Forever Familias
Cloth: 06/25/2024
About the Book
Peruvian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints face the dilemma of embracing their faith while finding space to nourish their Peruvianness. Jason Palmer draws on eight years of fieldwork to provide an on-the-ground look at the relationship between Peruvian Saints and the racial and gender complexities of the contemporary Church.Peruvian Saints discovered that the foundational ideas of kinship and religion ceased being distinct categories in their faith. At the same time, they came to see that LDS rituals and reenactments placed coloniality in opposition to the Peruvians’ Indigenous roots and family against the more expansive Peruvian idea of familia. In part one, Palmer explores how Peruvian Saints resolved the first clash by creating the idea of a new pioneer indigeneity that rejected victimhood in favor of subtle engagements with power. Part two illuminates the work performed by Peruvian Saints as they stretched the Anglo Church’s model of the nuclear family to encompass familia.
About the Author
Jason Palmer is an independent scholar.Reviews
Blurbs
“A fascinating ethnography that innovatively shows the ways Peruvian Mormons understand and reconfigure categories of US Mormonism that are set up to simultaneously include and exclude them. The author’s unique insider knowledge enhances his analysis.”--Erica Vogel, author of Migrant Conversions: Transforming Connections Between Peru and South Korea
“Pioneering and unsettling! Entanglements of pioneer life with Indigenous death in Peruvian Mormonism reveal a contradictory legacy of pioneer indigeneity, a nuanced Lamanite identity, through which forever familias collapse the dichotomy between settler and colonized.”--Thomas Murphy, President of the Mormon Social Science Association
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