In this interview (which has been edited and condensed for clarity), NYU PhD student Leela Khanna speaks with Patwardhan about his film and the current state of politics in India.

Leela Khanna: What led you to make this commentary on the Hindu Right? Was there a specific incident or set of events that served as an impetus to start this exhaustive project?

Anand Patwardhan: It was the murder of Indian rationalists[1] that triggered the film. First Dr. Dabholkar, a well-known anti-superstition activist, was gunned down by radical Hindutva groups in 2013, and then the left-wing politician of the Communist Party of India, Comrade Govind Pansare, was shot and killed in February 2015.

LK: Why have you named this film Vivek?

AP: Vivek can be translated as “reason” or “rationality,” but actually there is no perfect equivalent in English. It means more than rationality. Reason is often interpreted simply as scientific thought. But scientists made the atom bomb! You could be both rational and a ruthless fascist like Hitler and not believe in religion, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good human being. Vivek has a component of wisdom or humanism in it that sees all human beings as connected and all living creatures as interdependent.

LK: Could you tell us more about how you organized the film into eight chapters. Had you already thought about dividing it into these segments before the filming?

AP: None of my films are scripted in any sense. Basically I have a vague idea of what I’m doing. I keep gathering material and it’s only at the editing table when I’m looking at all the material I shot that I get ideas of where the film can go. I begin to see what the patterns are and what more needs to be shot to make sense of it all. In this film, as I shot what was happening in India in the 21^st century, I realized that I had to go back in time to explain where the religious divide came from and how it was engineered during British rule. The chapters that followed describe the slow unfolding of this process.

LK: You’ve made other films on Hindu nationalism and communalism in India, including the 1992 film, Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God). How has Hindu nationalism changed since the 1990s when the Hindu Right first gained electoral power?

AP: It has become much more aggressive. In the 1990s they were almost apologetic in comparison to today. Apologetic in the sense that they knew they had latched onto a good thing because they came to power using the Ram Temple issue[2], which effectively rallied Hindus against Muslims over the issue of a religious site. Back then they came to power in one state using communalism, but today they are in power everywhere. The Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] is the fastest growing NGO in the world, and actually calling it an NGO is not a good way to describe the RSS, because they are not just a non-governmental organization, they are, today, the government itself.

LK: What is at stake now? Is there something more at stake than there was in the 1990s?

AP: In the 1990s they were containable, they were not all powerful and not the dominant force in the country. The government of that day, The Congress Party, which was a so-called secular government could have nipped it in the bud. They could have actually taken counter measures, they knew that Hindutva was using cultural mobilization as a weapon but instead of fighting it by promoting secular culture, they abetted it by running a primetime Ramayana serial on national television! They could have promoted alternative narratives but they didn’t even show the films that many of us had made on the rise of fundamentalism. I had to fight in court cases to get Ram Ke Naam[3] shown on Doordarshan TV and by the time we won our case the Babri Mosque had long been demolished and Hindu-Muslim violence unleashed in its wake.

LK: Who is your intended audience for this work?

AP: I never have a single target, but I definitely want this work to be very easy to access in India. I think even internationally it needs to be seen not only because there are many parallels between what is happening in India and what is happening in the United States for instance. Although I don’t draw all of these parallels out, as in I don’t talk about Trump, but you can see the obvious connections. This apart, another reason for showing Reason abroad is that the Indian diaspora plays a big and often ugly role in promoting both majoritarian hatred and corporate greed, so reaching the diaspora may heal some people merely by supplying information that is missing from their usual ambit.

LK: What sort of reactions or conversations do you hope to generate through this film?

AP: I hope to wake people up from their slumber and their ideas about how the Indian Congress Party had so many years in power, and how they were so corrupt, and we should give somebody else a chance. That kind of uninformed wishy-washy thinking will disappear when people see what this current BJP government is actually up to.

LK: What kind of reactions has your film elicited?

AP: As of now, the film has been shown very little in India. So it’s been mostly reactions from abroad at festivals and a few universities. Some people haven’t been to India much, and even though they might be of South Asian origin, they didn’t know anything about this. And there are others who do know something about it. But almost all of them have been positive.

LK: In the epilogue you begin with the murder of rationalist journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017, showing that journalists critical of the Hindu Right are still being targeted and killed. However, you end this film with a quote by the left-wing rationalist, Comrade Govind Pansare, who you mentioned before and who seemed quite hopeful about where the world is heading. Could you explain your reasoning for that?

AP: Pansare is saying that inequity in the world has become so great that people will rise and fight back. This is not just a dream, but even if it were, dreaming is no sin. So it’s a bitter sweet ending because you don’t know if he means that a more just world is inevitable, or he’s saying that this is his dream. It is my dream too, so I thought it was a perfect place to end.

LK: So are you feeling hopeful?

AP: Yes, I’m hopeful in that I’m not stupidly hopeful, but realistically hopeful. This current trajectory that we’re going towards fascism is not going to last and it’s not sustainable. People will wake up and they are waking up.

***

[1] The rationalist movement in India refers to activists who advocate for scientific skepticism and who question the supernatural claims made by charismatic gurus, or so-called ‘god men,’ who claim to have paranormal powers.

[2] In the late 1980s, Hindu nationalist groups began campaigning for the construction of a temple for the Hindu deity, Rama, at the site of a 16^th century mosque. Hindu groups claimed that a Muslim ruler had demolished a Hindu temple and built the mosque on the temple’s ruins. The campaign resulted in the destruction of the mosque in 1992 and led to widespread Hindu-Muslim violence around India and the electoral victory of the Hindu majoritarian party, the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP].

[3] Patwardhan’s 1992 documentary examines the campaign led by Hindu nationalist forces to build the Ram temple at the site of the famous mosque, the Babri Masjid.

The post Reason: A Conversation with Anand Patwardhan appeared first on The Revealer.

First then, as I just mentioned, the book is called Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019). “Confession” is a word that carries a heavy load — religious, legal, emotional. So, maybe this is predictable, but I’d love to know more about how you think of the relationship between essays and confessions. What separates the forms or makes them similar? What makes the book a collection of both?

Briallen Hopper: I love that “confessions” sounds both religious and salacious, like a book by St. Augustine and a scandalous True Confessions magazine. The word adds both gravitas and trashiness! Both these terms are in tension with “essay,” which seems more neutral (it could be the subtitle of practically any book of short nonfiction pieces), and maybe a bit more literary and cerebral.

“Confessional” is often used as an insult, particularly for women who write about themselves on the internet, so I wanted to reclaim it. In Hard to Love, I’m definitely being confessional in that I’m revealing private things that have felt shameful to me, like getting dumped and being a hoarder and losing a pregnancy. But I’m also trying to make something literary out of them–hence “essays.”

In retrospect, I do think writing the book had a personal purpose that might have been something like going to confession. I made myself face some of the hardest things in my relationships, and in the process I sometimes found some kind of absolution or made some kind of amends.

KH: You have more and less direct ways of talking about your own religious life in the essays, at times referring explicitly to your upbringing by “devout Calvinist convert” “religious hippies” and at others, more indirectly talking about prayer, church, and shrines in your adult life. I’m interested in how you chose to include the religious parts of your life, from your childhood to your own practice and religious education (and teaching and leadership) as an adult. There are, of course, shelves of books by people who were raised religious and left, but that’s not really what yours is. Which is all to say, I’m interested in how you choose to write about the role of religion in your life, and how your relationship to religion (belief, practice, community, knowledge, all of it) has and hasn’t changed?

BH: I once taught a class on religious memoir at Yale Divinity School, and I organized the readings by plot: Were they stories about growing up in a religious tradition, or converting to it, or leaving it, or returning to it, or staying in it? Over the course of my life, I’ve done all of the above except convert.

