Item Detail
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11630
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2
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0
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English
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Making Mormonism : A Critical and Historical Analysis of Cultural Formation
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University of California, Berkeley
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Mormonism began as a resistance movement opposed to the capitalist transformation of the rural northeastern United States in the early nineteenth century. It survived and flourished because it created a new ground of Being upon which to base its resistance. The combined stresses of revolutionary economic change, social dislocation, political turmoil, and religious anxiety created an unlivable situation for the early Mormons, and drove them to an awareness of the cultural construction of reality. As a means of resisting the radical reconstruction of its world, early Mormonism set itself apart from American culture through a strategy of appropriation and reversal, producing itself by successfully coopting the means through which American culture replicated its own constructions of reality, linguistic representation, historical identity, and political ideology. In the process, Mormonism addressed the basic tasks of cultural formation, and emerged from American society as a fundamentally different culture, complete with its own nationalistic aspirations for territorial sovereignty. The fact of this difference generated a broad and intense struggle between Mormonism and the United States, as each sought to imprint its reality onto the material plane of North America. The terms of this confrontation determined the trajectory of Mormonism's institutional development throughout the nineteenth century, and eventually forced the Mormons to accept the superior power of the American State. Because the Mormons grounded their ability to resist domination in an alternative reality whose essential features remained intact, the coerced accommodation of Mormonism to American culture was not completely successful from the non-Mormon point of view. The United States would not tolerate the unified expression of Mormonism's potential for economic and ideological disruption, but it allowed Mormonism to exist in isolated fragments. The Mormons found that by organizing simultaneously as a church and as a business corporation, they could perpetuate their movement and continue to work toward the goal that had fueled their movement since its inception--establishing a literal kingdom of God on earth." [Author's abstract]