Civil Society

Challenging Western Models

Elizabeth Dunn, Chris Hann, Elizabeth Dunn, Chris Hann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134827084
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Between kinship ties on the one hand and the state on the other, human beings experience a diversity of social relationships and groupings which in modern western thought have come to be gathered under the label 'civil society'. A liberal-individualist model of civil society has become fashionable in recent years, but what can such a term mean in the late twentieth century?
Civil Society argues that civil society should not be studied as a separate, 'private' realm clearly separated in opposition to the state; nor should it be confined to the institutions of the 'voluntary' or 'non-governmental' sector. A broader understanding of civil society involves the investigation of everyday social practices, often elusive power relations and the shared moralities that hold communities together. By drawing on case materials from a range of contemporary societies, including the US, Britain, four of the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle and Far East, Civil Society demonstrates what anthropology contributes to debates taking place throughout the social sciences; adding up to an exciting renewal of the agenda for political anthropology.

Chapter 1
Money, morality and modes of civil society among American Mormons

Elizabeth Dunn

Civil society is broadly regarded as the domain of relationships which falls between the private realm of the family on the one hand and the state on the other. A more specific definition of civil society sees it as ‘the social relationships which involve the voluntary association and participation of individuals acting in their private capacities. In a simple and simplistic formula, civil society can be said to equal the milieu of private contractual relationships’ (Tester 1992:8). As such, civil society has been seen as the underpinning of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. However, as recent anthropological work (including White and Rabo, this volume) shows, civil society does not necessarily operate from the premise of liberal individualism. A broader definition of civil society is that of Charles Taylor: ‘a web of autonomous associations independent of the state, which bind citizens together in matters of common concern, and by their existence or actions could have an effect on public policy’ (cited in Kligman 1990:420). If civil society is more like this, then a much wider range of non-state organisations needs to be included. Organisations which are based on the family or on residence, and which are based neither on contractual relations between unbound individuals nor on self-interest, must also be considered.

Arguments against universal individualism (e.g. Strathern 1988) tend to rest on a dichotomy between ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’. The west, in this sense, provides a useful rhetorical device, which highlights the existence of non-individualistic, non-bourgeois forms of civil society. However, this is an incomplete picture of personhood and of civil society in ‘the west’. In this chapter, I take the example of the Mormon church, a religious group founded and based in the United States, in order to complicate and enrich arguments about civil society.¹ Although American Mormons are people who participate in a capitalist, individualist society, they have created a form of ‘civil society’ that looks much more like those described for ‘non-western’ societies. I argue that through their moral doctrines on the family and on gift-giving, Mormons create a milieu where, in certain contexts, self-interest is denied and individuals are made less relevant as social actors. In doing so, they create a space which is not only apart from the American state, but which rejects state action. Through the gift, and its powers of social reproduction, Mormons make a civil society which is not based on private individuals, but rather on a moral system of community interaction.

CANNING THE GIFT

I had been sorting white beans for four hours. Over and over I reached out, swept a handful of beans across the stainless-steel table, and examined them. I picked out the dirt, the small grey stones, and the broken beans, and threw them into a bucket. Then, with a sweep of my hand, I brushed all the good beans into a plastic garbage can. The can had been emptied several times: I had sorted 200 pounds of beans, and had 200 more to go. As I sorted, other members of the work team would come by and help me sort for a moment or two between their other tasks. ‘Have you counted all the beans, Sister Dunn?’ Brother Richards joked, ‘You know we need an accurate count! ’

The beans I sorted were to become part of a beef stew, which would be cooked, canned, shipped and distributed by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS or Mormons). Along with women from the Baltimore First Ward Relief Society,² I had volunteered to spend an evening transforming the food tithed by LDS farmers into cooked and preserved food. Other volunteers were using the huge machines in the factory (which is wholly owned by the LDS church, and used only for charitable production) to put the stew in metal cans. Later on, other volunteers would label the cans, and then ship them to ‘bishops’ storehouses, or the local church welfare distribution centres. The cans would be stocked with other food canned by other branches of the church in rooms like supermarkets, inside the bishop’s storehouse. Local church leaders would then be able to collect bags of groceries and distribute them to church members in need. Throughout this whole process, all the inputs to the stew—the raw materials, the machinery used to can, the labour involved in growing, shipping, canning and distributing, the money used to buy vegetables not grown by Mormon farmers—were donated by church members. In essence, the stew was not just a gift in itself, but the product of a long series of gifts made within the context of the church. It was an integral part of the enormous Mormon welfare system, which includes not only gifts of food, but also donated clothing, help with bills and mortgage payments, an employment bureau, child-care assistance, and spiritual, financial and emotional counselling.