I was baptized in the Presbyterian Church in America, one of the most conservative evangelical Calvinist denominations, and I fled from from it as soon as I could. In my twenties I found a temporary refuge in a black mainline Presbyterian church in Princeton, where I stayed for seven years. It was the religious reeducation I needed. I’m currently a member of the United Church of Christ, colloquially known as “the last stop on the Jesus train,” though most Sundays I’m more likely to attend services at the bilingual Spanish/English Episcopal church in my neighborhood in Jackson Heights, Queens, and pray with my grandma’s Book of Common Prayer.

I think I kept the faith. The people I grew up with would say I left it. But whether I’m preaching Calvinism or ignoring it, it’s who I am. I couldn’t write a book about love without writing about religion, and my religious temperament is Calvinist. And actually I think a lot of the ostensibly non-religious parts of the book are actually a kind of stealth Calvinism!

If I were to phrase the five points of Calvinism in Hard to Love terms, they would be: No one can be or do anything good on their own, so you must find something to lean on. Receiving love does not depend on being worthy of it. Not everyone who wants a partner or children will get to have them. Love is strong enough to overcome our resistance to it. And, to quote the Spice Girls, friendship never ends.

KH:You write in “Coming Home to the Best Years of Our Lives” that “I used to say that The Best Years of Our Lives” was like a religion to me.” Can you say more about what makes a movie, or a show (Cheers?) or actor (James Garfield? Paul Newman?) a religion? How do these forms of media become religion? (That may be the most Revealer question I could ask, I should probably just stop there, but I have so many more questions…)

BH: When I said The Best Years of Our Lives was like a religion to me, I think I meant, among other things, that it was a ritual practice; a source of meaning and identity; a foundation for ethics; a mode of connecting with others; a text I memorized and knew by heart; and also something unattainable, something always out of reach. A movie can be all these things.

And there are so many other ways for forms of media to become religion: ecstatic consumption, collective textual study, cultural edicts about what is or is not permissible to consume, the instinctive clutch of your phone in your pocket as if it were a handful of beads. I am here for them all.

KH: Similarly, perhaps, in many of the essays you have a central text (The Best Years of Our Lives, Hilton Als, a Gordon Parks photo, work by Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, The Fault in Our Stars, JD Salinger), you’re almost always reading something in your writing, and I wonder how you think about the role of these texts in your writing?

Hopper: Maybe it’s because I’ve always been addicted to reading, or maybe it’s because I was trained as a literary critic and then as a preacher, but I rarely write an essay without depending on another text.

Sometimes my essays are a kind of love letter to the text in question– I think most of the essays fall into that category. Sometimes I’m celebrating or defending it (as with The Best Years of Our Lives), and sometimes I’m revisiting and questioning it (Franny and Zooey). Sometimes I’m rapturously meditating on it as a visual icon (the Gordon Parks photo of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, or the author photo of Grace Metalious on the cover of Peyton Place), and sometimes I’m returning to it as the site of a pilgrimage (the Foundling Museum, the Women’s March).

But sometimes the text is just an excuse. I don’t really care much one way or another about the Fey-Poehler movie Sisters or Kate Bolick’s Spinster. They just offered a timely hook for me to write essays on larger topics I already wanted to write about. I asked to review these texts without knowing anything about them apart from their titles, because knew that whether I liked them or not I could use them as foils for what I wanted to do. I needed to write in relation to something in order to know what I wanted to say.

KH: Another media question, but in a different vein: It’s clear that social media is important to you personally, for relationships and friendships, and also as a place to share feelings and opinions and stories. I’m curious how you think about your relationship to social media — it comes up a few times in the book (contrasting your family of origin’s comments on Facebook with your friends’ and found family’s), or when you talk about “complaining hyperbolically on social media.” Or, in another direction, but back to my first question, is there ever a relationship between posting on social media and confession for you?

BH: Absolutely yes. I share and overshare on social media as a way of dealing with being a social person who often comes home to an empty apartment. There’s a compulsion to tell and the need for a response. I can’t really imagine my life without social media. One Lent I gave up Facebook and it was one of the loneliest times in my life. I went from being in a fairly good place to fending off depression.

I also rely on social media for writing. My writing career literally started on Facebook. The first two pieces I published in HuffPost and the Chronicle started out as confessional Facebook notes which I then revised and expanded. Writing in general is very social to me, whether that means writing in a room with other people or posting paragraphs to social media as I write them– it’s nice to crowdsource ideas and get instant feedback as you put them together, and in the absence of people to write next to and among, social media steps in.

I know social media companies are evil, but I also found my agent and my job on Facebook, or more accurately they found me there, so apparently for me it’s a necessary evil.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward photographed by Gordon Parks

KH: Many of your essays are working through different questions about what American-ness is. I wonder if that’s an explicit theme for you and how you think about American-ness vis-à-vis religion and media?

BH: I sold the book in 2016 and was writing it as we made the transition to Trump, so I think it became much more of a meditation on Americanness than I’d originally envisioned it to be. But it became harder and harder to write about love and friendship as separate from national beliefs and calamities.

The first essay, “Lean On,” is a kind of manifesto subtitled “A Declaration of Dependence,” and it’s an attempt to resist the American cult of self-reliance that has done so much damage both to personal relationships and social policy. I do a kind of media analysis of representations of dependence and independence in film, TV, best-selling books, and popular music– from Bill Withers to Depends diapers.

One of the last essays, “Waveforms and the Women’s March,” tells the story of Trump’s Inauguration and the 2017 Women’s March through the lens of the Book of Exodus. There is obviously a long tradition, particularly in African American Christianity, of seeing American history through Exodus, as a story about slavery and freedom. My essay focuses instead on Pharaoh and the plagues, and how no one is coming to part the sea for us. I link media references to the oceanic feeling of the march to an ancient story about drowning and escape.

KH: I was really impressed by your ability to move between introspection and analysis about your own life — your feelings, choices, relationships, values, etc — and systemic social thinking about classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, settler colonialism and more. It’s a tricky thing, to, for lack of a better way of putting it, focus on working through your own shit, while also acknowledging your privilege and representing and reckoning with injustice. Can you say more about how you strike that balance in the book?

BH: I don’t really know how to work through my own personal shit, particularly in relation to love and friendships– which are always shaped by class, gender, race, sexuality, migration– without understanding it in relation to systems and history. For example, as I discuss in my essay on spinsters, in order for me to recover from a breakup in my twenties, it was essential for me to realize that my taken-for-granted ideas about romantic love were limited and distorted by my straightness and whiteness.

To be honest I’m not especially good at being aware of privilege or reckoning with injustice in personal relationships, as my friends and lovers would tell you! That’s what revision is for. Revising my writing, revising myself. I don’t see love as a refuge from these systems, this history. It is a reckoning with it.

KH: I work with a lot of academics who are interested in having public writing careers. You’ve clearly always written (notebooks, letters, academic work, sermons, lists), can you tell me a bit about how you started writing for publication, though?

BH: Honestly I started writing for publication because I first went on the academic job market in 2008, the year of the crash, and it quickly became clear I was not going to get a tenure track job anytime soon, if ever. And I was like, OK, I never especially enjoyed academic writing and now it’s professionally pointless, so why don’t I start writing things I actually want to write? And it turned out what I wanted to write was reviews and essays and listicles and op-eds.

It was very stressful to be a contingent writing instructor for most of a decade, but in retrospect, I feel lucky I didn’t get a tenure-track job in my former field of 19th-century literature, because although I did want to write about that literature, I didn’t really want to write about it in academic article or monograph form. When I was writing Hard to Love, It was a joy to be able to write about Emerson and Melville and Henry James and George Eliot in a totally different way. I always identified with the “scribbling women” of the 19th century who “lived by their pens” and wrote prose for the public, and now, hopefully, I’m becoming one of them!

