Sorry, I’m just seeing this comment, more than a week after you left it. It’s been a while since I read the Cannell piece, so it’s not as fresh in my mind as when I wrote that blog posting, but here are a few other mistakes: she defines the concept of “eternal increase” (p.336) as “to conceive, birth, and raise children forever,” and glosses it as “having babies deep into eternity” (p.338). It’s a much more esoteric concept than that, and I’ve never heard any Mormon doctrine that suggests that we would be physically giving birth to children once we’re resurrected. (I’d rather go to the Terrestrial Kingdom than have to imagine giving birth into eternity.) It’s interesting, though, that her informants gloss this concept with such physical terms as “conceive” and “birth.”

Another example is when she uses “souls” to talk about what should properly be called premortal “spirits.” Mormon doctrine distinguishes between the two: the soul is the composite of both spirit and body, eternally joined by resurrection.

Then on p.345 she says that “converts have inherited their ‘teachability’ — and their right to exercise priesthood power — from their parents.” That’s not really right, either, to my mind. When a convert talks about being “born of goodly parents” or coming from a line of virtuous people, this is a way of expressing honor and respect for ancestors and demonstrating their worth even if they are not church members. It’s key to know that Mormons think of any good person as a potential Mormon, even posthumously; that’s why they do baptisms for the dead. But the concept of genetic inheritance is much more complicated in Mormonism (there’s a certain blessing that you get once in your life, called the Patriarchal Blessing, in which you get spiritually adopted into a tribe of Israel, and it’s not unknown for siblings to find that they are from different tribes, which clearly shows that the kind of descent line being identified is not simply a genetic one) and Mormons believe fervently in an individual’s own potential to be completely different from — in the direction of being either good or bad — her or his forebears. I have never heard of church authorities saying that certain special individuals were “foreordained” to be the parents of converts. That’s not to say that they haven’t said it — perhaps they have! — but only to not that I’m bothered that there’s no citation to back it up.

She also says that “some Church leaders see in individual revelation a potential conflict with the standardization of doctrine for which they aim.” What Church leaders think that? The concept of personal revelation is clearly structured so as to not conflict with church hierarchy. You can only have a personal revelation for yourself or someone you have responsibility for: a parent for his or her children, a bishop for his congregation, or the prophet for the entire church. But one person can’t have personal revelation for someone else, and you can’t have a personal revelation that contradicts church doctrine. This radically narrows the scope of what you can have personal revelation about. You can pray to get an answer to the question of “Should I go to Princeton or Berkeley for my PhD?” or “Should my family really move to Australia to take this new job?” but personal revelation can’t challenge any church doctrine in any way. (Fundamentally misunderstanding this is to my mind the most serious flaw in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, btw)

These are all very minor points and I don’t think they detract from the overall fine work Cannell has done to elucidate Mormon doctrine. I agree with John Edvalson that overall her approach is thoughtful and generous. It’s just that if a Mormon or expert on Mormon theology had been asked to review her article before it was published, many of these would have been corrected or clarified. Certainly “exultation” would have been spelled correctly. But it is not the practice of anthropologists to have their informants vet their publications, and this is the result.

I know I’m the pot calling the kettle black: no doubt there are also minor mistakes in my own ethnography of Egypt and I confess that I didn’t ask all (or even most of) my informants to check what I wrote before I published it.

One more specfic question–more a curiosity. WHat other ‘complicated’ mistakes with regard to Mornomism did you find in Cannell’s work? And do you know of any other interesting anthropological work on Mormonism?

Thanks in advance.