On Mormon Identity and the Mormon Eye

I am in Peru, staying with a family with whom I have stayed before. They are not LDS and I have had little to do with the Latter-day Saint community here. 

My work in Cusco has been on food and on popular Catholicism including its relationship with native Andean religiosity. A housekeeper has recently come to work in the family’s home. She is Mormon and I feel things have changed for me. 

This is not about her. It is about that notion of Mormon in your space and how it can change your feelings about the world you inhabit. 

I do not tell people here that I am Latter-day Saint. The issue almost never comes up.  They know I am from the United States and that I have entered into their world; I live with them and mostly try to do their customs.  

As an anthropologist you might say I put parts of myself on hold, on a shelf and leave them there in order to give priority to the world I am working in and living in. You can say that, but the closer you get to people the less you can maintain that distance. You have to make your whole self available.  

Nevertheless, my Mormon identity is known by people close to me and for others it has never come up. I suspect for those people close to me it is exotic, a bit like having red hair, or blue eyes. Nothing more. 

Even though I am working on popular Catholicism, I still pay attention to the circulation of the term Mormon and Mormon identity among people here.  

For example, the father of one of the families I am close to tells how when he was young he and his brother became Mormons. They were ready to go on mission.  I do not remember the details of why they quit participating. He now is a devotee of the Lord of Huanca, but will often say, “I am Mormon.” His brother did  the same one day at dinner in Lima. He said to all of us there, including his children who were surprised:  “Did you know that I am Mormon?”  

Multiple religious identities and a range of religious practices and devotions is not uncommon in Latin America.  Fixed, singular identity is rare, though strong among some Mormons.  

In this case, the two brothers do not participate in the LDS community here in Peru as far as I know, but the notion they are Mormon has some resonance for them, even if this defies the notions of religious membership as argued about among sociologists and others who want to known how many members a given group has.  

A different circulation of the ideas of Mormon. Last evening, I was walking up the Sun Avenue here in Cusco after visiting with colleagues from Utah Valley University who had come here with students and were staying at a hotel on that street.  

I had walked a block or two, lost in thoughts as often is the case. Suddenly someone called out “Señor David.”  It was a woman I have known since the mid eighties.  I met her when she was a twelve girl selling necklaces on the main Plaza and have run into her almost every year since. We always converse. 

She asked me where I was coming from and I said from the Eco Inn where I had been visiting with my colleagues. To this she said, “Are they the Mormons?”

That surprised me. I know they are from Utah, but I imagine some are LDS and some are not. Among the Saints, some are active and some are not. But to her they are Mormons. 

I responded I did not know if they were Mormons but, quickly trying to find an explanation, I said “you mean the people who are with César.”

César is a known travel agent and works with tour groups from Utah, especially people from CHOICE and other humanitarian organizations. He is also known to be Mormon.

Since this woman pays close attention to the movements of tourists--her livelihood depends on it, I gathered that was where the idea and identity of Mormon came from.  

This attribute “Mormon” moves in other people’s mouths, beyond any identification you might make. They label you and people then know you as that. Of course, that movement can conjoin with your own self attribution, and that may have nothing to do with what the formal Church accepts as Latter-day Saint or how other members might evaluate you. 

In Utah, these days, many people who are on the records of the Church self identity as “not-Mormon,” which although they mean to say they have left it behind or no longer consider themselves to “be” Mormon can come across as just another of the rich and broad set of varieties within the Latter-day Saint community in its complexity.

Now back to my story. I did not know Sra. Juanita (pseudonym) was Mormon. The second day I was here she asked me if I was an “hermano”. This word can mean Evangelical, Jehovah’s Witness, or some such, at the same time the word has many other meanings. I asked what she meant and she backed off it. 

A day or so later she said she had to go to the dentist and that her dentist was the same as me. His name was Josh (Pseudonym). I figured she meant American. 

Afterwards when I asked how the visit had gone, she said that Josh was Mormon and that he had said I was too. 

Wow,  I do not know Josh and can only guess at how that identity is circulating around me. But then Sra. Juanita told me that she was Mormon too. 

Suddenly I felt uncomfortable. It was as if an eye had opened in the roof and I was being watched. 

I felt it necessary to say that I was not active. I felt a need to partially separate myself from the eye and its implications for me. 

This made me think about the eye and how it works, including whether it is something just in me.  

Ultimately, who cares how much I go to Church or do not, how much I practice or do not?  However for me, and I suspect for many other Latter-day Saints of one sort of another, this issue does matter. 

It certainly is a concern when people argue about whether the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ membership numbers are “inflated” or not. The issue hinges on how much people really participate and really take on the formal notions of what being a Mormon mean. 

On one level I felt I had moved into the Panopticon and could hear Foucault snickering,  but then I realized my experience is not that of an all-seeing eye, whether from God or from Jeremy Bentham. 

It is an eye that pops up, seemingly external to myself, when the formal Church, or the possibility of the formal Church appears in discourse. 

I remember this from elementary school in Texas, third grade, when the teacher separated several of us out from the class and said “you are Mormon boys.  Mormon boys do not do that.”

It is this relationship with some identity, some classification, that is external to me but yet which embraces me. Its externality--whether solely in discourse or in the judgements of other people--is part of what makes it powerful. It circulates beyond my control and ties me to a symbol, and organization, expectations, and dynamics of power that in any given moment may not be where I feel I am or totally want to be. 

Of course, it is not simply external. I have been socialized to be disciplined and guided by this and I react internally. Elsewhere, I have written about the modal Mormon self as one that encompasses within itself this externality, the notion of the Spirit or simply the Church, as something with which you interact inside yourself.  

I suspect this experience of the Mormon Eye as something external, but felt inside, separates different kinds of Mormon from one another. 

I know I will work my way through the appearance of the Mormon Eye in the home I live in, as I have.  It’s starkness surprised me when it appeared suddenly.  It made me think there is something here, for gasping how Mormon identities are different form one another, how different Mormon identities circulate, whether self appellations or external denominations, and how a Mormon Eye--with implications of discipline--can pop up suddenly, potentially transforming interactions.