Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself (review)

Reviewed by: Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself Lori Beaman (bio) Donald Harman Akenson. Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself. McGill-Queen’s University Press. x, 350. $34.95 Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself is a fascinating blend of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, genealogical technique, and family narratives, which spans disciplines and offers a critical analysis that is both wide-ranging and rich in detail. Donald Akenson combines what might be considered, especially by Saints, occasional irreverent remarks and detailed description with an appreciative assessment of the Latter-day Saints’ meticulous, indeed obsessive, record keeping. Akenson describes the politics and the theology of genealogy, not only for the Latter-day Saints, but for a number of other groups and cultures as well (such as, for example, the subversive narratives created by Snorri Sturluson in The Prose Edda). He convincingly argues and demonstrates that thinking about how humanity keeps track of itself is important and a subject worthy of in-depth study and greater attention more broadly. Akenson begins with the assertion that genealogy is narrative, that is, that it is ultimately stories about ourselves that reflect what we believe and how we wish others to see us. In relation to the Mormons, Akenson argues that all of their efforts to create genealogical records are contingent on their creation story, both in terms of the genesis story and in reference to the beginning of Mormonism. Thus Akenson spends considerable time delving into the story of Joseph Smith, the founder (or prophet) of Mormonism. Akenson traces the theological roots of the baptism of the dead or, as he describes it, the Latter-day Saints’ ‘mission to retro-save the world’ and links it convincingly to the manner in which the Saints keep records today. The historical accuracy of some of Akenson’s assertions is difficult to assess, in part because of the very colourful character of Joseph Smith himself and the number of conflicting pieces of evidence surrounding the process by which he ‘received’ the Book of Mormon and other [End Page 192] sacred texts. Akenson’s conversational and blunt style is decidedly engaging, amusing, and sometimes distracting. For example, in assessing Smith’s writings Akenson states, ‘The sample shows unambiguously that at this point Joseph Smith was still engaged in a complete scam (not a holy sham): the material is risible, being a jumble of mock-Hebrew, Ogam, pictographs, misformed Greek letters, and glyphs made to look vaguely Egyptian. It is the sort of thing a smart twelve-year-old would do.’ Yet Akenson is clearly willing to give Smith his due as the founder of one of the world’s important modern religions when he states, ‘The clear point is that Joseph Smith had invented a great religious text (not a good novel, a great religious text), and he knew it.’ The book outlines some of the possible ways (what Akenson calls ‘grammars of genealogy’) in which genealogy is recorded. Akenson points to the limitations of the Standard Double System employed by the lds. His main objection is that it forces a particular version of the story of kinship and is more about how the lds (and any group using this system) wish to portray genealogical narrative than a representation of ‘fact.’ The Standard Double System both excludes and minimizes particular types of relationships, rendering them invisible or unimportant in the resulting narrative. Throughout his analysis Akenson attends to the impact the choice of narrative grammar has on the presence of women in the story of a group. Despite its limitations, Akenson concludes that the Mormon project, which has resulted in the world’s largest database on individual humans, is indeed useful although not, perhaps, in the ways in which Mormons intend it to be. There are three small frustrations I experienced while reading this book. First, it might have been helpful if Akenson had described his methods in the body of the text. The footnotes are somewhat helpful in this regard and are interesting in their own right, but I was interested in more detail...

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