KH: Lastly, and because I have the chance to ask, I have to ask: Your essay on hoarding may be my favorite in the whole collection (though I really don’t want to have to choose! All those sperm jokes in Moby-Dick! Heaven…), and, of course, as a Person of The Internet, I’ve been surrounded by (hoarding?) the Marie Kondo-ing of America this last month or so. Instagram posts of refreshed closets, thoughtful Facebook posts by scholars worried about the Orientalism and sexism running through the hottakes, hottake pearl-clutching about bookshelf purging, etc. So, basically, I just really want to know what — after doing so much thinking about what you keep and why you keep it — you think of the phenomenon?

BH: I’m so glad you liked the hoarding essay! I actually used it as the job talk for my current job, and I was like, hmm, outing myself as a hoarder to all my potential future colleagues is maybe a bit risky. But it still seemed safer than reading one of the essays about ex-boyfriends or sperm!

Anyway. Though I’ve read Marie Kondo’s first book, I haven’t yet seen the show. But even though I much prefer messy drawers to tidy ones (as you know, there’s a long section in the hoarding essay on chaotic drawers in Joan Didion and Marilynne Robinson!), I appreciate her approach to objects so much more than organization experts who focus on things like sanity, efficiency, and mental health. As someone who identifies as a hoarder, I resonate with Kondo’s unapologetic emphasis on “sparking joy” and on the magic of our relationship to objects, as well as her personification of them– the idea that you can thank them, say goodbye to them. It’s not an approach grounded in shaming or pseudoscience. It’s relational. It’s loving, in fact.

***

The post Hard to Love: A conversation with Briallen Hopper appeared first on The Revealer.

[The following has been edited for length, clarity, and the inclusion of citations].

Andrew Way Leong (AWL): Before we discuss Marie Kondo’s books, manga, and recent Netflix series, a caveat and some shout-outs.

First, Grace, Tara, and I are not religious studies scholars, but scholars trained in literary and cultural studies within the broader contexts of Asian American ethnic studies and Asian area studies. Accordingly, we are not interested in making definitive claims about what religion is, what Japanese religions are, and what is or isn’t an “authentic” Japanese religious practice. We are, instead, going to try to interpret how Marie Kondo’s print and visual media (specifically, her books, manga (comics), and Netflix show) depict practices and states of feeling that the media themselves describe as being derived from, or adjacent to, “religious,” “spiritual,” or “magical” practice and experience. We’ll also try to situate these descriptions within histories of popular media representations of people of Asian descent in North America and of domestic labor in Japan.

Second, thank you to all the commenters in the Facebook thread that informed our coming together for this discussion. Shout-outs go to Kerim Yasar, for pointing us to this Twitter thread by Jolyon Baraka Thomas (now expanded to an article) on hot takes of Kondo and “Shinto”; and to Jessie Starling, who, in another context, introduced me to the work of Jason Josephson-Storm. Storm’s books The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago, 2012) and The Myth of Disenchantment (Chicago, 2017) have both helped to shape our discussion about the Marie Kondo phenomenon.

Tara Fickle (TF): My first thought upon watching the Netflix show, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, was how this series fits within a longer history of American media representations of Asians—1960s gurus, feng shui experts, and so on—who carry with them some kind of Asian spirituality that helps Westerners fix the problems of their materialist society.

Grace En-Yi Ting (GET): I noticed similar issues when reading the Japanese manga adaptation (translated into English as The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up). In the original manga, Kondo is called a yōsei, a sort of spirit or sprite-type creature. When she goes into her back story, she’s depicted as a little bit weird–a tidying otaku or fanatic. She says that as an elementary school student, she just wanted to sort things and read lifestyle magazines for housewives. When she greets the house, or taps the books to wake them up, the manga’s main character, a twenty-nine year-old OL (“office lady”) seems surprised but tolerant, as if she’s thinking, okay, you do you, I get that you’re this otherworldly creature here to fix things in my ordinary life.

AWL: So there are two layers here. One is that the show might be feeding off a long pattern of Anglo-American representations of Japan as “a fairyland” where one finds “one’s way among quaint and mirthful Orientals.”^[1] The other is that in a manga first produced for a Japanese audience, Marie Kondo’s persona also appears “otherworldly” as a yōsei, or just slightly “weird,” as a tidying otaku.

TF: This otherworldly quality carries over into the production design of the Netflix show, which often makes Kondo seem strangely separated from ordinary space and time. She’s always in a similar outfit—pure white tops and cardigans—so it’s very hard to tell how much time has passed by looking at her. Plus the constant cuts to her sitting in a separate, ethereal, magical space – the New York Times nicely describes this set as “some pristine, enchanted space where the camera visits Ms. Kondo.”

GET: Even when Kondo enters and exits her clients’ homes, it seems like she’s just slipping in and out, to the extent that by the end of an episode, I sometimes think, “so what did she really do?” even if I don’t expect her to do manual labor. And then she will go into people’s houses and say something like, “Oh, you’re having a baby!” As if she doesn’t know anything about them.

TF: Right, didn’t the producers let her know anything about who she was visiting?

GET: So there’s the pretense of surprise, some type of distance that she wants to hold, or that is being held for her. Part of this has to do with the way she’s speaking. When she’s not saying a few phrases in English, she’s speaking only in formal, business Japanese. It’s a bit feminine and extremely polite – it’s Japanese that you’re trained to use. She creates a sense of formal distance where it’s clear that the client’s home is her workplace.

TF: I remember thinking how strategic the choice of the translator was. Because it’s clear that Kondo speaks a good amount of English, and at different times she chooses to be the main speaker, but at others she chooses to very intentionally back off and create a similar kind of distance by having everything go through the translator.

AWL: This discussion of the clients’ home as workplace also makes me think about Kondo’s description of her “custom” of kneeling on the floor to perform a silent greeting to her clients’ home. In the English edition of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo writes, “I began this custom quite naturally based upon the etiquette of worshipping at Shinto shrines. . . . because the tense expectancy in the air when a client opens the door resembles the atmosphere when one passes under the shrine gate and enters the sacred precincts.” Is a client’s home really analogous to a sacred space?

To unpack what’s going on here, I think we can turn to the work of Talal Asad and Sylvia Federici. Asad argued that Western European notions of “secular society” depend upon a public/private distinction where religion and the sacred are relegated “to the private domain” such that religious feelings become part of a “range of personal sensibilities.”^[2] Federici points to a similar turn in medieval Europe where the domain of social reproduction, or “the reproduction of workers” shifted from the “public space” of “the common, the church,” to the private space of the “home.”^[3]

Kondo’s show seems to reinforce European senses of the idea of the private home as analogous to a sacred domain for private religious practice, but the show also crosses the public/private threshold by displaying the clients’ home as a televised workplace. Kondo’s simultaneous reinforcement and crossing of this public-secular versus private-religious threshold is important to note when we think about how, in Euro-American contexts, this threshold has aligned with ideas about binary gender roles — in other words, the notion that men are supposed to work in the public realm for hourly wages while the timeless, sacred duty of women is to maintain the private home.

Marie Kondo

GET: It’s hard for me to view this as “timeless” because I see what Kondo’s doing as an extension of pressures placed on Japanese women with contemporary shufu, or housewife, discourses. Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni describes this as the “new happy housewife” phenomenon of contemporary Japan.^[4] Where housewives used to be pressured to just labor, now housework must involve the joy of self-fulfillment too. Kondo’s 2011 idea of “sparking joy” also resembles other contemporary Japanese political discourses of how women ought to “twinkle” or “shine.” Here I am reminded of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s 2013 speech to the UN in which he declared his intention to help working women in order to “create a society ‘in which women shine.’”

