Keeping the Sacred: Structured Silence in the Enactment of Priesthood Authority, Gendered Worship, and Sacramental Kinship in Mormonism by Bradley H. Kramer A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Edward Webb Keane, Jr., Chair Associate Professor Matthew Hull Professor Paul C. Johnson Professor Andrew J. Shryock For Neal, whose example of generosity, courage, intellectual rigor, and humilty has constantly inspired me toward this goal. And for Tracey, whose years of work, sacrifice, and never-ending patience have made this work possible in a degree that is impossible to overstate (and who, frankly, deserves better). ii Acknowledgments Special thanks go to my advisor, Webb Keane, and the other members of my dissertation committee: Andrew Shryock, Matthew Hull, and Paul Johnson. Their rigorous feedback and generous patience at every stage of the process have been invaluable to the work I have done. I am also immeasurably grateful for the instruction, mentoring, and general encouragement of countless professors, including but not limited to: Judith Irvine (who, in addition to teaching some of the most illuminating courses I've had the privilege of attending, graciously served on my preliminary examination committee), Bruce Mannheim (who fought for me), David Knowlton (who inspired my academic path and guided my early steps as an anthropologist), and Elizabeth Borgwardt (who pushed me hard and made me believe I could). I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge a debt of gratitude for the administrative staff members who have with saintly patience shepherded me through the graduate school process. Laurie Marx and Debbie Fitch, thank you for your often thankless work. A number of scholars of Mormonism have also given informal feedback and suggestions. There are too many to list here by name, but I would be horribly out of line not to at least mention Daymon Smith, Kristine Haglund, Rick Turley, Steve Taysom, Carol Lynn Pearson, and Joanna Brooks. I am indebted to their insights and grateful to count them as friends. Of course it goes without saying that I am grateful to all those who took the time to speak to me and answer my questions. Your stories, observations, and explanations drove this work, and without your participation there would be nothing for me to encumber with anthropological jargon. Finally, deepest gratitude to my family, most especially to my spouse, Tracey. In addition to shouldering the sacrifices so familiar to the spouses of graduate students with grace and aplomb (and earning her own degree in the process), she has been an invaluable interlocutor throughout the research and writing process—listening, digesting, pushing back, discarding, rewording, reframing, and gently translating into coherence virtually every idea I have had. She is a generous and necessary partner, and my vanity alone prevents me from listing her as co- author. iii Table of Contents Dedication......................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................iii Chapter 1: Introduction and Notes on Formal Theory..............................................................1 Part I—The Temple Chapter 2: Sacred, Not Secret....................................................................................................14 Chapter 3: “Those With Ears To Hear”....................................................................................49 Part II—Gender in Time and Eternity Chapter 4: Heavenly Mother......................................................................................................77 Chapter 5: Heavenly Mothers..................................................................................................115 Part III—Mormonism as Kinship Chapter 6: Toward a Theory of Mormon Kinship.................................................................148 Conclusion: Some Theoretical Gestures on Semiotics and Religious Modernity................199 Works Cited.................................................................................................................................217 iv Chapter 1: Introduction and Notes on Formal Theory This dissertation is as much a product of Mormonism as it is of Anthropology. Ethnographic research and analysis has a rich and storied history of pressing the particularity of specific communities into the service of more universal, general, cross-cultural theorizing and claims, and this very much draws upon and continues that tradition. But there is more at work in the genesis of this project than the application of anthropological theory to Mormon field data. As a practicing Mormon raised in the LDS Church, my own awareness of the potency of the sacred—and of the secrecy surrounding it—is part of what drove me to study anthropology in the first place. Which is to say, this project was conceived, executed, and written as much by a native as by an anthropologist. Anthropology as a discipline and a global enterprise has its own vexed historical relationship with evangelical Christianity (and the evangelizing project's close ties and shared heritage with the global spread of colonial power). Christian and colonial (and anti-christian and anti-colonial) anthropologies have intersected and interbred, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes violently, and often unwittingly, to produce the particular anthropology that counts as disciplinary Anthropology today. The hope here is that my own offering, with its own fraught genealogy, is a fruitful one. My research explores the following questions: what role do communicative practices, strategies, and taboos oriented around sacred objects, spaces, and texts play in organizing social relations and social realities within strongly-defined religious communities? How are the forms 1 of social value constituted by the practices under consideration channeled into creating and supporting other salient cultural formations like kinship, bureaucracy, and capital? What is the relationship between semiotic and social life—between, for example, secrecy and holiness, between insider speaking registers and kinshipping practices, between corporate organization and models of social personhood, between language about gender and the semiotic enactment of gender difference, between dress standards and transcendent religious experience? The capacity (and persistent tendency) of language for self-referentiality (what Agha, 2007, calls reflexivity)—the fact that language-use inevitably refers not just to the world but to language itself, to interactions, interactants, and interactional contexts—makes language an unusually powerful and exquisite tool for shaping and contesting our social world. The irreducible indexicality of language and language-use means that our actual semiotic interactions implicate and are implicated by the often power-saturated nexus of social relationships we inhabit, in the same way that the semantic properties of our words both refer to and draw meaning from the semiotic economy of our shared, structured lexicon. This dissertation explores these dynamics within two Mormon speech-communities (described below) and also proposes a new heuristic model or working cross-cultural “definition” of religion in expressly semiotic terms. This model will place the theoretical work of Durkheim—especially his claims about the role played by the sacred/profane binary partitioning of the world in the constituting of human sociality—into conversation with more recent trends in American linguistic anthropology. Rather than asking what makes an act religious, I ask how it is that we make certain of our acts legible to others as religious acts. The dissertation presents Mormonism as a case-study which challenges and problematizes some key orthodoxies in the social scientific study of religion, particularly those drawn from and built upon Weber's secularization thesis. 2 The dissertation is based on ethnographic and archival research conducted from 2011- 2013 in Utah and Missouri with members of The Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite) and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The Cutlerites are a small schismatic offshoot, distinct from the mainline LDS Church in Utah. In addition to sharing a “restoration” heritage with the LDS (Mormons refer to Joseph Smith's revelations and founding of a church as The Restoration), the Cutlerites share distinctive features of worship, particularly secretive ceremonial rites, with the Utah Church. Such religious forms are largely absent from other restoration Mormon churches, but are the basis for an unusually close proverbial kinship between these two groups as compared with other branches of Mormonism. Conversely, the Cutlerites typify the opposite pole of a sociological or demographic spectrum from Latter-day Saints. In contrast to the growing (roughly 15-million members), globalizing, corporate, highly capitalized LDS Church in Utah, the Cutlerites count fewer than one dozen members, have only one church-house, and are all close blood relatives. These strong similarities and stark differences formed the basis for fruitful comparative study. The analytic focus is not sacred discourse per se but discourse about the sacred in Mormonism, and the role played