caught up in academic romanticism (oh my). So, I thought I would give Sociology a try instead of Cultural Anthropology. Because of my interest in Mormonism I decided to apply to Brigham Young University to do doctoral work in Sociology. BYU had a doctoral programme at the time and I thought where better to study Mormonism socially, culturally, and historically than at BYU.

I was, I have to admit, as I was applying taken aback by the fact that I, a non-Mormon, a never Mormon, a “Gentile" in Mormon terms, needed to go see a Mormon Bishop as part of my application package to BYU in order to pledge to him that I to abide by the rules of BYU’s honour code. I did this even though I could not believe that BYU as a large university with a good graduate school was serious about all of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I had no problem keeping most of the rules of the honour code. I did not drink caffeinated coffee except in emergencies when I, an asthmatic, needed a epinephrine like kick. I did not drink sodas given the health issues associated with them. I was not interested in a relationship. I did not like or wear shorts. I did not want a beard. As for the hair length that was a problem since during much of my adult life I had longish hair by BYU standards. Hair length issues aside, at least for the moment, I headed for Utah and BYU after I was admitted to study for a Ph.D in Sociology.

I was lucky in getting a flat only a few blocks from the Y, a nickname for BYU I quickly learned, and even fewer blocks from downtown Provo and a grocery store. What I did not fully grasp at the time was that the award I was given by the Sociology faculty only covered tuition for one term instead of two. Getting a teaching gig in Sociology and working at Walt West Books, both of which actually furthered my opportunities to study Mormons ethnographically, helped with that. As for BYU students they were the best students collectively that I ever taught and in some cases rivalled students at Oxbridge. What a rare and wonderful pleasure it was to teach such committed and more than prepared students.

I had, as I noted, studied Mormonism and Mormon history before I arrived at the Y. Upon arrival I began to do ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Mormons. I talked to students, 93% of whom were LDS, and learned, for example, their ethno-categories for male and female Mormons (which included, for the Mormon women I talked to, "returning missionary" and "weird returning missionary") and what their Mormon faith meant to them. In the process I got a sense of what was symbolically central in Mormonism, namely, the Plan of Salvation. I talked to my neighbours who were all Mormons and BYU students. I talked to returned Mormon missionaries who were at the Y some of whom seemed to have been liberalised by the experience. I talked to some of the student activists in VOICE, a feminist organisation on campus and had five of them come to talk to my Sociology class. I went to ward meetings in Provo and Salt Lake with my neighbours and got, in the process, a sense of what Mormon rituals were like. I went to a Family Home Evening on the BYU campus thanks to two student friends. I talked to and observed ex-Mormons, one of who was a Quaker peace activist and co-founder of the peace encampment near the nuclear test site in Nevada. I talked to Jack Mormons or cultural Mormons. One, a female BYU student, told me that she still believed Jospeh Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, was the prophet even though she no longer believed in every tenant of contemporary Mormonism.  I talked to BYU faculty becoming particularly close to one, an archaeologist teaching while finishing up his Ph.D at the University of Michigan. It was he who dragged me to the Tanner’s in Salt Lake and to the FARMS brown bag talks held once a week in the Spencer W. Kimball Tower, the SWKT, where the Sociology and Anthropology faculties were at the time.

One of the things that struck me about these FARMS brown bags as I listened to scholars like Royal Skousen and Lyndon Cook was how what seemed to me like polemics, at least on one level, was grounded in scholarship like you would find in any intellectual and academic community on another level. I have to admit that I admired the scholarship of those like John Sorenson, who argued in a scholarly fashion that the Book of Mormon lands were actually in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Even though I could not accept Sorenson’s conclusions I admired the scholarly way he got there. 

It was this scholarship and the interest in scholarship that I most admired and continue to admire about BYU. It was a place, my ethnographic research revealed, where students were deeply engaged with their academic work and with the intellectual life, something that is rare as I would discover later during my part-time teaching sojourns—I hate bureaucracies of all types so a full-time position even if I got one, which was unlikely, was out of the question—at the University at Albany and SUNY Oneonta. RPI, where I also taught, was somewhat different in that the students at that institute were engaged but their engagement with academic work and intellectual culture was much narrower in focus than the students I met, talked to, and taught at the Y.

Another thing that struck me about students and faculty at the Y was how deeply engaged they were in what I would call social ethics. Many of those I met were deeply engaged with social issues. One of my neighbours, who knew English, German, and Dutch was so deeply committed to her feminism that she engaged the most conservative or traditionalist faculty and defenders of the Mormon faith in the Religious Education Department. I met a faculty member in Sociology who had become a pacifist—he was influenced by the Catholic Workers and Quakers—and who was involved with protests against nuclear weapons testing around Easter in Nevada. He took me and four Mormon students at the Y down to the Quaker eEster weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas, where we stayed in a Catholic Church and were fed by members of the Catholic Workers. All five of us had what might be called a mystical experience or, if you prefer a more secular explanation, a betwixt and between symbolic and ritual experience, while there. We five would later form the core of the Mormon Peace Gathering, a group that planned and implemented a Mormon weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site the next year.

My involvement as the only “Gentile” in the Mormon Peace Gathering gave me further entree into Mormon intellectual culture. I met Eugene England, Steve Epperson, and a host of other intellectual and intellectually “liberal” Mormons thanks to the Mormon Peace Gathering. It was all a heady and exciting experience. I learned from this experience that, at least for me, one of the factors, if not the central factor, that seemed to separate “liberal” Mormons from “conservative” Mormons was “continuing revelation”. Faithful Mormons believe that the prophet in Salt Lake received revelations periodically from god. The “liberals”, it seemed to me, differed from the “conservatives” in that for them only revelations received by the prophet in Salt Lake and which were signed by the First Presidency were authoritative revelations. “Conservatives”, on the other hand, believed, it seemed to me, that any revelation the prophet received was authoritative. So, for them, if Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson counselled women to stay at home and take care of the house and the children, it was an authoritative revelation that had to be obeyed.

Most of the Mormons I hung out with were of the “liberal” persuasion. I did meet more “conservative” Mormons during my years in Utah. One of the students in my Social Inequality class, for example, believed that anything the prophet said was divine and he held “conservative’ views on a host of social issues including capital punishment, homosexuality, and abortion. Another friend of mine was somewhere in between on the “liberal” and “conservative’ continuum. He went to the Quaker protest with me and was initially involved with Mormon Peace Gathering planning but he dropped out early in the planning stages finding that what the MPG was doing conflicted with parts of his Mormon faith, what parts I no longer recall (I can’t look at my field notes because they have been destroyed).

