MAKING THE STRANGE FAMILIAR: GEOGRAPHICAL ANALOGY IN GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS*

ABSTRACT. In several publications in the 1950s, Donald Meinig raised two themes that are central to contemporary “critical geopolitics”: criticizing the idea of a determining global physical geography that directs global geopolitics, and suggesting that geographical labels and geopolitical concepts have political consequences. I take off from Meinig's insight about geopolitics as an active process of naming and acting by discussing the broad power of analogy in world politics and by examining recent use of two geographical analogies—the Macedonian syndrome and balkanization—as symptomatic of a wider process of making the strange familiar by recycling geographical analogies.     

MEETINGHOUSES IN THE MORMON MIND: IDEOLOGY,ARCHITECTURE, AND TURBULENT STREAMS OF AN EXPANDING CHURCH*

ABSTRACT. Early work by D. W. Meinig delimiting “The Mormon Culture Region” focused on the spread of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (lds ) in a core, domain, and sphere scheme that recognized diffusion of a fast‐growing group bent on shifting its station from cultural edge to religious mainstream. Such a changeover from fringe belief to international force lacks any widely circulated rule book. The lds and its followers today extend influence through diverse, distinct pathways: making missionaries a recognizable global force, offering education on church‐controlled university campuses, emanating wholesomeness, entering high‐security federal service, and attaining national political power. But nothing so locks in an lds message as the standard‐plan meetinghouses, in uniform styles, that mark church presence in North America and other continents. This work analyzes that architecture and examines its fit within lds expansion and presentation of self, not just in the Salt Lake City church but even as imitated by outcast outliers.