Ramah, Chiapas, and Vogt: What They Say about Mormons

As you drive around the little Mormon town of Ramah, New Mexico, close to the city of Gallup and Zuni Pueblo, you see a mailbox standing on a rustic post with an important name on it, Vogt. 

This name struck me again this morning, far from the Land of Enchantment, in an article celebrating the decades of the Harvard Chiapas Project. In it I not only learned more about the famous Evon Z. Vogt, of Ramah and his project, but also about Mormons.

Mormons, Ex- and Still-

Ex-Mormons, the very word suggests an absence.  

That ostensible absence, the missing center in a world of apparently isolated, secular individuals bereft of religion’s anchor and community was the subject of a paper read by researcher E. Marshall Brooks at yesterday’s meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC.  

An hour or so before a die-in claimed all who were in the central lobby of the Woodley Park Marriott, where the conference is taking place, Marshall convoked his panel concerning secularity and personal meaning.  He, a non-Mormon Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, had come to Utah to carry out ethnographic research for his dissertation.