John L. Sorenson – Thoughts From My 10Th Decade.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

I prepared my extensively illustrated book Images of Ancient America: Visualizing Book of Mormon Life in 1997-98 in partial fulfillment of a responsibility I took upon myself at the suggestion of Elder Neal A. Maxwell to popularize scholarly, technical information about the Book of Mormon.

 

In January 1999 in the FARMS office I was present when Brent Hall, FARMS office manager, gave a presentation copy of the book to Hugh Nibley. After scanning it briefly, Hugh gave it hearty praise. Brent the same day wrote out his recollection of Hugh’s statement on the occasion (“This is the best book I have ever seen on the Book of Mormon”) and sent it off asking Hugh to sign and return it. Instead Nibley wrote out the following statement and sent it back to Brent.  (I have a copy in H.N.’s handwriting.)

 

“John Sorenson’s book ‘Images of [Ancient] America’ must remain the indispensable handbook for students of the Book of Mormon. The only book of its kind–enlightening and convincing. Who else will ever bring such diligence, knowledge and honesty to the task?  (signed) Hugh Nibley   1/14/99”. Brent meant to use the statement in advertising the book, but that was hardly necessary, since two printings sold out fairly quickly.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In the fall of 1979 John W. (Jack) Welch showed up one day at my campus office to inform me that he was thinking of joining the Law School faculty and bringing with him from his private practice in southern California his newly incorporated Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. When he explained his aims for it, I immediately gave him my full support. I had been associated with groups earlier that had somewhat similar aims as far as Book of Mormon research was concerned, but none of them had anyone who knew what they were doing organizationally. Jack brought his knowledge of tax law and how to handle donors. As far as I ever knew, I was the only  professor to fully support him at that  point. He decided to come and do it. I helped with the earliest volunteer activities carried on in the Law School basement. Others came aboard as the outfit took shape. I served in various functions but my Church (bishop) and departmental functions interfered with my doing more.

 

With FARMS moving to the Knight-Mangum building (as a courtesy to Jack) almost simultaneously with my retirement from the faculty and moving to a “retirement office” in the same building, I was heavily engaged with FARMS for some years. When BYU President Bateman saw the burgeoning reputation and output of FARMS in Book of Mormon studies, he wanted to take it under BYU’s auspices. Some of us were uncomfortable with the prospect that the organization would lose its independence inside BYU’s corporateness, but in public relations terms there was nothing to do but acquiesce. Ånd it did lose its independence, slowly but surely.

 

Near the end of the 90s the little Journal of Book of Mormon Studies that Stepen Ricks and others had originator was at a transition point where a new editor was called for. In accordance with my guidance from Elder Maxwell to  try to facilitate popularizing Book of Mormon research, I offered to take the journal over if certain conditions were met. Chief of those was that the publication be visually enhanced and be turned into an equivalent of Scientific American where actual scholars wrote their results in authoritative but popular terms. The organization said yes and backed the decision with resources to accomplish the intention. With Kent Brown and Jerry Bradford as assistants, we turned out two issues a year for five years of what was the bright spot of FARMS publications.

 

But there was constant threat that the primary concern of FARMS with the Book of Mormon would be eroded by “mission creep.” That has certainly been the case. My support for and interest in the organization eroded steadily, until now I don’t much care whether in its present incarnation it sinks or swims. It had a good run for a time. Thanks, Jack, for your initial vision, enthusiasm and labor that accomplished something of a miracle, for a while.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

Kent Brown and I together came up with a plan for a “Book of Mormon atlas.” Kent sold the notion to the head of an Israeli atlas publishing firm, Carta (Encarta?) But it soon became apparent that he had the idea that Mormons had lots of money and that we would come up with funding for the effort (but get little revenue in turn). That effort did not even get to the stage of looking for a cartographer.

 

A decade later I formulated an alternative plan for an atlas to be developed with my son Curtis, who had developed the handsome maps for my book Mormon’s Codex. I have the maps and some of the text conceptualized for the atlas, but it remains to be seen whether Curtis can find time to produce the 25 maps.

 

[i can, and will do it, Dad.]

