As Patrick Q. Mason notes in his introduction to this volume, the field of Mormon studies currently rides on the confluence of three twenty-first-century trends: an increased attention to religion within the academy, a heightened interest in Mormonism among the general public, and a burgeoning supply of well-trained Mormon scholars. This collection, forming something of a festschrift for influential sociologist of Mormonism Armand Mauss, both reflects on the field's past and points toward its future. Most of all, it offers readers a valuable sampling of its present.
Mason convincingly identifies five developments in Mormon studies around which he structures the book. First, Mormon studies has broken free of its traditional preoccupation with the nineteenth century to deal more intently with later eras. Second, the field—given the globally oriented church at its center—has begun to make good on its transnational possibilities by looking beyond the United States. Third, treatments of race have matured from a fixation on white Mormons’ racialisms to pay closer attention to the lives, perspectives, and subjectivities of racially diverse Mormons themselves. Fourth, the dominance that the historical method has long exercised in the field is giving way to a broader array of theories and approaches. And, finally, like other humanistic fields, Mormon studies has demonstrated a persisting interest in cultural constructions of the self. With two to three chapters dedicated to each of these topics, the book addresses key questions from multiple angles.
Mason's introductory essay exemplifies the strengths of the book's content and the necessary limitations of its format. His remarkable ability to condense the history and trajectory of the field into a set of brief passages both informs and—like many of the other concise chapters in the book—leaves readers eager for more. The swift pacing unavoidably comes at the expense of some nuance; broad-brush characterizations are recurrent and attributable to the book's effort to capture important subjects in tight spaces. Of particular note in this regard, Walter E. A. van Beek's chapter on the tensions between global cultural diversity and the LDS Church's quest for acultural consistency provides intriguing insights (such as those regarding the clashing implications of job rotation in LDS congregations or bridewealth in Cameroonian marriages), but does so on the basis of sweeping synchronic generalizations about “African” and “Deseret” cultures. Sometimes the authors enlist these limitations to their rhetorical advantage, as when Claudia Bushman—with a wink at her readers—playfully essentializes the California cool of West Coast Mormons. Wilfried Decoo frankly acknowledges the limitations of space and uses his essay to call for more textured research on a list of important questions, pointing Mormon studies scholars in a variety of promising directions. On balance, the anthology's effort to combine brevity and substance generates more benefits than liabilities.
In some cases, authors use this opportunity to offer digests of work that they have published in fuller forms elsewhere. In a precis of his excellent recent monograph, Paul Reeve demonstrates his capacity to let creatively analyzed images of racialized Mormonism make up for the thousands of words this volume could not contain. Jan Shipps summarizes a lifetime of ethnographic research into a ten page essay on “Mormon Ethnicity as Reality and Metaphor.” Also drawing from their own past publications, the sociologists Gary and Gordon Shepherd use synopses of their books to make a concentrated case for the importance of social-scientific methods in Mormon studies. Their argument is echoed from a complementary angle by the economist Michael McBride, who introduces readers to the ways rational choice and game theories might be applied to Mormon phenomena. More ambivalent about “generalization” than McBride, Richard Bushman nonetheless draws upon an early encounter with Mauss to acknowledge the ways in which particularizing historians can and do benefit from the universalizing theories of other scholars.
Even as the volume repeatedly calls for the methodological diversification of Mormon studies, some of the essays also convey the field's ongoing attention to the particularities of time, place, and person. Shinji Takagi's essay on the Church's missionary efforts in early twentieth-century Japan places its explanatory weight on the specific cultural contexts of the moment. Quincy Newell quickly sketches out the distinctive Mormon experience of Jane Manning James to argue—compellingly—that the lives of Saints of color take on new aspects when we choose to look with them rather than at them, that is, when we try to understand their world from their perspective rather than reducing them to the objects of others’ gazing. In the book's concluding section, essays on Mormon autobiography by Levi Peterson and Jana Reiss underscore the Latter-day Saints’ enduring struggle to draw broad lessons from the personal stories of individual agents. Peterson does so through a systematic summary of the literary theorist Wayne Booth's memoir, while Reiss skillfully moves across the sweep of Mormon history to frame the memoirists’ tasks of defending their stories, promoting their visions, and finding themselves.
Far from merely suggestive or reflective, the collection makes a number of substantive contributions to open scholarly debates. In the book's most historiographically significant essay, Matthew Bowman reinterprets the LDS Church's momentous mid-twentieth-century decision to integrate its various organizational centers into a more rigidly vertical structure known as Priesthood Correlation. Bowman challenges the traditional interpretation of this move—which characterizes it as a reactionary betrayal of the Church's nineteenth-century dedication to spiritual freedom—to argue that those driving this change felt multiple imperatives compelling their decisions: a return to the Restoration's founding vision, the salvific importance of personal character development, and a Progressive-Era conviction that institutional rationality was essential to both. By taking seriously the soteriological commitments that shape church policy, Bowman provides us with a bracingly fresh take on one of the most important chapters of Mormonism's twentieth-century history. Like others in this volume, Bowman's fast-paced revisionist account raises as many questions as it answers, but its bold reinterpretations and compelling lines of argument evince the sharp scholarship of contemporary Mormon studies.
