Viva George: Celebrating Washington’s Birthday at the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

those who wished to retain their social privilege despite their newfound democratic principles. Awkward Rituals challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about rituals as sincere, productive, and cohesive. Rather than idealizing ritual as something that always fits the moment, Logan depicts ritual “as an unfashionable set of furniture that societies drag along with them, through revolutions and historical realignments” (9). This opens new questions for scholars of religion in any context about what happens when rituals and ideals do not cohere. Ritual may persist through changing times, but in doing so it can enact old ways of ordering the world, even when ritual actors themselves reject those old ways. Readers of Material Religion will be particularly interested in how Logan makes this argument through attention to sensation. She carefully mines her archival sources to describe what bodies were (or were supposed to be) doing or feeling in particular material contexts. She offers vivid sensory details: the regal fabrics used in masonic costumes, the tears streaming down the immobile face of an ABS subscriber, the mother selecting dinner condiments to regulate her family’s nervous system. At the same time, she resists the impulse to romanticize these sensations into coherence. The awkwardness of these rituals is a feature, not a bug. For those of us concerned with objects, bodies, spaces, and sensations, this book is an example of how we can generatively engage with the ambiguity and contradictions of the material world. At certain points in the book, the difficulties of knowing how historical subjects felt become apparent. Despite Logan’s extensive archives, there are limits to what we can learn about sensation from the archival record. I felt this acutely as I read discussions of benevolent reformers and sovereign mothers interacting with sailors and domestic servants, respectively. Did the sailors and servants experience these interactions as awkward in the same way a twenty first century reader might infer? Similarly, did masons feel awkward looking at the aprons covering their laps or the laps of the men sitting next to them (17)? These slippages occasionally obscured who was defining awkward and whose real or imagined sensations were evoked. Overall, a wide range of scholars will find Awkward Rituals provocative and generative. It would fit well in courses on ritual theory or theory and method in the study of religion, and the chapter on Catharine Beecher could easily stand alone in a women’s studies course. As a scholar of American religion, however, I am excited about how this book might intervene in how we study and teach religion in nineteenth century America. Logan’s work challenges lingering claims about Protestantism and democratization in this period, and it also offers a counterpoint to discussions of white evangelical aesthetics that emphasize enthusiastic melodrama over mundane bureaucracy. Most importantly, in my view, Logan helps us to see that what Tracy Fessenden has called “unmarked Protestantism” is more than a set of ideas: it is also a set of sensations. As so many of us wrestle with the embedded white Protestant norms in American society—including the civility and compliance demanded by white supremacy culture—this critical insight prompts us to pay attention to feeling as well as thought, and to inefficacy as well as production.