west of the moon

show-me.

For all that it sounds like I've been whining about these trips, I want to be very clear about this: I love doing this kind of research.  The boxes and the folders and the reading rooms.  Doing it with a digital camera is new to me, but the principle is still the same.  I mentioned my mother's "history detectives" comment because there's a way in which this does feel like detective work, or maybe more like archaeology--carefully sifting through the accumulation of history to find bits of evidence, bits that can later be strung together into the skeleton of your book or article.  I can't push this analogy much further before it snaps, but there's at least something to it.

This week, as you may have guessed from comments on other entries, I'm in Missouri, at UM - Rolla.  (Formerly the Missouri School of Mining and Metallurgy, soon to be Missouri Science and Tech.)  As it turns out, I've been through Rolla before.  When Matt moved to California, we drove out from Boston together, and on Day Three (St. Louis to Oklahoma City) we passed through here on I-44.  I only remembered this on Monday evening, after leaving St. Louis.  Once you get clear of the city, it's a beautiful drive, gentle hills and trees in these hyper-saturated greens.  The last time I came this way, it was also summer, so I don't know what this area is like in the colder months, but I imagine all those trees and fields do something interesting in the fall.  It looks as though I'll have most of tomorrow free, and I have some touristing planned.

The archive experience I described in my previous entry isn't a universal one--it's the most common experience I've had, but there's a second type as well.  The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is a lovely, well-funded, relatively high-traffic archive.  (Anyone who ever doubted that archives and historical libraries can be high-traffic should have seen the crowd at the Bancroft Library before it closed for renovations.  People were queued up for an hour or more just to get in, and making reservations days in advance.)  Here at Rolla, they have the second type--running on a shoestring budget, jammed into whatever space the university can spare, staffed by a dedicated but under-supported staff.  (In all of my experience with these lower-traffic places, I've only encountered one archivist who was anything short of absolutely wonderful.  Archivists are the unsung heroes of the history profession.)   There aren't nearly as many procedures here, and I've been basically working at a desk in the archive office, surrounded by stacks of file boxes.  I've been picking up some informal history of the institution from the archivist, and a little bit of workplace gossip, along with my documentary evidence.

Rumor has it that Rolla has very little to offer by way of nightlife, but that's okay.  I'm spending afternoons and evenings locked away in my hotel room, organizing my archive files and writing up my finding reports.  Entertainment would be wasted on me.

history detectives.

Archives work is tiring.  I suppose it doesn't have to be, but the type of work I've been doing for the last week certainly was.  The first step is easy--go through the finding aid (a compiled index and description of the collections) and identify which material you want to look at, and then fill out request slips for all of the boxes.  I'm sure that every researcher has her own process, but I like to queue up all of my call slips before I start getting boxes. 

The historians (and librarians) among you (oh my patient readers) know this, but for the rest of you, a bit of explanation.  Archives and special collections don't work like normal libraries--because they're collecting material that's generally unique and irreplaceable, they have to be much more careful about access and use.  Most of the material is stored in file boxes, processed into separate folders, and kept in special storage areas.  Researchers work under relatively controlled conditions--usually a separate room, with restrictions on what can be brought in to the room.  Most often, you're not allowed to bring anything other than pencils, loose sheets of paper, a computer, and a camera.  (The camera is a new addition; as recently as when I started graduate school, most archives weren't allowing people to bring either digital cameras or handheld text scanners.)  Some archives, like the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, actually search your materials when you leave, to make sure you're not (intentionally or accidentally) taking documents with you.  Once you're set up at your table, they'll bring boxes to you, one box at a time.  You can only remove one folder from the box at a time, you have to keep the materials flat on the table, and if the material is particularly old or delicate, they'll bring special foam stands or make you wear cotton gloves. 

On this trip, I didn't have any material that required any special handling--the project I'm working on (not mine, I'm helping a colleague) focuses on roughly 1950-1980, so none of the documents were that fragile.  Because it's not my research project, though, my job was to collect as much documentary evidence as possible, and that meant photographing documents.  This is the first time I've done archives work this way, and I was a little skeptical, but it actually works pretty well.  I've been photographing on the second-best resolution my camera does, and the images come out clear enough to read without any real difficulty. 