What I have never forgotten about in the wake of my interactions with Mormon culture in Utah was the important fact that BYU was not representative of Mormons in general. It was representative, I think, of mainstream Mormon intellectual culture, a culture I was very impressed with. I really did not have much interaction with Mormons beyond BYU. Beyond campus I met academic to be scholars like Dennis now Kelli Potter while I worked at Walt West Books. I met non-Mormon academics interested in Mormons at the bookshop like Stephen Kent, a professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta at Walt’s. I even met the actor Edward Herrmann at the bookshop one day; he bought an SOED and a book on Catholicism as I recall. I met Mormons who were not academics but who were intellectuals deeply interested in Mormon Studies and Mormon history who I met at Walt West Books when I worked there including a book buyer for Seagull Books who showed me a first edition of the Book of Mormon. I was so impressed that amateurs, most of them who seemed to work at the computer software firms in the Provo area and most of whom where “liberals", were interested in and in some cases writing impressively on Mormon history. I met some in the Mormon fundamentalist community, both practitioners and ideological fellow travellers, at and through the bookshop and during my visit to a fundamentalist community south of Salt Lake thanks to a fundamentalist fellow traveller. I helped put together and write for the short lived Deseret Free Press. 

There were things that, as I became more familiar with BYU, that troubled me and troubled me deeply. I was at the Y, for example, when David Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr were fired for ideological reasons. I was there when the Brethren, the powerful leaders in Salt Lake, told members not to attend Sunstone conferences, Sunstone being a Mormon magazine for those of the “liberal” Mormon persuasion, “liberals” who, generally speaking, made use of historical and social scientific methodologies some “conservatives” saw as inherently “secular" and even possibly “anti-Mormon”. I was troubled by the Mormon policy on homosexuality. Given this I was and am proud that I, at the behest of the Y Sociology Club of which I was the faculty representative, was involved in bringing a group founded by the parents of gays which had a positive attitude toward homosexuals to campus. I was troubled by by the fact that I was turned in to the Honor Code Department by someone for bringing a book by the Tanner's on the changes in the Mormon temple ceremony to campus. After I wrote opinion pieces condemning the firings of Knowlton and Farr for the Utah Valley newspaper in Orem, arguing that the Y was more like Bob Jones and less like to Notre Dame (which I did attend briefly), after getting in trouble for some ethnographic experiments, and after Sociology proved as problematically ahistorical as Cultural Anthropology, I decided to leave the Y.

Given my conclusion that History was central to the human studies enterprise I decided to apply to doctoral programmes in History. I was accepted at several places including my dream school the University of Toronto. Though my dreams did not fully come true and it took me years to do so, thanks to financial problems and, when writing the dissertation, problems with my computer files, I finally finished my Ph.D and wrote my dissertation on Mormon Studies. Eventually that dissertation would be published after much blood, sweat, tears, and gnashing of teeth, by McFarland. Though it isn’t perfect—the writer’s cut which is in my possession is better and the authoritative version of the book—I am proud of the book and the research that went into it. 

I am no longer as interested in Mormonism as I was and as my book makes clear, I was more interested in broader questions of identity construction, identity, the origins of social movements as examples of how things are socially and culturally constructed and then fetishised or universalises than Mormonism per se in the first place. I had simply used Mormons to explore and get all of those broader issues. Social media, however, and specifically Mormon Stories and Mormon Discussions on YouTube, has peaked my interest if only slightly in Mormonism and Mormonism as a social and cultural movement again. Perhaps one day I may even get to tell my Non-Mormon Mormon Story on one of them.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Quality of Mercy is Not Always Buffy Reactors

 

One of the things Jana Riess’s book What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide, which I recently read, got me thinking about was how readers, in this case reactors to Joss Whedon’s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Youtube, read Buffy’s existentialist social ethics. Specifically, it got me thinking about how Buffy YouTube reactors read and respond to Buffy’s emphasis on the need for mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, themes that are all at the heart of this television show.

There is no doubt that when it comes to the social ethics of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption Buffy preaches the gospel that mercy is necessary, that forgiveness is divine, well as divine as humans can get, and that redemption is possible. There is also no doubt that in Buffy humans are frail and fallible and that they are often in need of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. And there is no doubt that because of human frailty humans are not always saints, are often sinners, and that they need redemption for their various “sins” again and again. Episodes of Buffy like the superb “I Only Have Eyes for You” in season two, the excellent “Amends" in season three,  the superb “Something Blue in season four, the magnificent “There’s No Place like Home in season five, virtually every episode in season six, and Buffy’s sometimes abuse of power in several episodes in season seven make this abundantly clear. All of the protagonist-heroes of Buffy, in fact, including Buffy, Angel (who was described by one Buffy writer as one drink away from becoming Angelus, his evil double again), Willow, Xander, Giles, Faith, Anya, and Spike are in need of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption at some point or other in the series, often at several points in the series again and again.

It is also abundantly clear that in Buffy vengeance, the negation of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, is not divine, metaphorically divine, in Buffy. The vengeance is a thing curse that the gypsy’s put on Angel because he has killed one of the beloved females of their tribe has disastrous consequences for everyone including the gypsy’s Jenny Calendar, Jana of the Kalderash people, and her Uncle Enyos to such an extent that it essentially karma that comes back to bite then in the proverbial arse. Vengeance, the metaphorically eye for an eye, Buffy tells us, results not in justice but in violence not only against the perpetrators of violence but also against those who seek vengeance upon the perpetrator of the initial act of violence and immorality. Buffy is not, in other words, your Tanakh or your Christians reinterpreting the Christian New Testament as the Tanakh kind of television show. Vengeance in Buffy makes those seeking vengeance blind to its violent consequences.

