Join the ILOS Area Studies group for a seminar paper and Q&A with Jonathan H. Ebel, Professor of Religion, University of Illinois. The seminar is open to the public.
Abstract: Beginning in 1935, the U.S. government partnered with California-based reformers and the California State Emergency Relief Administration to build a series of camps up and down the state’s interior to house migratory agricultural workers from the Dust Bowl. This talk takes the history of the migrant camp sanitary facilities—toilets, sinks, showers—as an opportunity to delve into the functioning of these camps as missionary spaces, and to reflect on the discourses and practices surrounding dirt and cleanliness, contamination and purity, as they operated in agricultural California during the Great Depression. Modern sanitation systems appeared to solve the interwoven crises of disordered people and disordered matter, but they neither fulfilled their promise in the moment nor worked their way free of religio-cultural concerns about social and economic contamination. Always lurking about the edges of local and RA/FSA concerns about the spread of biological contaminants were notions of boundary and belonging, that are as important to understanding the sanitary unit as are ideas about how properly to dispose of waste.
Bio: Jonathan H. Ebel is Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois. His research involves religion and war, religion and violence, and lay theologies of economic hardship. He is the author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (Yale University Press, 2015), Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton University Press, 2010), and the co-editor with John Carlson of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (University of California Press, 2012). His latest book, from which this talk is derived, is a religious history of the Great Depression in agricultural California (New York University Press, 2023). Ebel is the current president of the American Society of Church History.
Contact: Randall J. Stephens