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

At the time I was appointed chair of the “Department of Archaeology and Anthropology” in 1978 a couple of displays in the basement of the Maeser Building at BYU, which was the department’s  home, constituted what was optimistically called the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, a project of  Prof. Dale Berge. (I soon changed the title of the department to simply “Anthropology.”) When the new library was completed, the main floor of the old one, the Heber J. Grant Building, was left vacant. With my backing Berge asked for permission to use a portion of that high-ceilinged area for a modest expansion of the museum both for displays and archaeology laboratory space. After a couple of years there, we were allotted for that purpose Allen Hall, a former dormitory located on the corner of First East and Seventh North in  Provo. 

 

As chair of Anthropology I became also Director of the museum at that point, in order to emphasize (what I saw as) its potential importance. Berge had begun some Local contract archaeology activity by then, and I pushed it ahead by bringing aboard Donald Forsyth, a Univ. of Pennsylvania  Ph.D. archaeologist, to teach half-time and promote the  contract work half-time (funded from contracts). After a year, probably in 1980, he became full-time faculty, and I hired Asa Nielson, one of our graduates, to head up an expanded full-time contract archaeology effort. His vigor produced expanded funding and results. This work not only gave employment to many of our enrolled archaeology students but also filled up the Allen Hall laboratory work and collections storage space. 

 

I re-christened the facility the Museum of Peoples and Cultures, and some of the building was turned into exhibit space, especially utilizing materials from several important digs by the department’s archaeology professors. The work for the displays was done by students in the department’s classes in “museology” taught by Berge, Continued opportunistic labors by the contract archaeology workers allowed expansion of the staff: Drs. Joel Janetski and Jim Wilde (and his wife, Debbie), and eventually several junior level staff (former students). (Several dozen students in the department ended up obtaining professional employment as archaeologists throughout the western states as a result of this activity.) Eventually contract archaeology work fell under the heading within the Museum of the Office of Public Archeology.

 

The Allen Hall facility was under threat of closure by the physical plant office frequently from the time we obtained its use. The old building was supposedly doomed if the heating system gave out, etc., etc. Nevertheless tens of thousands of patrons have enjoyed the exhibits over 30 years of its service, and millions of dollars of contract and academic archaeology work has been carried out in the antiquated space. In the early 1980s, however, the doubtful quarters and limited space in Allen Hall was of imminent concern. I had visions of a new Museum of Peoples and Cultures. The only way to get it was to spur the administration to become enthusiastic about museums in general. I consulted with managers of the three other museums on campus, Art (they were planning a new building), Monte L. Bean Life Science, and Earth Sciences, and they agreed to be represented on a university museums panel with me as chair. I got the administration to appoint such a group. In consultation the committee came up with the idea for a complex of buildings in the area north and east of, and including, the Bean. Submitted to the Smoot Building, our plan was not approved and the committee was disbanded. No one at the university level was willing to approve such a major fund-raising move. The Museum of Art was subsequently built in its present location. Peoples and Cultures and Earth Sciences were forced to continue in their inadequate spaces, but at least they did continue. (I was told recently that the Museum will finally be moving to the BYU-owned building on North Canyon Road that was once a grocery store.) While the idea of a museum complex died, at least our effort in the early 1980s hopefully produced a firmer basis for the idea of museums in general at BYU.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

My Church service on campus came about by a request in 1981 from Eliot Butler, President of the BYU Eighth Stake (a chemistry professor and vice president at BYU) that I join his high council. We had just moved two months before from American Fork to the Edgemont area of Provo. I accepted the call. The council consisted of interesting people almost all not working at the Y. We met weekly in the school president’s council room in the middle of the Smoot Administration building (precisely above the spot where my family had occupied an old campus house ‘in the north orchard’ many years before there was an administration building). My assignment was to the married students’ ward meeting in the old Provo University Ward building on Fourth North where Kathryn and I first attended church in Provo. This was useful service backing up the bishopric.