AWL: Now that you mention it, there is an odd grammatical parallelism between Abe’s subete no josei ga kagayaku shakai zukuri honbu [Office for Creating a Society Where Every Woman Shines) and Kondo’s jinsei ga tokimeku katazuke no mahō [Magic of Life-Changing (or Joy Sparking) Tidying Up]. Both are in the form noun, intransitive verb, verbal noun, noun.

GET: I think some of these specific, gendered dimensions of Marie Kondo’s persona and products get wiped away in translation.

TF: Maybe Kondo’s method of tidying appeals to American audiences exactly because the criteria of “sparking joy” seems to set aside more typical economic criteria like exchange value or function. Questions like, “do you still use it?” fall away. When she talks about a client who got rid of fifteen garbage bags worth of stuff, the question, “ how much money did all of that cost?” disappears.

GET: In the manga, she says there are three ways of valuing objects. One is about the actual function of the object…

TF: Literal use-value!

GET: Another is information (i.e. books), and the third is feeling or emotion, which goes along with “tokimeki,” the sparking joy aspect. And that’s the one she cares about.

AWL: What do you make of this translation of “tokimeki” as “sparking joy”?

GET: “Tokimeki” shows up all the time in shōjo manga (girls’ comics). It’s this feeling of romantic anticipation, where your heart beats faster. It isn’t exactly the same as “doki doki,” which is an onomatopoeia for the sound that your heart is making, but a related word.

AWL: “Spark joy” also has unexpected resonances in English. “Joy” is an odd phrase to use in everyday life – people don’t walk around saying, “How are you?” “I’m joyous.” For me the word brings to mind heightened, maybe even “religious” states of feeling – as in “Joy to the World” and “Ode to Joy.”

I have no idea if this is where translator Cathy Hirano got the “spark joy” idea, but one of the key lines in Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” is “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” (“Joy, beautiful spark of the gods”). Schiller is only one among many European artists and thinkers who have been attached to ideas of “the divine spark” or forms of “enchanted nature” where spirits or fragments of the divine are understood to vitalize all of creation. All this is to say that holding the belief that objects can possess, give, or spark life, is first, not in any way restricted to Japan, and second, not universal to all Japanese people.

TF: Both the Netflix show and Kondo’s second book (Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up) contain illustrations of what sparking joy looks like. In the show, Kondo clutches an object to herself and makes this face that’s like, “Ding”! In the illustrated book, there’s a cartoon rabbit that does the same thing. Both of these seem light and cute, but they’re also didactic. What Kondo is trying to do is to teach you to make aesthetic judgements, not so much honing your appreciation for beauty, but honing your capacity to identify how objects make you feel.

AWL: So here Asad’s point about the European secular/religious split depending upon a celebration of personal feelings illustrates one of the limitations of Kondo’s accounts of aesthetic judgement via sparking joy. I can’t help but think that there’s a better, more collective account of the “aesthetic” to be found through a phrase that’s been problematically appropriated from the Black queer and trans ballroom community: “X gives me life.”

In a blogpost on the phrase, Azizi Powell quotes an observation that older uses of the phrase were restricted to “mother” and “God,” but now extend to anything or anyone that “gives an individual or group of people energy (vitality), validity, or significance.”

To be clear, I don’t want to see season two of the Netflix show featuring white suburbanites replacing the question “does this spark joy” with “does this give me life.” However, I do think the phrase “gives me life” better recognizes how members of marginalized communities who have been rejected by birth families (as signified by “mother”) and cast out from the church (“God”) have nevertheless found and been given life through aesthetic practices of collective art and performance.

TF: I’m curious about how Kondo’s method is presented as universally applicable. The Netflix show relentlessly displays diversity in the sense that every single episode has to be different — “the gay couple,” “the Japanese American couple,” “the widow” — and yet, all of them are universally served by her method. In the book she even says, “I thought about tailoring my method to each individual, but then I realized everyone is pretty much the same and can all benefit from my method.”

AWL: I just read Annie McClanahan’s Post-45 piece on contemporary TV and “tipworkification” and so have “types” on my mind. It’s embarrassing, but I can’t remember the names of any of the clients. I think this is because of how important type-work is for the genre of home improvement shows.

TF: Tidying Up seems like the pinnacle of “people are their houses” metaphors. There seemed to be no irony in the episode in which the gay couple – it’s true, the show is typological, I can’t remember their names – talked about how much stuff was in their closets.

GET: Marie Kondo herself might even be understood as a portable type — a way of packaging a “Japanese art” from “Japanese culture” in a easily digestible form. The engagement between a Japanese woman and these diverse couples is presumed to be something that is not difficult or tense, as if Kondo were representing a nation that does not have its own significant problems with racism, sexism, and homophobia.

All:

This is an untidy ending to a discussion that could go on for much longer, but it’s at least a start for working through the mess of thoughts and feelings that surrounds the “Marie Kondo phenomenon.”

***

^[1] Douglas Sladen, Queer Things about Japan (London: Anthony Treherne, 1904) 110.

^[2]Talal Asad, Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt, ISIM Paper, 1 – 24 (2001). ISIM, Leiden, 1. .

^[3] Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2014), 84.

^[4] Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni, Housewives of Japan: An Ethnography of Real Lives and Consumerized Domesticity (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 147.

***

Tara Fickle is an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Ethnic Studies, Center for Asian Pacific Studies, New Media & Culture Certificate, and Digital Humanities Minor at the University of Oregon.

Andrew Way Leong is an assistant professor of English and core faculty in the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Grace En-Yi Ting is a postdoctoral fellow specializing in contemporary Japanese literature and girls’ culture in the Faculty of Letters, Arts & Sciences at Waseda University.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Sparking Joy: Religion, Representation & Marie Kondo appeared first on The Revealer.

Thoreau and Walden Streets in Concord, Mass (Wikipedia)

Henry David Thoreau is often called a “saint” of the environmental movement. If a saint is someone who is revered for his holiness, to whom devotees pray, whose shrines are visited by pilgrims, and who is also regularly debunked by skeptics – Thoreau fits the description. For many who consider themselves environmentalists, Thoreau’s life serves as a great, saintly example. This was the man who loved Walden Woods, who lived close to the seasons, and who revered trees and other non-human species. Contemporary readers, fed up with the environmental harms that industrial civilization has wrought, often view him as a prophet, calling American society to a more wholesome way of living with nature.

Still, the skeptical debunkers have a point too: contemporary environmental problems will not be resolved by mass conversion to Thoreauvian nature piety. Those problems – especially climatic disruption, but also any number of other environmental harms like pollution, species extinction, and interference with nitrogen cycles – are now political problems. Their amelioration will come, if it does, through concerted efforts to gain the political power required to make meaningful changes to contemporary economic and governmental practices. Loving trees may well be a good place to start, and the right thing to do, but it cannot be the end of the story if we want future generations, both human and non-human, to thrive on Earth.

In this context, it’s fair enough to wonder if Thoreau should retain his saintly halo among environmentalists.

Two new biographies from 2017, the year of Thoreau’s 200^th birthday, serve as a test for this question. Unlike the majority of scholarship on Thoreau, both books attend to the importance of religion in Thoreau’s life. Both new biographies are, therefore, welcome additions to a literature that has too often been tone-deaf to the importance of religion in Thoreau’s life and work.

Kevin Dann’s Expect Great Things (TarcherPerigee, 2017) is, first of all, weird. It aims to situate Thoreau in what Dann describes as the “esoteric” thought of his era – the millenarianism, Freemasonry, astrology, alchemy, fascination with faerie, magic, spiritualism, and somnambulism that captivated the US at the time. And Dann – like the movements he describes – assumes the reality of spiritual forces, an assumption that has been rare in the pages of more scholarly works. His voice is thus unique among academic authors writing about Thoreau.

