 Our next speaker is John Bolesky, who is a fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His academic interests include the anthropology of religion, anthropology of the subject ontology and temporality, religious language ideology, and religious transhumanist movements. He received his B.A., M.A. and P.H.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and his J.D. from the University of San Diego. His work has been published in several edited volumes, as well as in academic journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He was also recently a co-editor of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly that focused on Christian language ideology. Please welcome John Bolesky. Thank you for that very kind introduction. I'm certain I won't be able to live up to it, but still, I appreciate all the same. Hi. Today, I'm not going to be speaking to you as a Mormon nor as a transhumanist because why I have obvious sympathies with both positions, I am for whatever reason, neither. Instead, I'm only talking to you as an anthropologist of American religion. Now, it may be odd that you would have an anthropologist studying American religion. Anthropology traditionally is associated with small-scale societies, often located at the edge of the world system, but as the discipline has come of age, it's increasingly focused on larger-scale societies, including Euro-American societies. We've even begun, just slowly, to study major Western religions and social movements in situ. Now, my prior work's an example of that. My first major field project was with Southern California evangelicals who adopted Pentecostal practices, such as speaking in tongues, healing, hearing from God, battling demons. As part of that work, I developed an interest in what constitutes religious authority, and the spaces where religious authority overlaps with other authoritative discourses, such as science. It was that interest in turn that prompted me almost a year ago to the day to contact the MTA's board and ask permission to conduct participant observation REAP search that's focused on the MTA, and I have been lucky enough to speak to many of you since that project begun, but not as many as I would like to. Before I go further, I want to take a moment to lay out, for those who may not be familiar with it, what participant observation research is, like what is it that I'm offering to do. I'd like to do this by contrasting my project with another academic study that's mentioned, albeit just in passing, Mormon transhumanism. Last year, Megan Leveridge, an American studies PhD student in Florida State, published an essay on the blog, Religion in American History. It's an academic blog, primarily academics writing for an academic audience. In the essay I'm speaking about, Leveridge used the film Ex Machina to present a critique of transhumanism across the board. Her argument was transhumanism was informed by a patriarchal logic, and it had a pronounced tendency to view women merely as objects. Now while she didn't focus her discussion solely on the MTA, she didn't invoke its existence as evidence, alongside other groups, such as, well, Heaven's Gate and the Raelians, strange company. She described the MTA in this words, quote, the Mormon transhumanist association, predominantly an online organization founded in 2006, is another post-humanist new religious movement that seeks godhood through the active development of technology. Although not polygamous, the MTA draws from Joseph Smith's revelation on eternal progression and eternal marriage, the same theology that supports polygamy in the 19th century. The MTA has also referenced 19th century swedeborgi and Mormon ideas of corporeal relations, sexual procreation, and burying post-human children in the next world. Now without necessarily questioning her analysis of either Ex Machina or of the other movements she's discussed, or perhaps even her discussion of transhumanism as a whole, I'd like to suggest that at least as far as the MTA goes, Miss Leveridge maybe have missed the beat. It's not that what she said is necessarily technically wrong depending on how you read it. But what she's missed is the social dynamics. Why women are demographically underrepresented in the MTA, there are several women who are on the MTA's board. Further, I think that the sympathy and sometimes outright support that a considerable number, but not all, members have expressed to ordained women alongside discussions and post urging a reconsideration of mother god and the critical reaction that many had the last false changes in the handbook, recording the children of people in same sex marriage suggest that this might not be the patriarchal organization that Miss Leveridge suggests. Now at the same time, and this is important, I don't want to suggest that the positions I just listed either constitutes or exhausts MTA thought on this topic. There's a mix of views on the MTA on this and many other topics, just as our members with varied relationships to the T in the MTA as well. This is after all a very great, very, very, very gated group. Lifelong Mormons, converts and reconverts to Mormonism, cultural Mormons and ex-Mormons, and many who have no relationship to Mormonism at all apart from their association with this organization. Now I mentioned this, not to shame Miss Leveridge, but to point out that what constitutes evidence to anthropology and how participation produces evidence and what differences this evidence makes. Miss Leveridge's Discipline of American Studies, like cultural studies, which it's related to, is primarily textual in nature, creating its evidence and advancing its argument through the reading and hermeneutics of suspicion. This is an approach that tends to produce totalizing arguments, statements of what amounts to the essence of what it is that they're trying to interrogate. By way of contrast, in anthropological participant observation, evidence does not come from text, although we do read texts from time to time, but directly from people, from what they say and do, whether this information is produced during discussion with the anthropologist, or when the anthropologist watch people interacting with one another. The other major source of evidence is the knowledge gained through participation by the anthropologist, whether that information is