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Show insured that the group would become increasingly culturally heterogeneous. Yet, such dissimilar cultural elements would become more and more similar through the unifying effects of town life , the matrix, as the historian Dean May has pointed out, from which came "a party of Saints for building up the Kingdom of God. 117 As perhaps the most visible symbol of nineteenth century Mormon society, the town has emerged as a major interpretative device in the study of Mormon history and acts as an {ntervening filter through which the experience of the past is conceptually ordered. 8 Moreover, in LDS studies~ the town as a form for hi storical explanation may be expressed as a practical syllogysm: If the Mormon settlement form, the nucleated town, was collective, orderly, and uniform, and if early Mormon culture was the product of this settlement form, therefore, the culture itself must have been collective, orderly, and uniform. In addition, as a tenacious and highly visible aspect of individual cultural expression, house form has repeatedly been called upon to substantiate the t own paradigm by serving as an index of cultural convergence in nineteenth century Utah. Recent research shows that frontier areas slowly develop regional architectures based upon a limited number of shared building types and that a pattern of convergence in housing emerges only after several generations of adapting old forms and adopting new ones. The degree of architectural diversity in a frontier community is, as a result, generally a factor of the cultural diversity of the immigrants themselves. 9 In the m11lti-cultural society which was early Utah, a heterogeneous building tradition would therefore be expected, especially since no offical design policies existed and church members were 4 |