The strength of Dann’s approach is that it reanimates the mythic world that Thoreau occupied, and it acquaints readers with some of the spirits that lived with him in Concord. Dann’s treatment of Greek myth, of fairy stories, of beliefs about the stars, and his insistence that Thoreau’s relationship with God and respect for Christ never waned, correct for some contemporary readers’ tendency to ignore Thoreau’s religious commitments. Dann’s frank account of Thoreau’s misconceptions about native people is also welcome in a book that tends never to find fault with him. (Though Dann’s strange cooptation of the word “indigenous” for the literature that Thoreau and others were trying to create in the United States, and his occasional tendency to revert to descriptions of North America as “unexplored” seems in tension with his evident learning about the First Nations of that continent.)

There are places where a serious reader will want more documentation than Dann provides, or doubt his judgment with respect to the spiritual forces he describes, but Dann admits at the end of the book that his account is more like the mythologies Thoreau himself read and wrote than a list of facts about Thoreau’s life. “Henry Thoreau, the indefatigable measurer of trees and truth, would ask that our measurement of his life hew to the facts, but that we then read those facts with an enlarged sense of meaning.” Dann aims to open our ears to the rhythms of the cosmos, to open our eyes to the fairies in the woods, and to open our minds to the “vast cosmos of esoteric thought” that he sees behind Thoreau’s life.

Dann is right, of course, that Thoreau’s life ought to mean more to us than a list of historical facts. Every book about Thoreau (and there are many, every year) participates in the controversy over what the meaning of his life really is, for us. But where so many of our current questions, especially with respect to environmental problems, are political ones, Dann’s account of Thoreau’s religion obscures the intrinsic connection between Thoreau’s spiritual life and the political efforts for justice that also animated his writing.

Thus, Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a welcome antidote to the common tendency (not only in Expect Great Things but also more broadly) to describe Thoreau’s religion and spirituality apart from his political commitment to justice. Walls’s is the best new biography of Thoreau since Robert Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1988), which was the standard until last year. Walls’s writing is also beautiful.

Walls is a scholar of literature and science, and her first book, Seeing New Worlds (1995), considered Thoreau as a scientist, arguing that his work had aimed to breech the boundaries growing among academic disciplines in his period. Her work since has included books on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexander von Humboldt, and her reading in the primary sources of the period is extraordinarily vast. She is part of a growing movement in the study of Thoreau that interprets his life and work as deeply situated in the social, cultural, and material history of his context, and this biography will be the standard for a long time to come.

Rejecting the tendency among some scholars of Transcendentalism to focus on literary and intellectual life, Walls’s account of Thoreau’s milieu attends to Concord’s citizens of all ages, classes, ethnicities, and genders, and she treats religion with great sensitivity. Where Dann purposefully focuses on esoteric thought (and sometimes seems to be cherry-picking evidence from all the two million words in Thoreau’s journal), Walls’s biographical approach is less focused on religion – in fact religion is not thematized much at all – but it is also less sensational, more subtle, and better attuned to the major religious influences on Thoreau’s thought.

This also means that she aids in the important effort — especially for our period — of reconciling Thoreau’s nature piety with his political commitment, two strands of Thoreau’s work that have often come apart in the literature. Dann’s mistake is a common one. Too often, accounts of Thoreau’s spirituality have deemphasized its relation to his politics. Thoreau’s essay on the duties of a citizen to resist an unjust government, “Resistance to Civil Government,” posthumously known as “Civil Disobedience,” inspired much liberatory politics of the 20^th century. Famously, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. attributed some of their own political views to lessons they learned from Thoreau.

The conclusion of Walls’s account of “Civil Disobedience” elegantly describes how resistance to injustice and love of nature were part of one thing for Thoreau:

“Resistance” means not just self-defense, defense of one’s fellow citizen, or even of one’s own nation, but defense of all those lives entangled with our own: slaves, upon whose labor even “free” Massachusetts depended economically; Mexicans, the declared enemies of the State; and Indians, the declared enemies of civilization itself. But Thoreau was not finished even here. Life at Walden Pond helped him understand how deeply humans are related to nonhumans as well…In the same weeks he was finishing “Resistance to Civil Government,” Thoreau put the final touches on A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. “Who hears the fishes when they cry?” he asked in its opening pages…What he worked out in writing “Resistance to Civil Government” became not only the foundation of his political philosophy but also the gateway to his environmental ethics.

This is the wisdom from Thoreau we need now, in an age of inequality made so much worse by climate change. Walls’s account of the intrinsic connection in Thoreau’s thought between his nature piety and his emphatic commitment to justice for human communities offers us more than Dann’s ethereal Thoreau. Walls’s Thoreau can hold together our outrage over the injustices committed by our nation with our outrage at the ruination of what Thoreau called nature, which is – of course – our home.

This Thoreau need not be a saint for us, no man is perfect, and we can learn much from his defects as well as from his virtues. But before we dismiss him as too enmeshed in the woods to do us any good where we are, here in the 21^st century, we should remember that our most vicious environmental problems are matters of injustice: against those whose island nations contribute so little to carbon emissions and yet are succumbing to sea-level rise, against those whose neighbourhoods are unrepresented in our government and yet bear the burden of our communal toxic waste, against refugees whose climates are rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and against a whole world of other-than-human species whose lives are in collapse. Against these injustices, Thoreau’s religion would preach properly political resistance.

***

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. Before coming to ACU she completed a B.A. at Stanford University, a M.Div. at The University of Chicago and a Ph.D. at Princeton University in Religion, Ethics, and Politics. She has taught in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, and she has worked as a research assistant for the Peabody Award-winning public radio program On Being, produced in the United States. Her research focuses on religious ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms. Her current work, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), treats Henry David Thoreau as an inheritor of traditional ascetic practices, and argues that his asceticism is politically relevant – both in his period and for contemporary environmental ethics.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs

The post Henry David Thoreau: Saint of the Environmental Movement? appeared first on The Revealer.

Public funerary rituals with a charity component have been organized for famous figures in different parts of Turkey for a long time now. Back in 2009, multiple death rituals were organized for Michael Jackson in Midyat —a small town in the southeast region of Turkey— attracting international attention. That June, Midyat locals joined Jackson’s fans across the globe in commemorating the King of Pop by performing a funeral service (Jackson’s body, of course, in absentia) and reciting prayers for the soul of the singer in five languages.

Lokma for Aretha Franklin in Izmir, Turkey (Birgün Newspaper)

The commemorations in honor of Jackson were organized by Mehmet Ali Aslan, head of the Mıhellemi Association for Dialogue between Religions, Languages and Civilizations, based in Midyat. Founded in 2008, the association’s mission is revitalizing the culture, language, and “civilization” of the Mıhellemi community, which is an Assyro-Arab community of Sunni Shafi’is living in Turkey and abroad.[1] The association organizes events and oral history projects in order to promote this community’s cultural diversity within what they call “the Semitic communities” located in Turkey. When interviewed about the rituals for Jackson’s soul, Aslan explained that it made sense to carry out these rituals because Jackson was part of the extended Mıhellemiler family by marriage. The Mıhellemiler claim that Elvis Presley was from a branch of their family who migrated to Latin America and then the US. Because Michael Jackson was once married to Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of the King of Rock n’ Roll, the King of Pop was also a part of the Mıhellemiler family.

These rituals—deeds and charity in the name of the deceased—not only continue a person’s positive impact on the community, but they also add positive points on an individual’s “deed pages.” Deed pages, as mentioned in the At-Takwir sura of the Qur’an, are the record of a person’s good and bad deeds. According to the sura, these pages will constitute the basis for God’s Judgment Day decision whether to put an individual in heaven or hell.