Despite this condemnation of vindictiveness, of the lack of forgiveness, and of vengeance in Buffy reactors like Nick (aka,Thor) Reacts, SofeReacts, the LexieCrowd, After Show Reacts, EvilQK, and all but one of The Normies, come to praise vengeance when it comes to the misogynous Warren Mears in “Villains". Warren, as those who have watched Buffy know, is one of the Trio of season six, one-third of the Troika of Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who accidentally kills Willow’s girlfriend Tara while trying to kill Buffy. As Willow gone dark (an iteration of VampWillow in season three) takes her revenge on Warren, seeks vengeance against Warren, they cheer Willow on (and look at those facial expressions as they do) urging her to murder Warren and revel in her torture of Warren (and the bullet Willow magically and slowly uses to rip apart his insides as she tortures him before murdering him) and her murder of him (though to be fair some are reflexive about the murder and disturbed when Willow skins Warren alive). The quality of these reactors to Warren is not, in other words, mercy. It is not forgiveness. It is not hoping for Warren’s possible future redemption (they don’t believe his apology and realisation he needs redemption), it is vengeance. It is an eye for an eye, a death for a death vengeance. Nick goes so far as to compare, in his reaction to the last episode of season six, Warren’s execution to the killing of a cockroach recalling in th process, at least for some of us, Nazi metaphors for Jews. Vengeance is vicariously ours these reactors seem to say. This is somewhat paradoxical given that while they seek vengeance against Warren they have repeatedly hoped for the redemption of others in the Buffyverse such as Faith and Spike (who they eventually forgive after his attempted rape of Buffy) not to mention the four original Scoobies. But then they liked if not loved those characters while they hated Warren.

Note: Three English reactors, Liam Duke, Liam Catterson, and Dakara are disturbed by Willow’s torture and murder of Warren and a bit more reflexive about the murder than the American reactors. Additionally,  the two Liam's make the connection between DarkWillow and VampWillow.

NoteL Another English reactor, Dakara, expressed her discontent with season six of Buffy with its darker arcs and DarkWillow character arc in her reaction video to “Villains". Many at the time of broadcast felt similarly. Of course, growing up—that which Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator, and who wasn’t as involved with season six as with previous seasons, was primarily about before the season began—is not all sugar and spice and everything nice, which is what Buffy is trying to depict in season six. Unfortunately, many fan boys and girls don’t want their beloved characters to suffer or change that much. They like repetition (so does Hollywood). I think this is at least one of the reasons some were discomfited by season six and season four of Buffy.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Homiletics Horror Show

 

There is a striking tendency among YouTube reactors that is quite noticeable to the critical ethnographic observer. It is a tendency that is hardly new and it is a tendency that is hardly a monopoly of YouTube reactors. It has long been quite common and widespread in the human community for some time, probably, in fact, since the beginning of thinking and speaking human community time. And it is a tendency, as a consequence, that has long been present among contributors to YouTube

While a lot if not most YouTube reactors are characterised by this tendency I am going to focus on three YouTube “reactors" who are, paradoxically, also amongst, in my opinion, the better Buffy the Vampire Slayer reactors on YouTube: domi e, TheLexieCrowd, and Sofie Reacts. All three have been reacting, if sometimes fitfully to Buffy as they have other things in their YouTube barrel they are reacting to in order to generate notoriety and, as a consequence, generate monies, for years now. Of the three domi e is the only one not to have finished the series at this point.

The human tendency I am referring to relates to method, if one can assume that there is indeed some method to the YouTube “reactor" madness. Like most humans most YouTube reactors and most YouTube Buffy reactors, even the best of them, apply a faulty method of “analysis” to the text they are reacting to, in this case to the Buffy text. Instead of starting with exegesis or a close textual analysis and one that draws on what the authors of a text professed to be up to when they created it and moving on next to an exegetically grounded hermeneutics, putting, in the process, the Buffy text in its empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts, most YouTube reactors and our three YouTube reactors in particular, start with the third aspect of the method in this chain of interpretation instead of the first, homiletics. They, in other words, begin and largely end their "analysis" by inscribing their ideologies into the Buffy text sans essential exegetical and hermeneutic analysis both of which should check and balance speculative readings of any text.

One recent example of this tendency or method—beginning and ending with homiletics—is particularly apparent when one explores how all three watched and reacted to the Buffy episode “Once More With Feeling”, the seventh episode in the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy, of course, as those who have watched the show know, died at the end of the fifth season as heroes often do during the heroes journey sketched out by Joseph Campbell (see Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces). In the heroes journey the hero doesn’t stay dead and in Buffy’s case her friends Willow, Xander, Anya, and Tara refuse to let her die and literally resurrect her in the first episode of season six of the show.

Buffy, however, doesn’t come back right. Her friends assume she was in a hell dimension, a hell dimension similar to the one Buffy sent Angel to at the end of season three of the show. She has been instead, as she tells the vampire with a chip in his head Spike in the third episode of season six, in what she describes in her theologically naive way, heaven. So like the damaged men of Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and even Buffy itself, Buffy is returned to what she calls hell, a real life in the real world, an ordinary life in an ordinary world (a shout out to Sartrean existentialism) that for her is literally hellish. 

Buffy faces not only emotional and psychological problems after she returns to life, problems related to that eternal existentialist question of why am I here. She also faces economic problems given that her mother’s long illness and death has left her in financial straights (a shoutout to the broken US health care system that often leaves many in debt and with debt even if they have medical insurance). She needs to get a loan to pay her many piled up bills and get a job in order to make ends meet and to fix the broken water pipes in her basement (metaphors and allegories become more tangible and obvious in season six of the BtVS bildungsroman, in the Buffy growing up tale of season six, for obvious reasons).

Getting either a bank loan or a job proves difficult for Buffy in season six. Buffy has no collateral and her home, which she inherited from her mother Joyce, and which she tries to use as collateral to get a loan from the bank, has  already, as the bank loan officer she goes to for a loan tells her, been fully leveraged and has been losing equity for years (a shout out to the fact that Joyce’s and Buffy's home has been trashed on many occasions given that Buffy already has a job, slaying). So she can’t, like many poorer Americans, get a loan. As for getting a job, Buffy never graduated from college dropping out from UC-Sunndyale in season five in order to move home to help take care of her sister Dawn and eventually her sick mother as well so her job options are, as little sister Dawn notes in season six, pretty much limited to poor paying retail and service industry work that literally in the Buffyverse, turns many fast food workers into retail automatons. Moreover, Buffy, who is called to be a slayer—it is her vocation not her job—can’t charge those she aids for killing the monsters, demons, and vampires of Sunnydale that are out to kill them.

