abstract: The Mormon Plan of Salvation explains that people originate in a heavenly state and are sent to Earth in a physical form, where they aspire to lead good lives and gain wisdom in order to reach glory in the afterlife. The dance piece "From There to Here to There: Whose Journey is it Anyway?" explores each stage in the Plan of Salvation at a different location, requiring dancers and audience to travel both metaphorically and physically. The piece incorporates several kinds of journeys: the collective journey of humankind based on the Plan of Salvation, the dancers' own journeys, and audience's journey as they watch the piece, and my journey as an artist. In the process of making this piece, I refined my identity as a 21st century Mormon artist interested in conveying religious messages through the traditionally secular art form of postmodern dance. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Dance 2011

Although historians generally view early Mormonism as a movement focused on restoring Christianity to its pristine New Testament state, in the Mormon movement’s first phase (1827-28) it was actually focused on restoring Judaism to its pristine “Old Testament” state and reconstituting the Jewish nation as it had existed before the Exile. Mormonism’s first scripture, “the Book of Lehi” (the first part of the Book of Mormon), disappeared shortly after its manuscript was produced. But evidence about its contents shows it to have had restoring Judaism and the Jewish nation to their pre-Exilic condition to have been one of its major themes. And statements by early Mormons at the time the Book of Lehi manuscript was produced show they were focused on “confirming the Old Testament” and “gathering” the Jews to an American New Jerusalem. This Judaic emphasis in earliest Mormonism appears to have been shaped by a set of movements in the same time and place (New York State in the 1820s) that I am calling “American proto-Zionism,” which aimed to colonize Jews in the United States. The early Mormon movement can be considered part of American proto-Zionism and was influenced by developments in early nineteenth century American Judaism.

The memory of past violence in Missouri and Illinois during the 1830s and 1840s shaped how members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Latter-day Saints or Mormons) saw themselves, their persecutors, and the states and the nation where the violence occurred. This thesis explores the role of collective memory of violence in forming Mormon identities and images of place from 1838, when governor Lilburn W. Boggs expelled the Latter-day Saints from Missouri, to 1858, with the conclusion of the Utah War. I argue that Latter-day Saint authors during these two decades used the memory of persecution to create and reinforce a communal identity as a means of resistance against oppression. The memory of persecution led Mormon writers to alter their image of the United States as a land of liberty, recasting the nation as a place of oppression, and coming to see the American West, in particular the Salt Lake Valley, as a new land of liberty. The thesis contains four chapters. Chapter I provides historical and theoretical background. Chapter II is an analysis of the martyrological tropes utilized by Mormon essayists from 1838 to 1858 to construct a group identity based on the memory of shared suffering and resistance against oppression. I show that remembering persecution allowed these writers to portray themselves as members of an elect community that included biblical prophets and ancient Christians. In turn, Mormon authors also represented their persecutors as part of a community of God's enemies, upon whom God would bring vengeance, either in this life or the next. Chapter III explores how Latter-day Saint essayists used the memory of persecution to form images of place. Although the Mormons believed that the nation was a divinely-established country based on religious freedom, portraying the violence against them as religious persecution led Latter-day Saint authors to discursively cast the deserts and mountains of the Great Basin as their new refuge. In Chapter IV I briefly examine ways that the memory of persecution shaped Mormon-non-Mormon interactions in the American West as a means to summarize the themes introduced in the thesis.

The purposes of this study were (1) to learn how many persons who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were blind, (2) to determine the social and economic conditions of these blind members, and (3) to learn what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has done to promote employment of blind members through its Welfare Program, and how this was accomplished.

This dissertation is a qualitative and interpretive project aimed at understanding the historical relationship between new media and religion. My primary research question asks how religious institutions handle the excitement and threat of new technology. To answer this question I conduct a series of case studies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS/Mormon) relationship with three of the most important twentieth-century media: emerging radio, television, and Internet technologies. More specifically, I analyze how these electronic media were understood through their organizational histories, how they were talked about in their novelty and transitional states, and their religious institutionalization over time. This dissertation argues that Mormon media are best understood through the concept of Zion: a sacred city and a holy people. As a social, cultural, theological, and material endeavor, Zion is impossible without modern technology. The history of Mormon media is a history of a people’s perpetual attempts to be in the world but not of the world--to stand apart in uniqueness and unity while yet remaining close enough to promote positive change. This is the paradox of Zion, and the paradox of twentieth-century media: both rely on the very things they seek to transcend. It is through media that Mormonism was founded, struggles, and thrives. Through case studies of radio, television, and the Internet it is clear that media function as the material and metaphysical infrastructure of the religion and the interface through which Mormonism positions itself in relation to the world. This dissertation argues that understanding media, and ultimately ourselves by extension, is a process of discovery and creation guided by experimentation, trial and error, entrepreneurial pragmatism, and improvisation. Mormonism teaches that understanding media requires discipline, work, and faith. Media are fundamentally agents of compromise.

