Ancestors in the Laying-By Time: Revival of the Living and the Dead at Shingleroof Camp Meeting Pubblico
Mote, Donna Susan (2012)
Abstract
Shingleroof Camp Meeting in Henry County, Georgia, founded in the 1820s, endures in the early twenty-first century as a distinctive and distinguishable religious culture in which ancestors play prominent roles. This multimedia ethnography and cultural history explores the relationships between the living and the dead at Shingleroof, analyzing the camp meeting as a cult of ancestor veneration and embodied collective remembering while maintaining a focus on the interplay of bodies and memory, practices and place.
From the starting point of an explicit ancestor-venerating religious culture, Obon, the Japanese Buddhist festival of the dead, as observed in rural northern Hiroshima, as comparand, the dissertation identifies Shingleroof as a religious culture in which ancestor veneration, while more implicit, is constitutive of the camp meeting's particular ethos. Reasons for the lack of attention to ancestors in the study of North American religions generally are surveyed as well as reasons behind the obscurity of camp meetings in US culture today despite the many and diverse cultural forms that descend from them. A history of the camp meeting form argues against the dominant narrative, locating the Southeast as its birth region, and a history of the camp meeting movement, roughly 1800-1840, examines the key role of ecumenism and other characteristics of the early meetings. A narrative history of Shingleroof reveals it as an exemplar of the meetings founded during the movement with a distinctive story of its own. Shingleroof's religious places and practices are analyzed separately in writing and together through a series of nine observational films.
This project is the first monograph-length study of a single camp meeting that provides analysis of practices and places in addition to an examination of history, the first camp meeting insider ethnography, and the first study of one camp meeting as a particular and peculiar religious culture in its own right. In addition, it is the first Emory doctoral dissertation in the Graduate Division of Religion to include original ethnographic film and other original media as part of the analysis and one of the two first Emory doctoral dissertations in any area to do so.
Table of Contents
PREVIEW
Sounds and Images from Shingleroof Camp Meeting 1
CHAPTER 1
Shingleroof Camp Meeting as a Religious Culture of the Living and the Dead 3
Research Problem and Questions 5
Background and Context 6
Categories and Terms 14
Approach and Methods 32
Organization of the Dissertation 36
Significance of the Project 39
CHAPTER 2
Descendant and Ancestor: The Camp Meeting in US Culture and Scholarship 42
Changes in US Culture That Have Obscured Camp Meetings 43
The Diffusion of Camp Meetings into Numerous Religious and Cultural Forms 43
The Absence of Historic or Contemporary Camp Meeting Networks 45
Ways in Which Scholars and Scholarship Have Obscured Camp Meetings 46
The Dominance of the “Frontier Thesis” in Scholarly Work on Camp Meetings 46
Popular and Scholarly Misconceptions of Camp Meetings 52
Competing Theories of Camp Meeting Origins 55
The Nature and Scope of Camp Meeting Scholarship Up to the Present 62
CHAPTER 3
A Distinctive American Religious Form: The Birth and Rise of the Camp Meeting 68
The Earliest Known Camp Meetings, 1786-1800 73
The Great Revival and the Early Years of the Camp Meeting Movement, 1800-1805 78
The Camp Meeting Movement After the Great Revival, 1805-1840 94
CHAPTER 4
A Great Cloud of Witnesses: The Generations of Shingleroof 113
Shingleroof’s Beginners 115
Shingleroof’s Beginnings and Early Architecture 119
Shingleroof’s Remarkable Continuity 130
Shingleroof Discontinuities 145
The First Abandonment, 1864-1872 146
The Second Abandonment, 1893-1901 147
The Great Fire of 1937 155
CHAPTER 5
One Hundred Acres with a Past: The Places of Shingleroof 161
Defining Place 163
Theorizing Place and Religious Place 168
The Religious Place of the Campground 176
The Religious Places of Shingleroof 192
Tabernacle 192
Tents 199
Porches 204
The Big Spring 207
The Religious Place of Shingleroof as a Memory Site 210
CHAPTER 6
Memory Lives in Bodies:
Aural and Visual Analysis of Shingleroof Places and Practices 214
Porch Soundscape 216
A Trip to the Spring 217
Making Biscuits 218
Softball 219
Family Photo 220
Preserving Memories 221
Tee Shirts 222
New Swing 223
Tabernacle Soundscape 224
CHAPTER 7
We Are the People Who Keep Camp Meeting: Shingleroof Practices as Ancestor Veneration 225
The Work of Re-enactment and Remembering 226
Commemorative Ceremonies 229
Bodily Practices: Inscribing and Incorporating 234
Inscribing Practices of Shingleroof 239
Incorporating Practices of Shingleroof 244
Incorporating Practices of the Campground 247
Incorporating Practices of the Tabernacle 252
Incorporating Practices of the Tents 256
Incorporating Practices of the Porches 259
Incorporating Practices of the Spring 263
The Religious Modes of Asceticism and Anamnesis 267
Asceticism 267
Anamnesis 271
Concluding Remarks 273
About this Dissertation
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Primary PDF
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