By way of explaining why it's so tiring, though, let me step you through the process.  When the archivist puts the file box on my desk, I stand up, open the box, and start reading the folder headers.  When I find a folder that looks promising, I put a placeholder card in the box, take out the folder, and look at the contents.  (Sometimes I sit down again to read it, sometimes I read it standing up.)  If the contents aren't actually relevant to the project, I replace the folder and keep looking.  (This happens pretty often--the folder descriptions in the finding aids are an invaluable start, but you can't know until you actually see the documents whether they're what you want or not.)  If the contents are relevant, I photograph them.  This involves standing over the folder, trying to cast as little shadow on the page as possible, centering the document in the viewfinder, taking the picture, turning the page, centering the next document, taking the picture, etc.  If the folder has a lot of those onionskin papers, the kind people used for keeping carbon copies of typed correspondence, then I probably have to insert a blank white sheet behind the page, to avoid visual bleed from the page behind.  If the pages are double-sided, I have to keep flipping and reorienting the pages.  If the document is a bound volume of some kind, I have to do all sorts of messing around with trying to gently prop it open without damaging it.  (Most archives keep special bookweights around to help with this, but it's really hard to weight a book open without obscuring the text on the page.)  When I've taken all the pictures, I sit back down, log all of the photographs on my computer (not downloading from the camera, just making a record of what I've just photographed) including the box call number and the folder title.   Then I return the folder to the box and look for the next folder.  When I've finished with all the folders in the box, I close it up, carry it over to the reshelving area, and give the next call slip to the archivist.

With all the standing up and sitting down, and the carrying boxes, and the taking pictures--over two thousand photgraphs taken in three days--I don't know, maybe I haven't actually made a case for this being physically tiring.  But it really was.  (Especially because I was on a tight schedule, and didn't feel justified really taking any breaks--half an hour or so for lunch, but otherwise I was working more-or-less continually from 9am to 5pm.)  In the evenings, I had a little bit of additional work to do, wrapping up and summarizing and correlating the research, but that's all I managed to do with myself.  That and watching bad television in my hotel room; I was too exhausted to do anything else. 

(The title of this post came from a conversation with my mother--I was explaining all of this to her a few days ago, and she said that it sounded like Cold Case.  "That's what they do when they start a case,"  she said.  "They take the box down from the shelf and start looking through it.  You're a history detective, I guess."

Greetings from Ann Arbor!

The traditional hotel-room-window view.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

So soon after returning from my last trip, I'm on the road again. This time to Ann Arbor--I'm working as a research specialist for the next couple of weeks, doing some quick (and probably fairly intensive) archives work.

neutral point of view.

One of the books I'm working through at the moment is Mystics and Messiahs by Philip Jenkins.  Five or six years ago, I read an article Jenkins wrote for The Atlantic Monthly about global Christianity; specifically, the article looked at the different types of Christianity proliferating (and thriving) in the Global South, pointing out that the face of religion internationally is not what you might expect if you're only extrapolating off of what you can see in Europe and the US.  I was reminded of the article recently, went looking for some books by Jenkins, and came up with Mystics and Messiahs, a history of cults, sects, and fringe religious groups in the United States.  (Although it turns out I was mistaken--I checked to see if the Atlantic had the article on their website, and in the process I've figured out that I was thinking of a different article.)

I'm enjoying reading this, but I'm also finding it troubling, or maybe just slightly irritating.  One of his major arguments is that fringe religious groups attract media or government attention far out of proportion to their actual size or importance, and that the portrayals of these groups in popular culture rely more on stereotypes than reality.  Cult persecution as a mainstream exercise in moral panic, as it were.  By and large, I'm finding it a persuasive argument, but I keep having these twinges while reading, the occasional annoyance at what appears to be a blanket dismissal of all anti-cult arguments.  It's a problem of style more than content--one of the twinges came from a statement (I can't find the sentence at the moment, but I'll come back and update this when I do find it) about how some new group was subject to the same overblown accusations of trickery and confidence scams.  The way it was phrased, the clear implication was that these are empty accusations, but just a chapter or two earlier he'd spent a great deal of effort cataloging all the ways in which many of the religious sects in the early twentieth century actually were confidence scams, or at least profit machines with a light religious gloss. 