But why are Muslims in Turkey celebrating these — not Turkish, not Muslim, not blood-related — stars with traditional rites?

Monument for Michael Jackson in Midyat, Turkey

When I first read the news reports on these rituals, I was puzzled: admiration for rock royalty cannot totally explain it. For one thing, these rituals and commemorative events require money, time, and labor. Professionals may be responsible for physically preparing the lokma at a mobile donut station on a sidewalk near the house of the deceased, but the family of the deceased runs the show.

As a Sunni Muslim from Izmir (Turkey’s third largest city, located on its Western coast), I know from personal experience that distributing lokma in the name of a deceased family member is challenging. When we organized a lokma giveaway on the seventh day after my own father’s death (as the tradition suggests), I was the one who instructed the lokma makers where to park and set up shop. As they heated vegetable oil in a huge pan, and started dropping dough into the heated oil on a busy sidewalk, I strategically placed the tables at a busy corner of the street. I also put my father’s picture up by the tables, along with a small sign carrying his name and a simple request “Ruhuna Fatiha.”[2]

Where you set the lokma stand is important. It should be a busy spot so the fried lokma doesn’t get soggy waiting for too long in the syrup and because the aim is to give them to as many people as possible, including community members who didn’t know the person being celebrated. So on that seventh day after his death, we set up our lokma stand on a bustling corner where we could give as many passers-by as possible a (sweet) reason to pray for my father’s soul.

For an hour or so, passers-by got in line to take plastic bowls of four or five lokmas covered in syrup and cinnamon powder. Some came with their own big bowls in order to take enough for the whole family. Elderly neighbors with diabetes asked for less or no syrup and children came back for seconds. Everyone said the same thing to me, though: “Allah kabul etsin” (May Allah accept your deed).” As people recited El-Fatiha, I was still in disbelief, holding back my tears, thanking people for their prayers.

A year later, at another lokma stand, I learned that time does, in fact, heal pain. On the first anniversary of his death, my family hosted a second lokma stand for my father. But at the anniversary ritual, I spent most of the time smiling, remembering the good times with him, celebrating his life, and thinking about how his death, though it still hurt, was now something sweet in the passers-by’s lives.

However meaningful, the lokma ritual is costly. If we were to repeat the lokma give-away my family performed for my father we would spend 300 Turkish liras or approximately $57 US dollars. That may not sound like very much to spend to feed so many people, but the average monthly wage in Turkey is currently 1603 liras, or about $303. The high cost means that not everyone can carry out these rituals in the same way. Some people in Turkey opt for more modest ways to commemorate their loved ones, choosing instead to hand out candy or homemade desserts, which are cheaper and less complicated.

This is all to say, one would need a profound reason to perform this ritual for anyone, particularly someone who was not even a part of your family. Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Stephen Hawking — they have to mean something more to people than just their status as celebrities.

***

For Ahmet Uhri, the archeologist who distributed lokma in honor of Aretha Franklin and Stephen Hawking, Franklin didn’t mean a lot when he first listened to her as a child. He first heard her voice from a record his American tenants played for him. But when, as an adult, Uhri got to know more about Aretha Franklin and her activism, he came to admire her. Uhri told me in an email that he saw Franklin as a leftist figure who taught her audience about “supporting labor in opposition to capital, preferring internationalism instead of the limited horizon of nationalism, choosing society over the individual, and standing in solidarity with the oppressed.” He continued, “her support [for] black people’s rights, hence the rights of minorities and oppressed people was the most important component of leftist thought, along with labor, society, and internationalism.”

The lokma ritual for Franklin in Karaburun was coincidentally, but serendipitously, held on the seventh day of her death, but Uhri was doing more than just carrying out a ritual for her soul: giving away lokma was a way to communicate Aretha Franklin’s message to the inhabitants of Karaburun, and make them pay attention to what Franklin advocated for in her career as a musician and as an activist. People danced to Franklin’s songs, and they got to know her and her legacy better, Uhri told me.

Ahmet Uhri’s Aretha Franklin Memorial in Karaburun, Turkey

While the Turkish ritual performed in Franklin’s honor was fairly traditional all things considered, the ceremonies held for Michael Jackson in Midyat took a different, more material, turn. Under Mehmet Ali Aslan’s leadership, Midyat residents turned their commemoration up a notch by erecting a monument. The monument’s design was influenced by Jackson’s famous dance move, the moonwalk. The abstract sculpture is full of symbolism: it has a globe as a symbol of internationalism, an index finger pointing forward as a symbol of the region’s monotheist religions, multiple colors on the sides as a symbol of many “races” of humankind, and a rainbow as a symbol of living together despite differences. The monument’s designer, architect M. Hıfzı Turgut, introduced the monument’s main theme as “kıyam” (resistance) because to Aslan, Jackson symbolizes resistance to oppression. Explaining his community’s enthusiasm in celebration Jackson, Aslan emphasized, (alongside Jackson’s position as a member of their extended family,) his “universal” qualities, and how he touched people’s lives through entertainment. Embracing Jackson’s legacy, Aslan said, means embracing what Jackson stood for: universal acceptance, multiculturalism, and humanism—all qualities that are embraced by Midyat locals.

Unfortunately, nature had its own plans for Jackson’s legacy. The Midyat monument was destroyed by a storm in 2012. This prompted the villagers to repair the monument and to plant a memorial forest in the King of Pop’s name. Mehmet Ali Aslan, who continued to spearhead the Jackson commemorations, explained that the forest “would combat the natural disasters, contribute positively to the nature and environment, and keep [Jackson’s] deed pages [amel defteri] open.” Today, Jackon’s deed pages are still being inscribed: his Turkish forest is flourishing.

Although the memorial forest is officially named only after Michael Jackson, Mehmet Ali Aslan also dedicated the forest during the planting ceremony to one more black public figure: Malcom X. According to Aslan, Jackson and Malcom X were both “mazlum” (the oppressed), and by dedicating this memorial forest to them, he was spreading a message of peace to the Middle East and the world. Ahmet Uhri gave a similar explanation for why Aretha Franklin and her activism in support of black people’s struggle in the US was so important for leftists internationally.

Michael Jackson Hatıra Ormanı (Memorial Forest)

Considered together, Aslan’s and Uhri’s public death rituals accomplish multiple things at once: they express gratitude for what these stars symbolized while they were alive, while turning their deaths into opportunities to spread their messages and legacies to those who are not familiar with them. Moreover, through these death rituals, the organizers actually induct these stars into their own families. Organizers like Aslan and Uhri are doing what a good child does for their parents — perpetuating their positive influence in their community. These rituals keep Franklin and Jackson’s deed pages open while adding more good points in their name for Judgment Day. One cannot help but wonder what Franklin and Jackson’s faces will look like on the Judgment Day when they notice among their good deed pages some solid entries in the form of Turkish lokma and trees.

***

[1] In the Sunni sect of Islam, there are four major schools of Islamic law: Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali, and Shafi’i. Although the majority of Sunnis in Turkey follow the Hanafi school, most Sunnis in the Kurdish region follow the Shafi’I school.

***

The post RIP: Public Funerary Rituals for American Celebrities in Turkey appeared first on The Revealer.

Americans are having a moment — which I hope will be more than a moment — in which we are taking stories about women’s sexual coercion and abuse more seriously than in generations past. This is an unsettling and important time to be thinking about women’s stories, and the bedrock of any examination, any dismantling of rape culture, must be this: listen to women.[i] Believe women. Their stories matter. We need to hear these stories.

Sharing stories about sexual abuse is not enough, though. These stories are a call to act, to prevent future abuses from happening. But we don’t act on every story of abuse — only certain kinds of stories, about certain kinds of survivors, seem to actually inspire action.