 

After two years of this I was called to be bishop of the 99th BYU Ward  in the same stake, still under President Butler. They were located in a sprawling housing area of apartments in southwest Provo (now known as The Boulders). Essentially every apartment unit was occupied by BYU married students. Church was held in the clubhouse of the development. A few families were inactive or less active, but mostly they were good and cooperative living more or less in student poverty. I had good men and women for key assignments including counselors. The greatest challenge was the transiency of personnel in the ward. Every month saw people move in or out. It was hard to keep track even of the officers, let alone the members. (My last year was under stake president Robert Mathews, Dean of Religious Education, one of whose  counselors was from his religion faculty, Jim Christianson, a neighbor of mine, whose widow, Helen, I would marry eight years later.)

 

As two years approached an end, I asked for a release because I planned to go away for a sabbatical semester. The declining student membership in the development led to combining the 99th Ward with a neighboring student ward upon my release. I was relieved to get back to my home ward where I hardly knew anyone since I had essentially not attended there after my move-in four years earlier.

 

On the whole I valued this experience, having dealt with many exemplary people. Yet within a few months after my release I suffered a heart attack, so I guess I paid a considerable price for my campus Church service and for concurrent work pressures.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In 2006 I began “my last book,” to be entitled Mormon’s Codex. I had completed a full (ca. 800-page) draft by July 2008, whereupon I submitted it to friendly readers for review. By January 2009 I had received back only two substantive (though brief) responses (very positive), from Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens. They thought it would not fly with a  non-LDS publisher. As a result I decided to publish it at the Maxwell Institute, who had requested it, and turned the manuscript over in December 2008. They “put it out for peer review” to four readers. In the Spring of 2009 I was furnished with the comments and then made limited revisions (the comments were extensive but not particularly helpful). The manuscript was resubmitted in June 2009 into the charge of Paul Hoskisson who finally contacted me in November. They had decided to print only a limited edition and to put it on the Web. I tentatively declined. 

 

During the summer of 2009 I began trying to produce a popularized version of Mormon’s Codex (about 80% of the major ms.) and in November sent off a sample to Deseret Book. Early in December they ased to see the entire ms. Later in December Hoskisson at the Institute communicated to me that they now had a new source of funds and wished to publish the full manuscript. Not having heard from Deseret I agreed. After my urgent final review was completed early in 2010, they began editing it in earnest. In the summer of 2010 I was informed by Hoskisson that Deseret Book had communicated that they wished to co-publish the book, and I agreed to that arrangement. Of course the editing, largely by Sandra Thorne but with much help by others, took a long time because of the complexity of the documentation and the length of the ms., but the result was a significant improvement in readability over the ms. version. The maps were prepared by Curtis Sorenson. The publishing arrangement was that the MI would prepare the print edition in conjunction with DB and would be the de facto “publisher” for print, while DB alone would issue it in ebook form. It finally came into my hands in August 2013 in as good a form as I could have hoped for.

 

I intended from the beginning to make the work available in Spanish. My son Curtis has begun some work on a translation but most of the labor yet remains to be completed. [it will get done, Dad.]

 

I am well pleased with the book and would not make any significant changes in it if given the chance. It is “all I can do.”

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In 1963 I contracted with Aldine Press of Chicago to produce an introductory anthropology textbook, entitled Approaches to Anthropology. It was take a unique history-of-the-field approach (Alex Moorin, president of Aldine, said of my plan, “Nobody else has even thought of such a book!”). I worked hard on it through 1964 when I left for Santa Barbara on sabbatical. I intended to finish it there but ended up not having the time nor interest and so dropped the project.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In 1980 I arranged a three-session symposium on “the anthropology of the  Mormons” as part of the annual meetings of the Mormon History Association held in Canandaigua, NY. One of the participants invited was (non-Mormon) archaeologist/antropologist Mark Leone, at the University of Maryland. Afterwards I arranged with Leone that we would co-edit a volume of papers on the topic, to include most of those from the MHA symposium. (They included some 15 sketches/”ethnographies” on Mormon communities in Arizona, New Zealand, Mexico, Bolivia, Canada, etc.) The planned title was “Mindful of Every People; Anthropological Perspectives on Mormons.” 
 

We worked over the next ten years to prepare and publish it. At first we signed a contract with the University of Utah Press, but before we had a manuscript ready, that organization changed management, and they decided to drop the contract. Thereafter Leone and I wrote, re-wrote, and edited several versions of the book manuscript but none proved acceptable to a publisher. (Leone did most of the scouting for one.) I possess the files. Ultimately one piece I had written for inclusion appeared in 2001 in Dialogue (“Ritual as Theology and Communication,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33 (2): 117-128).