The LDS church discourages its members from accepting government welfare cheques. It preaches financial self-sufficiency, and to that end, encourages its members to save money and to store a year’s worth of canned food and bottled water in their homes in case of natural disasters, social upheaval or financial need. However, the church recognises that unforeseeable circumstances sometimes force people to rely on others for assistance in meeting basic needs. Both the church welfare system and the Relief Society were developed to help church members meet those needs. Active church members, both men and women, are assigned three or four families to visit every month. Both a pair of men (home teachers) and a pair of women (visiting teachers) visit every family in the ward each month.³ Sometimes they enquire after the spiritual needs of the family, ministering to them or providing a lesson or bible study for spiritual enrichment. At other times, if they see the family is in need of material things, they attempt to find out the extent of the need and report it to either the bishop or the Relief Society president.

Allocating funds or goods from the LDS charity programme is entirely up to the bishop. He prays, and if he receives ‘divine guidance’ that the person or family in question should be helped, he can allocate whatever amount he feels is necessary. The only requirement is that the potential recipient be ‘judged worthy’. There are no hard and fast guidelines as to what being ‘worthy’ means, but LDS people I talked to suggested that, in general, the recipient should be an active member of the church.⁴ Recipients should be actively searching for ways to improve their situations, whether by job hunting, reexamining their budgets, or getting more education or training in order to get a job later (the church has programmes for all of these things, and welfare recipients are encouraged to take advantage of them). The church sees its welfare programmes as short-term solutions to temporarily bad times, not as long-term subsidy programmes.

Recipients, no matter how poor, are also expected to be giving. They, too, are expected to tithe 10 per cent of their income, no matter how meagre, and to give of their time and work to others. If they are the recipients of material goods from the church, they are expected to donate time and work to the cannery or the bishop’s storehouse. One man who was bedridden with diabetes was asked to become the bishop’s ‘secretary’. It was a task especially created for this man; one that allowed him to ‘give’ even though he could not get out of bed (Carlson 1992:25).

The giving that welfare recipients do is not seen as payment or an exchange of labour for the charity of the church. Rather, it is seen as a morally necessary exercise which keeps welfare (the unreciprocated gift) from corroding the souls of recipients. As one official church publication puts it, ‘Needy members are given the opportunity to work for the goods and services they receive, thus allowing them to maintain their dignity and make a meaningful contribution to others despite their untoward circumstances’ (Ballard 1993:112). One informant said that welfare recipients are expected to ‘Give back, yes. Pay for, no.’ Exact repayment (except on interest-free short-term loans to pay bills) is not expected, either during the time recipients are helped by the church or afterwards. Recipients are also expected to give to others when they are ‘back on their feet’, and to the extent that they are able, just as others gave to them. This, too, is not repayment or reciprocation of the original gift, but a second gift which likewise does not demand repayment.

TYPES OF VALUE

What is the value of the goods given by the Mormon welfare system? This is a question which is difficult to answer and may not even be meaningful in the context of the church. Within the space of the church, value has a very different meaning from the monetary value which is in use in domains more closely connected to the state.