My book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religion (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), looks at stories about abuse in American minority religious groups. These stories share a common thread: they depict the violation of white American women and children at the hands of religious minorities. And they have inspired massive — indeed, staggeringly disproportionate — responses from the American public through law enforcement, media coverage, targeted legislation, and congressional actions.

Abuse is obscenely common, but few stories of abuse incite raids by armored personnel carriers, news broadcasts that reach millions of viewers, decade-long FBI investigations, or congressional hearings. The stories I write about in Abusing Religion motivated all these responses and more. Americans’ horror and fascination with marginal religions often cause us to correlate religious difference with sexual danger. But we need to take all allegations of abuse seriously, not only the ones that confirm our fears about the inherent danger of sexual and religious difference.

This new series, “Abusing Religion,” will introduce three stories of abuse in minority religious communities, how they caught the public’s attention, and why they are still haunting the American religious imaginary. This first installment traces links between Mormon fundamentalists, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, and the American public’s fascination with polygyny.[ii]

SHORT CREEK WELCOME

In 1999, mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer stopped for gas near Colorado City, Arizona — formerly known as Short Creek. Across the highway, he saw a “hazy hodgepodge of half-built houses and trailers…like something out of a Steinbeck novel.” Women working in vegetable gardens wore inexpensive unisex sneakers and “pioneer-style dresses” that reminded him of “Muslim burqas.” When he drove in for a closer look at the settlement, Krakauer received “a Short Creek welcome: … a large 4×4 pickup with darkly tinted windows loomed in his rear-view mirror and began aggressively tailing [him].” Krakauer “couldn’t shake the vigilantes” on his bumper and claimed the encounter “scared the shit out of [him].” Krakauer eventually located a National Park ranger, who allegedly dismissed Krakauer’s concerns. “You were in Short Creek, the largest polygamist community in the country. That’s the way it’s been out there forever.”^[iii]

Four years later, in 2003, Krakauer published Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, which parallels the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with an account of two brutal murders committed by excommunicated Mormon fundamentalist zealots. Banner traces a causal line from religion-writ-large through to the founding and splintering of LDS, to Mormon fundamentalisms (primarily the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who have historically been based in Short Creek), and ultimately to the murders that anchor the book’s core narrative. If Banner has a moral, it’s that religion is irrational and dangerous. For Krakauer, the evidence of religion’s dangerous irrationality is the Mormon fundamentalist practice of polygyny.

Krakauer’s stated intention in writing Banner was “to grasp the nature of religious belief…to cast some light on…the roots of [religious] brutality [and]…the nature of faith.” But according to Sam Brower, private investigator and author of Prophet’s Pray: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Church of Latter Day Saints, Banner is Krakauer’s attempt to “portray Short Creek as it really was, a place without joy that is run by a Taliban-style theocracy.” Brower claims that Banner “might never have been written if the xenophobic people of Short Creek had not run [Krakauer] out of town.”

Whatever their failings as a community — and the abuse of women and children is always and everywhere a community failing as well as an intimate violence — the Mormon fundamentalists of Short Creek (now Colorado City) have reason to be suspicious of outsiders.

Not published in LIFE. Short Creek raid, Arizona, 1953.
Loomis Dean—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

In 1953, fifty state troopers and other assorted state officials conducted what Time called “the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history” at Short Creek. Authorities jailed more than a hundred men, removed most of the women from the town, and placed children with foster families. Some Short Creek children were placed with foster families and never returned home. The people of this small town retreated further into their insular community, increasingly wary of both Gentiles (that is: non-Mormons) and LDS.

Polygamy, Arizona Governor Howard Pyle insisted at the time, was “the foulest of conspiracies,” a “wicked theory” intent on enslaving women. That same year, Deseret News applauded the governor’s attempt to eradicate the practice before it became “a cancer of a sort that is beyond hope of human repair.”‘[iv]

WHO ARE MORMON FUNDAMENTALISTS?

Mormon fundamentalists trace their spiritual lineage back to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, just like members of the more mainstream Latter-day Saints (LDS) Church.[v] In 1852, President[vi] Young revealed Doctrine and Covenants 132, which included “The Principle” celebrating the salvific potential of polygynous, or plural, marriage.

But in the late nineteenth century, a post-Civil War federal government insisted that Mormons abandon the practice of polygyny to reclaim Church property and gain statehood for the Utah Territory. President Woodruff revealed that the Church would no longer consecrate plural marriages.[vii] The Woodruff Manifesto caused a series of schisms and led to the formation of numerous Mormon fundamentalist sects. The largest of these sects is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), led by Warren Steed Jeffs. There are a number of practices that set Mormon fundamentalists apart from LDS, but the American public has been most consistently concerned with the practice of polygyny.

After the 1953 raid, public opinion largely sided with the residents of Short Creek. Plural marriage remained illegal but mostly avoided both legal prosecution and national attention for decades. A few high-profile outlets covered Mormon fundamentalist communities: the New York Times reflected on the “Persistence of Polygamy” in 1999; in 2000 and 2001, several news outlets reported that Jeffs had required FLDS parents to remove their children from public schools. The 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart drew national attention again, but her fundamentalist abductor’s religious identity remained a confusing detail in most news coverage. Americans — those living outside Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, in any case — remained largely ignorant of Mormon fundamentalists’ practices or existence until Jon Krakauer’s 2003 blockbuster turned the spotlight on FLDS.

BEYOND BANNER

Under the Banner of Heaven is a deeply flawed but indisputably influential work of pulp nonfiction. Doubleday issued a massive first printing of 350,000 copies, and the book garnered rave reviews from major news outlets, including the New York Times and Newsweek. Krakauer’s blockbuster titillated millions of readers with lurid details of exploited girls and young women within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Throughout Banner, Krakauer locates the root of this violence against women in religion, frustrating scholars and believers alike.

For Krakauer, religion is abuse. And in the case of FLDS, that abuse takes the form of polygyny. In Banner and throughout his subsequent anti-polygamy activism following its publication, Krakauer draws no distinctions between plural marriage among consenting adults and the sexual abuse and coercion of women and children. (Indeed, the voices of consenting adult women in plural marriages are completely absent from the book.)

Krakauer’s post-Banner activism largely focused on finding and apprehending Warren Steed Jeffs, who seems to embody polygamy-as-abuse for the author. Warren Jeffs faced federal charges within a year of Banner’s 2003 publication, made the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list in 2006, and was arrested three months later on charges related to the sexual exploitation of FLDS girls and young women.[viii]

By his own admission and according to Brower’s account in Prophet’s Prey, Krakauer “obsessively” involved himself in the hunt for Warren Jeffs, contributing thousands of dollars of his personal wealth to the cause. Krakauer and Brower worked together to “alert” Texas law enforcement that an FLDS community led by Jeffs had moved into Eldorado.

During the fall of 2004, Krakauer and Brower personally “scouted” the FLDS property, attempting to “serve papers” to Jeffs. They conducted “daytime surveillance” by hiking through deep woods to the north of the commune, and returned after dark with night vision goggles to try to gather the license plate numbers of Jeffs’ support staff. In January 2005, Krakauer accompanied Brower on a small private flight over the FLDS-owned Yearning for Zion Ranch, successfully photographing Jeffs standing in the middle of a prayer circle.

Jeffs is currently serving a life sentence plus twenty years for two felony counts of child sexual assault and remains President of the FLDS. But Krakauer’s crusade to bring Jeffs to justice had effects far beyond one man’s incarceration.

In April 2005, as part of an emotional appeal to pass legislation directly targeting FLDS as a dangerous sect, Krakauer told the Texas House of Representatives’ Committee on Juvenile Justice and Family Issues that FLDS is dangerous, specifically because they practice plural marriage. Krakauer called polygamy “the bedrock of [FLDS] culture,” and warned that “these abuses [that is, of women and children] seem to be part and parcel of every polygamous culture.” (There were no FLDS women or children present at this hearing, and a member of the committee commented that even if FLDS members had been present, the committee would not have recognized them.)