Fortunately, for Buffy and those, like Willow and Tara who live with her in her home and who don’t have jobs or much income either, Giles, Buffy's mentor, is there to help. He gives Buffy monies to fix the broken water pipes in her house and to take care of her other financial issues. Instead of trying to find a job immediately, however, Buffy, admittedly somewhat depressed thanks to her resurrection to the hell of ordinary life, rushes off to meet her former boyfriend Angel somewhere between Sunnydale (a low rent Santa Barbara) and Los Angeles, where Angel now resides, shirking, as Giles sees it, her more mundane financial and familial duties foisting the disciplining of her sister off on Giles in the process.

Giles, Buffy’s watcher and mentor, is concerned with Buffy’s shirking of her adult responsibilities and this concern along with his feelings that he is “standing in the way” of her growing up comes to a head, 

in “Once More With Feeling. Buffy is not the only Scooby in season six shirking her adult responsibilities. Willow is using magic to make things easier for her including making things easier for her in her relationship with her girlfriend Tara, who, after an argument, she casts a forgetting spell on. Xander and Anya are having second thoughts about their forthcoming marriage. Sister Dawn is stealing in order to get attention. All these oh grow up story and character arcs come to a head in the episode “Once More With Feeling”.

In “Once More With Feeling", a musical episode, our characters sing out, thanks to a spell cast, their deepest feelings and, in the process, they learn about some of each others deepest secrets. It the episode it is revealed that Buffy was not in hell as her friends thought but in heaven, that Willow has been manipulating Tara’s mind, that Xander and Anya have things that bug them about each other, that Giles is sensing that he is standing in the way of Buffy becoming a responsible adult, and that Dawn is feeling alone and unwanted.

What is happening in season six up to and after “Once More With Feeling” is part and parcel with what Buffy creator, show runner, writer, and director said was the broad theme of season six of the show, the need to grow up and take responsibility for your actions. All the Scoobies, save for Giles, are stuck in pre-adult overdrive, including what seem like the villains or big bad of season six at first (they actually aren’t, the inability of our Scoobies to grow up is), the trio of Jonathan, Warren, and Andrew who, after graduating from high school, decide to become supervillains just like those they emulate in the science fiction and action adventure media they devour like fanboy kids. 

It is this, this exegetical fact, the fact that Buffy season six is about growing up and taking responsibility, that many YouTube reactors including our own trio of domi e, TheLexieCrow, and Sofie Reacts, miss because they have not (and perhaps will not) engage in empirical analysis and explore what those who made Buffy say about their intentions for season six. They prefer to “approach” Buffy tabula rasa (which is, of course, impossible given the reality of socialisation), paradoxically "Tabula Rasa” is the title of the episode of Buffy that was broadcast right after “Once More With Feeling”.

All three reactors are, as their reactions to “Once More With Feeling” reveal, particularly angry with Giles who sings to a Buffy who is not paying attention and who is lost in her own little hermetic world that he feels he is standing in the way of Buffy’s life course development and needs to leave, which he does in the next episode, so she can become a responsible adult. They want him instead to continue to play the father to Buffy,  not the father who realises that some tough love is sometimes necessary to aid someone to grow up but a father who solves all problems with the wave of the money want.

It is not surprising that many “reactors” read Buffy in this way and take Buffy’s side against Giles in this episode. Buffy, after all, is the main character of the show and though many reactors identity with Giles and other of the Scoobies, many, including our trio of “reactors" also strongly identify with Buffy and take her side in crises like the ones Buffy faces in season six. One might also argue that it is not surprising that reactors take Buffy's over that of Giles because they too in a world where good and good paying jobs are fewer and fewer, where the service sector with its poor paying and poor benefit jobs is dominant, where sons and daughters sometimes have to live with their parents to make ends meet, where marriage is being delayed, and where pregnancy is delayed, where delaying growing up is kind of a functional strategy for life in the real world. 

One thus has to wonder whether many of our “reactors" are, like their fictional counterparts in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, stuck in life course neutral and consequently take the side of someone who is delaying growing up just like they are (though I suppose one can argue that engaging in the mundane and banal not so fine art of YouTube reaction video capitalism is not unlike working in the fast growing fast food industry). One has to contemplate, in other words, whether YouTube Buffy “reactors" are creating a reality in Buffy that mirrors their own in reality, something made possible if not probable by their studied ignorance of the Buffy text the creators of the show actually made and the meanings they, and particularly Joss Whedon, put into the show, along with an ignorance of the broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of the show into which the television show fits. Needless to say this studied ignorance is something very much akin to the situation that the Trio find themselves in in Buffy season six, a situation where the Trio of stuck in neutral males who are still living in the basements of their parents' homes, who don’t have jobs, who are still playing with their beloved Star Wars toys (the detritus of a mediocre adolescent franchise), discoursing on who was the best James Bond, and who seemingly can’t or don’t want to grow up.  Oh the humaninanity...

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hannah Stoddard and Latter Day Mormon Apologetics and Polemics

 

YouTube is a wonderful mirror into the mentalities of modern and postmodern humans. It tells us, for example, something about the ways people read television shows. It tell us something about the ways people read classic rock and roll songs. It tells us something about how contemporary Mormon apologists and polemicists interpret the history of Mormonism, the history of the United States, and the history of the world.

Recently, I have been exploring the videos Mormon “traditionalist" Hanna Stoddard and her Jospeh Smith Foundation have produced and posted on YouTube and the YouTube videos in which Stoddard appears as a guest star. These videos, to pick a few examples, condemn the works of “progressive" Mormon historians like Leonard Arrington and Richard Bushman, condemn Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, celebrate those Mormon celebrities like Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruch McConkie, Boyd Packer, and Ezra Taft Benson who Stoddard and her fellow travellers regard as saints, and condemn modernity with its materialistic approach to history and its contextualism (history as the longue dureee product of economic, political, cultural, biological-demographic, and geographic factors).