The problem I'm having is most clearly illustrated by Jenkins' description of the conflicts in the 1940s and 1950s between the US government and the United Effort Order group, based out of Short Creek.  Here's an excerpt:

"Among the main victims [of increased federal anti-cult activity] were the Mormon fundamentalists, who had resisted the church's abandonment of polygamy and maintained separate colonies in remote areas.  The major sect was the United Effort Order, which had its communal headquarters in Short Creek, on the Arizona-Utah border; it claimed some twenty-five hundred members.  Though these "cultists" were usually ignored, there were sporadic investigations and prosecutions, beginning in 1935 when welfare claims from the area exposed a system of highly unusual family structures.  The legal situation was sensitive because community girls generally married at ages much younger than had become the American norm, so sect activities were portrayed in terms of a sexual threat to children. ...

"The [anti-polygamist] movement culminated in 1953 when Arizona authorities undertook a massive sweep aimed at eliminating the main traditionalist center of Short Creek.  ...  The news media paraded the now-classic charges of cult abuses, stressing "child brides" and "white slavery," and promising to save the "numerous women who were forced into the cult's bizarre system against their will."  Ultimately, over a hundred defendents stood trial in a mass prosecution that was billed as an epic cult trial.  Still, the purge failed to eliminate the practice of polygamy, and the harrowing images of children being dragged from caring if unorthodox families created a backlash."

That backlash essentially guaranteed that the federal government would adopt a relatively hands-off policy towards the group at Short Creek, now called Colorado City, and other similar communities.  Colorado City figures promimently in Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's book about Mormon fundamentalists.  One of the stories Krakauer tells is that of Flora Jessop and her sister Ruby.

"[Flora] Jessop grew up in Colorado City as one of twenty-eight siblings in a polygamous family.  When she was fourteen she filed sexual abuse charges against the family patriarch, her fundamentalist father, but the judge presumed she was lying and dismissed the case, after which leaders of the FLDS Church confined her to the home of a relative for two years.  ...  When she was sixteen, church authorities gave her a choice: "They told me I had to either marry this guy they'd picked for me -- one of my dad's brother's sons -- or be committed to the state mental hospital," says Jessop.  She opted for the arranged marriage and then fled both the marriage and Colorado City at the first opportunity." 

Krakauer goes on to talk about Ruby Jessop, who was forced to marry at the age of fourteen, raped by her new husband, and kept locked up in an uncle's house when she was caught trying to leave Colorado City.  By the time Flora was able to convince the state child protective services to take the case seriously, Ruby was insisting (when interviewed in front of her family members) that she was happy and nothing was wrong. 

It sounds sensationalist, pairing the Jessops with Jenkins' analysis of the 1953 raids.  I know that it sounds like an appeal to emotion rather than to reasoned historical discussion, but that's almost my point.  I don't doubt Jenkins' larger argument, that the public reactions to fringe or cult groups are often based on something other than the reality of life within those groups.  Not all groups are as bad or as dangerous as they're portrayed to be.  But I think there's a balance to be struck, between deflating the moral panic and acknowledging the actual negative aspects.  The Krakauer book is a good comparison here, because one of the things it does brilliantly is shine a light on some of the darker aspects of the FLDS (and of the history of both the FLDS and the Mormon mainstream it branched off from) in a way that critiques and analyzes but pulls back just shy of outright moral condemnation.  It's almost as though Jenkins is trying so hard to not pass judgment that he steps back from acknowledging all of the relevant facts.

This is unfair, what I'm doing here.  (And not just because Krakauer, doing a mixture of journalism and history, was free of the kind of stylistic constraints that Jenkins, doing academic history, no doubt felt bound by.  Those stylistic constraints are themselves the subject of another post, someday.)  Jenkins is trying to do something very specific in his book--he's not interested in the darker aspects of the groups he's studying, except insofar as those darker aspects relate to the public perception.  And it's not a bad book at all--it's actually really interesting.  I'm picking up a lot of great information about spiritualist trends in the United States, some fascinating details about things like the Foursquare Gospel and the early theology of Nation of Islam and the context of those yoga sessions I'd heard about in William James's Cambridge.  If you look just at the point that Jenkins was trying to make, the book is a success.  It's not his fault that I sometimes want to be reading a different book, one that does a different kind of analysis.

