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.
Vogt grew up on his family’s sheep ranch near this little town amongst the pines west central New Mexico where the LDS ward house is one of the most prominent buildings. Not LDS himself, his family has owned a ranch there since the nineteenth century when his father, settled there.
Vogt’s father, who shared the same name, came from Chicago and settled this land of mesa, piñones, and sheep. He located himself next to one of the classic Mormon settlements in its expansion outward from Utah into the rivers and mountains of Arizona and New Mexico and among others of New Mexico’s diverse populations of Hispanics and Indians, as well as Anglos.
Vogt’s New Mexico upbringing was key for his career as an important anthropologist at a celebrated place. He had an awareness of other ways of being, other languages, and other religions from childhood, especially among peoples such as the much studied Dine (Navajo) and Zuni who themselves had drawn scholars and figured in anthropological studies and debates as far away as Paris and London.
His professional work on Maya communities, such as Zinacantan, and many others through his students, over many decades established long lasting ties between North American scholars, Mexican scholars, and most importantly indigenous peoples. As a result, many of of his student's names were well known to Latin Americanists of my generation, even though I did not study the Maya nor Chiapas.
His project provided a framework and depth of understanding of Maya life in Chiapas over a critical part of the twentieth century that had relevance for work far removed from southern Mexico.
One odd little curiosity is that the Chiapas project did not appear all by itself as a massive, joint ethnographic work. Rather it was preceded by something else in which Evon Z Vogt, or Vogtie as they say he was called, took part. I refer to the Harvard Comparative Values Project that focused on the populations of the area where Vogt grew up, the Navajo, Zuni, Spanish Americans, Texans, and Mormons.
For that area of New Mexico at that time these appellations make sense, they referred to distinctive populations with distinctive forms of social organization and residence.They are a local set of categories that was drawn into anthropological discourse and hence made somewhat rigid as ethnonyms. It would have been interesting to compare this ethnic organization with those of Chiapas.
Nevertheless, there is a gap in Mormon studies, if no where else, illustrated by this. We do not know the myriad of different or similar ways in which the term Mormon fits into local sets of names for kinds of people nor how it fits into local social organization. The literature tends to use Mormon as a kind of absolute, a term whose meaning is given when it actually may not be so.
From the Values Project came Thomas O’Dea’s important monograph called simply The Mormons. While the Chiapas project broke ground and brought together information, the Values project did the same, certainly for the Mormons. O’Dea’s work is critically important, whether the main results come from his stay in the remote, Mormon village of Ramah, or from his stay among Latter-day Saint intellectuals in Salt Lake. It gave the sociological / anthropological study of Mormons a place in the intellectual universe of the US.
There is more. Mormons, in this sense, fit into the same frame of native communities as the Maya in Chiapas, they are not the national people. This became even more evident in the Harvard article about the Chiapas project when the author was explaining Vogt’s predilection for becoming an anthropologist and assiduously mentoring a generation of scholars in Chiapas.
Quoting Frank Miller, one of the main participants in the Chiapas project, the article states
Tolerance, agreed Miller, “was great training.” That was built into Vogt, he said, during his boyhood on a New Mexico sheep ranch where neighbors represented a diversity of languages and cultures. There were Zuni and Navajo Indians, Mexican-Americans, and Mormons, who were his earliest schoolteachers. Growing up, Vogt said there was a “rural microcosm of the United Nations lying within 40 miles of the Vogt ranch.”
The article emphasizes a “tolerance” acquired by growing up in multicultural New Mexico. I wish that statement were so easy and so little needing explanation.
New Mexico was hardly a place of intercultural understanding, much less tolerance. At least it was not in the fifties and sixties when I was a boy who either lived there or on its edges. There was violence and interethnic struggle, although there were also long periods of interaction, or perhaps more simply awareness, of different ways of being and living in close proximity to you.
I vividly remember my father taking me to see a farmstead near Las Vegas, New Mexico belonging to a Spanish American family that was burned with them in it to get them to clear out so the land would be available for Anglo purchase. I remember the Alianza and Tierra Amarilla, the calling out of the National Guard to pull people out of houses and keep them in sheep corrals, as well as bombings in Albuquerque.
In fact, the word tolerance, as many have commented, establishes a position of power and then noblesse oblige. It is a harsh and unrelenting word, not the pleasant word many people think it is. The presence of Mormons in the statement illustrates clearly the tacit fierceness of the word.
The article places Vogt in a different position from that of the Mormons who built Ramah and among whom he lived, just as they are different from Indians, the Navajo, and Zuni, as well as the Spanish-speaking Mexican Americans (who preferred to be called Spanish Americans unless down by Las Cruces).
Curiously, the Anglo Texans are elided in this accounting. They seem to smoothly meld with the position of the speaker, that of Harvard, looking out at cultural minorities who cannot be mainstream and so must be the subject of tolerance. The position taken is that of a mainstream academic and a mainstream American to whom these others are curiosities at best and marginals at worst.
Given Mormon claims to be mainstream, certainly following Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign, this colonialist elitism from an anthropologist within a publication from a prominent place should be unsettling and uncomfortable.
Vogt’s work was excellent and continues to have an impact, as does O’Dea’s work on Mormons. They both deserve tribute as do the Harvard Values project and the Chiapas project that followed on its heals and was much more successful. Nevertheless, there is much grist for our analytic mills in this work, including what it means to be Mormon within a power structure set by others, and how universal notions of Mormon play with the many, probably diverse, local classifications into which Mormons are drawn.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/11/first-model-for-harvard-in-mexico/
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