of the kind of propositional knowledge produced as one learns the rules of the game, or the kind of tacit or embodied knowledge can only be experienced via direct engagement in activities. When the participant and observer wings work together, creates, I like to think, a more nuanced and contextual form of knowledge. Now, this also creates a bit of a quandary for me today. If I'm giving a talk about the Mormon Transhumance Association, to the Mormon Transhumance Association, it's almost a totology that everything I have right, you already know, and anything I say that's new is wrong. And this is doubly the case, given the intellectual nature ambitions of this group. After all, it's not every social movement that starts out, at least this is my understanding, is an American pragmatist reading group. Trust me, the last group I studied didn't start out that way. Besides, this is a project that's far from over. Both the Mormon Church and transhumanism have high learning curves for me, and also it's apparent from the events of the last year and a half or two, that both Mormonism and transhumanism are very much in flux, as is the MTA itself. Another quandary I face is that many understandings common in the MTA are also actually in harmony with the anthropology of religion, or at least the best contemporary practices in the anthropology of religion. Just one example is the idea of religion as practice, techniques, technology or aesthetics, which are both in contemporary anthropology, but also quite commonly put forward in MTA circles. But I think I can say something of note. In the short amount of time I have left, I'd like to discuss not who the MTA is, but why the MTA is anthropologically interesting. The first reason is something that I skated over when first talking about participant observation. What does it mean to do participant observation with a group like the MTA? After all, anthropologists of small scale societies took advantage of the sedentary lives and their informants to better insert themselves into the quotient aspects of spaces of the people they studied. Basically, when you have people who live in a village, you just move into the village and they have to deal with you. More recently, anthropologists have taken on challenges that mean involving themselves with different kinds of spaces, urban areas, laboratories, offices. There's even been multi-sided research projects where informants were scattered through nodes and larger networks, and sometimes these networks were of global scale. There's even been ethnographies of virtual communities such as the group Anonymous or Groups in Second Life and even of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but I think the question of where the MTA happens is not reducible to these models or locatable in any particular physical or virtual space in quite the same way. The MTA is a hybrid group happening in online forums on the Bladrenackel, social media, podcasts, physical meetups, the sites of its humanitarian activities, and finally numerous conferences from Sunstone to Stanford University to here. But also happens in meeting houses, firesides, homes and priesthood and relief society meetings. This is because the MTA, by its nature, doesn't just address itself, but also faces outward to family, friends, ward members, co-workers. This is more than merely being multi-sided, it seems to me. This is a distribution through different virtualities and spaces in a way that imbricates it with a whole host of other institutions and populations. Chartering this distributed form will not only help us understand how the kind of contemporary modes of interaction, communication, accelerate religion, and it seems to me obvious at least from the Mormon case that religion is quite accelerating recently, but also maybe tell us more about how more Americans will go and build community as the mode of mediation which they engage with changes. I want to return to the Janus-faced nature of the MTA though. It's interesting that, at least it seems to me, the MTA is always transhumanist to Mormons, and always Mormon to transhumanists. This double nature flies in the face of a lot of the contemporary sociology and anthropology about the relationship between science and religion. We can, for instance, contrast the MTA with a much more phobic view of science found in many strains of evangelicalism. Of course, other religious traditions also have some positive engagements with science. You can think, for instance, of the papal astronomer, but it's commonly said that Mormon theology has affordances that make it less hostile to science. This form of post-Newtonian religion frames spirit as a morifying form matter, firms, every truth from heaven or hell. I think that's more or less how the quote goes. And finally, ideas such as Trump progression and theosis, it has concepts that resonate with the desire not just to perfect humanity, but to transcendent. But despite this, according to contemporary anthropology, y'all should not exist. This is because there is a consensus in the admittedly small amount of anthropological work done in transhumanism, and the consensus states that transhumanism is something that occurs in the withdrawal of religious authority. This withdrawal allows for other secular discourses to fill in the eschatological spaces and make the sort of cosmological claims that previously was solely religion's domain. Now, this, of course, has some problems. It can't account for phenomena like cosmism, which was mentioned earlier, and which is still a force on the ground in contemporary Russia. For this reason, it would be easy simply to say that the MTA disproves this. But the MTA is not just a simple rebuttal of this anthropological proposition either. This is because it would suggest the Janus-faced nature of the MTA makes simultaneously both religious and secular in nature. Many members of the MTA engage in what linguistic anthropology called code switching, a term for the conditions for and practices of switching between languages or between different dialects or registers of formality within the same language. Only instead of shifting between dialects or languages, we shift, or you shift, bit of a identification there, between vocabularies and framings, which, if you take the Superior War of Hypothesis seriously, means very much a shift