Call for Papers!

If you haven't seen this call, check out this panel being put together for the Western History Association:
CFP.

Topic for Discussion: “God in America” Goes West

by Tom Bremer

The recent PBS documentary “God in American: How Religious Liberty Shaped America" has received much attention, both critical and laudatory, from historians of American religions—see, for instance, reviews at Religion Dispatches (and this one); at The Immanent Frame; at Religion in American History (and this one; and yet another); and at the New York Times.  One criticism has been the scant attention to religion in the American west.  How might the American west have been better integrated in the narrative of “God in America,” and how would it have been a different kind of story if the religious history of the west had been more prominent?

Religion in the American West Seminar Meeting

by Tisa Wenger

It was great to see so many people at our seminar session in Atlanta! We had four very interesting papers to discuss:

1.    Travis Ross, “California Imagined: The Pacific Expositor and the Religious Imagination”

2.    Jonathan Olson, “Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West”

3.    Barry Alan Joyce, “Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at Chaco Culture National Historic Park”

4.    Brett Hendrickson, “Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace”

For anyone who wasn’t at the session and would like to read the papers, they are available to seminar members through the website’s members-only page (link in the blog sidebar). I gave a longer-than-it-should-have-been response to the session, which I thought I’d share in condensed form here on the blog. Reflecting on common themes that ran through some or all of these papers led us to a broader discussion about what key themes might distinguish “religion in the American west” and what contributions our work can offer the broader fields of U.S. western history, religious history, and religious studies more generally.

One common theme was the power of religious imagination to shape local and national identities. The first two papers focused on nineteenth-century Protestant public discourse. Ross gave us a close reading of a California Presbyterian newspaper to show how its writers developed a particular vision of Californian identity as they spoke to national debates around slavery, denominational vs. ecumenical efforts, and religious liberty. Olson showed us the power of religious discourse, and religious “othering,” to shape national political debates—in this case, how Protestant politicians in California deployed religious rhetoric to justify exclusionary legislation aimed at Asian immigrants at the end of the century.

The second set of papers examined tensions and points of convergence in more contemporary or perhaps “postmodern” contexts of religious hybridity and diversity. Joyce’s paper provided a finely layered discussion of competing religious narratives and practices laying claim to Casa Rinconada at Chaco Canyon, where National Park Service personnel attempt to negotiate compromises that honor strikingly different understandings of this space put forth by Pueblo Indians, Navajos, and New Age practitioners. Should New Age uses of the space be prohibited when they are offensive to American Indian traditions, or does the principle of religious freedom give them the right to use this public space? What happens when Navajo sacred histories, and Navajo understandings of how the space should be used, are deeply offensive to the Pueblo Indians who trace their ancestry to those that built this ancient city? Joyce asks, “Who decides under the bureaucratic, institutional umbrella of First Amendment rights which narrative becomes part of the cultural canon and which is denied admittance?”

Finally, Hendrickson’s paper, a study of curanderas who work across racial/cultural boundaries in the southwest borderlands, showed us the power of religious imagination and practices of healing to cross borders. Here, Mexican-American curanderas reshape and perhaps re-indigenize their practices in order to appeal to multiple audiences and especially New Age Anglos who, in Hendrickson’s analysis, are predisposed through an ongoing American metaphysical tradition to these hybridized healing modalities. Here, without minimizing the ongoing power disparities that shape these exchanges, Henrickson shows us how the power of religious imagination may be invoked to provide healing across all sorts of boundaries.

My conclusion proposed several broad rubrics (none of them original to me) for thinking about religion in the American west.

I. WEST AS PLACE.

·      Exploring the distinctive forms of racial and religious pluralism that are characteristic in this region

·      The particular salience and visibility of Native American traditions

·      The significance of LAND and PLACE for understanding religious practices, experience, and traditions in the west.

·      Mapping RELIGIOUS GEOGRAPHIES: region, regional identities and traditions as crucial to the study of religion. We can draw here on the work of cultural geographers and others who have done significant work to illuminate the cultural significance of place and geography.

·      GLOBALIZATION as a crucial emphasis in current scholarship across the humanities. How can we place our analysis of regional religious geographies in the context of globalized patterns of trade, communication, immigration, and religion?

II. WEST AS IMAGINED.

·      The role of religious imagination in constructing regional identities

·      The place of the west in national and global religious imaginations

Please share your thoughts in response these comments, and your suggestions for additional rubrics and themes.

Atlanta, 2010

This year's meeting of the Religion in the American West seminar will center around four papers exploring constructions of identity, especially in the Southwest and California.  The papers under discussion examine the role of religion in constructing and complicating regional and national identities, sacred sites, and religious rituals. In addition to discussing the critical issues that each paper raises, the seminar discussion will also focus on ways that the four papers taken together highlight the distinct contributions the American West makes to understanding American religion. Seminar attendees are asked to read the four papers in advance; they are available for seminar members through the “Members Only” page of our website (http://www.yale.edu/relwest/).  Enrolled seminar members should have received an email with instructions about accessing this page; those interested in attending who are not yet enrolled should contact tisa.wenger@yale.edu for more information accessing the papers via the website.

 

The Seminar Meeting will take place during the 4:00-6:30pm session on Saturday Oct. 30. Here is the list of presenters and their topics:

 

Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno

Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

 

Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University

“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

 

Barry Joyce, University of Delaware

Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

 

Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University

Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

 

Following the discussion will be a business meeting, in which we will chart our direction for the remaining two seminar meetings.

 

We hope to see in you in Atlanta!

In Memoriam, David Weber

by Tisa Wenger

This has become a summer of loss—of the passing of giants in the history of the American west. As many of you reading this blog will already have heard, David Weber, who defined the field of southwest borderlands history, died at his home in New Mexico on August 20 after a long battle with multiple myeloma.

I first encountered Weber’s work in a graduate seminar on Religion in the Colonial Atlantic World. Although his primary interests were not in religion, his book The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) included a wonderful chapter on the role of missionaries in the northern frontiers of colonial New Spain. More important, the groundbreaking quality of his work—its incisive treatment of a subject largely ignored by previous generations of historians—swept away a whole host of misconceptions and helped us all see why the borderlands mattered as an integral part of U.S. history. His work helped inauguarate the now thriving field of borderlands studies, and helped a new generation of American historians understand our work in the larger context of the western hemisphere.

A few years after that seminar, I was privileged to learn to know David when I held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies, which he founded and directed. Coming to SMU as a relative outsider to the worlds of western history and the southwest borderlands, I was deeply grateful for David’s welcoming kindness. He was a generous mentor to me, during and well beyond that fellowship year—as he has been to many others—and we will all miss him.

David was the author of more than seventy articles, and wrote or edited twenty-seven books. He was past president of the Western History Association, and the only American historian elected to membership in both the Mexican Academy of History and the Society of American Historians. In May 2003, he was knighted by order of the King of Spain, receiving the Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel La Católica; and in February 2005 he was named to membership in the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca (the Order of the Aztec Eagle), the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals.

David is survived by his wife, Carol Bryant Weber of Dallas, a son and daughter-in-law, a daughter, three grandchildren, and three siblings. Memorial services will be held in Dallas, with details forthcoming on the SMU website at http://www.smu.edu. Rest in peace, David Weber.