Considering and Re-Considering "the West"

By Cara L. Burnidge

Recently High Country News, and its wonderfully titled"The Goat Blog," (with "News and Views From High Country News Writers and Editors), considered and re-considered an issue that is familiar to readers of this blog: What is meant by "American West"?

In her post "What the West would look like with state boundaries drawn by culture, population, or watersheds," Jodi Peterson noted that "our definition of the West has morphed over the years." She writes that they "cover the 11 Western states, and for us, one of the key characteristics of those states is their high proportion of public land."

You can see their map of the West here, which leaves out Texas, because of its few public lands, but also leaves out Alaska, despite its allotment of public land, as shown on the right.

This working definition, of course, hasn't stopped High Country News from considering other states and regions in its discussions about the West. Peterson draws attention to Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America , a national map drawn according to watershed boundaries, and other possibilities of reconsidering regional identity in the West and the U.S. more broadly.

Peterson didn't include it in her piece, but I'm reminded of this map included in Max Fischer's "40 More Maps that Explain the World."

 "North American languages, before colonialism" highlights the diversity, but perhaps more importantly, the presence of languages and cultures prior to colonialism. It also brings attention to "America," "the West," and "the American West' beyond its current U.S.-state borders, an endeavor that I imagine Petersen and  RelAmWest readers agree on.

After their discussions, Peterson notes, High Country News decided to stick with their slogan “for people who care about the American West.”    Even though the conceptions and representations change, depending on one's orientation, she says, "our mission"--and therefore the name--"stays the same."

While our name--Religion in the American West--has stayed the same and our interest in "the West" continues, I am not satisfied in the same way Peterson is with the essence of "the West," as geographic space or place, as scholarly subject, or as subfield. I'm looking forward to the coming weeks on the blog, where we will highlight our contributor's interests in and approaches to "the West." Perhaps it won't be the essence alone, but the questions at hand that will gain interest as well.

Milestone: 200 Posts!

Gif Credit: nbcsnl.tumblr.com

We've reached the 200-post milestone! Thank you readers and contributors for helping make this blog a space to share ideas, try out new theses, and learn about new and innovative approaches to the study of religion in the American West. Thank you especially to Quincy Newell and Brandi Denison for starting the blog and shaping this space for our scholarship. You've given us much to celebrate!

Stay tuned for more to come at RelAmWest! If you're interested in contributing a post or receiving email notices about the blog and/or the Religion in the American West AAR Group, contact us at relamwest@gmail.com or follow us on twitter (@relwest1).

Book of the Month:

Robert L. Dorman. Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.

reviewed by Brett Hendrickson

There are two continua at play in Robert Dorman’s fascinating study of how the West has been perceived and handled over the past century and a half. The first and most prominent of these continua, found in the subtitle of the book, is the tension between regionalism and national unity. The second is the long-running debate about what land in the West can and should do: new frontier of agricultural and industrial paradise or unique setting of magnificent and virgin landscapes that are already spoken for by nature, by Indians, or by “authentic westerners.” The author does a wonderful job of allowing the story of the American West to move to and fro on these continua, and the reader can enjoy the sparks that fly when competing claims and ideas for the region and for the nation scrape against one another.

The question of regionalism is begged when one talks about the American West, and the cast of characters Dorman depicts in his book know this. From John Wesley Powell’s vision of a managed settlement of the West, to the Bureau of Indian Affair’s assimilationist manipulations of Native Americans, to Edward Abbey’s radical and environmental isolationism, to the Sierra Club’s paradoxical plea that the West be saved as a common and nation-wide heritage, it has long been up for debate how much the West should be known as its own special place, or if it should be known as an integral extension of the rest of the country. To complicate this debate about identity, the regionalism of the West has so often broken down into more and more minute expressions of localism, often going far beyond the typical divisions of Pacific Northwest, California, Mormon Country, Great Basin, Rocky Mountains, Southwest, Plains, and Texas.