between worlds. The temporality of the MTA is also something that, from an anthropological point of view, is very interesting. Now, I'm not talking about the sort of quotidian life rhythms of the MTA when I talk about its temporality, but rather the way the time is imagined. One reason there is so much code shifting among the many members of the MTA is because of an interest in new and emerging NVIC technologies, as well as a concomitant interest in social change that will come from them. At the same time, there's also an interest in potential future technologies that are not a part of the immediate horizon. Technologies are sometimes imagined to play out at a cosmological scale of time. And finally, and this is the interesting part, there's this concern for the tipping point where emerging technology might slip into the cosmological, and even more so, how emerging technology might prefigure how cosmological technologies could possibly work. What's particular is how this temporal imagination stands out when placed against other ethnographic depictions of modernist and postmodernist time. Whether it's evangelical and fundamentalist apocalyptic dispensationalism, neoliberal governmental tendencies to avoid planning by letting the markets supposedly optimize themselves, or corporate focus on short-term profits. Anthropologists have noted that since the 1970s, there's been a market tendency for temporal horizons to contract, leaving only one focus on the immediate future, and on the other, an unexamined assumption that ineligible, eschatological, economic, or social laws guarantee a positive long-term outcome. I would suggest that because of the MTA's interest in sort of tipping points in moments where one mode of technology and organization of being slips into another, that you actually have a fairly unique interest in the kind of middle term that's somewhat rare in contemporary neoliberal America. Now, I'm not particularly sure what accounts for that temporality. It can't be Mormon thought, or at least we can't have Mormon thought being the only variable, because Mormon thought is also full of a lot of front-load and apocalyptic temporalities as well, such as discussions of blood moons, white horses, and even certain particular parsings of the meaning of the phrase millennial generation. Show us. But that does not mean there's not a certain resonance with Mormon thought here. So I think that actually there's something about Mormon thought that does influence the kind of temporality. Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis is essentially an agnostic concept. However, articulations similar to it, such as the New God argument, rhymes with concepts such as eternal progress and the plan of salvation, and leads to linear yet layered time with each temporal stream suspended between the infinities that give birth to it and the infinities that it will give birth to in turn. And that's a very peculiar and fascinating way of going and picturing how time is arrayed. Of course, what I've just mentioned about the New God argument is speculative thought. And that's the last thing that I'll be mentioning today. Speculation, as it's been mentioned more than once today, is important to the MTA. That the MTA has similarities to and roots in the 19th and early 20th century tradition of Mormon's speculative thought is something that's been reflected on internally many times and also been noticed by commentators such as Richard Bushman. But I'd like to suggest that speculation here is of anthropological interest as well. When it comes to studies of institutionalized religion in literate societies, the anthropology of religion is split between two different framings. Some see belief as the central engine of religion, though it's not necessarily a cognized form of belief. One informed instead by reliance, more of a belief in than a belief that. Others view discipline either in the sense of institutional oversight or personal self-regulation through exercises as what creates religion subjects. And there are those who feel that whether it's discipline or belief in any particular circumstance is a function of social, cultural, and historical contingencies. However, drawing on what I've seen of the contemporary LDS, it's also possible to view belief and discipline as two sides of the same coin. That is, belief that motivates one to engage and submit to discipline, just as its discipline engages a capacity to believe. And while we can recognize that this is a productive process in that these two forces in conjunction mold a character and cognition in very specific ways, we can also see this as a narrowing as well, a loss of other possibilities. And this is why I think that the empty specular tendencies and the conditions for nature of religious speculation is such an interesting question. While obviously being predicated on the capacities instilled by belief and discipline, speculation is also a willful attempt to go beyond an experimentation thought that offers to create new possibilities in moments where current belief discipline complexes have fallen out of step with the larger social environment that they're embedded in, the larger social ecology, and are offering to start to perhaps act in maladaptive ways. What is instead with speculation is a way of thinking of other modes of being and reflecting back on the kind of beliefs and disciplines that ground the speculation in the first place. And this in the end, I think, may be one of the most important things to learn from the MTA. It's not just a particular attitude towards the relationship between science and religion, or is it even sort of the relationship between belief and discipline. But rather, it's the fact that speculation can be a way forward, that its theory is sort of future-facing hope, tracing out all sorts of phase spaces while still being grounded in a particular religion. With that, I think my time's almost up, so I'm going to conclude. As I said, if I've said anything that's new, I would love to be told how and why I'm wrong. And even if, by some chance, I actually said something right, I would still like to go and hear from you. I would encourage you to go and reach out to me either now or through email. Probably the best email address is john.bleskietjmail.com, and let's find a medium and platform to talk. Thank you very much.