Social Anthropology Seminar - Monday, 13th April 2015 - Professor Fenella Cannell – London School of Economics - “Book of remembrance; making Mormon American family history”
| Dates: | 13 April 2015 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Professor Fenella Cannell |
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Social Anthropology Seminar
Monday, 13th April 2015
Professor Fenella Cannell – London School of Economics
“Book of remembrance; Making Mormon American family history”
All Latter-day Saints are under a religious duty to write their own genealogy and family history, as one part of the work that constitutes sacred kinship. This work, in all its quotidian aspects, frames the salvation of the dead and the living, and the unfolding of divine purpose in the cosmos. Drawing on fieldwork since 2000, this paper explores contemporary American Mormon family histories, and asks what sense of relatedness is created in them and how. In contrast with accounts that, following Schneider, assume that American kinship is a secular domain, or that as Francois Weil has recently argued, the defining fact about modern popular American genealogy is its commercial character, I suggest that Mormon family histories follow a distinctive prophetic logic of person-making, one of whose effects is to allow Mormon narratives of descent to sidestep the battle for dominance between Darwinian evolutionary theory and Creationism which dominates other American Christian contexts.
2.016/2.017
Second Floor Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building
3:15 – 5:00pm
(Tea and coffee available outside the room from 3:00pm)
ALL WELCOME!
Speaker
Professor Fenella Cannell
Role: Seminar Speaker
Organisation: London School of Economics
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2.016 / 2.017 - Second Floor Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