Edited September 16, 2014 by cursor

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John L. Sorenson wrote: 

 

Probably in 1958, while I was a BYU Library employee, my friend Lyman Tyler (Professor of History and Director of the Library) employed me to do my first work in “applied anthropology.” He had for some years worked as an “historical expert” on Native American history in relation to Indian land claims cases in the West. At this time his services were retained by a prominent attorney in Salt Lake City, John  Boyden, who represented the Hopi tribe in litigation against the Navajo tribe over lands bordering the Hopi reservation in Arizona. Tyler hired me as an anthropologist/historian to document as far as I could the earliest presence of Navajos in that vicinity. (According to tradition ancestors of the Apaches and Navahos probably first came there in about the 16th century from the north. Their supposed ancestral home, and most of their linguistic relatives, were in northwestern Canada.) Over a six(?)-week period I mustered such limited data as I could find from archaeology and early Spanish reports that tended to show that they had probably not been around Hopi territory until the 1500s, and that the Hopi had used territory surrounding their reservation area for practical and ceremonial purposes long before that. For completing this task I was paid a modest stipend ($150?)  The Hopi at length won a qualified case in their lawsuit.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In the middle 1970s I spent considerable time developing a file on Mormon lexicon (about 2500 expressions).  In 1973 and 1974, with Harold Madsen of the English Department at BYU, I organized two symposia on “Mormon Language,” where I delivered (and published) a couple of papers on the topic. I have always wanted to get back to that subject but have not found time. I have two boxes of cards with definitions on them at home now.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In the 1970s and 1980s I was on the board of the BYU Charles Redd Center for Western Studies for a number of years. That consisted mainly of attending occasional meetings of the board to hear reports on its work and progress, discussing the strategy of the Center, and approving various small research grants. Historian Tom Alexander was the director and key figure at that time (along with Leonard Arrington). One notable event entailed holding the annual meeting of the board at the Redd family ranch in southeastern Utah. An excursion took us to Hole-in-the-Rock pioneer river crossing where we traversed the “Hole.” Kathryn was along on this rather rough trip and we greatly enjoyed the experience.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

My mother was enthusiastic about doing (or rather having done) family genealogy in order that vicarious LDS temple ordinances could be done for our ancestors. She was not personally capable of doing the research to identify ancestors, but she kept up as well as she could with the efforts of others who were at work in the activity (especially my father’s brother John P., who was, with his wife, diligent in doing it with the limited resources the 20s and 30s. I was early impressed that this was something that should be pursued by LDS folks.

 

When I was grown and married, a couple of times I pursued genealogy for a time but not very successfully. What I learned was that special skills and devoted work were required if a person was to get anywhere, and I never succeeded in finding enough time to accelerate into competence. At one point I got copies of family group sheets that had been prepared by various relatives on our immediate ancestors for three generations back. Carefully comparing those records, I came to realize that the information they contained was full of errors, something like 20 errors (points of conflicting data) on the multiple records for just one grandparent’s family’s record! That was enough to make me realize that without concentrated work in original sources, all I could do was arbitrarily produce another sheet filled with errors. 

 

I was not prepared to do the in-depth work required. 

 

Finally in recent years, when the source records have been greatly  expanded, I turned to someone with genuine competence to document from original sources what was required to reconstruct the families of my kinfolk, English, Danish and Swedish. The labor has cost a good deal but the results are, I trust, now as accurately recorded for the most part as the extant sources allow. The pedigree lines in some cases go back to the early 1500s, near the beginning of modern record-keeping. In other cases they stop in the 1600s and some in the 1700s. More could be done, I suppose. My genealogist is taking a rest right now as the relatively “easy” results are all in place. The records have been submitted for completion of the temple ordinances for all the persons listed, and each of my children has received printed pedigree charts for Kathryn and me.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

