Mrs Gardner's world: scale in Mormon women's autobiographical writing

This study of daily experiences of scale focuses on activity patterns recorded in the journal of a Mormon woman living in Pine Valley, Utah c.1890–1920. The household as 'private' domestic space was weakly developed, and both the home and village were sites of community activity. Lofland's concept of 'parochial space' distinguishes the spaces used by one's social and kinship networks vs areas occupied by strangers. In Pine Valley's isolated situation, large-scale economic and political involvement appeared limited. More significant for Mormon women was a transcendent religious ideology that furnished simultaneity and integration of scales.     

Spatial Transgression and the BYU Jerusalem Center Controversy*

Dominant groups tend to construct the meaning of places to justify and sustain their ideology and orthodoxy in order to solidify power and to maintain their control over others. New outsider groups whose ideology disrupts the established order and sovereignty of the dominant group can be labeled transgressive ( Sibley 1995; Cresswell 1996 ). Transgressions of hegemonic spaces force dominant groups to reexamine themselves and to reaffirm or to modify their position. This concept of transgression is used to examine the controversy surrounding the building of the Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center in the mid‐1980s in Jerusalem. The public outcry among some Israelis over the building of this educational edifice concerned the potential use of the Jerusalem Center as a focal point for Mormon (Latter‐day Saints) proselytizing efforts. We examine the way the Jerusalem Center was viewed and depicted by its opponents, suggesting how basic geographic concepts such as scale and site further refine the concept of spatial transgression for buildings and urban redevelopment.     

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.