The Masque of Undergrounder and Spy : Ubiquitous Addressivity, Dependent Social Roles, and Panopticism among Nineteenth Century Mormon Polygamists
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
2009
19
2
Arlington, VA
American Anthropological Association
2009
246-265
"Drawing on archival materials, I reconstruct the converging vectors that triangulated the modern Mormon person, whose mind could be semiotically incongruent with the observable body. The first section summarizes the legal addresses to Mormons as 'cohabs,' who were then obliged to submit to various federal agents. As elaborated in the second and third sections of this essay, run-away 'abductions' were circulated by what came to be called 'undergrounders' as part of a strategy to evade these agents (spies, spotters, marshals). Abductions guessed about future encounters with spies, or reconsiderations of a previous interlocutors real identity, or concerned realtime participants. Given their transient, entirely local ontology, abducted signs can be found with ease. Yet for this reason abductions can be culturally insignificant (even if overwhelming the researchers field notes). In the case discussed here, of course, my task is to track the cross-interactional stabilization of certain abductions in practice. As described in the third section, local abductions concerning spiespresently among us, in the future to be avoided, or previously on the lookoutcirculated beyond their points of origin and encouraged similar guesswork throughout the underground community. This network of abductions inadvertently induced what might be called, to borrow from Foucault, local panopticism. In the fourth section I discuss how the underground vis-à-vis spying induced panoptic conditions across Utah territory. An encompassing social panic and simultaneously silent, individual paranoia followed. The Mormon Undergrounder (as a type) was converted thus from a discursive role into a decontextualizable identity always under address and duress, who depended on federal surveillance to be summoned into being." [pp. 248-249]