I discovered this at one point during my shift on the canning line, when Brother Richards, who had been ‘called’ by the church to run the factory full time, came with another man to help me sort the beans. I asked Brother Richards what he thought was the aggregate value of the goods distributed from this particular bishop’s storehouse. He refused to tell me, saying that the church did not divulge such information. I asked him if he would confirm a range: ‘Is it over 100,000 dollars a year?’ I asked. ‘Let’s just say “a lot”’, he answered. Brother Richards was then called away, and I sat puzzling over his refusal to place a value on the gifts being given by and through the church. The other man, whom I had not met before, quietly asked me, ‘Do you want to know how much the church gives away?’ I nodded. He said, ‘Well, how much money do you spend a week on groceries?’ ‘About 40 dollars’, I responded. ‘And how many members of the church are there?’ ‘About 4 million’, I answered.⁵ ‘So,’ he said, ‘lf 1 per cent of the church’s members get groceries every week for a year, how much is that?’ I sat, stupidly, trying to do the sum in my head. ‘lt’s between 80 and a 100 million dollars a year?’ I was really surprised. He said, ‘And that’s just groceries. That’s why I laughed when you guessed 100,000. ’

The whole incident, both Brother Richards’s refusal and the other man’s indirect way of telling me the amount, was confusing to me. Why did the men avoid quantifying the value of the gifts being given? After all, I knew that the LDS church had no prohibition about specifying the value of gifts to the church, that is, the 1.0 per cent tithe. Yet, in every instance that I asked, LDS people refused to specify the value of gifts given by the church, or by themselves acting for the church.

For Mormon volunteer workers, time given in the service of the church is likewise not easily broken apart and reaggregated to form a quantifiable total. This is the direct opposite of time and labour which is exchanged for wages. In the ideal typical case of wage labour, time is broken down into increasingly minute quantities, so that the employer can get labour value out of every minute he has purchased. But work-time given in the service of the church cannot be infinitely fragmented and reaggregated. For this reason, no monetary value is ever assigned to time or work given. This bears some striking parallels to both Brother Richards’s joke about ‘counting the beans’ and his refusal to quantify the value of the church’s charity. Like the beans once they were in the stew, the gifts given by church members to others are whole and integral things; they cannot be easily broken down into commensurable units.

The contrast between work-time exchanged for wages and the worktime given by church members was shown in a joke made by Sean Moore, a young man who came as part of the second shift at the cannery. When he relieved me at my job (which by that time was chopping onions), I said ‘I can’t believe you’re working from midnight to 8 a.m. after working a full day at your job!’ He laughed and said, ‘Yeah, but you get more blessings that way!’ ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘lt’s like getting overtime pay, time-and-a-half, right?’ He replied, ‘Exactly, I’m getting more blessings than you.’ One might take this at face value, assuming that Mormons believe they are getting ‘paid’ in blessings from God for their work. In some senses this is true—every person that I asked said that they believed that because they were charitable, God would bless them. These blessings, however, are not a payment. Mormons do not believe there is a ‘blessings-per-hour’ rate of exchange, and they do not believe that God incurs a debt to them or is obligated to bless them because they work. In this way, Sean Moore’s joking equivalence of blessings and wages was meant to underscore their fundamental dissimilarity.

We cannot repay God for his blessings. We cannot purchase his blessings by our service and our obedience. He cannot be placed under contract to us. What he wants from us is this acknowledgment of which I have spoken —that we see our relationship to him, that we acknowledge the ties that bind us to him, and that we accept his generous gifts with a loving heart.

(Okazaki 1993:32)

Just as wage labour and donated work are dissimilar, so are tithes (in cash or in kind) and donated work-time. Tithes in cash or in kind are measured as they enter the church. The beans, for example, were weighed and assigned an equivalent monetary value when they were tithed by the farmer. Similarly, when people pay their tithe in cash, they fill out a form which details the amount of the payment and the amount of the income it was based on. Work-time, however, is never quantified. Even in the cannery, a quasi-industrial setting, time was not easily quantified: although each of us knew we were supposed to work about eight hours, from 4 p.m. until midnight, people arrived and left at different times. At midnight, people did not leave exactly on time, but worked until they reached some sort of a natural break in their tasks (e.g. finishing sorting one bag of beans). Church members do not ‘watch the clock’ while they are working for the church. They do not measure or keep track of the time they give or the work they do, nor do they ever assign it an equivalent cash value. Work-time and tithing cannot be substituted for one another: even if a person pays an extra tithe, he or she is still expected to volunteer to work. Likewise, working extra hours does not excuse a person from paying the full 10 per cent tithe. In the church, the capitalist truism that time is money does not apply. Because of the spiritual, moral and social virtues that Mormons believe service to others has, a Mormon cannot ‘buy’ his or her way out of serving in the church.