Krakauer’s testimony before the Texas House of Representatives also helped convince state officials that the entire FLDS community in Eldorado was sexually suspect. Despite having received no complaints of abuse, the Committee for Juvenile Justice and Family Issues swore that they would “go after” this marginal religious community, insisting that they would “be a little more creative in how we get the report” of sexual abuse from “inside” the FLDS Yearning for Zion ranch.

In April 2008, a series of phone calls from a woman calling herself Sarah Jessop gave the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services probable cause to investigate the community at Yearning for Zion.[ix] In an unprecedented move (later criticized by the state’s supreme court), law enforcement and child protective services raided the Yearning for Zion ranch soon after. This “military-style raid” — 55 years after the raid in Short Creek — deployed heavily armed officers and armored personnel carriers against US citizens, produced very little evidence of abuse, and separated nearly 500 children from their families — the single largest custodial seizure of children in American history.[x]

Faced with the seemingly-permanent loss of their children, the women of FLDS appealed directly to the public. Marie, separated from her three sons after the raid, explained that “they think we are brainwashed, or whatever,” she sobbingly told reporters. “Who can you tell? Who will believe that they’re really happy? The children are so happy… They are being abused from this experience [of being forcibly separated from their families]. They haven’t known abuse until this experience.”

EXPECTING ATROCITY

The assumption that polygyny constitutes abuse motivated the raid on Yearning for Zion, a Mormon fundamentalist community in Eldorado. The raid garnered massive news coverage, including over thirty stories in the New York Times alone, a special episode of Oprah in 2009, and a series on Anderson Cooper 360. American media outlets remain interested Mormon fundamentalists: Anderson Cooper 360 reported on a family’s “escape from the FLDS church” again in 2013; the Oprah Winfrey Network did a “Where Are They Now?” retrospective in 2015; and dozens of feature-length stories on Mormon fundamentalists have appeared in Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, the BBC, Al Jazeera America (RIP), and most recently, Buzzfeed (RIP?).

Oprah interviewing a woman from the Yearning for Zion community

Krakauer might have whetted Americans’ appetite for lurid tales of polygynous depravity, but he certainly did not exhaust it. His narrative, and those he facilitated (however indirectly), remain a constant source of fascination for American audiences. His interventions contributed to the capture and imprisonment of Warren Jeffs, a man who damaged and abused the community who trusted him to lead them. Banner also made space for more (and more nuanced) depictions of Mormon fundamentalism in the public sphere. At the same time, Americans’ fascination with polygyny has produced more — and more nuanced — depictions of plural marriage and Mormon fundamentalism.

In 2004, shortly after the publication (and popularity) of Under the Banner of Heaven, HBO greenlit “Big Love,” an Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning fictional — but surprisingly sympathetic — look at contemporary Mormon fundamentalist polygyny. “Big Love” ran for five seasons. In 2010, TLC began airing “Sister Wives,” a reality show featuring a Mormon fundamentalist family. “Sister Wives” averaged millions of viewers in its first season and is still on the air. Other reality show treatments of Mormon polygyny include “Polygamy, USA” (National Geographic, 2013), “My Five Wives” (TLC, 2013-2014), “Escaping Polygamy” (A&E, 2014 – present), and most recently the Channel 4 docuseries “Three Wives, One Husband,” which Netflix added in late 2018. At least twenty-three memoirs about Mormon polygyny were published between 2004 and 2017. Documentary filmmakers have produced at least seven films produced on plural marriage and Mormon fundamentalism since 2005, including Sons of Perdition (2010) and Prophet’s Prey (2015, based on Brower’s book of same name).

HBO’s “Big Love” promotional photo

Many of these programs still exoticize polygyny: “escape” and “abuse” and “survival” are consistent themes in many of these shows, books, and films. But shows like “Big Love,” “Sister Wives,” and “Three Wives, One Husband” all provide Mormon fundamentalist women in plural marriages a platform to advocate for themselves and resist depictions of polygynous women as brainwashed, coerced, stupid, or weak-willed. This is a core theme in the opening credits of “Sister Wives”: Meri Brown says that she “believes in living this lifestyle” because “it just makes each of us better,” while Christine Brown clarifies she “like[s] sister wives” and “wanted the family, I didn’t just want the man.” The voices of consenting Mormon fundamentalist women, so lacking in Under the Banner of Heaven, are nevertheless present in the media Banner helped popularize.

Polgyny is unusual, but that does not necessarily make it abusive. The conditions that facilitate abuse — poverty, isolation, patriarchal family structures — are not unique to Mormon fundamentalist communities. Neither sexual nor religious difference make abuse any more or less unlikely to occur. Under the Banner of Heaven and its pulp nonfiction ilk attempt to bring stories of abuse to light, presumably to stop ongoing abuses and prevent future ones. And the voices of abuse survivors absolutely deserve to be heard.

So too, though, do the voices of women who willingly enter into the covenant of plural marriage. Krakauer’s work is laudable for its attempts to make women’s suffering visible, but the silence of Mormon fundamentalist women throughout his work is deafening. Listening to women requires hearing voices that disrupt as well as confirm our suspicions.

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[i] And other survivors of violence, coercion, and assault, of course. I focus on women’s stories not because they are more important than those of other survivors, but because stories about white women and children being abused are most effective at inciting public response.

[ii] Polygamy refers to any marriage of multiple partners and is the most common term used by outsiders to describe Mormon fundamentalist plural marriage. But Mormon fundamentalist plural marriages are exclusively polygynist, marriages of one man to multiple women. Mormon fundamentalist doctrine permits — and in some cases encourages — this form of “plural marriage” while proscribing polyandry, the marriage of one woman to multiple men. See Doctrine and Covenants 132: 54-55.

[iii] All quotes from Brower, Prophet’s Prey (2011).

[iv] Deseret News is a Utah paper funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

[v] LDS officials would contest this definition.

[vi] The head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is known as the President of the Church; he also serves as prophet, seer, and revelator.

[vii] For more on this, see Sarah Barringer Gordon’s excellent The Mormon Question. Additionally, while the 1887 Edmunds Tucker Act revoked women’s suffrage in an attempt to discourage polygamy, the state’s 1895 constitution reinstated the right to vote for all white Utahans. State and federal governments have been deeply invested in regulating women for quite some time.

[viii] Jeffs’ conviction was overturned in 2010, after which he was extradited to Texas and convicted of sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault of children in 2011. He continues to serve as President and Prophet to FLDS from the jail cell he will occupy for the rest of his life.

[ix] “Jessop” was in fact Rozita Swinton, a woman who never lived at Yearning for Zion and has a history of false reports of abuse.

[x] Little evidence, however, is not an absence of evidence. Twelve FLDS men, residents of Yearning for Zion, were indicted on charges related to underage marriages. Warren Steed Jeffs is currently serving a prison term of life plus twenty years for the sexual assault of a twelve- and fifteen-year old girls, whom Jeffs had taken as wives. Nine other FLDS men were convicted of abusing or facilitating the abuse of twelve children at Yearning for Zion.

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Megan Goodwin (PhD UNC 2014)  is a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, and contemporary American minority religions. and the Director of Sacred Writes at Northeastern University, a project committed to amplifying the voices of experts who often go unheard in public discourse. Her current book project, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religion (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), explores the coding of religious difference as sexual danger. Her next project considers the ways contemporary American whiteness is (or feels) threatened by Muslims and Islam. Goodwin is the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s New Religious Movements Program Unit and a former co-editor of Religion Compass’s Religions in the Americas section. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs

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