Stoddard’s discourse has all the hallmarks of Mormon polemics and apologetics of the past, to Protestant Fundamentalist apologetics and polemics of the past, and to right wing Christian nationalist apologetics and polemics of the present. Like all apologetics since the beginning of apologetics time Stoddard’s apologetics are grounded in the assumption that “we", “us", however we and us are defined, and it is defined selectively by Stoddard, have the fullest essence of the truth. Stoddard assumes that Mormonism, her particular Mormonism, is true (she does admit that echoes of the truth can be found in other religious cultures). She believes that god exists, that the devil exists, that some people are inhabited by devils, and that there are evil witches out there in human land. She believes that the Mormon prophets are prophets of god. She believes the Mormon doctrine that America is a promised land and hence exceptional. She believes that the LDS Church is in danger of apostasy thanks to indoctrination by conspiratorial Mormon “progressives” (who are, in her mind, little better than devils and witches, Marxists and liberals) like Leonard Arrington and Richard Bushman (her apparent bete noirs along, echoing Benson, with Karl Marx, who, in an uncredited answer to what the teaching of class in the BYU Sociology Department on the Stoddards' Latter-day Answers (aka LDS Answers), refers approvingly to a book that accuses Marx of being a satanist, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes (all amongst Benson’s “antichrists” in “A Plea to Strengthen Our Families”, a document often cited by right wing Mormons but not apparently emphasised by the contemporary Church) and the “Darwinists" and “socialists” at contemporary BYU, the, in common LDS parlance, “Lord’s University").

Not surprisingly, these assumptions, assumptions that are grounded in Stoddard’s religious “testimony” (a Mormon term for spiritual guidance) provide the bedrock and foundation for Stoddard’s polemics. She claims that only true believers or the faithful can write quality history (faith history) not only of Mormonism but of America, Europe, the ancient Near East, and the world. Joseph Smith, Stoddard clams, could not have been a treasure hunter, someone who engaged in the occult, because the Mormon prophets said he wasn’t and those who say he was are secularists like the new Mormon historians or anti-Mormons, who the new Mormon historians draw on extensively claims Stoddard, and who can’t, as a consequence of the fact that they are anti-Mormons, be trusted. She claims the earth has only been around for around 6000 years and that Noah’s flood actually occurred globally because the Bible tells me so and god’s prophets, god’s real prophets, tell me so.

Like all apologists and polemicists Stoddard is selective. She condemns new Mormon history materialist contextualism but she is a contextualist too. She assumes, for example, that the context of the Book of Mormon is ancient Near Eastern history and ancient American prehistory and history. She is selective in that she applies the canons of critical history to what she regards as the mythhistory of the new Mormon historians but she doesn’t apply them to her faith history, an actual mythhistory since it is grounded in ideological assumptions rather than empirical evidence, something that makes her kin to Sandra Tanner, someone who also doesn’t apply the analytical strategies she applies to Mormonism to her Christian faith. She sometimes seems to conflate the critical new Mormon history with anti-Mormonism. She is selective in the evidence she uses. She, for example, far too often bases her dismissal of evidence that does not line up with her ideological assumptions because of the supposed character defects of the person from whom the evidence originates (the ad hominem strategy). She, for example, dismisses evidence about Smith on the basis that the person making the claim is someone left the Church while, at the same time, claiming that any analysis of evidence must be grounded analysis rather than assumed "analysis". She selectively dismisses evidence on the basis of it being taken down after the fact except when that evidence comes from those she regards as prophets and true religious authorities. She downplays differences among the Twelve. She ignores the fact that the LDS Church and its revelations have changed over the years. See plural marriage or polygamy and Blacks and the priesthood.  She uses inductive analysis for deductive purposes. All one has to do, Stoddard’s logic demands, is simply “verify” what god and his prophets say and bingo, you’ve got it. All of this makes Stoddard an apologist and a polemicist and only kind of an historian, one that plays in the clays of mythhistory more than real history. And this is why Stoddard is a kind of intellectual demagogue, a kind of anti-academic intellectual, and a kind of anti-intellectual intellectual since, for her, once god speaks all the thinking that needs to be done is done. That is dogma and dogmatics not history or social science.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Prophets and Profits in the Mormon Social Media Universe

 

Social media sites like YouTube are, in a way, microcosmic examples of what theoretical quantum physics in general tells us what the universe we all live in is like. To wit, there are a host of parallel universes on YouTube and within these parallel universes one can find a number of parallel worlds.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, of these parallel universes or cultures with parallel worlds or countercultures and subcultures within them on YouTube is that related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism. But then I have been studying Mormonism for some thirty years now.

There are a number of parallel worlds within the parallel universe that is Mormonism on YouTube. There is the parallel world of Mormon news. There is the official LDS content world which includes an ask a missionary page and the Meet the Mormons film. There is the what Mormon polygamy was and is like world, a world that ranges from the polemical, the apologetic, and the academic. There is the why I am a Mormon world. There is the why I am no longer a Mormon world. There are insider explorations of Mormon doctrine. There are critical exposes of Mormon finances and the Church’s use of their monies. There is the what are Mormon temple rituals like world. And there is the intellectual polemical and apologetic worlds related to Mormonism in general, both of which have long histories in the history of religion, particularly monotheistic our way or the highway religions, and a long pedigree in the history of Christianity. 

The Mormon polemical and apologetic world is one of the largest LDS worlds on YouTube. One can, for instance, find worlds on YouTube where some categorise Mormonism as a “fake" religion and a “fake" brand of Christianity. The bases for such a claim is grounded in the poster's perception that Mormonism is different than the religion of the poster, which these posters regard, of course, as the one true religion (ethnocentric apologetics) despite the fact that all monotheistic religions are grounded in belief and not empirical fact. See, for instance, the self proclaimed I am not a “progressive" Bible Thinker Mike Winger who, following in a long tradition in Christian polemics, condemns not only Mormonism as a “fake” variety of Christianity but also condemns Roman Catholicism as “fake” brand of Christianity, a theme that has a long history in Protestant and particularly evangelical polemics. See Capturing Christianity’s Cameron Bertuzzi, a photographer and self proclaimed Christian apologist, who, following again in a long line of Christian insider or emic polemics, condemns Mormonism and Islam as “false” religions created by “false” prophets.

Another of the parallel worlds within discussions of Mormonism on YouTube is the world populated by ex-Mormons who have converted to another sect or brand of Christianity. See, for example, the posts of Sandra Tanner, who converted to “true” Christianity thanks to her husband Jerald, the barber James Wardle, and Pauline Hancock, the founder of the more “orthodox” or mainline Mormon sect the Church of Christ (Hancock). In the wake of her de-conversion and conversion experience Sandra, along with her now deceased husband, has been arguing against (polemics) Mormonism, if in a somewhat academic way since 1964 through their Utah Lighthouse Ministry and its bookstore. See the ex-Mormon convert Ed Decker who converted to “true” Christianity—Decker was an early member of Saints Alive in Jesus, a group of ex-Mormon converts to “orthodox” Christianity—who, unlike the Tanner’s, often engages in defamations against Mormonism. See Heidi Luv, a self proclaimed “born again” Christian, demonologist, and “conspiracy theorist" who hosts the Unfiltered Rise Podcast and who has appeared as guest star on several YouTube “programmes”. Luv says that she broke away from the “Mormon cult”(a loaded ethnocentric term that in less ethnocentric scientific parlance refers to a new religious movement or a sect in tense relationships with its broader religious geography)  because of its “occult" origins. For Tanner, Decker, and Luv problems related to aspects of Mormon history eventually foregrounded for them the falsity of Mormonism. One of the curious aspects of these now “true” believing “orthodox” Christians—well not, I suppose curious from an emic point of view—is that they never apply the same empirical and historical standards to their own faiths that they do to Mormonism, their other, a religion which they remain obsessed with even after departing from it.