This suggests that time and work are the categories which transform the wages earned in the world outside the church into the gifts given and shared by church members. Volunteer work cooked the beans (which were individual, countable and separable), and turned them into a stew from which they were not separable. In the same way and at the same time, donated work-time ‘cooks’ money from outside the church which is given in tithes and fast offerings, and transforms it into food which does not have a cash equivalent. The essential value of money and commodities is converted, making them into gifts which are incommensurable with cash. In Mormonism, this conversion of quantifiable inputs (wages, commodities) into unmeasurable gifts reinforces the border between the social life of the church and the world outside it. Clear distinctions are made about the behaviour appropriate to each venue. For example, in the world outside the church, it is acceptable to charge money for one’s work, but inside the church, all work is a gift. Outside the church, it is all right to act in one’s self-interest (within limits), but inside the church, one should strive to be selfless and to act in the service of others.

THE CONCEPT OF THE FAMILY

The gift in Mormonism effaces some boundaries, and at the same time it creates others. This process is mediated through the concept of family, which is at the heart of the Mormon religion. At Sunday meetings in the Mormon church, speakers rarely refer to individuals except in the context of families. In Sacrament Meeting, for example, I often heard exhortations to young men and women to marry and form families. Individual behaviour, in this case adherence to a moral code which prohibits sexual activity, was explained to single adults in terms of the effects that premarital sex would have on their present (natal) and future (marital) families. Even physical health, which was said to be the responsibility of each individual, was related to families: the speaker said that you have to take care of yourself in order to be in good physical and spiritual health so you can fulfil your responsibilities to your family. The ideal type of the family as seen in church rhetoric is, of course, the nuclear family. Ideally, the father of the family earns a wage, while the mother takes care of the children and the home. Ideally, too, the nuclear family is set in the context of a large extended family which lives nearby. Women who are housewives have a large number of female kin nearby to help with child care, to teach home-making skills, and to help on larger chores such as quilting and home canning.⁶ Labour is a gift that is given ‘for free’ by female relatives to one another and to their families, with only vague expectations that it will be returned in kind some day. Within the family, either nuclear or extended, gifts are not expected to be repaid to the giver; rather, each member is expected to contribute to the family to the best of his or her ability.

Baltimore Mormon women and their families differ markedly from the ideal nuclear and/or extended family. A few of the women, mostly those who are from Utah and who have come to Baltimore with spouses who are attached to Johns Hopkins Medical School, live in nuclear families with children. These women, however, are cut off from the larger extended families that they left behind in Utah. As Anne Brown, a Utahborn woman, said, ‘Most young mothers here don’t have family around. It gets isolated here. I think society isolates mothers, because it doesn’t value people ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CIVIL SOCIETY
• EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: MONEY, MORALITY AND MODES OF CIVIL SOCIETY AMONG AMERICAN MORMONS
• CHAPTER 2: HOW ERNEST GELLNER GOT MUGGED ON THE STREETS OF LONDON
• CHAPTER 3: ANTI-SEMITISM AND FEAR OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN A POST-TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY EAST GERMANY
• CHAPTER 4: THE SHIFTING MEANINGS OF CIVIL AND CIVIC SOCIETY IN POLAND
• CHAPTER 5: BRINGING CIVIL SOCIETY TO AN UNCIVILISED PLACE
• CHAPTER 6: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PROJECTS
• CHAPTER 7: CIVIC CULTURE AND ISLAM IN URBAN TURKEY
• CHAPTER 8: GENDER, STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN JORDAN AND SYRIA
• CHAPTER 9: THE DEPLOYMENT OF CIVIL ENERGY IN INDONESIA
• CHAPTER 10: COMMUNITY VALUES AND STATE COOPTATION
• CHAPTER 11: MAKING CITIZENS IN POSTWAR JAPAN