These Bodies Were Born to Die': Separatism and Medicine in a Fundamentalist Mormon Community
This dissertation examines religious separatism within a polygamy-practicing Fundamentalist Mormon community called "the Group." Based on almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork, it specifically explores how adherents understand, construct, and negotiate their often-ambiguous position within the power structures in which they are embedded, specifically the Latter-day Saint religious movement and conceptions of American national identity. The Group exists in the margins of both of these communities, facing legal, ecclesiastical, and social discipline for their practice of polygamy and for diverging from legitimized religious forms. Consequently, the Group maintains a high degree of separation from surrounding communities. At the same time, adherents hold that they occupy a special position as chosen people within both the United States and the Latter-day Saint religious movement, and therefore embrace aspects of the very communities from which they are denied inclusion and legitimacy. This dissertation pays particular attention to how Group adherents' ideas about the body, health, and medicine reflect boundaries that they both perceive of and construct between their own community and the non-Fundamentalist world. Distrust of biomedical care and enthusiasm for non-biomedical alternatives articulate adherents' fears of alienation, discipline, and moral contamination and also point to the parameters along which adherents define belonging, safety, and righteousness on the one hand, and alienation, danger, and moral deterioration, on the other.
Alternative Medicine, Mormon Fundamentalism, Mormonism, Relationalism, Separatism
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