There are other once Mormons who remain as obsessed with their now Mormon other as they were with their Mormon us (a trait one also finds in former I believe us's who become evangelical anti-them’s or “anti-cult” crusaders) . Karl Lyman and Clarity of the Clarity Podcast, for instance, left Mormonism for other cultural, ideological, and religious reasons than did the Tanner’s Decker, and Luv. In their discussion on the Clarity Podcast Karli and Clarity note that they left the LDS because the leaders of the Church gave into governmental “tyranny" during the covid pandemic—something they compare to another federal governmental “tyranny”, prohibition—when they counselled members of the Church to get the covid vaccine shot, to wear masks, and when they shut down wards (Mormon congregations) meetings during the pandemic. Interestingly Kari and Clarity do not discuss the giving in of Mormon authorities to another possible federal government “tyranny”, the feds forcing of the Mormon elite to end polygamy. Karli and Clarity maintain that when the Mormon bureaucratic elite urged members to use masks and get the vaccine poke during the recent pandemic they capitulated to a governmental conspiracy to limit human freedom and liberty. In response, they say, they left the Church. Problematically, they miss certain historical facts. They fail to grasp that prohibition and temperance were mass movements that effectively lobbied local, state, and federal governments to end alcohol sales in the United States—prohibition, in other words, was a mass movement of citizens—and they fail to grasp that, like the birth control pill, masks, particularly the N95 mask, are, 95% effective in blocking airborne particles when worn correctly and that the covid vaccines, in all their iterations have proved to be quite effective in at least softening the effects of covid should one get it.

And then there are the ex-Mormons like John Dehlin, the excommunicated Mormon psychologist who runs the Mormon Stories podcast where a variety of historical and cultural issues related to the LDS are discussed by Mormon and cultural Mormon intellectuals, the ex-Mormon HailHeidi, many of whose posts explore the standup comedy of George Carlin and the criticism of religion of atheists Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, and the ex-MormonAlyssa Grenfell. The prolific Grenfell, like HailHeidi, seems to have jettisoned her Mormon beliefs largely because of historical problems related to Mormonism (a common theme in ex-Mormon posts), and exchanged it for another meaning system or cultural system, atheism. Grenfell ranges broadly over a variety of Mormon historical, cultural, and ideological topics from dancing in Mormonism, to Mormon garments, to what is was like to go to BYU, to what it was like to go on a mission, to Mormon purity ideologies, to Mormon polygamy, and to why I left the Church. Her posts, which condemn a prophetic religion and its prophets for empirical reasons, have garnered thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even a million views on some occasion, something that, no doubt, has brought Grenfell profits.

Grenfell is one of those rare birds on YouTube. She actually does empirical historical research for her sometimes over an hour posts, good solid empirical research. Her research, however, has its limits. For example, in her discussion of Mormon purity culture she doesn’t dig deep enough and discuss how the cult of domesticity, which is not a monopoly of Mormonism (see patriarchal macho White evangelicalism, for example), has Victorian and perhaps even further back historical and prehistorical roots. In her discussion of Mormon ballroom dance culture and the prevalence of Mormon dancers on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars she fails to explore the important role dancing has played in broader aristocratic culture and in cultures in general before the advent of radio and television.

Beyond the critics of Mormonism (polemicists) there are, of course, a number of defenders of the one “true" faith of Mormonism (apologists) on YouTube. Answering LDS Critics tries to do just that. CES Letters is, like FARMS of old, an intellectual apologetics and polemical site. Thoughtful Faith discusses, sometimes with others, the Mormon Faith and often turns anyone who is critical of Mormonism for valid empirical reasons into an anti-Mormon enemy of the one true faith. The youthful and MTVish and TV commercial hip Saints Unscripted, for example, is on a mission to "present information about the gospel of Jesus Christ in genuine, compelling, and loving ways". The various hosts of Saints Unscripted do not duck and cover when it comes to addressing criticism of Mormonism. FAIR, one of today’s leading Mormon apologetic and polemical organisations, particularly after the demise of FARMS, provides self proclaimed faithful answers and informed responses, FAIR, to issues associated with Mormonism. Like Saints Unscripted FAIR does not sweep critical takes on Mormonism under the rug though they often, like Thoughtful Faith, confuse and conflate empirical criticism of the LDS with polemical criticism, a common phenomenon that one can also see in those groups and individuals who wrongly and sometimes cynically and manipulatively conflate academic analysis of Zionism and Israel with anti-Semitism and academic analysis of America with anti-Americanism. There are professional historians like Ben Spackman, who has appeared on several faithful Mormon programmes like Saints Unscripted, Keystone, and The Interpreter Foundation, who argues that Mormonism is not a form of Protestantism (which I think is accurate) and that it is more like Judaism rather than Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism and thus is not a sola scriptura, Bible as sole authority, brand of Christianity (which I think is accurate and which also makes it more like the liturgical brands of Christianity). Like many Christians, including evangelical Christians, before him Sparkman, in hermeneutic and homiletic mode, argues that the creation/evolution binary does not have to be an either or binary (which is accurate if not my cuppa tea in terms of intellectual engagement). One can argue, for example, for god directed evolution. Spackman also (rightly in my opinion) argues that in the 1950s, for a variety of social and cultural reasons, Mormonism was fundamentalised.