A highly significant group in my life is “the study group”  (at one point we whimsically decided to dub the bunch “The Gadianton Polysophical Marching and Chowder Society”). The purpose of such assemblages is well-known among established Mormons (at least in the western states): to provide an intimate social setting for monthly occasions where selected Latter-day Saints can share their thoughts at an intellectual level somewhat above what is possible in formal Church settings. Kathryn and I were among the original set of friends in Santa Barbara in 1964 that made up such a group. The intent was that for each meeting we read and discuss a book selected in advance by the hosts and enjoy the sociality of the occasion. The tone was never to carp or complain but to be charitable, even when a book’s author displayed some limited ability. Membership varied of course over time but the first group included Karl and Jerry Haws and wives and a lot of UCSB people -- David and Libby Gardner (he went on to be president of the U. of U. and of the U. of Cal. system), R. J. Snow and wife, Dean and Helen Mann, Gary and Chris Ricks, Davis and Peggy Bitton, Hal and D’on Moore, et al. 

 

When we came back to Provo, Moores and others also drifted back, and we formed a new and extended group in Provo and Salt Lake (the Santa Barbara group continued). Some years ago Hal Moore compiled a list of where we had met, who came in or left the group, and the names of the books we had discussed. It was quite impressive. At one point four of the “alumni” were serving as mission presidents at the same time. Meanwhile at least half were professors (for good or ill!) Currently (our 50th year!) the Utah bunch includes such folks as Jim and Renee Allen, Joan Bitton, Tom and Marilyn Alexander, Tom and Miriam Rogers, Paul and Karen Hyer, Barnard and Cherry Silver, George and Joye Bennion, Lowell (Ben) and Sherilyn Bennion, Lanny and Shirley Britsch, Dan and Debbie Peterson, and on and on, a comfortable yet stimulating set of personalities.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

One of my most persistent habits is walking. It has given me many blessings. In my early years I had no choice, for I had no access to a car. When I did, usually the car I had was sometimes of questionable quality, Student days in California was a no-car time, UCLA was five miles from our home. I rode the bus as far as I could but there was much walking required also. When we lived in Orem (1970s), I suffered from considerable back trouble, and I thought that if I took long walks it would improve. I commonly walked at that time from BYU to 1600 South in Orem where our home was.  Some improvement did result. Dwelling in Edgemont I bused (when that was available) or walked the several miles needed to get me home. In retirement years I have walked for pleasure and exercise, usually from one to two miles per day. I credit the practice with helping keep the worst trouble with my back (which suffers from severe stenosis)  tolerable. I continue today walking (now with Helen) at age 90. I am not sorry for any of it, and I strongly recommend the practice as a fitness measure.

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In 1963 David Pack, a former student at the Y under Asianist professor Paul Hyer (I had been Hyer’s first church “ward teacher” upon our each arriving in Provo in 1949) had approached Paul about doing research on behalf of David’s employer, the U. S. Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at China Lake, California. Paul helped put together a team, which he insisted must include an anthropologist, me. (Six other BYU professors were also enrolled, one being Mark Cannon, brother of Joe and Chris, prominent Utah politicians/businessmen, and head of the BYU Political Science Department, who later went on to become the personal assistant to Warren Burger, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.)

 

A sizable contract was awarded and Pack moved to Provo to supervise it. The purpose was to analyze Vietnamese society broadly as to what were the dynamics of the country. The ultimate aim, from the NOTS perspective, was to be able to analyze the likelihood of success of new measures (weapons and strategies) that might be employed in the war.  Our group of analysts drew entirely on unclassified (open source) data to construct virtually a “systems analysis” of Vietnamese society and its primary actors (roles and social structures). Pack examined enough of the “classified” intelligence sources to assure us that they would tell us nothing significant that we couldn’t learn from open sources. Working fulltime over the first summer, then part-time over the 1962-63 school year, we constructed a rather remarkably detailed model of Vietnamese society. We concluded that there was little hope for South Vietnam’s “winning the war” because of inherent corruption and incompetence. My broad macro-societal view out of anthropology proved key to our success, and I wrote the final report, with some help from Pack.