Or is it really that unfair of me?  Look, I bring topics to the weblog when I want to discuss them.  I don't have a clean and articulate conclusion--I don't have a position paper, I just have a set of questions.  And here, the questions have to do with what the author's responsibilities are in a situation like this.  The real focus of the book is the public portrayal of cult groups, not the actual beliefs and practices of cult groups.  But I'm troubled by the way in which he seems to be ignoring (or just downplaying) certain practices that must, I would think, be relevant to a reasoned analysis of the public portrayal.  To go back to the Short Creek example: the federal government accused the Short Creek community of child sexual abuse and other kinds of "deviant" or illegal sexual practices.  Throughout the book, Jenkins talks about incident after incident where some fringe or cult group was accused, either by the government or the media, of deviant or illegal sexual practices.  In terms of his broader argument, he's pretty persuasive on the point that the accusations of sexual deviance are just part-and-parcel of the public fear of non-mainstream religious groups.  In the portrayal of the Short Creek raids, it's as though he's (implicitly) asserting that the accusation themselves are what's interesting and important, that the truth or falsity of the accusations is irrelevant. 

I think it might actually be very relevant, though--if you accuse someone of something that isn't true, then the accusation probably speaks mainly to your own situation.  If you accuse someone of something that -is- true, though, then your accusation might or might not be a reflection of your situation.  If the people at Short Creek really were engaging in the sexual abuse of children, then the fact of the accusations might be meaningless in terms of historical analysis. 

Another side of the problem: Krakauer and Jenkins are both, on some level, doing the same thing.  They're taking something that's generally accepted to be "strange" (for Krakauer, Mormon fundamentalism; for Jenkins, religious fringe groups in general) and analyzing how closely it relates to something "normal" (in both cases, mainstream religion in general).   In the case of the Krakauer book, he uses the juxtaposition to make the "normal" seem a little more strange--the courtroom chapter, with the back-and-forth as to whether self-styled fundamentalist prophet (and murderer) Ron Lafferty could be considered legally insane on the basis of his religious beliefs, has some of the most skillful analysis of the relationship between religious and secular belief that I've seen in a while.  In contrast, Jenkins is trying to use the juxtaposition to make the "strange" more normal, and while I see the value in that, I'm not sure it's always the right move.  It's one of those rhetorical moves that I think is designed to demonstrate objectivity, but it's a false objectivity--presenting everything as equally "normal" does, in fact, involve an implicit value judgement. 

What I Did With My Summer Vacation, Part I.

Somewhere back a few weeks ago, I passed a milestone of sorts--the end of my first year teaching.  I almost missed it, in the middle of everything else I was trying to keep track of.  Presented for your amusement and edification, a brief (and certainly incomplete) accounting of what I've been up to in the last six weeks or so.

• Wrapping up the semester, academically.  I've been really impressed with my students this year.  I see it more clearly with my seminar students, because I know them better, and I've seen more of their work up-close; my seminar students turned in a set of well-written, well-researched senior thesis papers, each of which was a pleasure to advise.  There weren't as many opportunities to interact with the students in the lecture class, but they asked great questions in class, which goes a long way towards making the whole classroom experience more enjoyable.
• Attending Commencement, as a member of the faculty.  More than just a great excuse to wear the regalia, it was a great opportunity to really feel like a member of the community.  I met the parents of some of my graduating seniors, got to say goodbye (and good luck) to some grad-school colleagues who are moving on to other things.
• A few days of vacation with friends in Madison.  First a couple of days with T. in his gorgeous condo near the capital building, then a couple of days with Karen and her family in their lovely home.  (The latter being the source of the Battleship story.)  I had two different kinds of house-envy that week; I also had a great time, welcoming and relaxing. 
• WisCon!  Wonderful as always, and thought-provoking too.  Barring catastrophe, I expect to post more about it in the next week or two.
• A few days of vacation with my family.  I had a chance to meet my new cousin (second cousin?) Sophia, and to spend some time with my best friend from high school. 
• A wedding, in upstate New York.  Matt's cousin got married, in a beautiful historic old chapel, and we had a fun couple of days with his family. 
• A joyful reunion with my apartment.  I know I've said mean things about it, but after nearly three weeks living out of a suitcase, I was genuinely thrilled to see this place again.

It's left me a little bit exhausted, and I've been sleeping a lot since I got back, trying to sort out the email and paperwork that accumulated while I was on the road.  I'm starting to get back into a normal routine again, which is nice.  (Just in time to set off on some business travel, week after next!  More on that later.)