Since Mark Leone’s landmark 1979 study Roots of Modern Mormonism, a scholarly consensus has emerged that a key element of Mormon distinctiveness stems from one’s subscription to an alternate narrative or experience of history. In the past generation, scholarship on Mormon historical thought has addressed important issues arising from these insights from anthropological and sociological perspectives. These perspectives have joined a rich and venerable controversial literature seeking to “debunk” Mormon narratives, apologetic scholarship asserting their epistemic harmony or superiority, as well as fault-finding scholarship that constructs differences in Mormon historical thinking as a problem that must be solved. The lacuna that this project begins to fill is the lack of scholarship specifically in the field of intellectual history describing the various alternate narratives of the past that have been and are being developed by Mormons, their contents, the methodologies by which they are produced and the theories of historical causation that they entail. This dissertation examines nine chronica (historical narratives and associated theories of history) generated by Mormon thinkers during the twentieth century. Following Philip Barlow’s definition of “Mormon” as any religious group that includes the Book of Mormon in its canon, this project examines five chronica generated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism’s 14-million-strong Utah-based denomination), two generated by the Community of Christ (Mormonism’s 175,000-strong Missouri-based denomination) and two generated by independent Mormon fundamentalists (polygamists), one in Utah and the other in Mexico. In so doing it examines the thought of B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, W. Cleon Skousen, Ogden Kraut, Margarito Bautista, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson and a variety of CoC writers such as Harold Velt, Roy Cheville, Little Pigeon and F. Edward Butterworth. Following the work of Leone and Jan Shipps, it engages ethnographic perspectives on unique elements of Mormon temporal phenomenology and its relationship with ritual practice. It also examines how national political and religious movements interpenetrate with Mormonism to condition different understandings of the past; the interactions of Mormon understandings of the past with Mexican revolutionary nationalism and indigenismo, Cold War anti-communism, the 1970s New Left, Christian fundamentalism and Gilded Age progressivism are concurrently examined. Similarly, Mormon interactions with various epistemes and methodologies are canvassed, including New Testament criticism, cultural anthropology, conspiracy theory, medieval typology and the Cambridge myth and ritual school. Ultimately, a set of religious communities that prioritize subscription to a narrative of Israelite immigration to the Americas and pre-Columbian Christian history of the Western Hemisphere, including the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus Christ, has had to reach a special accommodation with history. This project is a study of the diverse accommodations that have been achieved, their epistemic bases and their sustainability in light of the different forms of time consciousness that underpin them.

Since Mark Leone’s landmark 1979 study Roots of Modern Mormonism, a scholarly consensus has emerged that a key element of Mormon distinctiveness stems from one’s subscription to an alternate narrative or experience of history. In the past generation, scholarship on Mormon historical thought has addressed important issues arising from these insights from anthropological and sociological perspectives. These perspectives have joined a rich and venerable controversial literature seeking to “debunk” Mormon narratives, apologetic scholarship asserting their epistemic harmony or superiority, as well as fault-finding scholarship that constructs differences in Mormon historical thinking as a problem that must be solved. The lacuna that this project begins to fill is the lack of scholarship specifically in the field of intellectual history describing the various alternate narratives of the past that have been and are being developed by Mormons, their contents, the methodologies by which they are produced and the theories of historical causation that they entail. This dissertation examines nine chronica (historical narratives and associated theories of history) generated by Mormon thinkers during the twentieth century. Following Philip Barlow’s definition of “Mormon” as any religious group that includes the Book of Mormon in its canon, this project examines five chronica generated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism’s 14-million-strong Utah-based denomination), two generated by the Community of Christ (Mormonism’s 175,000-strong Missouri-based denomination) and two generated by independent Mormon fundamentalists (polygamists), one in Utah and the other in Mexico. In so doing it examines the thought of B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, W. Cleon Skousen, Ogden Kraut, Margarito Bautista, Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson and a variety of CoC writers such as Harold Velt, Roy Cheville, Little Pigeon and F. Edward Butterworth. Following the work of Leone and Jan Shipps, it engages ethnographic perspectives on unique elements of Mormon temporal phenomenology and its relationship with ritual practice. It also examines how national political and religious movements interpenetrate with Mormonism to condition different understandings of the past; the interactions of Mormon understandings of the past with Mexican revolutionary nationalism and indigenismo, Cold War anti-communism, the 1970s New Left, Christian fundamentalism and Gilded Age progressivism are concurrently examined. Similarly, Mormon interactions with various epistemes and methodologies are canvassed, including New Testament criticism, cultural anthropology, conspiracy theory, medieval typology and the Cambridge myth and ritual school. Ultimately, a set of religious communities that prioritize subscription to a narrative of Israelite immigration to the Americas and pre-Columbian Christian history of the Western Hemisphere, including the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus Christ, has had to reach a special accommodation with history. This project is a study of the diverse accommodations that have been achieved, their epistemic bases and their sustainability in light of the different forms of time consciousness that underpin them.

This is a descriptive account of Mormonism in a Maori community in New Zealand. Though this millennial movement has had a deep impact on the community, elements of the traditional religion and social structure continue to function, so that behaviour may be legitimized by either of two cultural systems. While the chapters on church organization, belief and ritual, and the teaching of values focus upon Mormonism, traditional aspects, of culture and society have been given some attention and contradictions between the two systems are shown in some detail. An attempt has been made to demonstrate that specific crises in the community are leading to a progressive acceptance of Mormonism. The Church makes less drastic demands upon the Maori than the dominant white society, but these demands seem to provide for the minimum of social change needed by the people of Whangaruru to cope adequately with the socio-economic problems that are facing them. The Maori Mormon combines in his self-concept the ideals of rapid modernization and of sacral linkage with tribal ancestors. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

A group of oil paintings completed in partial requirement of my MFA degree is discussed. The paintings are on wood panels and are the result of a combination of old master techniques of under-painting and glazing and more contemporary approaches to the painting process. Each painting represents a particular concept or event from Mormon theology; whereas, the pictorial structure is inspired by Medieval manuscript painting. Thus, this body of work is a synthesis between two worldviews existing centuries apart, yet sharing certain core values and beliefs.

This study was proposed to analyze articles referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the national magazine press. A "symbol coding" form of content analysis was used, in which each pertinent word or name was categorized, counted as indulgent or deprivatory and classified as to the thematic nature of the text.