One of the major problems associated with those who interpret Mormonism, whether they are insider faith apologists and polemicists, insider critical apologists and polemicists (semi-historians and social scientists), or outsider anti-Mormon apologists and polemicists is that they all accept the false notion that Mormonism is exceptional in some way, shape, or form. The insider faith apologists and polemicists believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is exceptionally true, the, in fact, only true Christian Church on the face of the globe. The insider critical apologists and polemicists seem to, though this may be a reflection of their fixation, in the case of ex-Mormons, on Mormonism, that Mormonism is exceptionally ridden with falsehoods. The outsider anti-Mormon polemicists and apologists believe that Mormonism, like others of its cult ilk, is exceptionally demonic. You can find all of these exceptionalists, exceptionalists that have actually been around almost since the advent of Mormonism itself on YouTube. Once again the more things change...

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

 

You always know what you are going to find on social media. You know that you are going to find a lot of lowest common denominator nonsense about the usual suspects, for example, films, television, women (some scantily clad for the “adolescent” male gaze), politics, sports (including fabrications related to Caitlin Clark), banal and mundane sensationalist and melodramatic clickbait for fun and profit, and music. You never know, however, how low the rubbish you find on social media will go. I was reminded of this fact yet again while I was looking at books by Warren I. Cohen on Amazon, one of the lowest of lowest common denominator social media sites on the world wide web given its poor search engine, its limited and I suspect mostly bot curation of its comments page, a curation that looks for certain hot button words and phrases, and the limitations it places on actual scholarly reviews. Amazon seems to prefer “reactions” that are reflective of the widespread reality of attention deficit disorder in postmodern America and large parts of the core nation world.

I am familiar with Cohen, a specialist on American foreign policy retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County  and author of introductory books on American foreign policy, including his excellent and aptly titled A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations published by Columbia, his introductory work on US and USSR relations published by Cambridge University Press in its four volume history of American foreign relations series, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991, and studies of Asian-American foreign relations, which is why I went to Amazon to see what other books he had written.

What I also found and found as interesting as the other books Cohen had written, were the comments on his book America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Two of the four comments—the fact that there were only four tells you a lot about the contemporary core nation world—on the book were favourable. The other two comments, however, were negative.  Of course, you are going to invariably find negative comments on almost any critical history and analysis of American foreign policy because you are inevitably going to step on the toes and draw the ire of the many faithful churchgoers of the Church of America who believe in the dogma of American exceptionalism.

One of these negative comments, that by Josh, was more “substantive” than the other, that by Sol D. Josh’s “reaction" to the book—I hesitate to call it a review since it really isn’t a review as is the case with most posts on scholarly books on Amazon—whinged about what he believed was Cohen’s New Dealism and his supposed belief that the New Deal was the best of all possible American worlds. He complains that Cohen interprets American post-WWII militarisation and the rise of its national security state as something other than a response to Soviet imperialism. He whines about Cohen's book being too much of an introductory text, something the book, in fact, is.

Sol D’s “substance” is also a statement of faith. Sol D’s faith is more clearly than that of Josh that hybrid mix of Christianity and America that has long been prominent in American culture and American life. He spends his reaction whining about Cambridge histories being the product of apologists and polemicists for “butt kissing atheist-Marxist tyrannical dictatorship”, a dictatorship, he claims, killed 200 million of its own citizens (today, of course, any self respecting empiricist would have to number many of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite, particularly in places like the Silicon Valley and Austin, amongst the tyrannical dictatorship of the mediocretariat). He ends his diatribe by stressing his devotion to his lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Both of these comments reveal, as I noted, a faith in America, a faith some theologians would argue is a form of heresy and blasphemy. The faith of both is ultimately grounded in metaphysical and metaphysical manichean presuppositions that some humans are good guys, generally the group, clique, community, state, or nation, in this case the United States of America, that one belongs to, and that other humans are bad guys, that other whoever the goods mark themselves off against, the USSR in most of the mid-to late twentieth century, and, after the fall of the USSR, those liberals and “New Dealers” who are seen as “commies” and, paradoxically, fascists, by many and are categorised as “commies” and fascists by demagogues looking for leverage to gain political, economic, and cultural power. They are grounded, in other words, in the notion that some humans are good and some humans, them, are evil. They are grounded in the dehuhamisation of these others.

And this last—dehumanising the other—is one of the fundamental problems with these manichean politically and ideologically correct ways of seeing. Contrary to such manichean faiths humans, to varying degrees, are characterised by their better angels and their less better angels Humans, real humans, be they Hitler, Stalin, those who ordered bombs dropped on civilian targets in the name of victory, or true believers in monotheistic religious inquisitions, are, as history shows, complex and contradictory. They are neither inhuman incarnations of pure evil or cliched and stereotyped incarnations of pure goodness. Those who see the world in such manichean hues, of course, can’t admit the fact that humans, particularly those humans in positions of power (the power corrupts prover ), are the same every where and at every time for if they did they would have to admit that Cohen and other empirically grounded analysts like him are right and that both American and Soviet powers that be are neither evil incarnate of good incarnate and that humans can and do make mistakes and, of course, they can be socialised for moronic ethnocentric conformity. Cognitive dissonance, as it often does, however, in these cases, often ends up making the faith of true believers  even stronger than it was despite empirical facts to the contrary because in so many cases fiction, created reality, trumps, as it does with Trump and his ilk, real reality.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: In the Kingdom of Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest?...

 

I should know by now that every time humans seem to take one step forward in the development of “new" communications technologies and technologies in general that there is, for the most part, no corresponding step forward in the use of those technologies by the masses. In fact, it often seems instead that most humans take several steps backwards when technological change occurs. I was reminded of this indisputable fact yet again today.

This morning I was looking at the 2017 Penguin Classics deluxe edition of Anne of Green Gables by the Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. I try to take a look at any new critical editions of Anne because Anne of Green Gables remains, long after I first read it in my youth, one of my favourite and most treasured books. Perhaps that is one of the joys or one of the curses for anyone who grew up, if in my case only in part, in English Canada. 

It actually took me several searches on Amazon to find the Penguin Classics edition of Anne. After several unsuccessful attempts—something that is quite common when searching for books or classical music CD's on Amazon these days—I finally found the book but only by going to the Penguin Random House page for the book and clicking on their link to Amazon. 

