Smith-Pettit Lecture: A Brief History of the Mormon Smile
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Kathryn Lofton
Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Professor of History and Divinity; FAS Dean of Humanities, Yale University
Psychologists explain that, in addition to its obvious role in signaling happiness, smiling serves two functions. It helps people manage their own reactions, and it helps them increase the type of social resources that foster coping with adversity. This presentation considers the representational history of the Mormon smile as a survival stratagem. Of particular interest is the relationship between early prejudicial descriptions of the Mormon smile as a salacious signal to contemporary prescriptions of smiling as right presenting behavior for managers and missionaries alike. How did something that was once a sign of a stigmatized person become an indicator of their social safety? Reviewing a wide variety of documentary examples and social scientific research, this history explains how a specific facial gesture became a metonym for Mormon modernity.