 

The degree of our success led to an extension of the project into the next summer (full-time) where we were directed to prepare a similar analysis of Venezuela (there was incipient guerrilla warfare there at the time). We accomplished that in two months time! I was by then the project director and again wrote the final monographic report; both reports were published by USNOTS early in 1964. I made a comparatively large amount of “extra” money from this work, in addition to my regular professorial duties, which allowed us to add a large, new room to our old Springville house, shortly before we left it. 

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John L. Sorenson wrote:

 

In 1964 the Defense Research Corp. (changed in 1967 to General Research Corp.) of Santa Barbara, CA, had obtained a contract to study “urban insurgency” for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon outfit. The principal people at DRC had special connections to ARPA, but their previous work had been entirely in missile warfare gaming. They were headed by some very acute people with a lot of defense experience, but they had no one who knew anything about insurgency, the emerging military threat of the moment. So they hired me (I was ready for a sabbatical that year but didn’t know where to go or how to finance it) on the basis of my published work on Vietnam and Venezuela. Their immediate interest was to be “urban insurgency,” to which absolutely no one in the U.S. government had paid the slightest attention to that point. My first task was to get up to speed to host a conference they said they would put on on the topic. We held a useful gathering in Santa Barbara of people who knew about the Spanish Civil War, the Irish struggle against the Brits, and so on but who had never attempted to generalize about the peculiar parameters of the urban setting. From there on I concentrated on collecting more data and assessing the prospects and vulnerabilities in three concrete settings of the great interest: Teheran (Iran), Caracas (Venezuela), and Guatemala City. By the end of the contract year I had drawn some useful (at least I thought so) conclusions about the problem and had made some theoretical contributions of value. (The results were classified.)

 

I was considered the company’s chief social scientist (at first being the only one) and so proceeded to add that dimension to subsequent projects. One was a critical evaluation of a scheme proposed by Pentagon people to build fence fortifications around every village in South Vietnam (!) so the Viet Cong insurgents could not get at villagers to lure them or threaten them into collaboration. We showed in spades why that tactic was stupid (to the anger of some soldiery general types in Washington. Most of the work was done by our own ex-military employees and various sorts of “operations researchers.” My special concern came to be calculation of a metric for “social costs and benefits” for various proposed measures. One particular study I completed (Top Secret classification) considered up to 25 new strategies or tactics the U. S. had already tried in the conflict which, I showed, had made absolutely no difference in hoped-for outcomes.

 

Another project included advising on a study of the insurgent threat in Thailand (I spent two two-week periods in country on that work; my sister Stella and her husband Clarence Burnham, a soils expert, were in Bangkok at the time where he worked for USAID). Other work considered the difficulties of conducting normal fire-fighting operations in dangerous urban situations. 

 

In an especially major change in research tone for GRC we also did a very large study of how to improve urban transportation planning for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (one angle considered was use  of driverless automobiles, like Google is finally testing today). This research was part of a GRC strategy to try to deal with more civilian issues instead of just “war.” We hired a couple of political science types plus several economists, and there were some helpful consultants often available. I was not “doing anthropology” in any conventional sense, but I enjoyed the broader perspectives I was thus called on to deal with. 

Unfortunately around this time some people in the American Anthropological Association got upset about “working for the military” and got the organization to condemn such. I resigned as a “Fellow” of the AAA in protest and in effect told them to go to hell.

 

I enjoyed my associations with the people at GRC. They were extremely bright and generally sociable. Some became my good friends. But the constant grind (even with a month per year of vacation time) of flying to Washington or somewhere else to pursue the next contract while still completing the last one began to wear heavily on me. But it was hard to say no to my salary, which had risen to near $30,000 (four years before at BYU I was paid less than $7.000) and the delightful Santa Barbara setting. In the end I decided I should make a change, and that resulted in the creation of Bonneville Research (on which see elsewhere in this Parade).

Edited September 16, 2014 by cursor

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"I'm finished."

[Grudunza]

Thanks for sharing that!

[toujours]

Thanks very much indeed, this is great. Seems like yer da likes to keep you busy. Does he have you slated for his biography too?

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I just inserted a couple of hyperlinks (in post #2 of this thread/topic) to my digitally scanned two 1984 issues (September and October) of The Ensign articles entitled "Digging into the Book of Mormon: Our changing understanding of ancient America and its scripture", Parts 1 and 2.