I must admit that I was rather disappointed in the new Penguin Classics edition of Anne. I was hoping that it would be more like the rival Broadview Editions and Norton Critical Edition editions of the book, but it wasn’t. The editor of the Penguin Classics Anne, Benjamin Lefebvre, a L.M. Montgomery specialist who directs the online L.M. Montgomery site on the world wide web, according to the Penguin classics author blurb, did write an introduction to the book, did write a textual note to explain his editorial decisions regarding the text of the book, and did provide suggestions for further reading on Montgomery and Anne for those interested in doing further research on the book and its author just as do the editors of the Broadview and Norton critical editions of Anne. However, the Penguin Classics Anne does not, as do the Broadview and Norton editions of the text which are also edited by Montgomery specialists, Cecily Devereux of the University of Alberta for Broadview and Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston of the University of Guelph, home of one of the important archives for Montgomery Studies, for Norton, offer annotated notes that provide essential context for the book. Given this, I won’t be purchasing the Penguin Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables.

The unfortunate limitations of the Penguin Anne wasn’t the only thing that I found interesting on the Anne of Green Gables Penguin Classics page on Amazon. Below in the “comments” section I happened upon a “review”of the Penguin Anne, a “review” that is actually a “reaction” rather than a review, something posters on Amazon and on YouTube, confuse and conflate, which I found even more interesting than the edition of the book itself. In this “review” "Laura from Spain" complains that the pages of the Penguin Deluxe Edition of Anne were not properly cut claiming, as a consequence, that the book was bad. 

"Laura from Spain’s” reaction—a “reaction that parallels most of those I have happened across on social media—to the Penguin Anne points up the fact that “Laura" was unaware of three empirical facts. First, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the history of books and the history and variations in how book pages have been cut across time and space. Second, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that all Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, which are done by Penguin US, have pages that are intentionally cut that way, that are cut in deckled fashion. See also the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Third, she seems blissfully unaware of the history of the deckled style of book pages, something she could have ascertained very easily by letting her fingers do the walking on the world wide web.

Ron once again shakes his head in disbelief...

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Musical “Expert” on Social Media

 

Over the years I have noticed that there are what I would call several subspecies or subgenres of reaction videos on the social media giant YouTube. One of the subspecies of music “reaction" videos  offered for “sale”on Patreon and YouTube are those by “experts" in vocal performance and music performance. The Charismatic Voice (Elizabeth Zharoff), Beth Roars, Maggie Renee, Aaliyah Capili, the Fairy Voice Mother (Lolli), and the Vocalyst (Bethany Hickman), for instance, are trained singers or singers in training who regularly break down the vocal performances of popular songs on YouTube. Another of the subgenres of YouTube “reaction" videos are those of classical musicians and classical composers who, like their vocal performance “reaction" video colleagues analyse popular music videos and performance for fun (or so one hopes) and profit. This group includes “reactors" like Doug Helvering and Virgin Rock.

Sometimes these social media “experts” tell us why they are “experts” in the field of music analysis. In every reaction video Maggie Renee does on YouTube, for instance, she makes sure to tell viewers, some of whom vote via polls on Patreon as to what piece of pop music Maggie Renee will react to next, that she is a Juilliard trained opera singer and this training at one of the elite music schools in the United States, along with her opera performances in less well known regional opera companies, something noted on her personal website, makes her an “expert" in the field of vocal performance. In her welcoming video to her YouTube page Elizabeth Zharoff, The Charismatic Voice, says she has degrees in voice, opera, and music production, According to Wikipedia Zharoff graduated from Oberlin and Curtis (also see her recent “My Story and Where We Go From Here” YouTube video where she recounts her burgeoning interest in pop music and shills for funding for her research). In her welcoming video to her Virgin Rock YouTube page Amy Shafer, LSRM, FRSM, and RYC, tells us that she is a trained harpist, pianist and teacher, and director of piano studies, and assistant director of harp studies at the Harp School, Inc. On rare occasions these “experts” tell viewers that they still have a lot to learn about both classical and popular music. Capili for instance, notes that she is a young Gen Z opera singer in training and, as a consequence, still has much to learn about the ins and outs of musical and vocal performances, something rare and refreshing in the social media world as far as I can tell from two years of ethnographic study of the medium.

Many of these reactors also use their YouTube pages to promote themselves and their careers. Virgin Rock, for instance, on her YouTube welcome page, offers viewers the opportunity to study one on one with her. The Charismatic Voice posts videos asking for monies to support vocal research (“The Most Important Video You Will Ever Watch”). Beth Roars’s "Symphony of 131 Nations” shows her performing this symphony with others presumably representing the 131 nations referenced in the title of the piece.

What is remarkable about several of these trained experts in music performance and composition, from whom one can indeed learn much about vocal performance, music performance, and music theory, is that so many of them appear to do little research on the music and the musicians they are “reacting” to and “analysing” and several of them seem to have little sense of popular music history. Interestingly, they also tend to ignore issues of technological manipulation including pitch correction and live not live “musical” performances, both of which are quite common in the world of pop music today, making one wonder whether this lack is a product of the fact that they don’t want to offend their revenue generating audience, most of whom, I suspect, are fan boys and fan girls rather than dispassionate analysts, with the truth (see Zharoff’s "My Story and Where We Go From Here" video retrospective on YouTube). I was recently reminded of this lack of historical knowledge and attention to historical context when I watched Shafer’s reaction to the 2001 System of a Down song “Chop Suey”

Shafer admits during the course of her reaction video to “Chop Suey" that she was confused by the song’s lyrical content. She gets the dynamic alterations in the song and comments on its alternation between its more folkish and calmer moments and its moments of speed and intensity. In the video Shafer mistakenly assumes that the song is parodic and humorous, a mistake that could have been avoided if she had actually done a bit of research on the band and the song before jumping off of a contextless hermetic interpretive cliff (the music studies variant of literary studies', film studies', and television studies' crystal ball textualism). Research could have revealed to Virgin Rock that System of a Down have been deeply influenced by Armenian folk musics, so she could have added heft to her been more general the statement that the calmer moments in the song have a folk like quality. Research might also have enabled her to grasp the biblical references ("Father into your hands I commend my spirit”, Luke 23:46) in the song, something that points up the fact that so many today no longer get a well-rounded humanities classical education which might enable them to grasp historical references including those from the Christian Bible. Additionally, research might also have enabled Shafer to understand that the title of the song was System of a Down’s response to real or perceived record company resistance to the original title of the song, "Suicide" according to one of the members of the band, or “Self-Righteous Suicide”, according to the producer of the record. “Suey”, (which band member Serj Tankian is seen presumably eating in the official video), one of the band members said, is suicide chopped in half. Knowing all of this might have helped Shafer understand the serious intent of the song and to better grasp the serious nature of the song’s dynamics. And it is so easy to do in the brave new world of digital media like the internet.