Reviewed by: Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America by Dana W. Logan Steven C. Bullock (bio) Keywords Protestantism, Rituals, Symbols, Benevolent societies, Freemasons, Catherine Beecher Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America. By Dana W. Logan. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 192. Paper, $27.50.) In studying what she calls the "sensations of governance," Dana W. Logan's Awkward Rituals does not round up the usual suspects either in civic life—commemorations, cornerstone-layings, and fourth of July celebrations—or in traditional sacred spaces—church services, camp meetings, public sermons. Logan, a specialist in religious studies, looks instead at how religious Americans portrayed power in less public settings, in fraternal orders, benevolent societies, and domestic life. Logan's compact work, less than 125 pages of text, seeks to move beyond previous considerations of rituals. For more than a century, scholars have struggled to find paths and patterns in what Victor Turner called the "forest of symbols." Turner, Émile Durkheim, and Clifford Geertz held that rituals expressed the central values of their culture. Pierre Bourdieu and a variety of more recent scholars have considered embodiment, how performances, practices, and rituals shape the actor. Rather than looking at how rituals fit, however, Logan considers how they often failed. Rather than noting the richness, the thickness of her ceremonies, she finds them "awkward," thin, and uncomfortable both physically and symbolically. The problem, in her telling, is that these American rituals were rooted in earlier conceptions of power. Seeking to build hierarchical power, they became "incongruous" in a society that had rejected monarchy (2). America's "sovereign rituals," expressing as well as establishing power, spoke using the Renaissance European vision of the monarch's two bodies, the physical that can die and the political that cannot, a model, she suggests, that helps account for the increasing popularity of the corporation in post-Revolutionary America (2). These problematic monarchical forms enacted what she calls "contractions in [the] culture" (19). The book particularly focuses on four sets of rituals. The first discussion, about the secret ceremonies of the Freemasons, is most clearly tied to the larger argument. The Masonic fraternity, which she calls a "club for powerful white men," both retained monarchical values and looked toward new ideas of the social body, figuring its members as elites within a more equal society (21). Most of its rituals were performed in spaces where only Masons were allowed. All participated in the drama, creating [End Page 329] a theatrical performance without a separate audience. Although Logan underestimates the role of initiating new participants in these ceremonies, she interestingly highlights their use of "physical discomfort" (37). Logan next turns to benevolent societies, looking first at the annual national meetings of the American Bible Society. Such organizations, she suggests, formed a new sort of social body. At their "head" was a board of directors that controlled the society through private meetings that made decisions using carefully regulated procedures that Logan suggests were "a genre of performance" (57). The board then reported on their actions in public meetings in which the head spoke to and for the body, the society's "members." This is an intriguing perspective, opening up new ways of thinking about both the nature of membership in such organizations (in comparison with Masonic participation) and the role of meetings in governing. Another benevolent organization, the American Seaman's Friend Society, provides the focus of the third case study. The society sought to aid sailors through approved boarding houses, onboard libraries, and religious solidarity with sailors. Logan shows that its members (who were largely not mariners) felt inspired (or perhaps obligated) to use maritime language and metaphors to signal their solidarity with sailors. These often-awkward expressions were similar to the religious meetings that members conducted with sailors, meetings that, in Logan's view, unintentionally highlighted the distinction between the two groups—and revealed the limits of benevolent concern. Although members offered religious fellowship, they refused to create more lasting kinship ties with the targeted populations. The final study examines Catherine Beecher's directions for women overseeing a household in her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843). Logan creatively considers Beecher's discussions of the...
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Dec 31, 2023
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