Creating regional identity,moral orders and spatial contiguity: imagined landscapes of Mormon Americanization

Abstract

I explore how moral orders, regional identity, and regional space were simultaneously reconstructed in the Mormon culture region during a period of great social change. Careful attention to the concept of moral orders helps us understand how regions are culturally constructed. In addition, I urge more attention to the spatial form of such regional cultural constructions. In recent years, scholars have been prone to disregard contiguity as deserving of spatial theorizing. I argue, to the contrary, that we need to understand how, where and why contiguities arise. I use the example of the Mormon culture region’s reworked moral orders that utilize cultural visions of particular natural environments to demonstrate this point.