Tensions about use of the West are tied to the question of region vs. nation. The anti-regionalists, to over-simplify Dorman’s fine analysis, want the area to be planned, tilled, ranched, mined, and managed as part of the national project. An example of this that Dorman discusses is historian Karl Wittfogel’s fear that the exploited, nationalized West could become a despotic “hydraulic society” that depended on “centralized works of water control.” The regionalists, who often include Native American groups as well as Mexican Americans, not to mention Western exceptionalists like Wallace Stegner, Willa Cather, and Earth First!, remind the would be exploiters and national project builders that the region cannot be made in the image of the East. The Dust Bowl, the poverty of reservations, and the contentious localism within the region itself make their point abundantly clear.

Another fascinating and provocative point that Dorman makes has to do with academic fashions and the notion of region. Take these examples:

[The regionalists’] cardinal sin was to attempt to define the regional characteristics of the West (aridity, wide-open spaces, predominant federal ownership of land, etc.). To do so was to “essentialize” the West—to fix its characteristics as a given, an essence—which to the postmodern, poststructuralist mindset of the 1990s was the gravest of scholarly errors....Historian Virginia Scharff declared that to “claim any object, idea, place, process, or people for the category ‘West’ is to fix things, thoughts, and social processes, and lives that are, historically, only contingently, contradictorily, and discontinuously Western” (176-7).

The opposing view:

Other scholars begged to differ with this assessment of regionalism, continuing to find it a potent source of cultural radicalism. Conceptually, their focus was on the subregional localist West....Regionalism was therefore “an alternative and oppositional tradition, one that worked against the construction of nation and empire and that challenged the construction of masculine and feminine that underwrote the projects of nation and empire” (177-8).

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that religion is barely mentioned in Dorman’s book. But one does not need to try very hard to apply Dorman’s observations about regionalism and its discontents to the study of religion in the West. This reader was inspired by Dorman’s book to think more about questions of regional religious study vis-à-vis the study of religion in all of North America. We know that regionalists tell stories that complicate nationalist myths. But we also know that regionalists can reify localist myths. That’s why we keep working and why books like Dorman’s are so helpful.

Welcome Cara!

By Brandi Denison

Please join me in welcoming Cara Burnidge as a co-editor of the blog! I met Cara when we were both selected to present papers for one of the earliest Religion in the American West Seminars at the American Academy of Religion. She wrote beautifully about the transition of Kansas from the Wild West to the tame Midwest, and about Carrie Nation’s role in establishing the idea of Kansas.

Since then, she’s graduated with a PhD in religious studies from Florida State University, and is an active contributor to both this blog and the Religion in American History blog. She is a clear thinker, energetic, and engaged in digital humanities projects. I’m confident that the blog with flourish with her editorship.

Cara will be taking my place as co-editor as I move on towards other projects. She has fantastic ideas for the blog and I can’t wait to see what she and Stan cook up.

We did it!

We have wonderful news to share! The AAR’s Program Committee met in December, and they decided to grant us official group status. This means that, for the foreseeable future, we will have a presence at every national AAR meeting as the Religion in the American West Group. We are thrilled that all of the important work we have been accomplishing these past few years concerning this growing area of study will now enjoy the stability of a first-rate institutional home.

A huge “thank you” to all of you who supported this effort with letters, kind words, blogposts, tweets, and your participation in the Seminar. And a special thanks to Quincy Newell and Jim Bennett, the co-chairs of the Religion in the American West Seminar. Moving forward, Brandi Denison and I (Brett Hendrickson) will serve as your intrepid co-chairs. We are happy to introduce you to the Group’s steering committee:

· Thomas Bremer, Associate Professor, Rhodes College

· John-Charles Duffy, Visiting Assistant Professor, Miami University

· Kathleen Holscher, Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico

· Patricia O’Connell Killen, Academic Vice President and Professor, Gonzaga University

· Sarah Pike, Professor, California State University at Chico

In the next few weeks, we will be circulating our Call to Papers for the 2014 AAR meeting in San Diego, so stay tuned!